Chapter 5: The Hungry Ridge

The first thing Jim noticed, when the lean time came up from the river, was the way the children stopped laughing.

He had been ten days at the town, long enough to have names for the working things if not the people, and every one of those days the yard had been loud with the ordinary noise of survival — dogs, arguments, the flat ring of the hammer-stone, the high sharp play of children stabbing the shadows with their sticks. Then the grinding slowed, and the dogs thinned out one by one, and the children stopped chasing each other and started standing in the gate, still as stones, watching the river as though the river owed them something and they were running out of patience to collect it.

The ridge was hungry. Not the valley — the whole country, from the look of it. The rains had come late and gone early, and the maize stood thin and rattling in the fields, and the deer that should have come down to the river in the first cold had not, and the old woman who had laughed at his raccoon pelt no longer laughed. She fed him anyway. She fed him from hands that were visibly lighter, and he watched her do it, and he understood that the valley had made its arithmetic and he was still on the good side of it — but he could see, in the shrinking of her shoulder, exactly where that side would run out.

The shaman found him at the edge of the yard on the worst morning yet, when the smoke coming up off the town was thin and frightened, and told him, in the plainest words he had, what no one had wanted to say in front of the god.

"There is nothing," Takawa said. "The stores are low and the ridge is bare. The hunting bands go out and come back with empty hands and a story about the weather. The people are beginning to watch each other the way they watch the river." He did not have to say the rest. Jim could read it in the man's careful half-bent stance, in the way he would not meet the god's eye: a god who cannot feed the people at a lean time is a god who has begun to be a mouth with no right to one.

For a long moment Jim stood with the whole weight of it on him, the cold certainty that the miracle of the sun could not fill a single belly, that all his clean museum knowledge of the valley was worthless next to a closed hand of maize. Then he did the thing that had been shaping itself in him all week, the only honest answer he had to the arithmetic of hunger.

"Then I will work the ridge with them," he said. "Show me."

Takawa blinked. "The ridge is our hunting ground. It is bare. There is nothing in a bare ridge for a god but dry grass."

"There is work," Jim said. "And a god who will not work when his people are hungry is a god who deserves to be watched the way they watch the river." He bent, and took up the good axe he had bound on the seventh day, and settled its weight in his hand as his own. "Take me. I will not be a mouth today. I will be two hands. And if the ridge is bare, then we will make the bareness work for us."

They went up the ridge that morning, a long sparse line of them — the shaman, the hunting men with their bows and their ranked flint, the boy, the old woman refusing, as ever, to be left behind, and the stranger with his borrowed axe bringing up the rear, watching everything, saying almost nothing. It was a mean country they climbed into: thin soil over shelving rock, cedar and briar and grass gone stiff and dry, no trace of the mast-heavy forest that had carried the town through kinder years. The men spread out along the spine of the ridge and still came up empty, and Jim could feel the lean time pressing down on the whole line like a hand, and he saw the boy stop at a bare patch of earth and stare at it with a face no child should have been able to make.

Jim did not try to comfort him. Comfort was a cup of water to a man dying of thirst. Instead he went to work.

He had spent a career learning how soil lies, how water hides, how a slope carries its wealth, and he walked the ridge the way he had walked a thousand excavations — slowly, knees in the dirt, reading the ground for what it did not say out loud. He found the wet place the way water always finds it, a seam in the shelving rock where even a dry year kept a thread of coldness and a mat of green. He found, under a dead log no bigger than his arm, the small sign the hunting men in their hurry had walked right past — a scatter of cracked nutshell, a gnawed-down stem, the ordinary litter of a creature that came here to eat when the mast was gone.

He stood up, and he called to the shaman in the twenty words they shared, and he made them understand.

"There is food on this ridge," Jim said. "Not walking. Hiding. The ground knows where it is. Let me find it, and I will feed you with the ground's own hand."

He showed them the sign, and then he did the part that took all his nerve and all his faith and all the small, ragged hope he had borrowed from a boy who had stopped laughing. He got down in the cold seam of the ground, there where the thin soil softened over the groan of roots, and he began to dig, bare-handed at first, then with a digging-stick they handed him, patient as the years, turning the good wet dirt and laying it aside. Behind him the hunting men stood and watched a god on his knees in the ground, which was either the most shameful or the most hopeful thing they had ever seen, and Takawa stood apart with his arms crossed and his mouth working and did not decide.

