Retrieving my spear, I stalked toward Jason. He tried to cover his stunned shock with a false smile, but it disappeared when I thrust the spear at him, tip pointed at the sky.
“You may take this spear for yourself,” I said, “on the condition that you take me along as well.”
And that is how I came to sail with theArgo.
It was not long before I regretted my decision.
“Bears were not meant to ride ships,” I muttered, wiping my mouth after hanging over the heaving railing of the ship for longer than I cared to admit. My feet had never been off the earth before for any extended period of time, and I did not take well to the water. Dusk was fast falling, and it seemed that we would not come to shore that night.
“Oh, are you a bear?” Meleager replied with a laugh. “Could have fooled me.”
A mild jest, but I was sore from my near exclusion and the words stung. It seemed I would always be a prisoner of my skin, my nature defined by others. I shot Meleager a silent glare, then bundled myself into my blankets, curling up and facing away from him.
My earliest memories were of fur and milk, then the packed earth floor of the hunters’ hut. I’d been found in a bear’s den as a baby, probably after being abandoned on the mountainside by my birth parents as female children sometimes were. By some miracle, though, a bear had taken me in. Instead of eating me, she nudged me to nurse.
When the hunter noticed a tiny red-limbed form within the mass of dark brown fur, he immediately feared for an infant so young. After the mother bear left to go hunting, the hunter darted in to snatch me. Despite the protestations of the other bear cubs, my brothers and sisters, he took me to his dirt-floored hut.
He brought me to the woman who shared his life, a huntress, and she nursed me. The hunters were the ones who taught me human speech and gave me my name: Atalanta, “equal in weight.” A human equal in weight to a bear, a girl equal to a boy.
When I was old enough to toddle, I sped out of the hut and across the mountain to the bear’s den. The first generation of cubs had already grown up and left the den, but the mother bear told me through grunts and the relaxed posture of her body that she remembered me and was glad that I was well. I buried my face in her thick, glossy fur.
The new litter of cubs mewled around me. When the mother bear took them hunting, she brought me as well. I learned that if you sit very still in the middle of the woods, all manner of life will emerge: rabbits from their burrows, pheasants from the underbrush, even deer from the slanting screen of leaves. Then you fall upon them with the speed of a shooting star and take them for your dinner.
When I was a little older, the hunters taught me their ways of bringing down prey, so much more delicate and precise than that of the bear. The efficiency of the human method for cleaning a carcass impressed me—far less chewy fur in your meal that way.
The hunters were not doting parents. The two of them treated me much like the hounds that were allowed to wander in and out of the hut, left to their own devices. Content in their mountain fastness, the hunters largely avoided human settlements except to trade and counseled me to do the same. As for the mother bear, she loved me in her own way, but she did not understand me—my long hairless limbs, my chattering speech, my reliance on spear and arrows rather than tooth and claw.
From earliest childhood, I was aware of a cold feeling in the pit of my belly, like hunger that persisted even when I was full. Gradually, I came to recognize it as loneliness. There was no one quite like me, caught between the human world and the animal one.
Sometimes the hunters told stories about gods and heroes bythe fire. One night, it was a story about the goddess Artemis and her lover, a nymph named Callisto. She was Artemis’s favorite, and no one could pull her from the goddess’s side. But Zeus saw the nymph and desired her, though Callisto spurned his advances out of loyalty to her beloved. Eventually, Zeus took the form of Artemis herself to lay with Callisto, dropping his disguise when the chance for escape had passed. When Artemis saw that Callisto was pregnant, marked indelibly by what she had suffered, Artemis wept and changed her former companion into a bear.
I recalled leaning forward, my lips slightly parted. “And her baby, was it born a bear?” I asked.
“No, it was human. A mortal,” the old hunter replied.
My heart fluttered in my chest. I was on the edge of knowing who I was, where I’d come from. I’d finally found an answer for my strange existence.
“And that baby,” I said breathlessly. “Was the baby me?”
The female hunter, who had been fletching arrows, looked up abruptly. Then she laughed. “No,” she replied. “That baby was Arkas, first king of Arcadia. This was long before your time. Probably you were the unwanted daughter of a farmer’s wife or a shepherd’s girl.”
Her words stung me. I thought I’d found some sense of belonging, or at least an understanding. But I had been mistaken and was instead reminded of the first thing I’d ever been: trash to be thrown out on the mountainside.
I’d fled from the hunters’ fire, their laughter ringing in my ears. The night was as dark as this one, with no moon to crowd out the stars. I remembered thinking of Callisto, turned into a bear by the goddess, and felt my desire sharpen to an obsidian-tipped point. If only I could be a bear, instead of this thing I could not understand called a human, then perhaps my loneliness would vanish like the dew at morning.
Opening my arms wide, I sent up a prayer to Artemis.“Please, turn me into a bear.”
If Artemis heard me, she did not grace me with such a gift. My limbs remained stubbornly long and naked of fur, my teeth blunt and useless. I was a human girl, even if I’d been raised like a young bear, and the next day the human world came to claim me.
I was stalking grouse when there came a rustling in the undergrowth. Something larger than a rabbit, perhaps even as big as a deer. I tensed, spear at the ready, when out of the forest emerged a girl like me.
7
Atalanta
The young woman wore a short, practical tunic and sturdy sandals. A sheen of sweat covered her body, so that she seemed slightly luminous. Her chest rose and fell with exertion, and she held a spear just as I did. In her other hand was a brace of rabbits, necks wrung from the snare. She was about my age, I thought, though I was not practiced at telling how old humans were.
If I’d had my wits about me, I would have fled into the underbrush, away from this chance encounter. But I was fascinated by this woman. There was a tenderness to her skin that seemed to call for touch.
