Ma says words over each deer as it's piled inside the high fence of the orchard. Ma and I skin each deer carefully, peeling it and easing it out of its skin. It is hard work and flies buzz around us. We wave the flies away and set up smoke pots. The smoke chases away the flies, but it calls to others.... I carry joints of meat outside the gate, and Mitra runs it off to market. My father smokes or salts the remainder for the family's use, although some are given away to the tenants. Ma and I make piles of gut and tendon, hooves and antlers, to be scraped, cleaned and dried for winter projects. But later. Now, Ma and I walk the around the outside of the fence. There is no one there. We reenter the orchard and lock the gate. Then we get to work on the skins. We turn them bloody side to the sky and stake them to the ground. The griots, called by the smoke pots, are expecting this. They have been waiting, silently, politely in the apple trees. The griots are beautiful birds, larger than the tuft-eared owls they resemble. They shine brown and golden. They have the faces of people, beautiful people, and they watch the work below them, calmly, intent, almost motionless. Ma and I stake a skin to the ground below a tree. We place the deer's head at the neck of its skin. We place a bowl of water at the base of the tree and we move on to the next one. Once we have moved down several places, comfortably far away enough, the griots come down from the trees. They pick at and nibble the gobbets of flesh stuck to the deerskins. They stick out raspy tongues and lick gluey white tegument off the hides. They gnaw the meat off the deer skulls and bones. They drink water from the bowls and they kiss the blood from off of each other's faces. In a few hours the skulls are naked; the skins are pristine canvases.

It would have taken us longer to scrape the hides so well. We still have to spread mixtures of deer brains and ash over the hides to finish and preserve them, but that's the easy part. (The hard part is then hand softening them.) With the help of the griots, Thaloc house gets a headstart in the process. Its not that much of a headstart, but somehow it is worth the price. Ma offers them hunks of deer. Each griot seizes a chunk in its claws, and flies away on muffled wings. The last one gives her a chaste smooch. Throughout the fall, sentinel griots haunt the house, watching for the smoke pots. There are seven griots this year, descendants of birds that have visited this household for generations. The griots and us speak no common language, but there is a contract between our two families, as solid as if written in stone. Perhaps it would break the spell, if we spoke of this outside the family. In any case, we never do speak of it. Ma married into this secret, learned the words from Baba, who was married to Thaloc house, but now is her own household. I have never learned the words. When I marry into another household I will not know them and so I won't be tempted to share them. ~Jemi