Free People of the Longhouse by W. Michael Gear

elders. Women also owned the fields and houses. That’s why women decided when to go to war. Everything at risk belonged to them. Men owned little more than their own clothing and weapons. It meant that men had fewer responsibilities, which freed them to fight, hunt …
    A shouted curse rang out.
    Sindak squinted at the council meeting where over five hundred people had gathered. The village matrons sat in a broad circle around the chief, discussing what should be done next. Chief Atotarho had just returned from a Trading voyage where his party had been attacked. During the fighting, his ten-summers-old daughter had been taken prisoner. War Chief Nesi had tried to track the enemy warriors, but had lost their trail in the rain. Atotarho had been hoping to trade freshwater pearls for food—but had failed.
    Everyone was hungry.
    The matrons said that the past one hundred summers had been unusually cold and dry. Sindak knew only that the corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers rarely matured. He gazed down at the six women pounding corn in the plaza. They used a hollowed-out log as a mortar, threw in handfuls of dried corn, then beat it to a fine powder with a heavy wooden pestle, about twelve hands long. The rhythmic thunk-thunk echoed. A short distance away two women stood roasting the corn that would be ground in the mortars. They roasted whole ears over an open trench filled with glowing coals. Y-shaped sticks stood at either end of the trench; then ears were hung from a pole placed in the crotches of the sticks and roasted until completely parched, whereupon the women shelled the kernels into a bark barrel and stored it until needed in the mortars. This time of year, there should be two hundred women pounding and roasting corn—not six.
    The harvest had been very poor. Meager harvests made people hunt harder, but after so many summers, the animals were mostly hunted out. The simple truth was that they were all growing desperate. Winter was almost upon them, and they had little food to stave off the cold. When people couldn’t feed their children, they had to take what they needed from nearby villages. Stealing had become a way of life. When it failed, warfare broke out. Battles had been raging, off and on, for more than one hundred summers, but it had gotten particularly violent in the past twenty summers. That’s why a forty-hand-tall palisade of upright logs enclosed the village.
    Sindak watched the people milling around inside the palisade. During the autumn most people spent every moment until total darkness down along rivers where the fields were, collecting the last green-corn cobs or picking late squash blossoms—but everyone knew this council meeting was critical.
    Sindak climbed to a higher branch, where he could see better. Two of the clan matrons—both white-haired and skinny—waved their arms. Chief Atotarho, who had seen fifty-two summers, sat with his head down and his eyes closed, as though he could bear no more of this. He’d braided rattlesnake skins into his gray-streaked black hair, then coiled it into a bun at the base of his head and secured it with a tortoiseshell comb. The style gave his narrow face a starved look. On this cool day, he wore a smoked deerhide cape over his shoulders. Red paintings covered the golden hide, mostly images of men in battle, for he had once, a long time ago, been a great warrior. But now, the cape covered a crooked and misshapen body. Every summer, he seemed to grow thinner. The village Healers said he had the joint stiffening disease. His enemies, however, said Atotarho was a powerful sorcerer, a witch, and his evil deeds had come back to haunt him.
    As evening settled over the land in a smoky veil, long purple shadows spread through the forest, filling in the hollows of Atotarho’s gaunt face. He had lost his only son in a raid seven summers ago; now his daughter was gone—probably being held hostage, maybe being tortured or worse. Atotarho must be frantic to get his