Solar Storms

by Linda Hogan

Theirs was the job of healing the river, breaching a dike, letting water flow in its own way.

It was against the will of land, I knew, to turn rivers into lakes, lakes into dry land, to send rivers along new paths. I hoped the earth would one day forgive this breach of faith, the broken agreement humans had with it.

It was only later that I realized how much they feared us, our darkness, our coming from the site of the dams.

Between us there was only one life jacket. For Aurora, I thought, in case something happened to us. She’d live. She’d come in from water like Loretta, Hannah, and me.

did as he said and the car came to rest in a ditch, then I drove out of the ditch and went on as if nothing had happened. It was only later that I realized the danger we had been in. I thanked Fortune, the one who had changed clothing for us.

We headed south in silence with only the hypnotic movement of the car, the road, the sound of tires, and Aurora’s breathing.

BEGINNINGS, I know now, are everything. And when Bush and I returned to Adam’s Rib, I knew we walked into another day of creation, a beginning.

when Bush, Aurora, and I returned to Adam’s Rib on Tinselman’s Ferry, the place seemed unfamiliar. Little by little, the land had been sinking, diminishing.

Tommy arrived with his traps. Some of the animals that couldn’t swim he trapped or snared, carried off to Adam’s Rib, and let go.

LaRue and The Raven towed the island of spiders, with its silken weavings and shimmering strands, to the mainland and secured it there. We didn’t want to lose that little broken-off raft of land in all the greedy, hungry water that was, through the acts of men, laying claim to everything it once created.

From The Raven we watched the turtle bones that Bush had assembled. Water was taking back the turtle.

The animal had been killed by a hunter in a far forest. One of his regular customers. It was the last of this kind of creature, according to the man who’d shot it, and he was proud for taking it. Take, I thought then, what a strange word it is. To conquer, to possess, to win, to swallow.

Tears have a purpose. They are what we carry of ocean, and perhaps we must become sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.

“I’ve been meditating. But I don’t have inner peace. I can’t find it again. I think it would be better to have never had it than to lose it this way.” He shook his head, sad. “But then why should the inside be different than the outside? This is what happens to humans when their land is destroyed. Don’t you think so, Maniki, that they lose their inside ways?”

To others, we were such insignificant people. In their minds we were only a remnant of a past. They romanticized this past in fantasy, sometimes even wanted to bring it back for themselves, but they despised our real human presence. Their men, even their children, had entered forests, pretended to be us, imagined our lives, but now we were present, alive, a force to be reckoned with.

If they’d known what their decisions meant to our people, and if they continued with this building in spite of that knowing, then they were evil. They were the cannibals who consumed human flesh, set fire to worlds the gods had loved and asked the humans to care for.

IT TOOK MORE THAN A YEAR before the building of the dams ceased and Tulik did not live long enough to see us win. He would have liked that, even though so much change had already fallen on the land. It was too late for the Child River, for the caribou, the fish, even for our own children, but we had to believe, true or not, that our belated victory was the end of something. That one fracture was healed, one crack mended, one piece back in place. Yes, the pieces were infinite and worn as broken pots, and our human pain was deep, but we’d thrown an anchor into the future and followed the rope to the end of it, to where we would dream new dreams, new medicines, and one day, once again, remember the sacredness of every living thing.

In all of this, something was stripped away from me. Like a snake I emerged, rubbing myself out of my old skin, my old eyes. I was fresh, I was seeing clearly.

There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity.

SO OFTEN I think of Hannah. She is always at the edge of my dreaming, at the periphery of wakefulness and sleep. Anything can bring her to mind—an icy wind on a hot day, a day with a bad feel to it, a newspaper account of an injured child. My mother walked out of the rifles of our killers. She was born of knives, the skinned-alive beaver and marten and the chewed-off legs of wolves. She hurt me because I was part of her and she hated herself. I think of her last name, Wing, as if she could fly, weightless as a bird catching a current of air. Or, like the wolverine on the rock paintings, perhaps her wings were invisible until they were wet, and then they opened, full and strong. I hoped she lived in a place where she could open those wings with a love she’d never known in her life.

Lately I hear something like a voice inside my ear, whispering to me. “Get up,” the voice says in the morning. “Offer cornmeal to the morning people.” I do it. “Be slow,” it says. I do this, too.

And I could tell about my own passing through doors not of this world, how my soul travels at times to the middle of rivers where doctors named stone reside, how I search for the plants of my grandmothers. Since then I have stood in the way of fireballs, begging them to fill me.

it is not that the ways are lost from us but that we are lost from them. But the ways are patient and await our return.

“Nobody will come to my death,” she said. “I’m here,” I told her gently. “Yes, you are, Maniki, a true human being.”

a story Tulik had once told me about the men, the human people, who wanted what all the other creatures had. They went to the large bird and said they wanted to fly. They were granted this wish. They went to the mole and said they wanted to tunnel, and this they were able to do. Last, they went to the water and said, We must have this unbound manner of living. The water said, You have asked for too much, and then all of it was taken away from them. With all of their wishes, they had forgotten to ask to become human beings.

Now the river below us was trying to learn its new home, its new journey. It wasn’t doing very well. Nor was the dry land that had been under water, now exposed to air, not yet with new grasses sprouting from it.

though it was cloudless, it began to rain, a soft female rain. It fell over us. I sat with her body, rocking her in my lap. Above the cloudless rain was the sun, meteor showers, and cosmic dust. I was small, sitting there, rocking death. I sang an old song. It had been Dora-Rouge’s song. It was the animal-calling song. And while I sang, the animals came to where she lay. I didn’t see them with my eyes, but I knew they were there. Wolf, thin and old, stood back away from us in the trees. He kept his distance. Who could blame him? And there was Eagle with watchful eyes. The sound of a bear, snuffling, moving through the brush, and another shadow behind him. Wolverine, I thought, come to pay last respects.

Sometimes the aurora borealis moves across night, strands of light that remind me of a spider’s web or a fishnet cast out across the starry skies to pull life in toward it. At other times it reminds me of the lines across a pregnant woman’s belly. It leaves me thinking that maybe our earth, our sky, will give birth to something, perhaps there’s still another day of creation, and the earth is only a little boat with men and women, slugs and manta rays, all floating in a shell across the dark blue face of a god.

When I told Bush, she laughed and softened even more. I told her he had holes in his socks and that I’d seen him cry. She said, “I’m starting to like that man.”

EVEN NOW the voice of Agnes floats toward me. I hear her say, “Once the whole world was covered in water.”

I hear her say that a human is alive water, that creation is not yet over.

If you listen at the walls of one human being, even if that one is yourself, you will hear the drumming. Older creatures are remembered in the blood. Inside ourselves we are not yet upright walkers. We are tree. We are frog in amber. Maybe earth itself is just now starting to form.

Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it. You will see.