Fiction

The Huntress

Tala Bar

The Huntress listened to the forest. It was a mixed wood of various oaks, pines and fruit trees that spread over some low hills well below the snow line. It had a variety of animals and birds and she could hear them all, large and small, going about their business. She knew that business well – the flight of the jay and the knocking of the woodpecker; the call of the woodcock and the hiss of the snake; and the rustle of the little rodents hiding from fox or ferret. But more than anything else, she listened to the majestic deer that walked gently over dry leaves and twigs.

The season was the end of summer. The chicks in the nests were beginning to stretch their little wings, and the animal young were skipping beside their mothers, having been born in spring. It was hot, and at this hour toward the end of the day, many of these creatures came down to drink from the pond that was fed by an underground stream, and never dried in summer. The pond lay beyond a thin line of trees that hid it from where the Huntress was standing.

The Huntress listened to the deer, their hooves stepping gently on the dry fallout; she was a brown-skinned young woman of medium height, with a bundle of dark hair and dark, large brown eyes; besides a spotted cat's skin tied with leather throngs around her hips, she was completely naked. She waited now for the deer to show up, her bow raised and the arrow lying on the string.

Here they came. A mother doe and her two fawn, a male and a female. The Huntress had spotted them a few times since they were born in the spring; now was the season to take one of them down and bring home the goods. She had decided to kill the male, leaving the female to breed. She watched as the mother’s neck came out from among the trees, then the young female, then the male.

The male, then, turned his head to look right at her, as if inviting her action. She let the arrow go and it buzzed through the air, hitting him in the neck. He fell at his mother’s hooves and she skipped away, vanishing among the trees followed by the young female. Uttering a silent prayer of thanks to the Mother of the Forest, the Huntress came up to her kill, bending over it for a short inspection.

“Hey, Huntress,” she heard a call. A man came from the direction of the pond, naked, showing off his brave manhood as if ready for anything. He was young, tall and muscular, with dark hair and eyes and a strong aquiline nose. She knew him, and the unusually tamed dog that followed him everywhere; he had reared it from a puppy, having found it abandoned by his band. The Huntress had always liked the man, who frequently passed the camp at the forest edge on his wanderings through the woods. Now, she felt, was her chance.

“Dogman!” she cried, softly. “Have you got your knife? If you help me with my catch, you can have your reward afterwards.”

“What would you like done with your catch, then?” he asked, playfully.

From nowhere – perhaps from the long, thick, dark hair on his head – he produced a flint knife honed to a sharp edge; together, they worked on the corpse of the deer, first skinning then cutting its body open. The Huntress took out the stomach and put it on a cleft of a tree.

“What is that for?” asked Dogman.

“A gift to the Mother of the Forest,” she said. “It may encourage her to make it plentiful, and allow us to hunt in it.”

The man was silent, not being familiar with her ideas. They then cut the rest of the corpse into separate parts, to make it easier to carry back to Camp. The body of the deer contained useful parts for the Huntress' family, which consisted of her mother, sisters and their children; sometimes they also included a brother or two, who preferred to stay with the family rather than wander off, as most men did. The deer supplied them with meat to eat, bones for carving into tools, intestines and sinews to use for tying and weaving. The Huntress handed the deer’s eyes to Dogman, as a special delicacy, a rewarding gift for his help. When they finished, and she had put what she needed in her woven basket, she looked at her bloody body and said, “I'd like to freshen up in the pond. Would you join me?” she invited.

He grinned at her, watched her as she removed the cat's skin from her waist and appreciated what he saw. She was not as tall as he was, but had a lithe, slim body with rounded breasts, full of curves to take hold of. She also had a straight, well carved nose and full lips, and there was no man around Camp who would not covet her image.

She ran to the pond and splashed in it, then came up to the man, who had come in and was swimming around; she collided with him on purpose, then began a splashing match. Such frolicking led to a closer game of the bodies, which started in the water and finished on the grassy bank of the pond. At last, they were satiated, and it was time for Huntress to go back home and for Dogman to wander off on his way.

As hoped for, the Huntress got pregnant. Having a close look at the animals of the forest, she realized the connection between the pleasures of sex and fulfilling her expectation for having children. Such insight was kept by a few knowledgeable women as a power over most other people. She told her mother of her expectation, but it did not change her way of life. At the Autumn festival, she took part in the traditional Hunt dancing, having decorated her body with symbolic tattoos around her breasts, and for the dance stuck feathers in her hair and covered her body with additional animal skins; the fawn’s hide thrown on her shoulders for the dance was the peak of her glory.

