Chapter 14: What Winter Teaches

~ Emmie ~

Winter had its own curriculum.

She had thought, coming from a farming family in Missouri, that she understood cold and the management of it — the laying in of stores, the banking of fires, the particular discipline of making things last that frontier winters demanded. She had not understood that she understood only one dialect of a much older language, and that the Cayuse had been speaking the original for generations beyond counting, and that the difference between what she knew and what they knew was the difference between surviving winter and living inside it.

The grandmother taught her without appearing to teach her. This was a technique Emmie had come to deeply respect — the way instruction was woven into the doing of things, so that you learned not in lessons but in the accumulated experience of working alongside someone who knew more than you and allowed you to discover the knowing through your hands rather than through your ears. Her mother had taught her this way. She had not recognized it as a method until she encountered it again here, in a language she was still learning, from a woman whose name she now knew meant something close to She Who Holds the Memory of the People.

She was learning to tan hides properly. This was slow work and humbling work and she had ruined two before she began to understand what she was doing wrong, and understanding what she was doing wrong had required watching the grandmother’s hands rather than trying to replicate the surface of the motion, understanding the intention behind it — not scraping but listening, the hide telling you where it needed to give and where it was ready and where it would tear if you pushed.

Everything here was like that, she was finding. Listen first. The thing will tell you what it needs.

She was learning the songs.

This had begun accidentally — she had been singing to Kanti one evening, her mother’s lullaby as always, and the grandmother had been nearby and had gone still in the listening way she had, and afterward had said something to Suki that Suki had translated with unusual care. The grandmother says your song is very old. She says all songs that sound like that are old. She says old songs know things the singer doesn’t always know they know.

The next day the grandmother had begun to sing while they worked. Low, without announcement, just the song becoming part of the work the way breathing was part of the work. And Emmie had listened and begun, without being asked, to learn the shape of it — not the words yet, the words came slowly, but the melody, the structure, the places where the voice was meant to go and the places where it was meant to rest. The grandmother had heard her learning and had sung more slowly the next day, and more slowly still the day after, patient as the river.

Kanti was beside himself with approval. He had always known his mother could sing. Now his people were learning it too. This seemed to him entirely correct and long overdue.

Five Crows came to where she was working on the third morning after the wood.

Not with a reason this time — or not with an obvious one. He came and crouched near the fire she was tending and looked at the work she was doing and said something about the method she was using, a suggestion, offered in the flat matter-of-fact tone of someone sharing information rather than offering criticism. She caught most of it. She adjusted what she was doing. It worked better.

“Thank you,” she said.

He stayed.

Not long — perhaps a quarter of an hour, perhaps less. He didn’t speak again except once, when Kanti came barreling in from whatever he had been doing and launched himself at Emmie with his characteristic total commitment and Five Crows said one word, sharp and brief, that stopped Kanti in his tracks two feet from her.