THE LEGEND OF HOMBAS
HOMBAS was wiser than his people, but not stronger than Death, who makes no exceptions. Several times, even before the departure of the Spring Caravan, when the day’s-end prayers had been spoken and he sat at the fringe of the night-fire in the compound, Hombas had seen the red bear Death approaching through the flames.
Hombas had also seen Death in the woods by daylight, the presence so like a true red bear that it would have deceived anyone else. He knew the truth, being Shaman and Chief Elder of the Commun. He had observed the red shadow, the Unanswerable, the Well-intentioned, following one or another of the people. Unaware, the objects of Death’s study continued their evening tasks, preparing the Commun to survive the night—stacking wood for the fires, making a circuit of the stockade, rounding up and counting the goats and children.
Trailing older members of the Commun (or the children, the timid weaker ones) and snuffling at their heels, the red bear might lift a black nose to savor the air for the scent of mortality. And now and then Death stood in front of them, obliging them to walk unknowingly through what only Hombas saw, the core of the mystery.
Hombas knew that Death had so far reached no decision.
Many times the red bear Death had risen to overwhelming shaggy height, twice the height of a man, and stared at Hombas himself across the village street, small red eyes noncommittal like a pig’s and sorrowfully wise like a man’s. And now and then, when Hombas had been fasting or smoking the marawan pipe to invite wisdom, the red bear Death had drawn very close to observe him, vast russet head swaying back and forth barely an arm’s length away. The last time this happened Hombas had said, quietly so as not to excite the small fry who enjoyed their evening romps around his hut: “I will go and wait for you in the open place when I must, but I am not ready.” Death made no response to this, and he spoke again: “Or, if it will not offend you, I should like to wait until the return of the Spring Caravan, which must be soon (Jesus willing), so that I may bless the young men and hear for the last time what they tell of the out-world.”
The red bear sighed hugely and went away, but only two nights later returned, standing close over Hombas, rising up on mighty hinder legs and gazing down, blotting away the night and the fire, and youth and age and time, the village and the world. The Spring Caravan was now shockingly overdue. Fear of disaster was chilling everyone. Hombas prayed once more to the red bear: “I ask you to allow me to remain until after the Ottoba harvest, for my people have always needed me when they were frightened.”
At this appeal—Hombas hoped he had avoided loss of dignity in making it—the red bear Death showed neither anger nor assent, but shambled off to lie in the grass of the outground, under Hombas’ eyes, until the stockade gate was closed for the night. Head on great flat paws, Death dozed, or looked toward the south when the children squealed or the little blattering goats walked through the presence.
Death lives in the south when at rest. The warm wind-spirits flee; that is why the south wind is hurried and soft like the touch of memory.
* * * *
Hombas’ people were wealthy, owning two other commun sites and prepared to defend them. It was nearly time, even in the usual order of affairs, for the people to move to the next of these locations—Flint Hill—after the necessary sacrifices and housecleaning. The people should never remain too long in one place. The ground sickens; squash, yam, and beans come to a puny harvest; the goats give poor milk. Men also sicken of sameness, just as they dread too big a change; then the gods are offended. Hombas saw in the eyes of his people that the move ought to be made soon, and all except the children would guess that on this occasion Hombas was not to travel with them. But he had not yet spoken, and one does not hurry the Chief of Elders.
They possessed other wealth, including a treasure of Old-Time coins for trading with the mad foreign city of Malone (some say Mayone), a four days’ march toward the sunrise side of the world. In the spring, loaded with a winter’s take of furs, or after the Ottoba harvest with handsome stacks of new-woven baskets, wood carvings, bows, necklaces of painted clay, doll toys of soft pine or plaited straw for children, the young men of the Caravan would gather for the good-luck prayers and Hombas’ blessing. Then some skylarking, brag, and horseplay—boys are like that, and young men may now and then be allowed to act like boys—and in good time the Caravan would sort itself out and march in excellent silence down the dense green trail.
