The Year Keepers

I do not have a birthday. Well I mean there was a day I was born but I do not know when that was. We as Tuchuk do not keep track of days and hands like most people do. We keep track of time by seasons and sometimes a season is longer and sometimes a season is shorter. So our time is varied. I know how many times I have seen Turia. I know how many Seasons of the Snows I have lived through. And that is as close as I get to how old I am and when the time of my birth was.

This move North marks another passing of Turia. I am another season older and I have to look back on the last few seasons and wonder how far I have come. What have I accomplished. What have I seen completed.

I went to ask for a Year Keeper to be sent forward to the First Wagons. We have a few here but they are rarely about and I am in need of some advice and I do not have all the season's names remembered. Among the brightly painted wagons and various colored pegs I felt a bit in awe of time and space and how it all fits together to form a history .. a heritage of the Tuchuk. I felt suddenly protective of this Clan. What would we do if we lost all the Year Keepers? Who would remember the names of the seasons and recite them and bring back the instant memory of the events that led to the naming of the year? The Singers create the stories and sing the songs of our people but the Year Keepers are the logic stitchers of our fabric of life.

Is this the kind of fear that made men want to learn to read and write in the first place? This sudden desire to leave something behind to be remembered even if there was no one there to remember the names or sing the songs? But Tuchuk to do not live by fear. I let the sudden feeling leave me and replaced it with the knowledge of our strength and should a time come when the Sky takes us back up where we belong .. we will take our heritage with us and the plains will sing a new song and remember new names. I was no longer afraid of the change that might someday come. Change is a way of life and all I needed to think on was that today .. we were a fierce and proud people thundering across the plains in the prime of our lives. There was only to stretch and feel the hot breath of the Central Fire and know that for now .. it was good to be alive and Tuchuk.