During the winter rains and cold weather, as her belly grew larger and heavier, the Huntress stayed home most of the time. The women and children sheltered under thick mats woven from branches of the forest’s trees erected as conical tent to guard from the rain in winter and from the sun in summer. The Huntress had taken on herself the hard task of stretching the fawn’s intestines into usable strings, a job that was gladly left to her by her sisters, who preferred weaving baskets and mats; most of the bone carving was done by their brother, and the few other men who preferred the sedentary way of life in Camp to the wanderings through the woods.

Then spring came, and the Huntress gave birth to twins, male and female. ‘Just like the deer,’ she thought to herself with satisfaction. She presented them at the Spring festival, hearing praise from everyone for her well-taken effort. Being a huntress, though, and bound to the forest in ways other women did not feel, she had some peculiar ideas about her progeny, which she found unnecessary to share with the others. Solitary by nature and by occupation, she had been used to take her own council since her adulthood, without much consultation, not even that of the Wise Woman of her tribe.

The first day the Huntress went to the forest after her delivery, she took both children with her, kept in a sling and carried on the front of her body. Her mother tried to argue that she should leave them at Camp – one of her cousins had just given birth and could suckle them if needed – but the Huntress would not listen. As usual, she had her own way in what she wanted to do way.

It was a glorious day, though not very hot. The sun's warmth caressed her body and kissed the babies' dark heads; the Huntress felt success was accompanying her in what she was going to do. The golden rays of the sun filtered through the green leaves of those trees which never shed theirs, awakening the ones that had slept through the winter. Little rivulets of water still ran among the trees through the undergrowth from the last rain, but the Huntress knew they were going to dry out very soon. She walked through the trees to the pond, whose ripples played with the blue of the sky and the gold of the naked sun. She dipped her hand in the fresh water and sprinkled droplets on her children’s heads, and they made gurgling sounds of happiness.

She then went deep into the thicket, walked some way until she reached a particular flat rock she knew about. It lay under the naked sky, the trees standing a little way away from it. The sunrays falling on top of it warmed it up, and the Huntress sat down to take care of her children. First she took out her daughter from the sling to suckle her; she cleaned the child with some broad leaves and fondled her, rocked her until she was asleep and laid her on the grass besides the rock. Then she took out her son and repeated that performance with him. But after she cleaned him, fondled and rocked him to sleep, instead of laying him on the grass she put him on the warm face of the rock. Then she stepped a little backward and gave homage to the Mother of the Forest.

The words and the monotonous tune filled the Huntress' heart with deep emotions, and the tears dropped from her eyes and flowed down her cheeks. She lifted her daughter and put her back in the sling, close to her heart, then turned her back on her precious son and went away, through the forest and back to Camp. She had done her duty by the Mother of the Forest, and she was going to bring up her to take her place as a Huntress when she grows up.

While the Huntress' daughter could not walk, her mother carried her in the sling with her into the forest. Hunting was not easy in this way, and she spent her time gathering other kinds of food. She collected eggs in the season of birds nesting; she gathered young and newborn animals from their layer; she dug for succulent roots and picked a variety of fruits and berries.

As her daughter started to walk, the Huntress took her always into the woods with her. She was free now to use her bow and arrow, and her knife, and could teach her daughter the ways of the forest. The Huntress took great pleasure in doing so, showing her daughter the trees and plants, birds and animals, explaining their ways of life to her long before she could teach her to shoot and kill. The mother also taught her daughter about the dangers of the forest and how to avoid them, and the daughter had an advantage over mother, who had never had anyone to teach her these ways.

One part of her life the Huntress never mentioned to her daughter, and that was about the son she had sacrificed to the Mother of the Forest. But when five summers and five winters had passed since she was born, the daughter one day asked her mother, "Is it true that once I had a brother?”

Alarmed at the question, the Huntress crouched by her Daughter’s side, looked at her intently and said, “Why are you asking?”

“I heard Aunty One and Aunty Two talking about it; but when I asked Gran, she would not tell me. Did I?”

The Huntress was silent for a long time, and the Daughter began to think she asked the wrong question. It happened sometimes, and that was how she learned what not to ask. Her mother, in the mean time, was remembering how her own mother behaved when she came back from the forest on that day without her son. She knew, straight away, although the Huntress tried to tell her sisters some fabricated story about a disaster. They tried to believe her, but her mother was too wise for that. However, she said nothing, but scooped up in her arms the son of another of her daughters and fondled him, until he was fed up and got away from her. No one had ever spoken of the Huntress' son.

“Daughter,” the Huntress said now as she made them both sit down on the bank of the pond, “You tell me why you ask and I’ll be frank with you.” It was a pleasant autumn day, and they had been gathering nuts and berries that grew in plenty, filling up their baskets. They had not been swimming in the pond, but dipped their bare feet in the water, munching on some of their findings.

