slipped from a cliff or choked on a peach pit, or being attacked by a wild rodent, which attack then caused bleeding which could not be stopped. Taltos rarely if ever broke their bones when they were young. But once a Taltos’s skin had lost its baby softness and there were perhaps a few white hairs in his head, well, then he could be killed by falling from the cliffs. And it was during those years, I think, that most Taltos died. We were a people of the white-haired, and the blond, the red, and the black-haired. We didn’t have many people of the mixed hair, and of course the young greatly outnumbered the old.
Sometimes a pestilence came over the valley that greatly diminished our numbers, and the stories of the pestilence were the saddest that we were ever told.
But I still don’t know what the pestilence was. Those which kill humans do not apparently kill us.
I could “remember” pestilence, and nursing sick ones. I was born knowing how to get fire and carry it safely back to the valley. I knew how to make fire so that I did not have to go to get it, though getting it from someone else was the easiest way. I was born knowing how to cook mussels and limpets with fire. I knew how to make black paste for painting from ashes of fire.
But to return to the subject of death, there was no murder. The idea that one Taltos had the power to kill another was not generally believed. Indeed, if you did quarrel and push someone off a cliff, and that person fell and died, it was still an “accident.” You hadn’t really done it, though others might condemn you for your appalling carelessness and even send you away.
The white-haired ones who liked to tell tales had been alive the longest, certainly, but no one thought of them as old. And if they lay down one night and failed to wake in the morning, it was assumed they had died of a blow from an accident that had not been observed. The white-haired ones often had very thin skin, so thin you could almost see the blood running under it; and often they had lost their scent. But other than that, we didn’t know age in any particular.
To be old was just to know the longest and the best stories, to have stories to relate from Taltos who were gone.
Tales were told in loose verses, or were sung as songs, or sometimes merely poured forth in a rush, with lavish images and rhythms and little bits and pieces of melody and much laughter. Telling, telling was joyful; telling was glorious; telling was the spiritual side of life.
The material side of life? I’m not sure there was one, in the strict sense. There was no ownership, except perhaps of musical instruments or pigments for painting, but even these were fairly liberally shared. Everything was easy.
Now and then a whale would be washed ashore, and when the meat had rotted, we would take the bones and make things of them, but to us, these were toys. Digging in the sand was fun, digging loose rocks to make them tumble downhill was fun. Even carving little shapes and circles into the bone with a sharp stone or another bone—this was fun.
But telling, ah, that took respectable talent, and true remembering, and remembering not only in one’s own head, but remembering what other people had remembered and told as well.
You see what I am driving at. Our assumptions about life and death were founded upon these special conditions and notions. Obedience was natural to Taltos. To be agreeable was apparently natural. Seldom was there a rebel or a visionary, until the human blood became mixed with ours.
There were very few white-haired women, perhaps one to every twenty men. And these women were much sought after, for their fount was dried, like that of Tessa, and they wouldn’t birth when they gave themselves to the men.
But in the main, childbirth killed the women, though we never said so at the time. It weakened women, and if a woman did not die by the fourth or fifth birth, she would almost always fall asleep later and die. Many women did not care to give birth at all, or would do it only once.
Birth always followed the true coupling of a pair of true Taltos. It was only later, when we mingled with humans, that women were