The boy dropped to his knees beside him, unasked. Then the hunting men, one by one, odd and unsteady out of pride, came and knelt and dug, until a whole company of the valley's men was down on the hungry ridge with the stranger, hauling up the root-crowned sedge and the tubers that had been holding their breath through the dry year, waiting, exactly as water waits, for a hand to bother to come for them.

It was the first true work the ridge had ever been asked to do in front of him, and Jim gave it everything he had in him, because he had learned in a dozen careful seasons of digging that a country will not lie to a man who asks it properly, and that the ground answers patience the way fire answers the right wood. He did not pray to it and he did not curse it. He simply read it, clod by clod, the way he had read a hundred silent trenches, looking for the pale seam of root, the dark crowding of good earth, the tell-tale moisture that said a thing was growing down there out of the reach of the sun. And slowly, the way water unseats a stone and the way a lean man finds his footing in a flood, the ridge began to give up its secrets to him, and to the boy at his heels, and to the hunting men who had given the place up for a dead land: a store of hard, nut-flavored kernels a squirrel had buried and forgot, a run of the tender white roots the old woman called star-nuts, a blue-grey cluster of clay-cold bulbs that Jim recognized with a jolt of pure animal relief as something a starving man could trust.

Each time a hand came up out of the earth bearing something, the boy let out a short, fierce laugh that was half a sob, and the hunting men glanced at one another and bent lower over their own digging, and Jim understood, with a quiet and terrible clarity, that he was not merely feeding them — he was teaching a whole people back to the one truth that had kept them alive before the chiefs and the long sitting-down of them: that the ground in front of a man cannot be given for dead while there is still a hand willing to ask it for food.

They came up dirty and sweet and plentiful — the thick, chewy tubers the valley called morels in another season, ground-nuts, a buried store of wild onion bulb, the pale, god-fearing roots that Jim had known by the Latin and now learned by their working names. They came up until there was an honest heap of them on the cold seam, enough to feed the town a real meal at the turning of the worst day, and the boy looked up at Jim with the fire back in his face and did not say a word, and the old woman knelt and turned the first tuber over in her dry hands and made a sound that was half a laugh and half a blessing.

Takawa came down the slope and stood over the heap, and for a long time he said nothing. Then he knelt, slowly, heavily, as a man lays down something he has carried too long, and he picked up one of the muddy roots and turned it in his fingers.

"You found the country's table," the shaman said, very low, "when the country had covered it. The ridge was bare to every man who looked at it with his eyes and his hunger. You looked at it with your hands and your patience." He looked up at Jim, and the suspicion that had lived behind his eyes since the altar was still there, but it had moved, changed its shape, made room for something else. "This is the first thing you have given this people," he said, "that no man has to believe to be fed by it. That is worth more than all the names they have ever put on you."

That evening, for the first time since he had walked down off the platform, the town fed together. The fires came back up thick and proud, the old woman's pot made its way around the yard, and the children, full-bellied and wild again, ran their sticks between the feet of the adults, and the walls of sound that had once been made to hurry a knife home rose again in the firelight, different now — not the tense ropy roar of a crowd about to kill, but the loose, rich, unguarded noise of people who had eaten and would sleep.

Jim sat a little apart, at the edge of the fire's reach, and ran his hands — raw, split, dirty, his own at last — over the good haft he had bound, and he let the town's songs wash over him. He did not delude himself that the hungry ridge was done feeding them. The seam was one seam and the ground was one ground, and the lean time would come again, harder, and he was a stranger still, a man who had once been a god and was now only two hands and a patience and a handful of words. But something had settled in him that evening that he had been fighting since the altar, and he recognized it for what it was.

He was no longer merely surviving them. He was being survived with.

In the open yard, in the firelight, the shaman caught his eye from across the flames, and raised the cup he was holding to him — not to a god, but to a man who had fed a people. And Jim raised his own cup back, and drank, and felt the cold, remote possibility that this valley, this hard and generous ground, might not be a place that had simply taken him in from a dying altar, but the first country he had ever truly learned to lie down in.