SPIRIT WALKER

Chapter 20: Ananoi and Shape Changing Woman

At the Okanjara camp, lightning cracked in the distance, and a young girl not more than three years old came out of her tent crying.

"Bad dreams are walking around! Bad dreams are walking!" she said, her eyes wide with fear. For some reason Tull could not imagine, the girl chose to come to him, crying for comfort, so he pulled her up on his lap and hugged her, and told her, "Do not worry. The bad dreams will soon go away."

A moment later, the girl's mother came, sat beside Tull, and took the girl.

"There are no bad dreams walking around, it is only the Okanjara and the Pwi walking," the girl's mother said. The child looked about in dismay, and because the shadows were deep around the tents, and greasy smoke of cooking meat obscured the camp, she was not inclined to believe that only men were walking around.

In order to comfort her, the mother pointed at the two great Frowning Idols and said, "Would you like to know why these stones frown?"

The little girl nodded, and the woman told a story Tull had never heard, the tale of Ananoi and Shape-Changing Woman:

Once, long ago, a Shape-Changing Woman was a widow and head of her tribe. All people thought her wise, and because she was wise, it added to her beauty.

However, she had an evil son, Xetxetcha, who used his shape-changing power to fool the animals and slay them against their will. Xetxetcha believed himself to be a great wrestler, for he could wrestle in any form-be it cave bear, sloth, or giant deer.

In this day, there lived a mammoth, named Vozha, who shook the mountains down to hills when he walked. Redwoods grew in the dirt on his back, yet they were shorter than his giant hairs. Even the fleas on his back were enormous and grew to the size of wolves. Only the sea was large enough to be his water hole, and when he sprayed water from his trunk, it rained on the far side of the world.

Now each fall, as the mammoths went into their mating frenzy, their eyes would glaze and turn red. The bulls shook the mountains as they charged one another, butting heads, and their trumpeting could be heard to the ends of the earth. But none could withstand Vozha, for he picked up the other mammoths two and three at a time with his enormous trunk and he threw them over his back, and he alone mated with all of the dainty mammoth women.

So, one day, the mammoths came to Shape-Changing Woman and asked her advice, saying, "Zhofwa has blown her kisses to us, and we love the beautiful cow mammoths, but we never get to sleep with our sweet lovers. How can we defeat this monster?"

Shape-Changing Woman sat and thought upon it, for it was a tricky question, so she told the mammoths to wait for a month while she considered the answer.

But when her son, Xetxetcha, heard of the question, he thought, Aha, now I have found a wrestling opponent worthy of me, and he immediately turned himself into a giant mammoth and trotted off to the north.

Meanwhile, Ananoi, that great hero who destroyed Bashevgo and put the red drones in heaven so the Pirate Lords would not escape this world, also had some mammoths come to him and complain saying, "Vozha has taken all the sweet women mammoths as lovers, and though he is a mighty fighter, this is not right."

So Ananoi decided to go speak with this monster. Everyone knew that Ananoi was the mightiest of the Okanjara, and he did not want to frighten the monster into submission, yet he knew he needed a weapon, so he took a cattail reed as a spear, and he carved petals of a lily to be the spear tip, and with that as his only weapon, he set off north.

Ananoi had not come far when he met a giant mammoth, taller than the mountains around it. The mammoth did not have redwoods growing upon its back, but in all other respects it looked like Vozha, and at the moment it was tossing several other mammoths over its back with its enormous trunk while trumpeting its challenge to all comers.