Those foolish people of Malone have no notion of commercial values. For a stack of fewer baskets than the fingers of one hand, they may pay a whole nickel coin, or even a penny. Apparently they don’t know how grand a polish these red-brown things will take, nor how easily you can pound a hole in one of them with a steel point, and thus wear it for protection against smallpox and the malare. A soft people, the Maloners, and often you see grown mues among them behind their great stone walls, a great evil certain to bring a greater evil upon them, if they really don’t understand the necessity of destroying these dreadful beings at birth. But their weapons and magic make them terrible. (Someday, says another Shaman who has grown old since Hombas’ time, Malone shall fall desolate, and we shall go there to take what we will, and be rich forever.)
In a good year the Caravan would return with whole handfuls of gorgeous coins—steel knives too, brass arrowheads nearly as good as steel, perhaps smoked fish, and soft cotton or wool cloth for the women’s delight. It was a day for carnival and rejoicing when the Spring Caravan returned.
But where were they?
Hombas could remember the time, before his initiation, when the Elders had taken him aside and taught him how to measure the years of his life by spreading the fingers of both hands. You can measure days in the same fashion. He recalled how, after the circumcision and knocking out of an eye tooth and other agonies of passage, there came a year when his age was told by both hands together and one more hand. Thus on and on, adding a finger with every return of the moon of spring, until the joy was gone from it, and such counting became a reminder of stiffening in the joints, fading of sight, waning of all powers. He remembered the spring moon of nine fives, long ago, when he became a Shaman, and with the following winter moon an Elder. His age now was hardly to be credited: he numbered it by opening both hands together six times and then showing two fingers. Few but the gods can live to such an age. The people believe that when a Chief of Elders journeys over the waters marking the boundaries of life he becomes a god, and joins the divine Council of Elders in the country beyond the mountain Marsia.
The hands of Hombas counted far too many days since the Spring Caravan had gone. The red bear was walking in the firelight.
The red bear comes for all, but only the wise can observe the presence; only the wise remember that the red bear Death will take from them even wisdom. That is why we should listen to the wise, but not too much.
* * * *
The Spring Caravan never returned. One young man at last crawled naked up the trail, gasping and torn. His right leg was broken; flies clung to gaping and festering wounds; he could not number the days he had spent in hobbling and creeping home. Once, driven off the trail by the smell of black wolf, he had lost his direction, and found it again, he said, only by the mercy of Jesus, Shaman of Shamans. He was brought to Hombas, and in the dust before the blanket where Hombas sat he collapsed, digging clawed fingers into the dirt and beating his forehead on the ground, broken with shame that he should be the carrier of such news. But Hombas was gentle in speech, saying only: “You may tell us now, Absolon, son of Josson.”
The young man told how the Spring Caravan, returning with rich goods from the trading at Malone, had been ambushed not far outside the walls of the city. Of the seven young men, only Absolon had survived. Him the ravagers had left for dead under the pile of other bodies, after stripping them of every smallest thing, every rag, bead, coin, ornament—even the wild parrot’s feather that Absolon wore in his hair because the White Parrot was his patron.
The enemy were Sallorens, Absolon was sure, from the Ontara coast country, squat black-haired men who took no scalps. The savages of Eri in the southwest, or the red-haired Cayugas, would certainly have taken scalps and probably living captives, too, for the entertainment of their villages. These Sallorens, or anyway dark men tattooed just like them, are often seen at Malone, Absolon declared, wearing Mohan clothes and acting in other ways like Maloners. Then Absolon lifted his torn head and cursed Malone in all its days and years, for he believed there had been a conspiracy, Malone sending word to the Sallorens of the Caravan’s coming.
“Do you know this, Absolon? Perhaps they were lying in wait for any caravan that might appear.”
“It may be,” said Absolon. “Before the Chief Elder’s wisdom I am a fool and a nothing.”
The women wailed and scored their breasts; they pulled out their hair and raved. The other young men who had not been chosen to go with the Caravan smeared their faces with dung, and wept, and sharpened their knives. Then all became still, for after Absolon had been taken away to be cared for and if possible healed, Hombas called a Council of the other four Elders. When the old men discuss what is to be done, there should be no speech or foolish noise.
