In the Desert of Bones

She didn't even know where she was.

She was lost in so many senses of the word. Lost in direction. In identity. In Life.

She was a dying breed whose name was in a mothertongue she could no longer speak, whose spirit-gods were nowhere to be found, and whose mere appearance in a room summoned fantasies of Noble Savages, painted skin, and the silhouettes of writhing bodies dancing around a campfire. Depending on how racist the room she walked into was, the images could be worse. Her history was not taught in schools. Her people were frail now, beaten down from generations of oppression, given smidgeons of poor land when the entire continent used to belong to them. The children had no grasp of their culture, their language; they sought the mainstream ideals of a world that did not cater to them, but treated them as token characters that appeared every few episodes with some stereotypical insignificant role.

She lived in constant restlessness. Restlessness lived beneath her skin. In her blood.

The restlessness took root from the first moment she had decided to 'become White'. It was the 70s and 80s in a small grey town on a small island; if you weren't like everyone else, you were never accepted. For her, to be accepted by friends had taken precedence over the stories of her ancestors. A little piece of herself was forgotten every time she walked away. The restlessness grew every time she thought of the empty hole inside herself where she knew the stories should have been. From the moment she had been named, it seemed she had been doomed to restlessness.

Her Mother and Father had given her the name Nattesg'g Mui'n, Chasing Bear.

What her friends used to call her was Nattie because they couldn't say her real name, but when they found out what her true name meant, they called her Chase instead.

Chase. To chase. To go after. Forever trying to catch something just out of reach.

Sometimes she wished to call out to her Spirit Guide for guidance, but shame and embarrassment quelled her tongue. The urge to call was there, in the pit of her stomach, on the tip of her tongue, but the words were gone. Her language was gone. She was afraid the spirits wouldn't understand her if she called out in the tongue she spoke in now.

Life had removed her from North to South, East to West, from the lush wet green of her island to the dust and red sand of the barren desert. Would the spirits even hear her when she was so far from her home? Was her Spirit Guide with her? She didn't remember enough of her own ways to know if she was allowed to speak to the gods of this land. She was too humiliated to dare ask.

Midlife came in a blur of grey. Days passed without knowing, devoid of the wonder of life. She was so very lost in it all. The hot, sticky grime of sweat layered against her skin. Car grease smeared into her pores. Breath stale. Ears muffled. Hair tangled. Eyes sore, always red around the edges from staring at a landscape as unforgiving as her heart had become.

She felt dried out from the inside; frail bones holding up a frame of fat, blood, and muscle.

Her fortieth year on the planet and all she had to show for it was a disappearing act she liked to pull on her niece whenever the mood suited her. Mikaela was a good kid. A smart kid. She could survive a week or two without her aunt. Chase just needed to disappear sometimes. Walk away. Run. She needed to slough off a little of the restless always clawing beneath her skin.

Even if she could never savour the sweet release of freedom, it was fine just to lick it once in a while.

Now she was here, wherever that was.

No more lost than she was when she first began her journey, except for the place she sat in had no name she could remember. It was the kind of place that one expected to find on route down a dusty desert road. It was a low, dim wooden building with a floor that was maybe concrete, maybe wood, but was so tracked with dirt that it looked one with the desert ground. The windows were small, the glass dirty. There weren't many lights in the place, just a few old, yellowed things that didn't so much illuminate anything than they did throw them into deeper shadow. A layer of something hung in the air, over every surface; it was grey, dull, and strange, like the remnants of a thousand cigars smoked, gun power from a thousand old guns fired. To breathe in the scents of the place was to discover deep smells, scents that reached back into ones' memory and triggered nostalgia even if you have never smelled a place like that before. Beer, no matter how fresh the bottle was, was always lukewarm and gritty with the sand of the desert worked straight through the glass of the bottle. Long-term patrons appeared as ingrained into the wood as the dirt and cigarette ash was, their faces worn down like leather, their eyes black and strange; they talked in low murmurs, broken by the scrape of chairs, the gulp of beer.

She was as much a stranger here as she was in her own life.

Wrapping her mouth around the smooth glass of her beer bottle, she tipped the sleek glass back and swallowed its warm contents, letting it slide down her throat, washing away the sand, settling in her stomach where the tar from her life seemed to accumulate. Wiping her stale mouth across the back of her unwashed hand, she stood from her ancient seat and slouched to the bar. Her footsteps were too loud, too heavy, to be welcome in this kind of place. She drew the notice of the patrons as much by her noise as by her copper-coloured skin. The bartender, who was sand-coloured and deep-eyed, with sagging skin falling in folds around his face, took her money with a murmur.

Night had fallen. The air was cool, the sky dark, the vastness of the desert sands whispering their secrets on the night breeze as silent animals watched her with beady black eyes. The night was so large around her, the sky so high and full of stars, the land reaching out to the horizons in every direction, she felt as if she would be swallowed whole.

Shrugging her thin, frayed jacket close, she walked. The scrape of her boots against the old, crumbling asphalt became her only company. There would be no cars or trucks to hitch a ride from tonight, so it was either walk until dawn or sleep in a ditch.

When it felt as if her tired old bones had dissolved and her heart had turned to a leaden stone in her chest, she discovered she was not alone on the old highway.

