Yelloweye
1 Birth and Confusion
The Family
SHIVERS RAN THROUGH RAMIE and gooseflesh raised on her neck and arms as her hands stroked the polished wooden box. It had sat untouched for three and a half years as far as Ramie knew.
“It’s not good to keep them together,” Caitlin said as she handed Ramie the key to the box. “I’ll keep the box safe. You take the key.”
“It’s a Schrödinger’s box,” Phile added. “The cat is both dead and alive until you open the box. One day, your need to know will outweigh your fear that you’ll find a dead cat.”
“When you make that decision, come and get the box,” Caitlin concluded.
Her bratty brother and sister had been gone for a year now. They disappeared right after the family’s celebration of their twenty-first birthday. Everyone went to bed that night just like always. In the morning, Caitlin, Phile, and their two horses were gone. Even that didn’t trigger alarms. It wasn’t unusual for the pair to disappear for a few weeks or even a month and then show up back at the ranch as if nothing had happened.
But when a few days stretched to a few weeks and then a few months a dark cloud seemed to settle over the ranch. The two kids had been a source of chaos on the ranch, but after their disappearance, worry and then despair had permeated the family.
It cast a pall over the celebration of Theresa Miranda Bell’s third birthday. The elder of the third generation living on the ranch had been born on Caitlin’s nineteenth birthday, a day after Phile’s. The three-year-old didn’t know there was a problem. She happily accepted the wagon, the dolls, and the toy horses as her due. After all, for the past few months, her position as princess of the household had been usurped by baby Katherine Renee.
The family loved Aubrey’s little critters. Of all of them, Miranda, riding quietly in Ramie’s mind, was the most affected.
I never even got to hold my baby. Oh, my poor Kyle. How can your parents stand not having their children in their arms? How can you stand it, Ramie? How can you stand thinking you’ll never have a child with our husband?
“I think about it,” Ramie answered. “We’d be risking everything. But the more I look at those little ones, the more I’m willing to take the risk.”
It was so sweet of Aubrey to give our daughters family names. It is like my stepsister and our lover still live in them.
“And you,” Ramie added. “Our darling wife is as committed to the family as our husband. The names seem to be part of the land we dwell on.”
Ashley and Mary Beth are distraught. Cole is hardly better. It is time to open the box.
“It is,” Ramie sighed. Cole looked at her and opened his arms. His daughter hugged him.
“We all miss them,” Cole said.
“I have something, Pa,” Ramie said. “They gave it to me on my golden birthday. Caitlin kept it in her room so I wouldn’t be unnecessarily tempted to open it.” Ramie drew the key from beneath her shirt, held by the leather thong next to the wolf’s teeth that had never been taken from around her neck.
“Tempted?” Cole asked quietly.
“It’s a locked box, Pa,” Ramie said. “Phile said our need to know had to outweigh the possibility that it would contain a dead cat.”
“Schrödinger. Taught you kids all about that, whether you were time traveling or not.”
“Are we ready, Pa?”
“Look at your moms,” he said. “At me. We’ve aged ten years in the past year, not knowing what happened to our children. Do you think that’s what is in the box?”
“Knowing the brats, they might have literally left a dead cat in it,” Ramie snorted. “I think we need to know.”
“Get it.”
Ramie held the box in her arms almost as lovingly as Aubrey cradled their baby. They joined Moms and Pa in the ranch office. Pa was in his big chair by the fireplace and held out his arms for his granddaughter. Aubrey surprised him by plopping herself in his lap. He laughed and held both baby and daughter-in-law. Theresa ran to her grandmothers.
Kyle paused behind Ramie and put his hands on her shoulders.
“What have you got?” Ashley asked.
“Schrödinger’s box,” Ramie answered. “Caitlin and Phile gave it to me three and a half years ago. They said it was for when the need to know…”
“And you’ve been holding onto it for a year since they… left? You never once thought that we should investigate this?” Ashley demanded.