“Because,” the Daughter said, not looking at her mother but at the wood on the far end of the pond, “I’ve always had a feeling someone was following us in the woods. But today he spoke to me.”

“He spoke to you?” The Huntress asked in astonishment.

“He calls himself Son, and I thought he was the Son of the Mother of the Forest. But today he told me he was your son before he became her son, so I wondered.”

“He never spoke to me,” the Huntress whispered. “Is he angry with me?”

“No, he’s never angry. But sometimes he’s sad, when he can’t join us in what we are doing.”

“I did hope she would be his Mother, and look after him the way I would. I always thought it was a pity that she did not have her own son to care for, so I gave him to her. She has been so good to us, and I hoped that would be a proper gift to the Mother of the Forest. I would have explained it to him if he had talked to me.”

The daughter was silent for a long time, and the Huntress waited patiently until she would be ready to speak. At last, she said, "He says he can't, but I can give you his words. He loves us, and sometimes he send the hunting our way, but he can’t talk to you as you’re an adult and would not hear him.”

"I see," the Huntress said, and her daughter heard her sigh for the first time in her life. “Give him my love, then." She rose on her feet and stretched her hand to the girl. "We still have much to do. Come.”

They never talked about it again, but the Huntress noticed that whenever they went to the forest, her daughter listened even more intensively than before, as if hearing the voice of her brother, who had become the Son of the Mother of the Forest.

Times passed. The Daughter grew up skilled in all tasks of a huntress. She became taller than her mother, more willowy in shape than her mother, more willowy in shape and movements. Unlike her strong, solid looking mother, she was a dancing creature who was able to slide among trees and undergrowth, like a snake or the wind rustling among the leaves.

Then, one day, her blood showed, and as they were setting out to the woods, the Huntress said to her, "You're a woman now, and it's time for you to get your own name. We are going to have a celebration in your honor, so think about it and make your choice."

The daughter thought for a moment, and then, instead of answering her mother, she said, "I’ve seen the Mother of the Forest.”

The older woman stood still and looked at her daughter in silent wonder. She had never forgotten her daughter told her about hearing her brother, and now she was saying this new thing. Had the girl some strange gift that the Huntress knew nothing about?

“Let’s sit for a moment, and you tell me all about it,” she invited. They sat down on a rock jutting out of the forest’s floor not far from the pond, which was the Huntress favorite spot.

As she watched the water playing under the light breeze, her daughter told her, “She appeared suddenly from among the trees a couple of days ago, when we were separated on our different tasks. You wanted me to find certain plants on my own, and she was there.”

“What did you see? What did she look like?” The Huntress asked. She had never aspired to see the Mother of the Forest, and she hardly knew how to take this idea.

“I'm not sure, because she merged so well with the trees and the undergrowth,” the girl answered.

“And how did you know who she was?”

“She told me, and I had to believe her, because she all about you, and about the way I was becoming. It was awesome!”

For the second time in her daughter's experience, she heard the Huntress sighing. “You are blessed, my Daughter, and may it help you pass your life in happiness. Do you think it should affect the way you are going to choose your name?”

"I'll see when the time comes," the daughter answered enigmatically, and for the first time the Huntress knew that they are drawing apart, that she was no longer important as a mother to her daughter; she only hoped that they would retain in adulthood some of the close relations they had when her daughter was still a child.

The day of the celebration arrived, food was prepared, and strong drink made from the fruit of the forest; the Camp’s clearing was cleaned of rubbish, and new flowers suddenly appeared as if by magic. The musicians picked up their reed pipes and their wood drums and started playing their music and the dancers, who had put on fresh grass skirts, arranged themselves for their performances.

In the center of the dance, the Huntress’ daughter appeared, ready to perform a new dance. It was her declaration, by which she would demonstrate the name she had chosen to be called from then and forever. Thus, in spite of her profession of huntress she had inherited from her mother, people must know her always by the name Dancer.

Later, when they were sitting by themselves together, as they used to do frequently in the old days, the Dancer said to the Huntress, “I did not tell you before, but it was when I was dancing in the forest that the Mother of the Forest appeared to me. That’s why I had to choose this particular name.”

A few days later the Huntress said to the Dancer, “You know all the ways of the forest as I know, and you are as perfectly skilled a huntress as I was at your age. It is time for you to go on your own and fulfill your calling there, and it is time for me to stay in Camp and do what work I can do there, as I’m too old to fulfill the task of hunting properly, so it's up to you.”

“I’m sorry we won’t go out together anymore, Mother,” the girl said, her dark eyes shining with the tears standing in them.

“I can still come with you once in a while, Daughter,” the Huntress said, fondly, “but from now on you will be in charge and I shall do whatever you say. Good luck to you, Dancer, and may the Mother of the Forest have you always in her sight.”