Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin

wanted me to come. She wanted me to call the elk. I didn’t want to. But she said I had to. She said people wouldn’t believe I had the gift if I didn’t use it. I said I’d rather train horses. She said anybody can train horses, but they need us to call the elk. She said, ‘You can’t withhold the gift from need.’ So I went with the hunt. And I called the elk.” She seemed to be watching the elk come pacing to her through the air, on our high perch. She gave a deep sigh. “They came…The bowmen shot five of them. Three young bulls and an old bull and a cow. Before we left they gave us a lot of meat and presents—a cask of mead, and yam, and woven goods. They gave me a beautiful shawl. I’ll show it to you Mother was really happy about the hunt. They gave us a knife too It’s a beauty. It has an elkhorn handle mounted in silver. Father says it’s an old war dagger. They sent it for him, as a kind of joke. Hanno Corde said, ‘You give to our need, we give to your not-need!’ But Father likes it.” Hugging her knees she sighed again not unhappily yet as if something oppressed her.
    I didn’t know why she had told me the story. Not that she needed a particular reason; we told each other everything that happened to us, everything we thought. She was not boasting; she never boasted. I did not know what the elk hunt had meant to her, if she was happy about it or proud of it or not. Maybe she didn’t know herself, and told the story to find out. Maybe by telling it she was asking for my story, my triumph. But I could not tell it.
    “When you call,” I said, and stopped.
    She waited.
    “What does it feel like?”
    “I don’t know.” She didn’t understand my question; I hardly did myself.
    “The first time your gift worked,” I said, trying another tack, “did you know it was working? Was it sort of different from, from the times it didn’t work?”
    “Oh,” she said. “Yes.” But nothing more.
    I waited.
    “It just works,” she said. She frowned, and wriggled her toes, and thought, and finally said, “It’s different from your gift, Orrec. You have to use the eye, and…”
    She hesitated and I filled in, “Eye, hand, word, will.”
    “Yes. But with calling, you just have to find where the creature is, and think about it, and of course it’s different with each one, but it’s just sort of like reaching out, or like calling aloud, only you don’t use your hand, or your voice, mostly.”
    “But you know when it’s working.”
    “Yes. Because they’re there. You know where they are. You feel it. And they answer. Or they come…It’s like a line between you and them. A cord, a string, from here,” and she touched her breastbone, “between you and them. Stretched. Like a string on a fiddle—you know? If you just touch it, it calls out?” I must have looked blank. She shook her head. “It’s hard to talk about!”
    “But you know you’re doing it, when you do it.”
    “Oh yes. Even before I could call, sometimes I could feel the string. Only it wasn’t stretched enough. It wasn’t tuned.”
    I sat hunched up, despairing. I tried to say something about the adder. No words would come.
    Gry said, “What was it like when you killed the adder?”
    So simply, she gave me my release from silence.
    I could not accept it. I started to speak, and broke into tears. Only for a moment. The tears made me angry, shamed me. “It wasn’t like anything,” I said. “It was just—just nothing. Easy. Everybody makes this fuss about it. It’s stupid!”
    I stood up and walked right to the end of the ledge of rock, put my hands on my knees and stooped far over to look down to the pool below the falls. I wanted to do something daring, courageous, foolhardy. “Come on!” I said, turning. “Race you to the pool!” Gry was up and off the rock quick as a squirrel. I won the race, but skinned both knees doing it.
    ♦ ♦ ♦
    I R O D E B R A N T Y H O M E over the sunlit hills, and walked him to