The Elders grouped by the night-fire. Hombas said: “My brothers and my children, this calamity was foretold. But I, Hombas, Chief of Elders, failed to read the signs truly. I am in sorrow. For many days and nights I have seen the red bear.”
Isaia, second in age and virtue of the Elders, asked: “The red bear, the Well-intentioned, has not chosen, Chief of Elders?
“He has not chosen.”
The Elder Isaia said: “The Chief of Elders is burdened with years and long service to Jesus, Shaman of Shamans.”
And others: “Jesus, Shaman of Shamans, knows what is to be.”
“The people shall move to Flint Hill,” Hombas told them, “as soon as the bodies of the young men have been recovered, if that may be. They shall be given as heroes to the burning. After this, Jero, and Adam, and the Elder Elahu, shall go to Flint Hill and see that the stockade is in repair, the ground fit, the dwellings clean and sound, the wood gathered, and the night-fire restored.”
“It shall be done as the Chief of Elders explains.”
“I, Hombas, shall not go to Flint Hill.”
“The saying of the Chief of Elders is hard.”
“I have lived six tens and two.”
“Make us to understand the will of the Spirit.”
“I foretold a safe journey for the Caravan. Now the young men who went with my blessing are dead, my head is covered with ashes, the women tear their breasts.”
Isaia said again, as was proper, but with the noise a voice makes when ambition mixes uneasily with kindness: “The Chief of Elders is heavy with years and godlike in long service.”
“Before the sun rises ten men shall go and recover the bodies of young men, if that may be, if the forest has not taken them. But now the people must understand a hard thing: Without these men we have not the strength to carry war against the Sallorens this year. After the winter moons perhaps it may be done, under the guidance of another Chief of Elders, when I have journeyed over the waters that mark the boundaries of life.”
“Amen, amen.”
“At your departure for Flint Hill, I shall go out to the open place and await the Unanswerable. Let none look back.”
“Amen, O Hombas, Chief of Elders.”
“And now, O Lord of Hosts,” said Hombas, “deliver us from evils and evildoing, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit! May the wombs of our women bear, may the earth bring forth, and the white-scut deer be plentiful. And may my children and my brothers dwell with one another in justice and mercy, amen.”
“Amen.”
After quiet, the Elder Dorson said: “Hombas, Chief of Elders, the fourth child of the woman of Jero turns blue in the face and scarcely breathes. The child is, to be sure, a girl.”
“I will carry her with me to the open place, in Jesus’ name.”
And the Elder Magann: “Hombas, Chief of Elders, an earthen pot in the house of Adam cracked last night for no clear reason as it stood by the fire.”
“Let it be broken in small shards, for exorcism. The fragments may be left with me in the open place.”
The Elder Isaia said with respect: “Hombas, Chief of Elders, I have a sleek male kid not yet weaned of its mother.”
“This I accept as first offering to the Unanswerable. Let it be tethered in the open place at the time of your departure. Should the people ratify you, dear and well-spoken Isaia, as Chief of Elders, may you live long and continue to love justice.”
Then Hombas, who had lived for many years without women, entered his hut and laid across his eyes the white cloth that brings prophetic dreams. In the village, no loud talk, no more wailing, out of respect for the rest and sleep of him who had been Chief of Elders and who would not go with the people on their next journey.
* * * *
And Hombas dreamed of his own journey to come, over the waters that mark the boundaries of life.
He stood on the bank in his dream, while the Ferryman approached through fog like one reluctant. By the mystery of dreaming, Hombas was able to observe his face—calm it was, devoid of anger and joy—as he could not observe the face of a companion who stood beside him in the heaving vapor. It was proposed to Hombas by this companion that he might not be ready for the passage. To him Hombas replied: “I am ready in years, ready in weariness; my joints pain me, my memory mocks me like a naughty servant. In other ways, can one ever be ready, my companion? Is not life too sweet to abandon even when the stream widens and moves sluggishly with a burden of memories? What more must I do before I rest with my fathers?”
