Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier

broad face as I rode past. A constant hum of human sound came from the buildings, the sound of a beehive pitched low, not even enough volume to overwhelm the river flow or the hiss of the woman’s relief. A dog barked, and from way up the cove another dog barked in answer. Then they both fell silent, as if other than expressing greetings they had nothing to communicate. The river face was interlocked curves of black glass, motion frozen. Past the village, a last man fished with a cane spear. He stood posed with an arm cocked above his head. A pine torch stobbed into the soft dirt of the riverbank cast a yellow circle of uncertain light around him. One sharp motion and a brook trout, pierced to the root of its bowels, flashed silver in the torchlight.
             
    A LONG BLACKSNAKE lived in an old oak tree down near the place in the creek where I dipped my water. My uncle used to say not to worry too much about snakes, poisonous or not, for they are more afraid of us than we are of them. That sentiment has not been borne out by my encounters with snakes, for many of them would rather fight than yield an inch. This one, as soon as I approached, would rear up from its home fifteen feet up in the tree where the trunk crotched into two fat limbs. It would hiss and flatten its yellow neck like a hood and offer to fight. I would fling stones and hope it did not choose to launch itself down on me. And as further sign of the contempt the local animal world held for me, during that entire first summer, a raccoon chose the second step to the porch as his nighttime place to take a big black oily shit, punctuated with various seeds and berries.
    But in fairness I should add that not all animals disdained me. If I turned Waverley out of his corral while I was doing outdoor chores, he would follow me wherever I went, walking with his nose just touching the small of my back. I would cook him horse biscuits at the hearth, and they were just like people biscuits from my aunt’s recipe except that I added a lot more salt and didn’t wash my hands before mixing the dough.
             
    THE LANGUAGE CAME to me fairly suddenly, and it was a good thing it did, for back in that whole white part of the map, linksters were few indeed, there being no more than five people who could render either language into the other. I listened hard to Bear and all the traders passing through the store, and within a few months I felt the words and their pattern begin to come on me and settle in my mind with great ease and gentleness. The words were just there in my mind. I didn’t know how or when I’d gone from
tsis-kun,
the general word for bird, to
ka-gu’,
the particular word for crow. From
ani-tsila’-ski
to
awi-akta,
flower to black-eyed Susan. And then the proliferation of verb tenses—much more numerous and tedious than in English—began to make some sense, so that before very long I could talk and account for gradations in the flow of time without everything having to be happening right in the present instance.
    Around that time, Bear’s jokes began falling within the range of my understanding. Previously the only way I knew he was telling a joke was by his tone of voice and a certain cadence to his speech, and the only way I knew the joke was over was that he began laughing. But even after I could understand most of what he was saying, I still didn’t think his jokes were funny. The characters were mostly animals, and the humor seemed to arise from their behaving exactly as one would expect them to do. Deer wary and frightful, bear ponderous and irritable. I tried to tell him my favorite joke, the one about the hunting dog named Old Blue whose main talent is his ability to hump raccoons to death after they have been shaken to the ground from their tree. Every old man swapping knives and pocket watches on benches outside county courthouses knows it, as do all twelve-year-old boys. Like certain personality traits and eye color and