“We won’t be able to change anything once the box is open,” Kyle said. “We always hoped there would be something we could do. The box holds the answer.”
“You think,” Mary Beth said.
“We decided it should be a family decision whether we open it or not,” Ramie said.
“We who?” Cole asked. Baby Theresa was trying to reach his glasses and he was catching her little fingers in his lips. She giggled.
“Miranda and me. They gave it to me.”
“So, open it,” Ashley said. Her impatience showed.
“Mom Mar?” Ramie said. Mary Beth put her arm around her sister wife and held her, then nodded. “Pa?”
Cole sighed. He patted Aubrey on her rump and gently pushed her and the baby toward Kyle. Mary Beth handed Theresa off to Kyle and the two wives piled onto Cole in his chair.
“Open it,” he said as he embraced his wives.
Ramie sat between Kyle and Aubrey and fished the key from her shirt. It was such a flimsy little lock that she could have twisted and broken it in her fingers. It was such a delicate barrier between her and the truth about Caitlin and Phile, yet there was something significant about inserting the key and turning it. The box opened and she lifted the sheaf of paper from the box. She could see the top page was in Phile’s handwriting. It would take a while to read this aloud, but no member of the family wanted to be left behind in the discovery.
She took a breath and began.
Phile: Entering the World
I remember being born.
I was eight years old. It was summer and Caitlin and I had gone out to the pond in the north pasture. I don’t remember what we were playing. We just liked to run and whoop and holler. Seemed like we always had a lot of energy. Of course, being a hot July day, we ran ourselves exhausted, dove into the pond, then plopped in the grass and went to sleep.
I thought I was dreaming, but I couldn’t wake up. Then I realized that I was awake and Cait was crushing my hand in hers. She looked panicked, but I couldn’t reach out to her. I had this other scene in my head that I was seeing—not just seeing. I could feel everything that was happening.
I didn’t want to be born. My consciousness was telling me that it was nice and I should stay where I was, but I was being pushed and I just panicked.
I don’t think babies are supposed to remember being born. They have to forget that shit in order to survive. But I remember everything about it like it happened a minute ago.
I hated my mother. She’d given me everything I needed and now she didn’t want me any longer. She pushed and strained and forced me out where it was cold and light and rough and hurt. Why didn’t she want me? We’d been so close. I cried.
Women I didn’t know took me away from her. I couldn’t understand any of the gibberish they were speaking. If they’d just speak English, I’d know what was happening. They cut my lifeline to my mother and I felt her blood cease to flow in my veins. I was alone.
Voices I couldn’t understand spoke softly all around me. This was what it was like to be a baby? Hearing and thinking, but unable to understand anything? I was wrapped in a soft skin. I tried to apply the word blanket to it, but rejected the thought. Skin. It was almost like having a person wrapped around me. Then nothing. I thought they’d forgotten me.
I was scooped up in a woman’s arms—the softness told me woman—and taken to another place. It was dark and I kept trying to see what kind of place I was in. I expected a hospital, but a cool breeze told me I was outside. Then back inside. My eyes didn’t work right. It was like waking up in the morning with your eyes full of sleep gunk but being unable to wipe them.
And then there was real skin against me. I could feel a heart beating and I could smell nice warm milk. Instinct took over and I started sucking like mad. It tasted so good and it was like mother was taking me in her arms again. Only it wasn’t my mother.
That’s when my eyes started to clear and I looked straight into the eyes of Caitlin. I could see her in two realities. My eight-year-old sister was sitting next to me outside in front of the pond, scared and crying. My infant sister looked at me across the breast of the mother feeding us. We reached for each other and when our hands touched, I finally knew everything would be okay. As long as I had Caitlin, everything would be okay.
Caitlin: Loving
I love Phile. I’ve loved him since the day I was laid in a crib beside him. No. I don’t remember that day. I remember the day we were born, eight years later, when I reached over and took his hand at my mother’s breast. He’s sweet and he keeps me from being… well, worse than I am. For a wild Indian, he gets real sentimental sometimes. I guess I take after Mom Ash. She would never talk about that emotional stuff. I know she feels it, though. And I feel it, too. I just thought that before I start my part of the story, I should make sure you know for a fact. My spirit is bound with my brother’s. Our hearts beat as one.