The reply of his companion was not in words, but Hombas understood that some further labor might indeed remain—but it would be for him to discover the nature of it. And as though he had come to Hombas for no purpose except to offer a troubling communication, the faceless companion was now gone—all along he might have been no more than a heavy part of the mist. In his place the red bear stood half-seen, surely too vast to accompany Hombas in the little boat, but ready perhaps to swim in the black water beside him, or to drift through the obscurity as a phantom. As one who had loved and served his fellows a long time, Hombas understood how the most immense and inescapable of forces may well appear unreal to human beings—they always have—until these forces sweep them away: flood, fire, war, pestilence, human folly, or that death which is merely the end of living.
The Ferryman was poling an oarless boat. This might mean that the waters marking the boundaries of life are as shallow as they are slow. It was an instructive, amusing detail that he could have told the village children who liked to tumble and chase each other around his hut, climb his legs, sprawl in his lap and fall asleep, tease for some little present or a kiss—children are not repelled by the truly wise, only by the half-wise. But the red bear stirred and sighed, and Hombas remembered it was not fitting for him to think of seeing the children again, nor the village, nor any of the faces of his own kind.
The Ferryman grounded his boat on the gravel margin. Hombas offered him the coin of passage. But the gaunt naked fellow said: “This is only metal. From Hombas, Chief of Elders, more is expected.”
“What must I pay then?” asked Hombas. “The wise are poor in the world, Ferryman; their chief reward is not much more than uneasy tolerance.”
“Will you pay me your hopes?”
“If I have my hopes no longer, can I rest among my fathers? I see that perhaps I might, and—yes, rather than stay here on this bank among these homeless vapors, I will pay you my hopes.”
“It is offered grudgingly. It is not enough. Will you pay me your visions and your memories of human love?”
“Without them, Ferryman, how shall I be better than this broken rock and sand, which has no will except the water’s will?”
“You are not ready for passage,” said the Ferryman. “Go back in the world a little while, Hombas, in your tattered loincloth and nakedness and pride. Go back and labor again, if it is only the labor of learning humility.”
And Hombas woke, putting away the cloth from his eyes and seeing the tranquil night-fire outside his hut. He heard muted voices with other village sounds, the desolate laughter of a loon in the marsh, a night-hawk, a wolf’s howl from the midnight hills. Up in the maple leaves a wind was rippling in the current of spring. The dream disturbed him in his heart. Before first light—he knew the ten men were about to go and recover the bodies of the slain, if that might be—a boy came softly to tell him the messenger Absolon had died in the night, of fever and the festering of his wounds.
Hombas wished he might consult a wiser head as to the meaning of all that was happening, but he knew, as sober truth, that however imperfect his wisdom, no one wiser than himself was in the village or perhaps anywhere in the world; unless it might be the children, who have no time to transmit the virtue of their simplicity before it is gone—that is why we should listen to children.
* * * *
The bodies of the young men were brought back, what the Sallorens and the forest scavengers had left of them, and were given as heroes to the burning. All that day Hombas sat on his blanket in the compound fasting, his eyes in pain from the smoke of the pyre. It hung sullen over the village in the windless hours. He was aloof, as was proper for one lately Chief of Elders, unapproachable and old. He thought of the young men, prayed for them. He thought too of the older days, of the years outside his experience but spoken of by his father, who had known himself to be a great-grandson of the West Wind. When at last the funeral songs were done and the blaze not more than heat remembered, evening was coming on again, while in the village certain quiet preparations were being made for departure in the morning.
It was not fitting that Hombas should pay heed to these. He meditated through another night on his dream of that shallow river marking the boundaries of life, of the Ferryman’s hard sayings. He did not see the red bear.
At dawn the younger wife of Isaia brought him goat’s milk, and the kid that was to be tethered near him in the open place. As he drank the milk and blessed her, the Elder Isaia came also to kneel before him, and said: “Hombas, venerable Shaman, the Elders have chosen me to hold the office that you honored, in Jesus’ name. I pray you bless me to this service, Hombas.”
