The Animal Wife Read Online Free Page B

speaking for Mother.
    "Kori can decide for himself," said Uncle Bala. "Well, Kori—your mother or your father?"
    "My father," I said.
    "Then you must tell your mother. Go on. Go do it."
    So I went. I found Mother all red in the light of the setting sun, sitting by her fire in front of her grass shelter, cracking the shinbone of the mare I had taken from the lion. Without a word she looked at me sadly, handing me the broken shin. I took it and licked out the marrow. "You're leaving," she said.
    "But not now," I said. "Not until Father goes."
    Mother looked at me steadily, planning her words as if she hadn't heard mine. At last she spoke. "On the bank of the Hair," she said, "you will find a huge, dark cave where many people spend the summer. I used to spend the summer there too. We were there when I bore you. I went out to the plain where no one would see me and I hid myself in a thicket. I hid from the lions. There were many lions. I crouched down out of sight and hung on to the thickest branch of one of the bushes. I bit the branch so I wouldn't scream. I was there all day, until sunset, without help or safety or water. At last I bore you, in a river of my blood. And then I carried you back to the safety of the cave. I took care of you. I fed you. These fed you." Mother opened her shirt and showed me her breasts, the nipples now hung with drops of milk for her new baby.
    "Mother, I know that—" I began, but she interrupted me.
    "Don't speak! I'm speaking," she said. "In winter, when there was no food, you ate the food of my body. Even when I starved, I had milk in my breasts for you. And wherever I went, I took you. When your father divorced me I brought you to my people, thinking that you would be with me when I grew old, that you would hunt and give me meat, give back to me some of that life and food I gave to you. But I see I was wrong. You're going." She pressed her lips tight and looked at me with huge eyes.
    Childishly, I began to cry. I couldn't help it. "Please, Mother," I said, "Father wants you. You could still come. Please change your mind. Nothing is settled. It's not too late."
    "I won't live with your father," said Mother. "Let him remarry. I feel sorry for his wives. I feel sorry for you. You won't like it at his home on the Hair River."
    "Why not?" I asked. But Mother shook her head. She wouldn't tell me.
    I finished the marrow and laid the bone on the fire. We watched it without speaking until it flamed. Inside the grass shelter, on Mother's deerskin bed, the baby began to cry. For the first time that I could remember, Mother didn't go to him. As if she didn't hear him, she turned to look at the sky in the west, where the low red sun was filling the clouds with fire. She said, "You will go and I will stay. But we will meet again, Kori. Not on the summergrounds or wintergrounds of any man, but there in the west, where we will eat the sun by the fire of our lineage—yours and mine, but not your father's—with our elders in the Camps of the Dead."
    ***
    After dark, at Uncle Bala's fire, I had to unfasten my pack to get my sleeping-skin, and I saw how I had been too eager to leave, too hasty. But even after all that Mother had said, I had no thought of not following Father. My pack might sit untied for a while, but it was ready.
    Yet as I lay waiting for sleep, I saw in my mind's eye a single fire far out on a plain, lit by evening light. Small, but with a long shadow, my mother sat alone beside it. The thought made me so sad that again I couldn't help but cry. Perhaps Father heard me. In the dark I felt his hand on my arm. "I think your mother wants you to stay," he said. "You don't have to come with us this year. You can wait for another year. There's plenty of time."
    "I won't wait," I told him.
    ***
    Soon after that, one day at noon, when all of us were resting in the shade of bushes or in our grass shelters, someone noticed that to the east of us people were in sight. We all stood up to see a