That first week after we were born… It still seems strange to talk about something that happened when we were eight years old and we have all the memories of. Suddenly, we had Mom Mar and Mom Ash who we saw every day and had lived with for eight years, and we had another mommy who held our little infant bodies in her arms and let us suck milk out of her teats. It was impossible not to bond to her. We didn’t want to not bond with her. She was our safety in the strange world we’d just been born into. She was food and warmth and comfort. And little cooing sounds and singing.
Don’t know if you remember how sick we were that week. Delirious, I think Mom Mar said. From my perspective, I’d have said disoriented. Something was happening in my brain because the world I’d always known was continuing in one half while the other half was getting a whole new data stream from a different me. And it was almost like watching a DVD at 4x. You know, that fast forward thing. And neither Phile nor I could stand to be apart from each other, even when it was so disorienting that we threw up.
We’d often slept with each other. Seemed like he always knew when I was upset over something and would come padding into my room so I could hold him. Worked the other way, too, but I learned not to go wandering into his room since he shared with Kyle. If he got upset, he just came to me. It was funny that Mom Mar insisted we share a room that week so we wouldn’t infect anybody else. It was what got us through the first wave of adapting.
Phile: Mommy
It was really confusing. Caitlin and I would lie in the bed in her room here at the ranch, and squeeze our eyes shut trying to just see one life instead of two. It was obvious that other life wasn’t in the here and now. While our mommy was warm and loving, we didn’t understand anything she said and conditions were kind of primitive.
“Are you sucking on a tit?” I asked Caitlin as we lay in bed. “Are we okay?”
“I think so,” Cait said. “Phile, we just got born someplace else. What’s happening?”
“I can… I can taste the milk in my mouth. When I look at you here in my room, I can see baby you sucking away beside me. And I know it’s you, but…”
“Yeah. You don’t look like your baby pictures. You’re dark with black hair and brown eyes.”
“So are you. Are we twins?”
“I don’t think so. There was no one inside with me. I don’t like to think about being born. But at least when I got out they stuck me right on Mommy’s tit. I was so scared. Then you got there and I knew it would be okay,” Cait said.
“Someone took me away as soon as I got out. I was wrapped in a skin kind of thing and they brought me to you. That’s not like normal, is it? Caitlin? Do you think something is wrong with my mommy?”
It was the middle of the night in real time on the same day we’d been out by the pond, but it seemed like time was moving a lot faster in the… We decided to call it ‘before-time’ eventually, though that didn’t happen right away. We were living some time and place that was long ago. But in a week or so of life in before-time, we’d still only seen Cait’s mommy and not mine. I felt this deep sadness and sense of loss when I thought of my birth mother. I knew… I just knew she was gone and I’d never see her. And that kind of bled over into now-time and I was afraid I’d never see my mom here either.
“I have to go see Mom Mar!” I blurted out.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
I don’t reckon we’d busted in on Moms and Pa since we were little, but Cait and I crawled right into bed with them and hugged them all night. They were another anchor to what little reality we could grasp.
Moms weren’t sure what to do with two thumb-sucking eight-year-olds plastered against them when they woke up. Pa mumbled something about needing a bigger bed and crawled out from the middle. Mom Ash and Mom Mar tucked us back in bed.
With the initial shock fading, we slept a lot that week. I remember a doctor came out. I don’t know what he thought, but we just stayed in bed and slept most of the time. That helped because before-time was moving a lot faster than now-time and we could almost convince ourselves it was a dream if we were asleep. But we’d wake up and look at each other and still be able to see what was happening in before-time. It never stopped.
By the end of that week in bed, we were almost a year old in before-time. We could walk to the kitchen in now-time without our baby selves wanting to crawl. It was like growing a new arm or something and having to get used to it doing stuff our regular two arms didn’t know about. But the physical disorientation settled down. We’d decided we were just crazy.
