Free Beneath Ceaseless Skies #172 by E. Catherine Tobler, Erin Cashier, Shannon Peavey

SPLITSKIN
    by E. Catherine Tobler
            Gugán was always my
khaa yahaayí,
my soul bound into the flesh of another while yet part of my own. From beginning to the end, Gugán’s bones were my bones, his breath my breath. He moved as sun and I as moon, reflecting and eclipsing the other in eternal dance, one standing brighter for the other’s shadows. The immortal ghost of him—
khaa yakghwahéiyagu
—remains with me even as I speak these words. Hear him speak with my voice if this pleases, using my tongue as if it is his own, because it is. We were born with two spirits, never only male or female, but revered for the way we walked both paths, each unable to exist without the other.
    * * *
            My love reveled in winter’s sunbroken days, when the light spills to the fresh-fallen snow to stab a person in the eyes. Gugán flit from path to stone, a trickster comfortable with his Raven heritage. I, as Eagle, startled at every shift of snow, caught always unawares in the bright sun as he pelted me with clumps of melting cold.
            It was one of these days when we witnessed our mothers taken from us, lifted into the sky and away where we could not yet reach. After failing to take the deer we had tracked the morning through, our mothers brought us to the wild wet of the river slicing through the woods. The doe skipped into the forest shadows and our mothers let her go, because the forest is an uncertain thing, but the water known and trusted. There, we emptied the woven fish traps, cooked a meal, and ate in a pleased silence.
            We did not yet lick each other’s fingers clean—we did not yet understand such a thing was possible, well-content to press thigh-to-thigh upon a cold log while our mothers harvested more fish from more traps.
            It was then Raven swallowed the sun. Raven-as-clouds descended upon the running river and made the air thick, unknowable. The day around us turned as night, as if the forest itself had dissolved and spread across the river, leaving it strange and unsettled. I leaned into Gugán, not for warmth but to know I was not alone in witnessing this.
Give way
, something inside me whispered, but the terror of that whisper was deeper than even the sight of an empty river.
            When the clouded dark retreated, our mothers no longer stood within the rushing waters. The baskets of wriggling fish remained, but nothing else. We crept to the river as one and looked to the clouded sky, as if they might be suspended there, laughing as birds were wont. The sky hung empty and silent.
            That our mothers were thunderbirds; we had known this for all our days. Each and every one knows the story, has heard it spoken around crackling fires. But there remains within me a deep joy at speaking these words—my words, with the echo of his voice—in allowing myself to remember all he was, all we were, and how the thunderbirds came to break the sky.
    * * *
            Gold brought the men to the mountains, invading the way ants will swarm upon a fallen morsel, crawling one over the other with little regard for the body on the bottom of the stack. The coming of men meant the coming of trains, and there is a joy in the recollection of their black iron stench even as much of what we had known was changed. They broke our quiet world with rail and axe, shining innards hauled to more distant shores.
            The men who came wanted to know more than we could tell them. We were asked to be guides—we were natives and must know the mountains as we knew the ridges of our own interlocked knees. They asked for but shunned our suggestions as to how the land might be conquered. Many men went their own ways, and many died, and we did not mourn—not because they were unlike us, but because we knew this was the way. Every person carries with them their own story and creates with their own hands their own ending. This rests inside until it can