Centuries of June by Keith Donohue Read Free Book Online

morning before anyone else had risen, Shax’saani visited S’ee’s bed andshook her gently awake. “My sweet little Dolly,” she said. “Come walk with me, and we’ll see the sun sneak over the trees.”
    They strolled to the bayshore and watched a pod of orca swim past, leisurely hunting their breakfast. “When you followed the man, I was afraid for your life, and when you didn’t come back that day or the next or many months, I was heartbroken. There was no one to talk with anymore, and even after D’is—”
    “Man in the moon,” S’ee giggled.
    “After he married another, there was just no one left in the world. I still longed for you, and not a day went by that I did not think of you.”
    “I missed you, too, sister.”
    “When the brothers arrived with the news they had found you and then fetched our mother to send your clothes, my torment was over, and when you first walked through the door—after the smell off you cleared my head—well, my heart leapt like a babe in the womb.”
    The last of the whales passed by. Behind them, the sun had cleared the firs on the far shore and now light sparkled across the waters. Shax’saani took S’ee’s hand in hers. “But you brought those two wild things into our family, and the men have made medicine to judge what must be done. They say the eating of the flesh of brown bear is now taboo. Only black bear may be taken for food. You may stay with us, Dolly, but your son and daughter must be exiled to the rain forest, for our own safety. They will become grizzlies one day and will surely kill a Tlingit, maybe your brother, maybe your sister.”
    S’ee considered her sister’s words, picked up stones from the gravelly beach, and held them while she thought. “I am glad that no Tlingit will eat the brown bear from this day on, and X’oots would be happy, too. But they are my boy and girl, Shax’saani. Banish them and you banish me. Forever.”
    “It’s not me, little sister, but the wisdom of the village.”
    Taking her sister’s hand, S’ee forced open her palm and transferredthe pebbles to her. The sun shone full on the bay. From over the ocean, a thin band of clouds gathered on the western horizon. She walked away without looking back, walked on through the village stirring with life, down the pathways that rained with salmon in the months before her birth. She walked past her mother’s home without stopping at the door, past her sisters’ homes, past her brothers’ homes with rack after rack of herring drying in the sun. Her children stirred when she entered, and she sang as the breakfast cooked on the fire, and when they had finished their meal, S’ee told them they must go.
    Because the heavy skin baked in the sun, they took turns wearing the burden and bore to the shady side of trails where the mosses made the trees look like green ghosts. The trip took much longer than S’ee had hoped. Journeying with her children over the same path traveled years ago with her young husband, S’ee felt the circle closing. His spirit lingered, fell with the rain, rose with the mist. She recollected the tender way he cradled the babies in his arms, the grin on his face when he brought back to the den some treat like cloudberries or the warm haunch of a moose. The wildness of his eyes and how it freed her to be wild. The way he’d dip his head into a river and come up gleaming, the water racing off his skin, glistening at the tips of his hair. How fat he was in December and rail-thin come April. How he roared with delight when she bucked her hips beneath him. How he chose to be a man for her.
    In the valley of the brown bear, she could find no one willing to speak Lingit with her, and every word had to be filtered through the ears and mouths of her children. Her sense, after their brokered conversation, was that the bears blamed her for the death of X’oots and for bringing the humans to the rain forest, and that while her children were welcome, she could not