Caitlin: Meeting Yelloweye
Moms watched us like hawks all the time and we couldn’t get any privacy so we could talk about what was going on. Seemed like things slowed up a little in before-time when we were awake in now-time. When we slept in now-time, before-time sped up. But we were learning things. Words. We had to be careful with our little before-time bodies that we didn’t try to do something that our eight-year-old bodies could do. But we learned quickly that if we were really quiet, we could whisper to each other in English in before-time and people would just think we were talking baby talk. We started doing the same thing in now-time to talk in the language of the people. Moms shook their heads and said something about us talking gibberish.
We were lucky it was summer. We did our chores in the morning and lay low the rest of the day. When you look at them, you think babies don’t do much but suck and shit, but these two babies were learning so much our heads hurt. All the time. We knew we were crazy, even though we didn’t know the words for it. We were relearning everything while we were still trying to learn ourselves.
We figured out that we were Indians. We were in a tribe and on the move. Náhko'éehe, our mother, had little time to recover from childbirth before we were carried together on her back as we marched. We moved a day or two and then camped for a week or more. The first time Phile called our mother ‘mama’ she didn’t respond at all. It took a while to figure out that the word she used was Náhko'e.
Being able to talk to each other in now-time and learn together helped speed things up and it started to look like we were psychic. When school started, it was almost like cheating. There was this one question on an arithmetic test that I had trouble with. The question just didn’t make sense. I turned to Phile in our before-time and asked him about it. He said I missed the addition sign and to do that. In our classroom, I looked at the paper and made the correction. He didn’t give me the answer, exactly, but he was always better at arithmetic than me. I did the same thing for him in spelling.
It worked the other way, too. Náhko'e said something to Phile that he didn’t understand and was about to get smacked. We were walking out in the pasture here while we were setting up camp there and I told him what to say. He did it right away and didn’t get punished.
Somehow, we made it through that whole first year of now-time and were relieved when school was finally out. In before-time, we were about five years old. The People—that’s what our tribe called themselves—avoided us most of the time. While our Náhko'e continued to love and care for us, the others thought we were some kind of spirit children. An old man in the tribe we called Grandfather made sure we had food and Náhko'e often tended his fire. I suppose it was because we learned so damned fast. I mean, we had an eight-year head start on most babies. We had a lot to learn about life in the village, but we knew a lot already and if we didn’t understand something, we could look it up on the Internet.
That first day of summer vacation, Ramie and Kyle went off riding their black horses and came back with Ramie all doubled over with cramps. She’d started her period and made like it was some kind of disaster. Not like every woman in the history of the world hadn’t done it before her. But the Moms were all sympathetic and taking care of her. Pa took Kyle out for a ride and for the first time in a year, we weren’t being watched.
We made a couple sandwiches and grabbed a can of soda and just walked away.
We didn’t go very far. We never intended to run away or anything. We just wanted to be away from where everyone was watching us all the time. And that meant heading down to the pond, stripping off all our clothes and diving in. The water was still damn cold, but we didn’t care. We were naked and excited to be out of school. We could run and be wild as we wanted and no one would ever know or care. And our before-time selves were right in sync with us. Something was going on in the village and we just wandered off to play in the creek.
And that’s what brought us to Yelloweye. He scared the shit out of us when we first saw him. He was standing on a log just where the creek enters the pond. We were nine years old and barely four feet tall. That owl sitting on a log was looking us right in the eye.
And he was there in before-time, too. Talk about little! That big old owl towered over our five-year-old selves. We were terrified.
I grabbed Phile’s hand and started tugging, but Yelloweye stopped me.
I don’t mean he physically did something to block my path or anything. He just started a series of gentle hoots. I’d never heard anything with so gentle a voice. And with each little hoot I was drawn closer until Phile and me were just a couple feet away. Our other selves just plopped down on the ground in front of him.