They say that Hombas smiled as he blessed Isaia, who was not a cheerful man, and placed on him the sacred deer-bone necklace that confers courage and quickness of mind. They say also that Isaia, in his time as Chief of Elders, governed well, though sometimes hesitant and anxious, and that the precedents upholding his decisions were very often the judgments of Hombas. “Be content, Isaia,” Hombas said. “It is a brave journey between midnights.” This has been remembered, though few agree on all that Hombas meant by it.
Then there came to him the aging warrior Jero; he had taken from his woman the infant girl five days old whose face turned blue and who could not breathe except with difficulty, bringing her to Hombas; behind him his woman watched dry-eyed, and did not speak. The baby, as Hombas received her in his arms, curled a fist around his finger and for awhile her gasping breath came more quietly. The people remember this, not as a miracle but as a certain evidence of divine grace. And when Hombas rose, holding her in the hollow of his arm and leading the unweaned kid with his left hand, it was seen that the kid followed him without any tugging at the leash of leather, and that the child had fallen asleep. Hombas said then to the woman of Jero: “Be content, Rashel, with what no power can change. If she is not to know joy in living, neither can she know sorrow.”
Hombas went out beyond the stockade of the village, through the pasture where the goats were being herded together for the journey to Flint Hill, and up a winding path in the long grass, among juniper and scattered boulders and tangles of wild raspberry canes, to the open place, a wide area where flat granite covered a shoulder of the hillside; at the western end of the outcropping of rock grew a thick spruce that held away the wind. Near this tree the good man Adam had brought the shards of his broken pot, and a sound jar filled with spring-water. Hombas blessed him, and sat here with the still sleeping child, gazing over undulant hills in the south, and toward the mountain Marsia in the southwest, distant under the sky of spring.
The little goat he had tethered somewhat below the open place out of his sight. It was necessary that it should bleat and call, being a first offering to the powers who would come for Hombas himself when the time was right. The small creature might feel desolate and abandoned for a time, until the gods of the forest came and released it; but they would do so. It would not be fitting for Hombas to witness their coming. The forest gods ought not to be drawn by trickery, or against their will, into human observation. They are lonely ones. That is why the bats, who are the gods of those night-thoughts that flutter past too quickly to be questioned, never appear by day. Or if one does, a good man will help it to a tree-hollow where it can wait on the return of dark.
* * * *
Holding the infant, Hombas meditated on death, and found it strange that all he could remember of his people’s thought on the matter, including his own, had been concerned not with the thing itself but with hope or legend or speculation concerning some life beyond the incident of death: as though death were no more than a passage, an opening in the woods. But what if it is not so? What if death is no passage at all, only the termination of thought, feeling, presence? Who has seen the soul that is to board the Ferryman’s little boat and cross the waters that mark the boundaries of life? If none has seen it, can a wise man accept a belief in the existence of it?
Was it my soul far wandering that spoke with the Ferryman, and with someone faceless, in my dream? All people dream, and most dreams are ridiculous. In sleep are we perhaps not wandering away from the body into the country of the spirits as the wise men of the past have taught us, but merely lying still and thinking fantastically in our sleep? . . . Now this might mean that there is no soul, and even that the wise men of the past were not quite wise.
The morning drew on with quiet, in springtime coolness. Hombas sensed that the people had gone, and his mind traveled a little way with them on the obscure trail to Flint Hill, and let them go, returning to the open place. The child did not wake; her breathing was very shallow, her pallor more waxen than bluish, with pinched tiny nostrils. Now and then Hombas waved away a hovering fly. It might have been more fitting, more pleasing to the forest gods, to set her out now on the rock or where the kid was tethered, but Hombas preferred to hold her fading warmth against his own until her small, foredoomed struggle for continuing life should end. It would not be long.
