Ursula K. LeGuin - Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences Read online

  "I hope you all die in pain," she said aloud. She turned away and walked down into the desert

  It was Chickadee who met her, on the second evening north of Horse Butte.

  "I didn't cry," the child said.

  "None of us do," said Chickadee. "Come with me this way now. Come into Grandmother's house."

  It was underground, but very large, dark and large, and the Grandmother was there at the center, at her loom. She was making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the lightning. As they spoke she wove.

  "Hello, Chickadee. Hello, New Person."

  "Grandmother," Chickadee greeted her.

  The child said, "I'm not one of them."

  Grandmother's eyes were small and dim. She smiled and wove. The shuttle thrummed through the warp.

  "Old Person, then," said Grandmother. "You'd better go back there now, Granddaughter. That's where you live."

  "I lived with Coyote. She's dead. They killed her."

  "Oh, don't worry about Coyote!" Grandmother said, with a little huff of laughter. "She gets killed all the time."

  Won't You Come Out Tonight A.51

  The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.

  "Then I -- Could I go back home -- to her house -- ?"

  "I don't think it would work," Grandmother said. "Do you, Chickadee?" Chickadee shook her head once, silent

  "It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas... You got outside your people's time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn't your father there?"

  The child nodded.

  "They've been looking for you."

  "They have?"

  "Oh, yes, ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren't there -- they kept looking."

  "Serves him right Serves them all right," the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.

  "Go on, little one, Granddaughter," Spider said. "Don't be afraid. You can live well there. I'll be there too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark comers in the basement. Don't kill me, or 111 make it rain... "

  "I'll come around," Chickadee said. "Make gardens for me."

  The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak

  "Will I ever see Coyote?"

  "I don't know," the Grandmother replied.

  The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, "Can I keep my eye?"

  "Yes. You can keep your eye."

  "Thank you, Grandmother," the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope towards the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, lightwinged.

  Three Rock Poems

  The first thing about rocks is, they're old. What a geologist calls a "young1 rock may be older than the species of the individual who picks it up to look at or throw at something or build with; even a genuinely new bit of pumice, fresh from the mouth of Mt. St. Helens, which spat it out into the Columbia River in 1981 to drift down and be picked up on a beach south of the rivermouth, is potentially (if one may say so) old -- able to exist in its shapeless, chaotic thingness for time to come beyond human count of years. In the wonderful passage in T.H.

  White's Sword in the Stone where young Arthur the Wart learns to understand what the rocks are saying what he hears them whisper is, "Cohere. Cohere." Rocks are in time in a different way than living things are, even the ancient trees. So I was thinking when I came to the last line of the poem "Flints." But then, the other thing about rocks is that they are place (hence the next-to-last line). Rocks are what a place is made of to start with and after all. They are under everything else in the world, din, water, street, house, air, launching pad. The stone is at the center.

  The man and woman who survived the Greek Flood were told, "Cast your mother's bones behind you and don't look back." When they had figured out what their mother's bones were, they did so; and the rocks softened, and took form, and became flesh: our flesh. And this is indeed what happened, between the Pre-Cambrian Era and this week: the matter of Earth, rock, softened, took form, opened eyes, stood up, stooped down to pick up a rock in soft, warm, momentary fingers...

  55

  56 JT BUFFALO GALS The Basalt

  This rock land poured like milk.

  Molten it flowed like honey.

  Volcanoes told it,

  their mouths told all the words of the story, continuous, tremendous, coherent, brimming over and flowing as easy as milk and as certain as darkness.

  You can pick up a word and hold it,

  opaque,

  untranslated.

  Flints

  Color of sun on stone, what color, grey or gold?

  In winter Oregon

  on Wiltshire flints in the window the same sun. The same stones:

  the standing woman,

  the blind head,

  the leaner, the turner, the stranger.

  Bones of England, single stones

  that mean the world,

  that mean the world is old.

  Wont You Come Out TonightA 57 (1982)

  (1986)

  Mount St Helens/ Omphalos

  O mountain there is no other where you stand the center is

  Seven stones in a circle Robert Spott the shaman set them the child watched him

  There stands the Henge a child plays with toy cars on the Altar Stone

  There stands the mountain alone and there is no other center nor circle's edge

  0 stone among the stars the children on the moon saw you

  and came home Earth, hearth, hill, altar, heart's home, the stone is at the center

  (1972)

  "The Wife's Story" and "Mazes"

  "Mazes" is a quite old story, and "The Wife's Story" a more recent one; what they have in common, it seems to me, is that they are both betrayals. They are simple but drastic reversals of the conventional, the expected. So strong is the sway of the expected that I have learned to explain before I read them to an audience that "The Wife's Story" is not about werewolves, and that "Mazes" is not about rats. Perhaps what confuses people in "Mazes" is that the character called 'the alien'is from what we call 'the earth,'and the other one isn't. The source of the resistance to the reversal in "The Wife's Story" may lie somewhat deeper.

