A Hero's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

listen.
    Unlike Merin's council of old women, who could spend all day talking about nothing, the forest people seemed to want to have their serious discussion over with as quickly as possible. Sett listened to what everyone had to say, then thought for a little while before speaking a few words to each one. Then the forest people rose and went to bed.
    Maara and I followed their example and crept naked into the bed they offered us. The news of strangers worried me. I was full of questions, but before I could whisper even one of them, Maara put her arms around me. For a long time, being close to her was all I could think about. The love I felt for her made me feel strong, while her love for me made me feel safe. Soon I slept.
    The children woke us. They must have been up long enough to grow impatient with waiting for their elders to wake up. I was reminded of the many mornings of my own childhood when I would play almost quietly enough not to wake the sleeping household.
    The fire was out. The only light inside the cave came from a little daylight that found its way through fissures in the rock. Two ghostly figures all in white cavorted by the cave entrance. I rubbed my eyes. Then I saw that they were children. Each was wearing one of our shirts. I glanced around me, looking for the rest of our clothing. Every stitch was gone. One boy wore my trousers wrapped around his shoulders, while another wore Maara's on his head, with the legs trailing along behind him like a train. Our tunics were nowhere to be seen.
    We still had our cloaks. We had spread them out under us, to keep us from the cold floor. Our fur leggings lay where we had left them, and Maara found our boots, which the children had used to scoop cold ashes from the fire pit. We shook the ashes out and put them on, and wrapped our cloaks around our naked bodies. Then we joined the others, who were gathering around the fire.
    No one scolded the children for taking our clothing or tried to take it from them to give back to us. One of the women found a couple of fur tunics for us to put on. Mine covered me fairly well, but Maara's ended above her waist, so that she had to wear her cloak wrapped around her like a skirt.
    We breakfasted inside the cave. When I went outdoors to relieve myself, I saw why the forest people hadn't yet gone outside. A heavy snow was falling. The wind drove it under the hood of my cloak and down my neck, and it lay in drifts so deep that my knees above my leggings were soon blue with cold.
    When I went back inside, Maara was standing naked, surrounded by the women, while the men watched and gave advice. Beside her lay a pile of furs and deerskins. One woman held a deerskin up to Maara's waist, while another wrapped it around her thigh and marked it with a bit of charcoal.
    All afternoon we stayed inside, while the women made Maara a complete suit of clothing. In only a few hours they had made her a pair of deerskin trousers, decorated with clay beads colored blue and black and baked hard in the fire. By the end of the day, they had made her a tunic of rabbit fur, greyish-brown in color, with bits of red squirrel worked in for decoration. I thought she looked quite splendid.
    We stayed with the forest people for several days. By the time we left for home, both of us had new clothes -- trousers of soft deerskin, leggings that covered our legs to above the knee, long-sleeved fur tunics, and fur caps with flaps that turned down over our ears. To replace our heavy boots they made us moccasins of elk hide lined with fur. We would have been satisfied with our own cloaks, but the forest people insisted on making us capes of deerskin, tanned with the hair on it to repel the rain and snow.
    My new clothes felt strange to me at first. Instead of the scratchy wool that I was used to, the forest people's clothing felt like a second skin, so much so that I could almost believe I wasn't wearing clothes at all, except that I was warm. No cold air leaked in, even