He meditated on the tales and fancies and histories of the Old Time, the Age of Sorcerers. It was darkly long ago—five generations, even two fives, who can say? Hombas’ father when he was young had met a very old man in Malone who said that as a boy he had seen one of the Old-Time death-sticks of heavy metal, in possession of an ancient redheaded Cayuga. That savage had told him how there used to be pellets made by the Sorcerers, each containing a devil, which could be placed inside the hollow stick. Then, by command of the stick’s owner, the devil would burst forth at the other end with such frightful power that anything in its path was instantly killed. Catrishes, those pellets were called. The Cayuga assured the boy they had all been used up and swept out of existence in Old-Time—at least, he said, looking sly, he thought they had. He broke open the stick at the large end so that the boy might look through the hollow passage inside and see the strange regular spirals cut into the metal, and then made him jump out of his skin by slamming a foot on the ground and shouting “Broom!”’ Cayugas never have any manners. The boy, telling the story as an old man, was said to have said that the Maloners who saw the stick had no belief in the powers of it. They claimed it was just a hollow iron bar with wooden fittings, part of one of the Sorcerers’ miraculous machines; or perhaps the Sorcerers had used it to beat their servant devils and make them obey.
Hombas knew other tales. In the Age of Sorcerers, myriads of magicians rushed about all over the earth in wheeled carts that moved of themselves by a horrid magic. Hombas himself, when young, hunting with two companions and following a wounded woods buffalo too far to the south, dangerously close to Cayuga country, had come upon one of the enormous roads built by the Sorcerers to serve these hell-carts. Straight as a spear the road ran and level as a stream, cutting a valley from hilltop to hilltop with mighty disdain for any lesser rises or hollows. Vines had been able to cross it here and there, especially the poison ivy and jinna-creeper, with their countless busy rootlets. Elsewhere the road stretched bleak and clear, pitted with cracks and holes but nearly lifeless, a track of desolation through the green. Seeing this thing, one could understand how the curse of the good Jesus had fallen on the Sorcerers and destroyed them and all their works.
Hombas and his friends had known better than to venture out on that horror. Yet, the young men do say that the Townfolk make some use of these roads, near Malone and those other places where they have their clustered dwellings, and impregnable high walls to hold off brown tiger and black wolf and red bear. The feet of their horses and oxen cannot endure the surface of the ancient roads, of course, but the Maloners and their kind, with leather shoes and an unlimited store of foolishness, walk out on them and apparently take no harm.
The Sorcerers rode in the machines that climbed through the air beyond human vision. They could make the air vibrate, too, and so talk magically with each other across many miles. And they traveled back and forth at will between the earth and the moon.
The moon is a globe that the god Jehova set spinning many centuries ago along with the sun, in such a way that the two run a strictly ordered course above the earth and below the earth. The heat of the sun is life and day; the light of the moon is wisdom and night. A long time from now, the force of the god’s original cast will run down (according to his own foresight) and then both sun and moon will fall into the sea that runs all around the field of the earth. In that time will be only starlight; there will be no day. The earth will stand without heat or wisdom. The people, all of them, will have crossed the waters that mark the boundaries of life.
In the time of the Sorcerers the moon was larger in the skies, and often red. And the impious traveling of the Sorcerers to the moon resulted in the first of their great punishments. The moon-people came out of the center of their globe and made war on them. The Sorcerers fought hard, but the moon-people, whom Jesus loves also, defeated them with a mightier science (that is an Old-Time word for magic), destroying countless numbers of the Sorcerers’ flying craft. Before the Sorcerers’ armies on the moon were annihilated by the moon-people, the colossal warfare had laid waste enormous areas of that globe and created mountainous ruins.
There is never any profit in trying to tell of these things to the Maloners. They build walls, contrary to Jesus’ commands, and they cherish the ugly fancy that the earth itself is a globe, and there is no truth in them. When they die, the Ferryman cannot take them because they do not believe in the god Jehova nor in Jesus his prophet, but follow the false prophet Abraham. At death their poor homeless spirits go wandering, swept here and there until they become caught in the tree branches. When the wind strikes those branches in the barren time of winter, you hear them crying.