  Mazes

  1 have tried hard to use my wits and keep up my courage, but I know now that I will not be able to withstand the torture any longer. My perceptions of time are confused, but I think it has been several days since I realized I could no longer keep my emotions under aesthetic control, and now the physical breakdown is also nearly complete. I cannot accomplish any of the greater motions. I cannot speak. Breathing in this heavy foreign air, grows more difficult When the paralysis reaches my chest I shall die: probably tonight The alien's cruelly is refined, yet irrational. If it intended

  61

  62 JT BUFFALO GALS If

  IP

  all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want Only they were not fresh. They had been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something anything that might still the pain and craving in the gut So I ate, and ate, and starved.

  It is a relief, now, to be so weak I cannot eat

  The same elaborately perverse cruelty marks all its behavior. And the worst thing of all is just the one I welcomed with such relief and delight at first: the maze. I was badly disoriented at first, after the trapping being handled by a giant, being dropp
ed into a prison; and this place around the prison is disorienting spatially disquieting the strange, smooth, curved wall-ceiling is of an alien substance and its lines are meaningless to me. So when I was taken up and put down, amidst all this strangeness, in a maze, a recognizable, even familiar maze, it was a moment of strength and hope after great distress. It seemed pretty clear that I had been put in the maze as a kind of test or investigation, that a first approach toward communication was being attempted. I tried to cooperate in every way. But it was not possible to believe for very long that the creature's purpose was to achieve communication.

  It is intelligent, highly intelligent, that is clear from a thousand evidences. We are both intelligent creatures, we are both maze-builders: surely it would be quite easy to leam to talk together! If that were what the alien wanted. But it is not I do not know what kind of mazes it builds for itself. The ones it made for me were instruments of torture.

  Mazes ~63

  The mazes were, as I said, of basically familiar types, though the walls were of that foreign material much colder and smoother than packed clay. The alien left a pile of picked leaves in one extremity of each maze, I do not know why; it may be a ritual or superstition. The first maze it put me in was babyishly short and simple. Nothing expressive or even interesting could be worked out from it The second, however, was a kind of simple version of the Ungated Affirmation, quite adequate for the reassuring outreaching statement I wanted to make. And the last, the long maze, with seven corridors and nineteen connections, lent itself surprisingly well to the Maluvian mode, and indeed to almost all the New Expressionist techniques. Adaptations had to be made to the alien spatial understanding but a certain quality of creativity arose precisely from the adaptations. I worked hard at the problem of that maze, planning all night long re-imagining the lines and spaces, the feints and pauses, the erratic, unfamiliar, and yet beautiful course of the True Run. Next day when I was placed in the long maze and the alien began to observe, I performed the Eighth Maluvian in its entirety.

  It was not a polished performance. I was nervous, and the spatio-temporal parameters were only approximate. But the Eighth Maluvian survives the crudest performance in the poorest maze. The evolutions in the ninth encatena-tion, where the "cloud" theme recurs so strangely transposed into the ancient spiraling motif, are indestructibly beautiful. I have seen them performed by a very old person, so old and stiff-jointed that he could only suggest the movements, hint at them, a shadow-gesture, a dim reflection of the themes: and all who watched were inexpressibly moved. There is no nobler statement of our being. Performing I myself was carried away by the power of the motions and forgot that I was a prisoner, forgot the alien eyes watching me; I transcended the errors of the maze

  64 JT BUFFALO GALS

  and my own weakness, and danced the Eighth Maluvian as I have never danced it before.

  When it was done, the alien picked me up and set me down in the first maze -- the short one, the maze for little children who have not yet learned how to talk.

  Was the humiliation deliberate? Now that it is all past, I see that there is no way to know. But it remains very hard to ascribe its behavior to ignorance.

  After all, it is not blind. It has eyes, recognizable eyes. They are enough like our eyes that it must see somewhat as we do. It has a mouth, four legs, can move bipedally, has grasping hands, etc.; for all its gigantism and strange looks, it seems less fundamentally different from us, physically, than a fish. And yet, fish school and dance and, in their own stupid way, communicate! The alien has never once attempted to talk with me. It has been with me, watched me, touched me, handled me, for days: but all its motions have been purposeful, not communicative. It is evidently a solitary creature, totally selfabsorbed.

  This would go far to explain its cruelty.

  I noticed early that from time to time it would move its curious horizontal mouth in a series of fairly delicate, repetitive gestures, a little like someone eating. At first I thought it was jeering at me; then I wondered if it was trying to urge me to eat the indigestible fodder; then I wondered if it could be communicating 1obiaUy. It seemed a limited and unhandy language for one so well provided with hands, feet, limbs, flexible spine, and all; but that would be like the creature's perversity, I thought I studied its lip-motions and tried hard to imitate them. It did not respond. It stared at me briefly and then went away.

