I sit now, with the other young men of
my village, hidden from the others, who are behind their own wall of
boulders. I listen to the silence. I cannot sleep, must not sleep,
for it is my turn to keep watch. The night is clear and cold. I keep
my nose down, sheltered by my wrap, to keep my nostril hairs from
cracking. It is my ears that bear the brunt, remaining uncovered,
unable to hear if covered.
When younger, before, when my winters
were spent in warm comfort of fire and house, I would stare at the
elders, unsure and afraid of their tattered and torn earlobes. My
father was among them, the “Order of the Tattered Ears” as I
thought of them. It was the summer of my changing that I finally
found the courage to ask, “Had he always been deformed?”. I
remembered how father had rumbled a hearty laugh and smiled. “So
many questions, too many questions,” he had said, not angry as he
often was. “Perhaps you will find your answers, come the dark of
winter, and the time of the warrior stars.”
Was it less than a year ago that I had
asked the question? It had been less than six moons ago, but the
memory seemed a dream.
When I was a child, father had told me
the stories, during the long darkness of winter. We would go outside,
“to be men,” he would say to the women. But it was the women who
chased us out into the cold, to get more wood, more water, more food.
“Wait, take time,” he would say when I showed too much
enthusiasm. “It is hard work, too hard for women.” And we would
sit and look up into the winter sky, and he would connect the points
of light with his finger, trace the hidden shapes and tell the
stories.
And so the warrior stars were there for
me, their stories distant echoes that I heard differently now, since
I had seen a man die, since I had killed a man.
I lifted my head and listened, but it
was only the wind chasing snow over the rocks. I looked up, searching
out the familiar shapes, finding one that heralded morning. But it
was still high, and the light of the crescent moon had not yet shown.
The night was not over. I shrugged to keep the cold from seeping down
my neck. A quick sniff and I knew it had gotten colder.
We had been told we would stay only one
moon, which meant we leave in four or five days. Perhaps the
challenges were over. Certainly they had diminished, now that the
nights were darker. I did not dwell on living or dying, not like I
once had. Perhaps I would return home, perhaps. But I knew home would
not be the same.
Hearing only the quiet of a still, cold
night, I lowered my nose and protected it once more. Right now, I am
alive, and this winter, should I survive, I will have joined the
order of the tattered ears.
- James Seamarsh, who writes of far-away
winters in a long-past youth.