This is how you may know the truth of what happened to the Sorcerers on the moon. When the moon is full, look on those gray marks that seem like shadows. Those are blighted areas left by the war up there, just like the desert of Eri and other places that the Sorcerers left ruined on the earth before they perished.
* * * *
The child made a noise too small and fleeting for a groan. Her breathing ceased. Hombas recited the prayer for those dying in infancy, that the Ferryman should let them pass without payment of a coin. Rising stiffly with her, he felt the spring chill with sudden acuteness; his joints ached. Dizziness from the hours of fasting laid hold of him, and he staggered.
These disorders could be overcome. Presently he was able to carry the baby’s lifeless body to the far edge of the rocks. There the Forest People would find her, or the Well-meaning Winged Ones whose faces are not to be looked on because the god Jehova for his own reasons has made them horrible.
He had set down the little corpse and made the sign of the cross over her, when from no great distance an intolerable cry of outrage and pain rang and rang through the woods, echoing metallically from bare tree-trunks and rock surfaces. Shrill it was, keening and prolonged, coming from some great chest of powerful resonance. Black wolf could not have made that noise. Red bear does not speak, except to growl or chuckle or snort a little: The red bear expects deference from everyone, except the Maloners who are foolish and sinful, and has no need of threatening or angry cries. Hombas stood paralyzed with wonder, shrinking too, for it was a sound to make the flesh cringe regardless of courage. He trembled in the certainty that he would again hear the anguished voice. He did, once more, and the sound trailed off in a long groan. Brown tiger never sent forth that roar of agony. If this were a victim of brown tiger—woods buffalo, maybe, or elk—it would have had no chance for a second cry. And what grass-eater could utter such vast rage?
There came distant thrashing noises, and a muffled pounding as if a giant’s fist were hammering the earth. Then Hombas belatedly remembered that not very long ago, before the departure of the Spring Caravan, the people had built a deep deadfall near the Open Place, where they had found a trail beaten by those vermin, the wild pigs, attackers of children and raiders of the gardens. Hombas had approved the digging at the time. Presumably the swine had proved too clever to be deceived, and so he had heard no more said about it. All the same Hombas found it shocking that he could have forgotten it. High time indeed to go and sit in the Open Place.
Well—wild boar never made such a noise as that. And Hombas reflected: In the forest live many gods we do not know. Perhaps one of them has need of me. Perhaps Jesus, Shaman of Shamans, has offered me opportunity to do some service before I cross the waters that mark the boundaries of life.
Somewhat lightheaded but no longer much afraid, he glanced toward the sun, astonished to note how far the day had advanced beyond noon. He let himself down from the rock, moving more easily as his muscles limbered with the action, and moved off under the trees in the direction of that pounding. He heard now a heartrending moaning, muffled, high, nasal, broken now and then by a snap of jaws. So it might be bear after all, for they chatter their teeth like that in anger; but surely not a red bear. In Hombas’ memory, no red bear had ever been caught in a trap or deadfall.
Hombas’ foot caused a dry branch to crack under him; the moaning and pounding ceased. The noise had summoned him; now the being, whoever it was, knew he was coming, and so fell silent. Hombas was sure of the direction. He called politely: “I who come to you am Hombas who was Chief of Elders. If you are a god, you may command me, a believer in the laws. If you are a forest thing, I come in mercy.”
He heard no reply. But the Forest People are not given to needless speech, except for the wind spirits, and what they say is more music than speaking. He hobbled on therefore, no longer trying to move with quiet. He found the trail that had been tramped, not recently, by the wild swine. The smell in his nostrils was the feral, fishy scent of bear. He came to the edge of the pit, where the branches hiding the deadfall had been broken in. Rearing a tormented head above the surface of the ground was the red bear Death, who was blind.
With the eyes of the flesh Hombas saw him, an old and mighty male who had evidently been blind in his right eye for a long time, since the socket was shrunken and fallen in—perhaps an arrow wound, or a slash in some battle with his own kind. Now the other eye was squeezed shut, leaking tears, and in the fur of the great, round, innocent face were tangled the bodies of many wild bees, smashed by the bear’s paw—but one of them must have carried a sting to the eyeball. The bear’s head was turned toward Hombas, but only because he had heard the approach. When Hombas stepped silently to one side, the creature did not move in response to the action.