Couldn’t tell you a word of that conversation. Not because I don’t remember it, but we just can’t speak in that voice. Animals—even really smart animals like that great gray owl—don’t talk in words. There’s no one-to-one relationship that says this hoot equals that word or even that concept. They don’t have the same concepts we do. They don’t have the same imagery. They fly! How can someone with two feet anchored to the ground ever comprehend stretching out wings and catching an updraft to soar a mile above us?
When he’d finished talking to us, he tucked his head under a wing and ignored us. We were dismissed. We almost forgot to put our clothes on to come home, we were so excited and scared.
Yelloweye, the owl, or in the language of the people, Heove-'éxané, had a mission for us. For the first time since we started living a double life, things started to make sense to us. We had a gift and he would teach us how to use it.
Phile: Bullies
We were lucky for as strange as we were. In now-time we just stuck together and we were so weird that most everyone avoided us. Grade school is like that, I guess. There were other kids who the cool kids shunned as well. I don’t know why we never thought of becoming friends, but maybe we just assumed that we should avoid the weird kids, too.
The biggest problem we’d had wasn’t from one of the kids, but from our teacher. She didn’t like the fact that we slept in class a lot so she kept trying to trick us and humiliate us. In order to manage the inflow of experiences, one of us would stay awake in class while the other concentrated on what was happening in before-time.
“Kȧsóéso, teacher is going to call on you,” my sister whispered in before-time. “She wants to know countries that touch the North Pacific.”
“Thank you, He'éka'ėškónėhéso,” I said to Caitlin. We didn’t have names in our tribe yet. We were just called little boy and little girl.
“Phile, would you answer the question, please?” Miss Sanders said. I know she suspected I was asleep. Well, I had been.
“All the countries of North America touch the North Pacific,” I said. “Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The western edge of the North Pacific is bordered by Russia, Japan, and China.”
“Very good, Phile. I was afraid you weren’t paying attention.”
“But where is the dividing line?” I asked. “Is it the equator that separates the North Pacific from the South Pacific? Shouldn’t we include Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the Philippines?”
“Ah… In this instance, we were only discussing the major nations of the north, but… This would be some excellent research for you to conduct on behalf of the class. Monday during our geography lesson, I would like you to do a presentation on where the North Pacific is divided from the South Pacific and have a comprehensive list of all the independent nations that touch the North Pacific,” Miss Sanders said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Bitch. I went back to sleep. It was Caitlin’s day to pay attention.
But that doesn’t mean there weren’t bullies in before-time, too. Bent Bow was a teenager, maybe ten years older than us at the time Yelloweye appeared next to the creek. You’d think that his accomplishments as a hunter would make noticing little kids unimportant. But Bent Bow liked to torment us—all the smaller children. It wasn’t unusual for him to ‘accidentally’ trip a toddler or to make fun of a hurt child. I’d been pushed down many times, but there was no one to complain to. Náhko'e was a kind and caring parent, but she did not want to hear tales. Children had to work out their own issues.
So, of course, it was Bent Bow that saw us talking to Yelloweye.
Owls, among many Native Americans, are respected but viewed as a bad omen. It seems they always show up just before someone dies. Yelloweye flitted away, knocking the two of us back as an arrow flew near our heads. Bent Bow had been determined to kill the evil omen and didn’t care if we were in the way. We scrambled up and ran as he was nocking another arrow.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. Bent Bow went to the village elders and told them of the owl that spoke to the ‘death children’. It wasn’t the first time we’d been called that. We’d long-since learned that my mother died the night I was born. Ma'heóná'e, our medicine woman, called us to the central fire. Cait and I held hands as we faced her and glanced around at the hardened faces around us.
“Children, have you spoken to Heove-'éxané?” she asked softly. We nodded. “Has he a message for us? Is death near?”
We were lucky that in now-time, we were huddled together in Caitlin’s room, waiting for Yelloweye to take us somewhere that we could learn to use our gift—even though it wasn’t clear what the gift was. Caitlin and I talked over what we should say. We were only five years old in before-time. So, when we spoke to the medicine woman in unison, it added a lot of weight to what we said.
