He was searching for a very specific rock marking the trail, somewhere on the right side along the tall banks, right after a small poplar and a rotting fencepost. She would be waiting in the woods there, still waiting, even though the sun now said high noon had come and gone and come and gone again. His stomach growled and he muffled another rumble with the heel of his hand against his sternum, inhaling sharply as if oxygen were flavor to the concept of a meal.
He was wearing a full feather headress as absurd as such a thing was in such a moment, but he hadn’t worn it the whole journey, only taken it gently out of his pack and arranged it over his braids a short walk back. He’d come this far, and he wanted her to see him wearing it, for her.
He could barely make out what looked like the totem rock straight ahead, the way the sun was reflecting off shiny dark green leaves dangling hot white in his eyes, but yes, that was it, and it also gleamed in the sun, only blackly, in all its majestically muted obsidian promise.
Mating falcons drop-dived at speeds as high and fast as a waterfall, their feathers the same as his, directly over the trail ahead of him, and it was as clear a sign as any ever.
He turned at the marker and entered the cool, dark woods. Something smelled wrong in the air.
She was plain, but she wore it like a garland of poppies. There was a man in a bear fur and he came to her in the night while she waited and she did not ask why of the night sky but only knew that he was, the way the stars were. It was this lack of fear, the not-asking that made her father love her, but it was also why she was now here, in these woods, alone as a fawn whose antlers are still fuzzy with newness.
The bear fur man led her to a cabin that took a river’s crossing and a climb and she followed him because a lover who says he will come then and does not has either betrayed or is weak and it was the cutting of weakness that had brought her this far.
The man’s cabin had curtains made of colorful cloth pieces, stitched together beautifully and she knew he had not made them because his hands were calloused and these had been done with a touch that was not native to his soul but that craved the touch again. This much was clear and he fed her and took her to bed with him and she forgot the one she had waited for.
The man in the hopeful headress stood in the small clearing and knew that the strange smell was danger and not the hope he had hoped for, but it was too late and they were on him, from all sides, and he was dragged back to her village, still panting from thirst. When the gauntlet was done and he was lying, reeking with his lack of shame, in the house of the medicine man, he finally spoke.
‘I did it because it was ordained.’
And the medicine man asked again, why. Why did he betray his own tribe, and come for the daughter of his father’s sworn enemy?
And he could only say, ‘She was worth it.’
And where was she now? He could not say, because he did not know any better than them.
It was only later that he admitted to himself that the falcons had actually swerved away from one another at the last moment. Such is the way that signs are interpreted.
