SPIRIT WALKER

Chapter 6: A Man of the Pwi (part 1 of 3)

That night, 160 Pwi gathered on the banks of the Smilodon River a mile east of town to witness the ceremony that would make Tull one of their family. A dozen bonfires lit the scene, and flame-lit smoke rose up in clouds, casting red light upon the water. Bullfrogs croaked in the bushes, and bats wheeled about beneath the redwoods.

Freya, a small moon, was nearly full, and its pale blue light shattered the darkness. The night was clear. In the sky above, one red drone—an ancient war machine left by the Eridani to ensure that the inhabitants of Anee never took to the stars—plodded in its orbit, a long red tube of light, brighter than a comet.

Tull chose Chaa to be his father and Chaa's wife, Zhopila, to be his mother—which would make Ayuvah his brother and Fava his sister. They were best friends, so the arrangement made sense, and Ayuvah's family was one of the best in town.

From childhood, Tull had always dreamed of being a member of a family like this. The word Pwi means both family and person. As far as the Pwi were concerned, to be one was to be both.

Amid the light from bonfires that reflected in the river, each mother from among the Pwi brought out a favorite piece of leather and told the group why it was special: "I planned to make a coat for my child from this leather," one woman said, "and so I have worked it till it is very soft."

"My brother painted a piya bird on this leather," another said, "and so I think it is beautiful."

"My son killed the trees-on-head that made this leather, before he left for the House of Dust," a third woman said, and tears streamed down her face as she spoke of the lost boy. It was only old pain, and her husband comforted her while she remembered the son who had died.

Chaa inspected the gifts of leather and agreed that each held kwea—a memory of power, of pain, or of love—and therefore, the gift was sacred because it was also a gift from the heart.

The Pwi gathered together and sewed the leather into a great bag. The river was alive with the croaking of frogs and the startled calls of night birds; a cool thermal wind crept down the river channel from the mountains.

When the bag was sewn, Chaa stood before the Pwi in the guttering torchlight and said, "No two men walk the same world. Kwea shapes each man's perceptions. Kwea shapes his loves and fears, and because of this it is often not easy for the Pwi to understand one another.

"Here, we have Tull Genet, a man who has been Tcho-Pwi, and he is hard for us to understand, for he sometimes thinks like a human. Yet I say that he is Pwi, and that it is right for us to adopt him into the family.

"My grandfather taught me that all things are connected: when a man plants wheat in a field he makes bread from it, and it is easy to see that the man would not exist without the bread, and it is also easy to see that the bread would not exist without the labor of the man. If you are awake to the connections, then certainly you will see that the man and the bread, they are not separate, but are one thing. They are two parts of a greater whole.

"But the bread and the man, they could not exist without the wheat. And the wheat cannot exist without the rain and the oceans and the sun and the soil and the worms within the soil. And both the bread and the man who eats the bread become connected to all of these things, and they are not separate, but part of a greater whole.

"You are rain and soil and sunlight and wind and oceans. Always there is an ocean throbbing in your veins, and when you exhale, you add force to the winds, and when you work in a field on a hot day, the sweat of your body rains upon the ground, and when you are joyful, you release sunlight in the twinkling of your eyes."