With the senses of his flesh Hombas heard, some distance up the trail, the still furious snarling hum of the hive. The bee warriors had not pursued the ravisher this far, or perhaps had lost sight of him when he fell into the pit in his pain and blindness.
Hombas smelled the bear’s blood. In falling he had pierced a hind foot on one of the sharpened stakes in the pit. He had torn the foot free, but other stakes prevented him from winning a purchase with his hind claws on the dense clay walls. He had pounded at the edges of the pit, without aim in his darkness, trying to break down a passage to freedom, but the clay was tight, the pit dug deep and wide by the people with good steel tools from Malone. Now the bear had ceased that effort.
Smelling and hearing man, he roared in despair and agony. He lunged toward Hombas, bringing down both forepaws tremendously on the edge. But then his blind head dropped between them, and he let it remain there, as if he prayed.
With the senses of the flesh, the knowledge of a hunter, the wisdom of a Shaman, Hombas observed and understood all this, and feared the tortured beast, and pitied him.
With the eyes of the spirit, Hombas knew that the red bear Death might be about to die.
* * * *
Hombas asked him: “Has the god Jehova decreed that Death shall die? Is it possible?”
He won no answer. In the faintness from his age and long fasting, he believed the waters that mark the boundaries of life must be flowing not far from this lonely place in the woods, and without sight of him he felt the presence of the Ferryman. Poling the little boat (perhaps) nearer to this shore, expecting that Hombas might by now have discovered what labor it was he ought still to perform. What will become of the Ferryman, if Death is about to die?
Hombas moved away, disturbed by an inner rejoicing not altogether candid nor genuine. Death was to be no more—why, if so, all the Forest People should be singing, and every leaf should smile with an inner sunlight. But he, Hombas, was, the only one who knew it yet—he alone among all the wise men. Soon all would know it. No more dying! (But if flowers do not fade, how shall new flowers grow?)
He walked feebly down the trail, unwilling to look back although the blind bear might be silently calling him. I shall not die. I shall live forever. (With these aching joints, this weariness?—oh, even that way, is life not dear?) I shall enjoy the night-fire, the changes of life in the compound, the children, the meditation, the sharing of wisdom, the tenderness of returning spring. (But if flowers do not fade, how can there be rebirth, how can there be spring?)
I must go to Flint Hill and tell my people. I return to you—hear me! There is to be no more dying. I, Hombas, Chief of Elders, have permitted Death to die although he prayed to me. I bring you life eternal—rejoice, rejoice! Your children shall not perish! Never shall your beloved die!
He found laughter, running down the trail, stumbling, weeping and shouting: “Life eternal! Hear me, my people! Life eternal!”
But in this clumsy ecstasy he tripped on a root, and saved himself by clutching at a branch, and stood there wavering, dizzy and gasping for breath. His eyes cleared. He stared along the branch. A fat greenish blowfly lit on it not far from his fingers; she was ripe with eggs and bloated with carrion meals, and he saw her accept the mounting and penetration of a male. The two squatted there linked in copulation, seeming to regard him. No dying? . . .
* * * *
Hombas returned to the pit. He spoke a little to the red bear Death, but the legend does not say whether this was a true conversation or only the voiced reflections of a man with a difficult task to perform. He searched the region around the pit until he found where his people had cut an ash tree to use in making the deadfall. They had left the long butt on the ground, wanting only the flimsy upper branches. Moving this fourteen-foot log was surely a task for two men in their prime, yet Hombas accomplished it, levering it with small sticks we suppose, and resting often.
He worked it to the edge of the deadfall. He said to the blinded beast: “It is well that we met, who have need of each other.” And then he slid the log down so that an end rested against one of the stakes, a bridge on an easy slant for the bear’s escape. And he sat by the trail waiting.
That is how Death became blind. But the people who know the legend call Hombas blessed, because of his mercy to us.