Through Yellow Eyes

Caddo

Caddo is home. I know because his weapons are lying outside the tipi on the ground. His spear, bow and arrow and his knife are in a heap beside the entrance. You can tell he has angrily thrown them there because of how the knife is tangled up in the bowstring. Unlike my handmade weapons, Caddo’s is finely crafted with colour and pattern. It infuriates me on how poorly he treats such good tools. 

I enter the tipi and find him standing in the middle of the room, staring at the ground as he thinks to himself. Mother is at the corner minding her own business, as usual. She is crouched on the ground, mindlessly weaving blades of straw together for no purpose. I look back at Caddo. His muscular figure is slightly hunched and still. His long black hair is netting around his face and is damp with sweat. He is wearing his tribe’s fighting clothes, a dark brown deer skin piece of clothing with mud smeared on for camouflage. 

Caddo is deep in thought. It is probably about training. Every year, the tribe spends a day devoted to training for the work they do. It also the chance for boys who have just reached the age of sixteen, to join the tribe. They practice their archery, spearing, and techniques on the field beside our village. And every year Caddo goes in a state where he thinks to himself about the training, because every year the skills shown in the field have been poor. I can easily take down all of the men who protect our tribe, if only I have the chance to show it.

“So training starts at sunrise?” I ask, making Caddo snap out of his trance. 

“Yes. But you do not worry about that.” He snaps back. He does not scare me, but the snap remark does make Mother shuffle back a bit. Mother is scared of Caddo most of the time. But I, however, just find him infuriating.

“Why should I not?” I ask calmly, which just shortens his temper. I usually do not talk to him like this, but I could not care anymore. It was as if a twig that had been carrying a large weight of tolerance had suddenly snapped. 

“You should not because it is none of your concern!” Caddo yells, jerking from his posture until he was facing right at me. He looks at me with cold eyes for a second, and then goes to sit down on the skin rug. “Why are you suddenly concerned about training? It is nothing for a girl.” He spits out the word “girl” as if it is poison. This causes a fire to start inside me, burning my patience until there was nothing left but choking ashes.

Suddenly, I do not care. I do not care about this gruelling way of life that leaves me in the dark. I do not care that what I want goes against everything our tribe is about. Sixteen years is long enough to keep my needs hidden.

“I want to train, Caddo!” I yell. Caddo looks at me in shock, but then his eyes narrow into slit, and his face goes stone hard.

“You cannot train, that is ridiculous. You would get killed on your first day in the forest.”

“Caddo, I want to train! I will be able to hunt!” I say back, the tone of plead thick in my voice. 

“You will get killed on your first day! You have not got what it takes to be in the forest.” He barks back. 

I want to scream out all the things I have managed to do in the forest since I was a little girl, but I know that I cannot. I want to say that I can take down a grown deer with one small hand-made throwing knife, but the words are too deadly to be spoken. “I do have what it takes! I am just as good as all the men in our tribe!” Is what I say.

“How would you know that?” Caddo asks. I open my mouth to respond, but leave it gaping open when I realize how dangerous that sentence is. I don’t reply in the end, and this infuriates Caddo. He turns to Mother, who had been watching the conversation with wide eyes. “Tell her she is being absurd.” He barks. Mother looks scared for a moment, but her face seems to relax a bit.

She says with a smile on her face, “If she wants to train, I have no objection.”

I am shocked at the courage Mother has pulled up so suddenly. I feel a new respect for her now. Caddo, however, does not think of this remark as respectful. But instead of lashing out or yelling back, he gave a look of consideration.

“Sekani, you may train.”

I don’t believe what he says at first, I think I had heard him wrong.  But then I realised that he did say that, and he means it.

“What? Are you serious?” I ask, my eyes widening with every quick breath I took.

“You may train. You may come to the field at sunrise and use the weapons.” He answers simply. His eyes are still narrow and his forehead is still creased with worry lines. I look exasperatedly at Mother, who is also in shock, but not quite as much as me.

“Oh thank you so much, Caddo!” I squeal, almost jumping in the air. Caddo lifts up his hand to stop me.

“Sekani, I said you may train. But that does not mean you can be a hunter or fighter. You get one day to be what you want to be, but then you are finished.” He says sharply, then gets up and leaves us to go outside. I watch him as he leaves through the opening in the animal hide walls, disappearing round the bend.

I turn back to Mother, who has stood up from her seated position at the corner. She takes a tentative step towards me, and slowly takes her hands in mine. She doesn’t speak, and neither do I. Both of us have never imagined this day to arrive, so neither of us knows what to say. Instead we concentrate on each other’s eyes, as if they told all the things we wanted to say but couldn’t get our minds on. From her stone cold and hollow gaze, I can tell we are both thinking the same thing.

The future is indefinite. 

Everything can go well, or everything can go terribly wrong. Those seem to be my only options; there is no line in between. One step in a certain direction can tip the scales completely, leaving me trapped in the lower side with no way back up.

It is when I am lying in my bed in the late hours of the risen moon that I start to question Caddo’s unnatural acts. It does not make any sense how he suddenly decided to perform an act of kindness. Is he changing? Is there string attached? Or is he just curious about what will happen? It is these unanswered questions that keep me wide awake and my head buzzing. 

The whole tipi is shrouded in darkness, with only the faint moonlight creeping through the walls making me able to see the silhouettes of my Mother and Caddo. Mother’s small body is sleeping near my bed, her chest rising slowly in a steady beat. Caddo is in the other side of the tipi, his silhouette much larger than Mothers, breathing loudly enough that you don’t need to watch his moving chest to see when he took a breath. I watch him with suspicion and curiosity. I cannot help but feel like there is something that I am missing. That this is more than just giving in to my pleads to train. Either way, I try not to think about it. But the thoughts still haunt me every time I close my eyes, so I resort to staring up at the roof until dawn breaks the sky.