Not quite by her side, but to the left in the desert a few paces in, was a woman quite unlike anything she had ever seen before. A woman who was more at one with the landscape than the cactus or coyotes could ever be. A life of hard work had given the woman leathered skin of the same dark red-brown colour Chase's, but thicker somehow, more ancient. In the night, the woman's eyes were shiny and black, very much like a fox's eyes as it peers up from a den. She was a short, hunched figure; fat and barren at the same time, like tumbleweed. Hair grew everywhere, even from the knuckles of her gnarled fingers and bare toes. 

One gnarled hand was offered in silent invitation.

A sense of depth came about as Chase stared at this woman. She was the embodiment of things Chase could only hope to half remember of a life she never lived. There was deep power living in every pore of the Wild Woman's skin. Knowledge swam in her eyes. Connection to the greater root of people, history, life, danced across the old woman's weathered skin. She was a small, strange old women, yet seemingly standing in the same place as she was a figure that remained unseen yet unfolded across the universe; Creation and End and everything in between.

She was the instinctual quell of everything that made Chase restless.

With a deep breath, she stepped from the cracked, grey road into the vastness and majesty of the desert. Her company nodded in approval and led the way on a path that was not defined in any physical sense. The dirt was hard, but somehow less so than the asphalt. The smell of the Wild Woman was of animal and pure fresh air, bringing forth a second wind in Chase. New power. gentle strength. There was new noise in the desert, that of the woman cackling or crowing to herself, making noises much like the animals as if she could not sound at all human.

Along their path, they gathered bones.

They were large bones. Beautiful bones. Picked clean by the hungers of the desert. Bleached white by the unforgiving gaze of the sun. They were perfect bones.

They were familiar bones.

Chase said nothing as she gathered, touching each bone with perfect awe, deep reverence. She was taken hold by an urge she thought had been long dead. She didn't dare speak a word for fear of shattering whatever power had taken hold of the night. Exhaustion left her as she hefted the bones as her burden, leaving Wild Woman to sift and murmur to the sand. Their winding path brought them to many bones, all beautiful and forgotten, caging flesh picked clean. When they were done, she followed her guide to a cave in the hills where a fire crackled and the rocks held deep old stories.

As fine as a sculptor, Wild Woman pieced the bones back together. Chase was clumsy and terrible at figuring out the shape. It was a shape she had once known, but had long since forgotten. The skeleton fell many times under her fingers. Her old, knowing company was patient, ever only murmuring or crowing laughter. There was no restraint in the woman. Nothing barred her from the powers that lay around her. She took Chase's hands and helped, bone by bone, to build back the shape of a creature that had lain broken in the desert for so long.

And when the skeleton laid whole and complete upon the ground, its shape burned itself into the back of Chase's mind. Dancing shadows cast its living form upon the cave walls. It had lain dead and scattered for so long, now whole and beautiful.

Bear.

Bear Bones.

They had been chasing bear bones through the desert. A deep stirring came into her chest and Chase knew these were not ordinary bear bones. They were her bones.

Her bones.

Wild Woman sat by the fire and stared into it until Chase came to sit across from her. Old eyes crinkled, and shadows danced in wild hair that tangled like whipped branches in a storm.

"What is your name?" the woman asked in a voice as dry as the desert.

"Chase."

Those old eyes, more animal than human, dancing in the firelight, crinkled a little more with a wry smile.

"What is your real name?"

A sick, dry knot clotted her throat, tangled her tongue. She couldn't even speak her own name. Not her real name. Her company was patient, contemplating the world over the flames of her fire. When finally her lips would work, Chase said for the first time in a long time:

"Nattesg'g Mui'n."

One weight amongst thousands suddenly left her.

The old woman smiled, and then began to sing. It was a language that was music. It was stories. They were not words that Nattesg'g Mui'n knew, but she felt them. Resonating in her ears, her chest, her heart, the words came alive. They swirled like rivers. Gushed high and low like the winds. They were mighty like the storms, but as gentle as the dawn kissing the sands. Listening to the words washed away the chronic greyness that had settled in her body; the things that had accumulated in her skin scoured away. Soon it felt as if her own skin was flaking away to reveal the old bones beneath, bones that were not quite the shape of what she was now. Bones that longed to stand on four legs, shake off the monotone life she was caged in, and run free like the animals. Piece by piece, she became unraveled. Revealed.

She threw back her head in wish to join the Song. Words fell from her lips that had not crossed for the better part of 30 years; not the Wild Woman's Song, but her own. Her own wild song that breathed life back into her tired bones, brought back the stories she had forgotten, summoned the soul she had been living without. She resurrected the old songs of her language, feeling them fill her, rush over her, revitalize her. There was life in the Song she sang.

And in the midst of their Songs, the bear bones became flesh. Flesh became fur. A short, stubby tail twitched. Eyes blinked. Mouth opened wide and took a deep breath of life.

Natesg'g met that wild, free gaze in a split second of time that would forever be frozen for them.

And then the bear was gone, loping across the desert with its tongue lolling, tasting freedom on the wind.

Perhaps it was in the speed of the bear, or the splash of the river against its hide; maybe the last remnants of moonlight or the first glow of sunlight glancing off its thick fur, but in a flash the bear was suddenly a woman of 40 running free toward the horizon.

She is no longer lost.