Chapter 6
Atalanta
“Are you sure about this?” I hissed, looking askance at the ship and the people spread out on the beach around it. The Argo, seeking its crew.
“Sure as anything,” Meleager replied. “A long voyage and then a joyous homecoming, it’s exactly what we need. Mother’s temper
will have cooled by then. Besides, don’t you want to find your girl?”
He had a point. If there was any possibility of finding Procris, I had to take the risk. A ship bound for Colchis was the
best chance I’d encountered yet.
Meleager was accepted immediately into the fellowship of the Argo, but I found my way barred by a young man still coltish with youth. He had curly hair and hazel eyes, and a face I might
describe as pleasing if it belonged to someone else. There was a feeling of falsehood about him, as if everything he did was
calculated to please.
“I’m afraid you cannot come aboard,” the young man said, his forehead prettily furrowed, as though it pained him to give me
this news. “None of the other men are bringing their wives.”
“I am not Meleager’s wife,” I replied hotly. Really, why did everyone always assume that any man and woman close to each other
were husband and wife? “And anyway, who are you to deny me?”
“I am Jason, leader of this expedition.” He looked mildly astonished. “Nor are the other men bringing their sisters—”
“I’m not Meleager’s sister either,” I snapped. “I am his friend and fellow hunter.”
“It’s true,” Meleager put in, watching the exchange between Jason and me with wry amusement. “Atalanta is a mighty hunter,
and she will be a credit to your crew. Have you not heard of her fame? She joined me on the hunt for the monstrous Calydonian
boar, and it was she who brought the beast down.”
A series of sense impressions rose in my memory: The scratch of bark as I scaled a tree, pulling my ankles away from the boar’s
snapping teeth. The tension of the bow as I shot the creature in the eye, and the knife in my hands as I delivered the killing
blow before the boar could charge Meleager. And then all the trouble that came after, when the men of the hunting party declared
that I should not have the pelt that was my rightful prize, simply because I was a woman.
“Atalanta has killed lions too,” Meleager added. “Even a pair of centaurs.”
“What is your concern, Jason? If it is a matter of skill,” I began, gripping tight my spear, “know that I was nursed by bears
and raised by the finest hunters in all Arcadia.”
“I mean no insult,” Jason said, looking increasingly taxed. “I merely fear for your virtue among so many men, and worry that
your presence may divide the crew.”
“My virtue?” I echoed, eyes narrowing. What a preposterous statement, as if anything a man could do to me could possibly diminish my
virtue. “You would bar me from your ship rather than demand the others behave themselves?”
My blood was up now. I remembered the names the men called me after the Calydonian boar hunt: whore, bitch, witch. Jason’s concern about my virtue was just a more polite way of voicing the same sentiments.
A crowd began to gather around us, drawn by the activity. Two slight young men glided through the air, and a man with the
largest muscles I had ever seen ambled over.
An audience. At once, a plan formed in my mind: Men never liked losing in front of other men, especially to a woman.
“How about this,” I said, spinning my spear so that it moved like the wings of a hummingbird, too fast for the eye to follow.
“A spear toss. If mine goes farther than yours, I will ride with you on the Argo. If you beat me, I will leave without further complaint. Hopefully such a challenge will not compromise my virtue,” I added.
The growing crowd of Argonauts cheered. Jason paled but could not refuse, not with the others watching.
Jason went first. He launched the spear with a grunt, nearly wrenching his shoulder in the process. A child’s throw, weak
and unambitious. The spear wobbled through the air, burying itself in the sand.
Someone fetched the spear and placed it in my hand. The weapon consisted of an obsidian point affixed to a polished oak shaft,
crafted from a tree I’d felled myself. So familiar that it felt like an extension of my own body.
I strode forward, each step as sure as a knife thrust. My arm drew back, every sinew directed toward the point of the spear.
Then release, when the weapon took like a bird into the sky, its trajectory following a wide arc and planting itself in the
earth far beyond the mark left by Jason’s.
The gathered crowd roared in delight, and my lips bent into a smile.
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 the Argo.
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 by the 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.