  In fact, the only indubitable response I ever got from it was on a pitifully low level of interpersonal aesthetics. It was tormenting me with knob-pushing, as it did once a day. I had endured this grotesque routine pretty patiently

  Mazes "A-65

  for the first several days. If I pushed one knob I got a nasty sensation in my feet, if I pushed a second I got a nasty pellet of dried-up food, if I pushed a third I got nothing whatever. Obviously, to demonstrate my intelligence I was to push the third knob. But it appeared that my intelligence irritated my captor, because it removed the neutral knob after the second day. I could not imagine what it was trying to establish or accomplish, except the fact that I was its prisoner and a great deal smaller than it When I tried to leave the knobs, it forced me physically to return. I must sit there pushing knobs for it, receiving punishment from one and mockery from the other. The deliberate outrageousness of the situation, the insufferable heaviness and thickness of this air, the feeling of being forever watched yet never understood, all combined to drive me into a condition for which we have no description at all. The nearest thing I can suggest is the last interlude of the Ten Gate Dream, when all the feintways are closed and the dance narrows in and in until it bursts terribly into the vertical. I cannot say what I felt, but it was a little like that If I got my feet stung once more, or got pelted once more with a lump of rotten food, I would go vertical forever... I took the knobs off the wall (they came off with a sharp tug like flowerbuds), laid them in the middle of the floor, and defecated on them.

  The alien took me up at once and returned to my prison. It had got the message, and had acted on it But how unbelievably primitive the message had had to be! And the next day, it put me back in the knob room, and there were the knobs as good as new, and I was to choose alternate punishments for its amusement... Until then I had told myself that the creature was alien, therefore incomprehensible and uncomprehending, perhaps not intelligent in the same manner as we, and so on. But since then I have known that, though all that may remain true, it is also unmistakably and grossly cruel.

  66 JT BUFFALO GALS

  When it put me into the baby maze yesterday, I could not move. The power of speech was all but gone (I am dancing this, of course, in my mind; "the best maze is the mind," the old proverb goes) and I simply crouched there, silent. After a while it took me out again, gently enough. There is the ultimate perversity of its behavior it has never once touched me cruelly.

  It set me down in the prison, locked the gate, and filled up the trough with inedible food. Then it stood two-legged, looking at me for a while.

  Its face is very mobile, but if it speaks with its face I cannot understand it, that is too foreign a language. And its body is always covered with bulky, binding mats, like an old widower who has taken the

  Vow of Silence. But I had become accustomed to its great size, and to the angular character of its limb-positions, which at first had seemed to be saying a steady stream of incoherent and mispronounced phrases, a horrible nonsense-dance like the motions of an imbecile, until I realized that they were strictly purposive movements. Now I saw something a little beyond that, in its position. There were no words, yet there was communication. I saw, as it stood watching me, a clear signification of angry sadness -- as clear as the Sembrian Stance.

  There was the same lax immobility, the bentness, the assertion of defeat. Never a word came clear, and yet it told me that it was filled with resentment, pity, impatience, and frustration. It told me it was sick of torturing me, and wanted me to help it. I am sure I understood it. I tried to answer. I tried to say, "What i
s it you want of me? Only tell me what it is you want." But I was too weak to speak clearly, and it did not understand. It has never understood.

  And now I have to die. No doubt it will come in to watch me die; but it will not understand the dance I dance in dying. (1971)

  A.67

  The Wife's Story

  HE WAS A GOOD HUSBAND, a good father. I don't understand it I don't believe in it I don't believe that it happened. I saw it happen but it isn't true. It can't be. He was always gentle. If you'd have seen him playing with the children, anybody who saw him with the children would have known that there wasn't any bad in him, not one mean bone. When I first met him he was still living with his mother over near Spring Lake, and I used to see them together, the mother and the sons, and think that any young fellow that was that nice with his family must be one worth knowing. Then one time when I was walking in the woods I met him by himself coming back from a hunting trip. He hadn't got any game at all, not so much as a field mouse, but he wasn't cast down about it He was just larking along enjoying the morning air. That's one of the things I first loved about him. He didn't take things hard, he didn't grouch and whine when things didn't go his way. So we got to talking that day. And I guess things moved right along after that, because pretty soon he was over here pretty near all the time. And my sister said -- see, my parents had moved out the year before and gone South, leaving us the place -- my sister said, kind of teasing but serious, "Well! If he's going to be here every day and half the night, I guess there isn't room for me!" And she moved out -- just down the way. We've always been real close, her and me. That's the sort of thing doesn't ever change. I couldn't ever have got through this bad time without my sis.

  Well, so he came to live here. And all I can say is, it was the happy year of my life. He was just purely good to me. A

  68J7 BUFFALO GALS

  hard worker and never lazy, and so big and fine-looking. Everybody looked up to him, you know, young as he was. Lodge Meeting nights, more and more often they had him to lead the singing. He had such a beautiful voice, and he'd lead off strong and the others following and joining in, high voices and low. It brings the shivers on me now to think of it, hearing it, nights when I'd stayed home from meeting when the children was babies -- the singing coming up through the trees there, and the moonlight, summer nights, the full moon shining. Ill never hear anything so beautiful. 111 never know a joy like that again.