One summer's day, a few moons after I had my first bleeding and became a woman, my older sister Saka and I were gathering berries and roots when she dug up something strange under the roots of a sassafras bush.  It was bright and shiny like the sunlit surface of a brook.  She called me over to look as she dug it out and lifted it.  It was bigger than a man's fist, smaller than a baby's head, and perfectly round, like the full moon.  It caught the sunlight in wonderful wavy patterns.

And then it turned dull and lifeless, and crumbled into dust, and my sister suddenly went mad.  Or so I thought at the time.

She looked around her, looking a little harder at me than at the other things around us, then looked at herself.  Then she grasped her breasts and moaned, and said something I didn't understand.  Something like the language of another tribe.  "What's wrong, Saka?" I asked, but she put a hand to her crotch and screamed.

The other women came running over.  "What happened?" asked our mother.  She was still alive then, though she died not long afterward -- before she saw much of what followed that strange day.

I tried to describe what I'd seen, the strange thing that had been buried in the ground and how it had crumbled to dust -- you could still see the gray dust on Saka's palms as she wrung her hands and breathed hard and fast.  Mother shook her by the shoulder and said, "Saka, what happened?" and then "Speak to me!," but Saka just breathed hard and stared at everyone.

My grandmother -- she was the oldest woman in the tribe then, as I am now -- asked me further questions about what had happened up to the moment Saka screamed and alerted them.  When I mentioned that she had spoken strange words like those of another tribe, Grandmother turned and spoke to her in the languages of several other tribes.  But she did not respond at first, and when she finally spoke up again, only briefly, Grandmother shook her head and said, "I think she has been touched by a spirit, and is speaking spirit language."

"Don't you know spirit language?" I asked naively.

"The spirits have as many languages as people, girl."

Grandmother stayed with me and Saka and told the other women to get back to gathering.  We held her hands and comforted her, and spoke with her even though she hardly responded, for the span of time it takes the sun to go halfway across the sky.  The other women got farther away and out of sight.

Finally, as the sun neared the horizon, Grandmother said, "We must return to camp.  You'll need to help me with her if she won't walk there under her own power."

But she stood up and followed us when we made ready to go.  As we went, she looked around us as if she'd never seen anything before.  Now and then she would say something in her strange language.

The hunters had already returned to camp before us, and they had had a good hunt.  Each of them carried a big hunk of aurochs meat, and two of the biggest men dragged the remainder of it.  We ate well that night, but Saka only picked at her food, eating a few berries and mushrooms, making a face at the taste of roots, and gagging at the sight of the grubs.

Saka had been sleeping with one of the young men, Qeru, since not long after she became a woman.  But when Qeru sat down beside her at supper and put a friendly hand on her thigh, she recoiled from him and put her arms around me.  I hugged her back, and told Qeru what had happened.  He was dismayed, but said, "If she has been touched by a spirit, I should not sleep with her until the spirit goes away."

That night Saka slept with me for the first time in a long while.  I was comforted by her presence, and I hoped she was comforted by mine.  I woke up during the night a couple of times to hear her softly weeping, and hugged her, murmuring softly to her that I loved her even though she probably couldn't understand me.

The next day, some of the older men and women stayed in camp to finish dealing with the aurochs' hide and bones, while the young men went hunting and the younger women went out to gather.  Saka followed me closely.  When we crossed a brook, she paused a long while, looking at her reflection and then running her hands over her face and breasts and shuddering.

"Come on," I said, "I see a berry patch over there."  She followed me and watched what I did.  I had to correct her a couple of times when she picked unripe berries.  She seemed to have forgotten everything.

After a little while, she pointed to one of the berries in her left hand and said a word.  Then she looked at me expectantly.

"Blackberry," I said, pointing at it.  She pointed to a leaf of the berry bush and said another word, and I said "Leaf."  Later on, I told Grandmother what she had been doing, and she nodded approvingly.

"We must all help her relearn people language," she decreed, and then all the women started pointing to things and saying their names, and that night in camp, some of the men did the same.

It was well into winter before she began speaking in complete simple sentences, and near the end of the following summer before she could explain what had happened to her that strange day.  By then, she had learned how to tell edible plants from inedible, and gotten over her distaste for most of the things people eat, though she still refused to eat grubs or insects.  When the women sang as we gathered, or when the whole tribe sang together in the camp at morning or evening, she joined in, but sometimes she sang songs in her own language.  She never slept with Qeru or any other man, always with me.

One evening near the end of summer, when a few of the leaves were beginning to turn, she told us her story.

"One day, when your granddaughters' granddaughters are long dead, and their granddaughters' granddaughters too, and all the aurochs and cave bears and mammoths are dead, leaving only the smaller beasts, a boy will be born.  In that far off time, people do not live like they do now.  They stay in one place, mostly, and don't travel all the time like we do.  They make plants grow where they want them to instead of taking them as they find them.  They make cattle and pigs live in certain confined fields so they can find them and kill them easily.  They make artificial caves out of tree parts and live in them all year, not just in the winter.

"The boy will grow up and become a man, and one day he will be digging a hole to find old things.  The people of that time dig holes to find old things that the people of past years left behind.  They do this to find out how people of past years lived.  He will find a round silvery thing bigger than a man's fist and smaller than a baby's head, and pick it up and look at it.  The next moment, he will see it turning dull and crumbling to dust in hands that are suddenly much smaller and darker colored.  He looked around and saw that he was in a strange place, a meadow on the edge of a forest, with a girl nearby and other women not far away, and that he was now a young woman.  That man was me."

Grandmother asked, "Then you -- the man you were -- has not been born yet?"

"Nor his grandmother's grandmother's grandmother, for as many generations as you could name if you talked till you grew hoarse."

"Are things really so different in that time?" I asked.

"More different than you could imagine."

We all had many questions for her, and she tried to answer them all, but many of her answers made no sense.  The questions continued all the next day as we women gathered, and the next night in camp, and so on for many days.

After that time, Saka began showing us her wisdom.  She peeled bark from certain trees and showed us how to scratch patterns on it to represent language, so a person could make marks as they spoke and another person could look at it later and say what the other person said.  (Saka never spoke as she made or looked at the marks, but everyone else does.)  Later on, we made marks on the walls of our winter caves too, and carved them into wood and bone.  She showed us how to plant seeds of berries and other edible plants and make them grow where we would be able to find them the next spring or summer.  And later, she found rocks that would melt in the fire and produce gold, silver and copper.  She showed us how to build houses and weave cloth.  You cannot imagine how different the world is now from when I was a little girl.

Many years later, when some of you were little boys and girls, and some of you were not born yet, she became pensive as we sat around the fire one night.  She had drunk too much of the fermentations she had shown us how to make.  "I wonder if this will have any effect at all," she said.  "All I've taught you.  If this tribe is wiped out in the next generation or two by a plague or a hostile tribe, there might be no effect on history at all.  But if you survive and teach what I've taught you to other tribes, maybe everything I remember will happen much sooner, and then more besides.  We might reach far-distant stars long before I was born the first time around.  Or we might kill ourselves with *nuclear* fire."  She sometimes used words from her own language, and sometimes she would explain them, but she refused to explain that one.

Later that winter, she died.  The whole tribe mourned for many days.  But she left us many sheets of birch bark with language-markings on them, and it is our task to carve all of them into the cave walls before the birch bark decays.  There is wisdom there that your granddaughters' granddaughters will still be learning how to use.

What's that, Tari?  No, she never learned to eat grubs.