belonged, and finally one of them turned back and said to me,
“Come.”
I followed him to his cabin, which was wood-framed, with a wooden floor, and walls and roof of reedcloth. It had no door or windows, since you could open up a whole side of it by raising any of the walls. Having put away the box and clay pot of food which he’d got from the women, the man raised the wall that faced the lake and tied it up on posts so that it extended the roof, shading that part of the deck from the hot late-afternoon sunlight. There he sat down on a thick reedcloth mat and set to work on a half-made fish hook of clamshell. Not looking up at me, he gestured to the house and said, “Take what you like.”
I felt intrusive and out of place, and did not want to take anything at all. I did not understand these people. If I was truly a lost child of the village, was this all the welcome they had for me? I was bitterly disappointed, but I wasn’t going to show any disappointment, any weakness to these coldhearted strangers. I would keep my dignity, and act as standoffish as they did. I was a city man, an educated man; they were barbarians, lost in their marshes. I told myself that I’d come a long way to get here and might as well stay the night at least. Long enough to decide where else I might go, in a world where evidently I belonged nowhere.
I found another mat and sat down on the outer edge of the deck. My feet dangled a couple of inches above the mud of the lakeshore. After a while I said, “May I know the name of my host?”
“Metter Aytana Sidoy,” he said. His voice was very soft.
“Would you be my father?”
“I would be the younger brother of that one, your aunt,” he said.
The way he spoke, keeping his face down, made me suspect that he was not so much unfriendly as very shy. Since he didn’t look at me, I felt I shouldn’t stare too much at him, but from the corner of my eye I could tell he didn’t look much like the crow woman, my aunt, or like me.
“And of my mother?”
He nodded. One deep nod.
At that I had to look round at him. Metter was younger than Gege-mer by a good deal, and not so dark and sharp-faced; in fact he looked something like Sallo, round-cheeked, with clear brown skin. Maybe that was what my mother Tano had looked like.
He would have been about the age I was now when his sister disappeared with her two little children.
After a long time I said, “Uncle.”
He said, “Ao.”
“Am I to live here?”
“Ao.”
“With you?”
“Ao.”
“I will have to learn how to live here. I don’t know how you live.”
“Anh,” he said.
I would soon be familiar with these grunted or murmured responses:
Another voice made itself heard:
“Prut’s a good mouser,” my uncle said.
I kneaded the nape of the cat’s neck. Prut purred.
After a while Metter said, “Mice are thick this year.”
I scratched behind Prut’s ears and wondered if I should tell my uncle that for one summer of my life I had eaten mice as a major part of my diet. It seemed unwise. Nobody had yet asked me anything about where I came from.
No one in Ferusi ever would. I had been in “Ettera'—where the slave takers came from, the robbing, raping, murdering, child-stealing soldiers. That was all they needed to know. I’d been elsewhere. They didn’t want to know about elsewhere. Not many people do.
It wasn’t easy for me to ask them about Ferusi, not that they didn’t know all about it or didn’t want to talk about it, but because it was their entire universe and was therefore taken for granted. They could not understand the kind of questions I asked. How could anybody not know the name of the lake? Why would anybody ask why men and women lived separately—surely no one could think they should live shamelessly in the same village, the same house? How could anybody possibly be ignorant of the evening worship or the words to say when giving or receiving food? How could a man not know how to cut reed-grass or a woman not know how to pound it to make reedcloth? I soon learned that I was more ignorant here than I’d been even my first winter in the forest, for there was a lot more to be ignorant of. City people might say that the Sidoyu were simple people, living a simple life; but I think only a life as solitary, poor, and crude as Cuga’s could be called simple, and even so the word belies it. In the villages of the Sidoyu existence was full, rich, elaborate, a tapestry of demanding relationships, choices, obligations, and rules. To live as a Sidoy was as complex and subtle a business as to live as an Etran; to live rightly as either was, perhaps, equally difficult.
My uncle Metter had taken me into his house without any show of welcome, certainly, but without the least reluctance; he was quite ready to be fond of his long-lost nephew. He was a mild, modest, gentle man, embedded contentedly in the village network of duties and habits and relations like a bee in a hive or a swallow in a colony of mud nests. He wasn’t very highly considered by the other men, but didn’t mind, not being restless or rivalrous. He had several wives, and that did earn him respect, though any relationship with women was of course set apart from the rest of a man’s life… . But if I try to tell what I learned about living as a Sidoy as I learned it—slowly, in fragments, by guesswork—my story will go on and on. I must explain what I can while I get on with what happened.
What happened was that I ate a good supper of cold fish cakes and ricegrass wine with my uncle, his cat Prut, and his dog Minki, a kind old bitch who showed up just in time for her supper. She put her greying muzzle on my palm very politely. I watched my uncle dance and speak a brief worship to the Lord of the Waters on the deck of his hut in the twilight, as other men were doing on the decks of their huts in the twilight, and then he unrolled a bed mat for himself and helped me lay out the sitting mats as my bed. The cat went mousing underneath the hut, and the dog curled up on her master s mat as soon as he unrolled it. We lay down, said good night, and went to sleep while the last gleam of daylight was fading from the water of the lake.
Before sunrise the men of the village went out on the lake, one or two of them to a boat, with a dog or two. Metter told me that this was the season for great numbers of a fish called tuta to come into the lake from the seaward channels, and they hoped this morning might begin the run. If so, I gathered they’d be working hard for a month or so in both villages, the men catching fish and the women drying them. I asked if I could come with him and begin to learn how they fished. He was the sort of man who finds it impossible to say no. He hemmed and mumbled. Somebody was coming that I should talk to, was all I could understand.
“Is it my father who is coming?” I asked.
“Your father? Metter Sodia, you mean? Oh, he went north after Tano was lost,” Metter said rather vaguely. I tried to ask but all he would say was, “Nobody ever heard about him again.”
He got away as soon as he could and left me alone in the village—with the cats. Every house had its black cat, or several of them. When the men and dogs were gone, the cats ruled, lying about on the decks, wandering over the roofs, having hissing matches between houses, bringing kittens out to play in the sun. I sat and watched cats, and though the kittens made me laugh, I felt my heart very heavy. I knew now that Metter meant no unkindness. But I had come home to my people, and they were utterly strange to me, and I a stranger to them.
I could see the fishing boats away off on the lake, the tiny wings of the sails on the silken blue water.
A boat was coming towards the village. It was a big canoe, several men paddling hard. The canoe slid up to the muddy shore, the men leapt out, drew it up farther, and then came directly to me. Their faces were painted, I