“Heove-'éxané does not bring an omen of death to our village today,” we said together. “He has come to teach us so we may help protect the village. We must learn from Yelloweye and protect his people.”
Ma'heóná'e looked around the circle at the shocked elders. We had spoken clearly and together. And in adult language, not children’s talk. There were some grunts from around the circle and warding signs against evil, but mostly there were nods to the old woman.
“Hestȧhkeho,” she whispered. It meant ‘twins’. She took ash from the edge of the fire—to us it looked like she was just putting her hands in the fire, but the ash at the edge was cool. She drew on our faces with the ash while she chanted about the spirits guarding us and the village helping the Great Spirit teach us. Periodically, the men and other women near the fire joined the chant and circled us as she continued drawing on our chests. As little children, we didn’t wear clothes unless it was cold and we had to wrap in a blanket. She painted us up front and back as the village chanted and danced. Then we were sent back to the edge of the village to our mother’s tent and told to come back to see the medicine woman in the morning.
Our real education had begun.
Caitlin: Learning
We shivered together on my bed looking out the open window, thinking about what we’d just been through in the village. It was confusing and frightening. And we still didn’t know what our gift was or how we were supposed to use it.
Yelloweye had said it would be difficult, but it was important. We needed to help him save his People. Or our People. Or maybe all people. Some things just weren’t clear. We couldn’t figure out why he was talking to us in now-time if we needed to save the People in before-time.
Not far off we heard the hoot of the owl. It called to us. I felt like I was being tugged right out of my skin. I tried to resist, holding onto Phile and trying not to cry out with pain at the grip he had on me.
And then we weren’t there in my room any longer.
We were soaring up in the night sky. Far below us, we could see every blade of grass in the pasture. Trees rushed beneath us and we felt the updraft catch under our wings and lift us so we could bank and turn again. There was a change in the direction the grasses moved and suddenly we were diving toward the earth. It was frightening and exhilarating and joyful all at once. And then we had a mouse in our claws, tearing the head from its body as we climbed into the sky again.
This is what you will learn. You will ride in the minds of the flyers, the four-leggeds, the two-leggeds. You will learn how they live and how they die. You will learn how they hunt and how they kill. You will learn the secrets of NéÅ¡ke'emÄne, Grandmother Earth, and she will make you ready.
Yelloweye had spoken in our heads as we had ridden in his. And then we were back in our own bodies.
The Family
“My poor babies,” Ashley sobbed. She and Mary Beth wept against Cole’s shoulders. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Even the baby, nestled against Aubrey’s bosom whimpered. Kyle rocked three-year-old Theresa in his arms. Ramie set the bundle of papers back in the box.
“I can’t just keep reading this,” Ramie said. “We gotta take breaks. There’s children to feed and horses to care for. Pa, Alex wants to talk to you before they drive the cattle up to the summer pasture. They’re late moving because the grass has been so lush down here, but they want to be moving at first light tomorrow, so you better go see him now.”
“You’ve taken to being boss just fine, daughter,” Mary Beth sniffed. She got off Cole and pulled Ashley with her. “Come on, wife,” she said. “It’s time to get the family settled for the night. Aubrey, may I burp the little treasure when she’s done with your tit?” She needed the contact with a child as she let what she’d learned about her own youngest settle over her.
“Yes, Mom Mar,” Aubrey said. “I think she’s about done sucking.”
“Come to Gramma, Theresa. It’s time to get the birthday girl ready for beddie. Papa has to go water the horses,” Ashley said holding out her arms to her granddaughter. She needed the contact as well. The child jumped to her grandma and started giggling when Ashley blew a raspberry on her tummy. The mood gradually lightened as the family went about their chores and prepared for bed.
The younger generation finally gathered the children and went across the yard to the bunkhouse. With two children and three adults, the little two-bedroom home was beginning to feel crowded. They would have to deal with that eventually.
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