The Changeling

 

The Skagit River Delta.

            Her home waters were the chilly murky depths of greater Puget Sound. As a mere nestling, a fry, she had lived and breathed there contentedly. Hers was an easy life, a peaceful aquatic drift of days and nights.
            As the days grew in number, she grew to maturity. She was lithe, cold, observant. She was, perforce, a huntress.
            Artistic representations of such as she, both modern and antique miss the point entirely and prove the artist to be no honest observer. Forgivable, considering. What if he had been honest? What would a human observer see?
            Not a bosomy maiden down to the hips and a fishy extremity below there. No, that was a polite, cheerful fiction. She was profoundly more alien than that. Some might have considered her monstrous. She had the voice of a woman and could sing strange wordless songs.
            One day, in the fifteenth year of her swimming, she caught an unknown scent. It was a watery scent, but different in some essential way. It called to her. She followed it, swimming for the first time with intention, her curiosity aroused.
            There was current in this water. Not just the eternal rise and fall of the tide. It was more than that, strongly directional. She swam into it. In short, up by Whidbey Island, she swam right into the Skagit River, right through its delta!
            The fresh river water fell upon her like a changing song, a spell. She breathed the fresh water, and she became a huntress of trout. She swam further until there was a branching. She entered a smaller river, one that leads quite close to a Great Forest which we know well. Still, she swam on, further and further upstream into the Cascade Range.
            A last she came to a straight stretch of this smaller river. It felt good to her there. She rested, with just her long finny tail waving slightly in the current, to hold her position.
            Looking through the water, she could see such sights as she had never beheld before. There were the mighty towering Douglas firs! There were the great bulky riverside boulders. There were unfamiliar birds and their calls. There were wild roses and fireweed growing near the river. It was dazzling!
            As she watched, a youth of the Forest People came walking to the riverside. He carried a bag. He was very tall and covered in soft dark hair that moved with the breeze. The impression he gave her was of sweetness, and once more she was dazzled.
            From her position in the water, she saw him sit on a large rock just at the edge of the river with his feet in the water. He began to sing a fishing song learned from his father, and to dangle his fingers in the water. As she watched she saw spotted trout one by one approach his fingers. Then he would pick each one up and pop it into the bag. This went on for some time.
            As they used to say in old-fashioned stories, her heart smote her. She loved him with all of her mind, heart and soul. Helplessly, she swam to him sitting there, just as the foolish trout had. She sat on the river bottom there and raised her head above the surface and gazed upon him.
            Now, Twigg, who had been catching some fish for Ramona to cook for dinner, watched intently as this strange creature rose out of the water before him. She was scaly like an ocean fish, perhaps like a salmon, she had fins, down her back and on the backs of her arms. She had gills but seemed to be able to breathe air anyhow in the time he had been watching her. Her face had the familiar features of a hominid, and her eyes were green he noticed. Her long pale wet hair hung over her shoulders, dripping river water.
            “I greet thee,” said Twigg, in formal Saslingua. He smiled.
            She gazed into his kind brown eyes but didn’t speak. Speech had never been asked of her before. She shook her head a little.
            “Would you like to come out of the water?” he asked and held out a hand, keeping the bag of fish secure in the other hand. She took his hand and came out of the river. He helped her to sit beside him on the very large rock.
            “Do you have a name?” said Twigg. Again she shook her head.
            He looked at her sitting there beside him, and said, “A lady should have a name. I will name you! Does that please you?”
            She nodded at the question in his voice without understanding it.
            Since he was a young thing, he called her Rose, as foolish as that may seem, since she was of the water, not the land.
            But, maybe it wasn’t foolish, for in some ways Twigg was to be greater than his father. He had a way of knowing that became being.
            Twigg took her head into his two hands, looking deeply into those adoring green eyes and he said, “I bless thee,” in the deepest most formal form of the old language passed down from the earliest times. Rose nodded slowly, in acceptance.
            Then, as they sat together, Rose became a daughter of his people.
            She wept. She examined her body over and over. She compared it to his and she laughed for the very first time. She stood on her feet. She walked up and down the riverbank. She stretched out her arms to the sky. Rose exulted!
            So, Twigg took her hand and led her home to the Home Clearing, bag of fish in his left hand.
            Seeing them arrive, Ramona said, “Who is this fair young thing my son?”
            “This is Rose. I found her in the river, Mama,” he answered his mother.
            “She doesn’t speak yet, but she will, Mama,” Twigg added.
            Ramona held out her arms to Rose, who came to her, and became her newborn daughter in that moment.
            There is much more to be said, as you can well imagine, but that is a story for another day.  

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