Centuries of June Read Online Free PDF Page B

a coat of fur. S’ee was happy with him, the one she called simply X’oots, or Brown Bear.
    As that first winter blustered outside, she felt the alien kicks and stirrings in her womb, and until summer arrived again, she worried whether their child would be grizzly or Tlingit. X’oots roared when the baby emerged, pink as sockeye, a human boy. She named him Yeikoo.shk’ after the father she never knew. With one child at the breast, but growing like a cub, she became pregnant again that fall, and in her second summer, a girl child arrived among the bears. The two small children kept her mind busy so that she forgot her people, and it can be said that love’s first blush fools each of us into believing we are changed from the person we once were. Only when she was not thinking about it could her past creep in like a fox to the den. When the sun became a stranger again, X’oots prepared to find a new home, and the thought of him snoring for months while she tended to their babies filled her with dread. One morning while the children crawled and batted around a piece of dry fish, S’ee asked her husband, “Who will help me while you sleep all winter?”
    “We will all sleep,” he grunted. “You, me, the babies.”
    “No, the babies never sleep, or when they sleep I am wide awake, and when I am tired, they want to nurse or play. Your boy is all teeth and thinks my nipple is a piece of bark. And there you are in the corner on the best branches. You never open an eye, the baby could be screaming, foot caught in a hole, and now there are two.”
    “I am a bear, Dolly, and they are half bear. We will sleep, and you need to stop gnawing the bone. It is the most natural thing—”
    “For you. But I am Tlingit, not a bear.”
    “I should have known when you cursed me for your own mistake—”
    “And I should have listened to my sister and never followed you.”
    The image of her sister persisted the rest of the day, as well as the spirits of her other sisters, her mother, all of her people. Homesickness infected her heart as surely as a fever, and a delirium of memories beat like a drum through the night. She could not hold her babies without thinking of the other children in the village, running, as she had, half naked in the muddy square, chasing a three-legged dog, kicking an old seal bladder, torturing one another with spruce switches. As she stirred a stew of moose meat and roots over the fire, she saw in the steam a vision of fog rolling off the sea, enveloping the houses in the village, the people moving through a cloud, calling out to unseen cousins, and hearing the happy sound of their replies. When X’oots lumbered to a corner for his night’s sleep, he left her alone with her sorrow, and while everyone slept, she cried for the first time since coming to live among the bears. Resentment broke the seedskin of her heart and shot its vines through her veins. Her husband’s snoring disgusted her, and he smelled of wet fur and stomach gases. She began to plan her escape.
    As the threat of snow deepened, X’oots decided that they needed a bigger home for the two cubs now wintering in with them. For three days, he searched the mountains for a suitable space, and upon his return, he ordered them to pack at once. They traveled higher into the hardscrabble country, and when the family reached the half-excavated den, he told S’ee to gather spruce branches for the floor while he finished digging. Instead of picking up fallen ones, she climbed a nearby tree and broke off high branches, enough for three beds. When X’oots saw what she had done, he confronted her.
    “Foolish woman, why don’t you do as I say? Now any hunter can see by the treetops that there is a den nearby. I asked you to gather only those branches already on the ground.”
    She shrugged her shoulders and brought their daughter to her breast. Grumbling at every step, he moved them higher up the mountain faceand dug so furiously that she thought the