Indian Summer :: the woods :: oak maple hickory

     The day had started as any other.
     Onatah was the first to wake. She gathered wood to revive the dying fire, choosing the hot-burning oak logs for the cooking fire. In the dim morning light, she watched her tribe as they slept, covered with bear and buckskins, on the ground. Since their retreat into the woods, they had taken to sleeping under the stars for as long as the weather held. It had been warm and dry since leaving their village, but with autumn coming to a close, winter was not far behind. They hoped to reach their brethren tribe at the edge of the Great Plains before the first snow.    
    Her sisters and aunts would wake soon to tend the fire and prepare the morning meal. There was enough corn to get them through to the new moon, but only enough acorn meal for this day. There was a sack of dried acorns that needed to be peeled, pounded, and leached of their bitter tannins. In another sack were hickory nuts, gathered just before their departure from a stand of shagbark hickory trees that grew behind their longhouse. She loved the sinuous texture of the bark almost as much as the sweet oily nuts. She would miss those trees and savor their last offering. 
    There were more sacks and baskets of roots and tubers, both fresh and dried, maple sugar, sumac, mushrooms, dried venison and pumpkins, smoked fish, chokecherries, beans, and tallow. All of their food, save the fresh sunchokes and mushrooms that they had foraged along their journey, had been gathered from their storage pits and packed in haste.

     On the last full moon, the elders from coastal tribes had come with stories about them.
     The salty people.
     They came from the Great Sea in large vessels, pushed by the wind caught in white sheets. There were many of them and more came with each moon.
     The elders took turns telling stories of how their tribes had shared their food and taught them how to forage and grow The Three Sisters. They made houses from logs, stacked one upon the other on their sides. They had brought with them hoofed animals that they kept in pens. They drank the milk and used it to make butter as their people did with nuts. They made a fine bread from a grain they call wheat. 
     They also brought with them illnesses that spread through their people and that medicine men could not cure. Many had died in their tribes. 

     The elders came to warn Onatah's tribe. They said that the salty people wanted to possess the rich fertile land along the rivers and lakes; the land where their ancestors had lived and where their children were living now. 
      Onatah's husband had laughed then, saying "Don't they know that land can not be owned any more than the stars or the sky?"
      An elder shook his head and said "No, they live by different ways than ours."
     "Then we will fight them!"
     "Their diseases will kill many of you and others will die by their weapons, which are more powerful and deadly than ours. My ancestors have come to me in dreams. They revealed that a Great War is coming and that we should warn others and seek protection in numbers so that our people and our ways will persevere. "

     And so, it came to be that Onatah and her tribe had packed up everything that they could carry and left the village where she had been born and where she was to give birth to her children. At first, her husband was set on staying behind to fight but when she told him that he would be a father in the spring, he had a change of heart.

     As the sun lifted higher in the sky, the tribe woke one by one, and went about their morning activities. The women prepared corn cakes and pemmican for the men and older boys to take hunting and fishing. Their day would be filled with the preparation of food that would see them through the next part of their journey. They would walk for days, stopping only when the sun set, to spread their furs beneath the stars and sleep.
    After they ate, some of the women went into the woods to forage, while others went to fill gourds and makak baskets with water from the brook. Onatah went in search of a stone for pounding. The children stayed behind to shell acorns and hickory nuts.
    Beneath an ancient oak, Onatah found a stone that pleased her. It was as broad as her hips and nearly as deep. She ran her hand over the rough shallow well in the top and thought of the pounding stone that she had left behind. It had been her mother's, and her mother's mother before her. With each generation, the well had grown deeper, rounder, smoother. All of the women remarked at how swiftly and effortlessly it could grind even the hardest corn into a fine powder. Onatah believed that it contained the Spirits of her women ancestors, who endowed it with the power of their lifelong labor. Of all the things she left behind, it was the one thing she could never replace. 
    She returned to camp to gather the shelled and peeled acorns into the sack and brought them back to the stone. She sat cross-legged in front of it, pounding the nuts into fine powder, feeling the muscles in her arms and shoulder flex with each strike. The rock that she had chosen to pound with felt awkward in her hand and caught on the crags in the stone, sending loud reverberating echoes through the silent woods. She realized that she was alone. 

    As a child, she had often wandered into the woods alone. It had been a time of discovery where every texture, sound, and scent had thrilled and filled her with an overwhelming awe. She had felt the Great Spirit speak to her through the trees in a gentle, loving voice that rustled with the leaves, creaked with the boughs, and swarmed with the bees that built their hives high on the limbs. Alone in the woods, she felt connected to every leaf and insect and rejoiced at being alive.
    As she grew older, so too, did her responsibilities with the tribe. Her days were now filled with caring for their needs. She relished the time that she spent foraging away from the village, but she was always accompanied by her sisters. 
    She stopped pounding to look up at the trees, listening intently for the voice. She heard the laughter of the children carry through the woods. She remembered her unborn child in her womb and her heart swelled to think that one day, too, it would be laughing and playing along with them. In gratitude, she would make acorn pudding for the children when she returned to camp. She would use the rest of the finished acorn flour, mix it with nut milk, and cook it in a birchbark basket with hot rocks. When it had thickened, she would set it aside in a basket to cool, then swirl in the sweet maple sugar. She would serve it to them with stewed chokecherries and hickory nut butter and tell them that it was a gift from the trees. They will like that.
    When she had finished pounding, Onatah gathered the acorn flour into the sack and headed for the brook. On her way, she noticed that gray clouds had replaced the sun and that the air had grown cold. She searched the banks for sand, but there was only mud. In her village, she leached the bitterness from acorns in a mound of sand in a pit by the river. With her hands, she would form a well in the mound to fill with the dried, pounded acorn flour, then build a bridge of pine boughs from the river to the mound. The water would flow over the boughs, through the flour, and leach the tannins into the sand. When the leaching was started in the evening, the flour would be sweet by morning and could then be spread out to dry in the sun. Without sand, Onatah decided that the flour would have to be leached with ashes mixed in water. The water would have to be changed several times throughout the day, but the acorns were not very bitter and would be sweet by nightfall. She would spread it on washed bark to dry by the fire as they slept.
    Onatah sighed. She wanted to linger, but there was much work to be done. She looked up at the trees and saw the first snowflakes, like tiny white feathers, drift down through the branches. She panicked. 
 
    For the first time in her life, she was filled with uncertainty. Up until then, she had lived in a steadfast rhythm that flowed with the seasons. Now, there was so much that was unforeseen.
How would they survive if their food ran out and they were unable to hunt or forage?
What if the salty people, with their diseases and weapons, caught up with them?
What kind of life would her children lead?
What would become of her people?

She took comfort in the few things that she knew with certainty.
The first fallen acorns were always infested with worms and the nuts of the white oak were sweeter than the red oak.
The sun, stars, and moon would always guide them.
The winter, no matter how harsh, would pass, and in the spring, the trees will run sweet with sap.
The Great Spirit will watch over them and one day, she will again hear its voice from the trees.

As Onatah stood there, alone in the woods, among the silent trees and falling snow, with her heart pounding and her womb growing, she knew with her entirety what it was to be alive. 

Tree Spirit

acorn maple pudding log
hickory nut ash bark
chokecherry leaf