The world of smell seems to me to be organized in much the same way as taste. Some of its basic categories include sweetness, bitterness or acridity and spiciness. There is also a kind of instinctual sense of what is fetid and so I think it must be a category of its own. Nothing is so hard to learn to bear than the smell of something animal rotting. When I first learned to tan a hide, I got one that somebody had put in water to make taking the deer hair from it easier, but he or she walked away from it leaving it to rot and for someone else to take care of.

How it came to me is simple. I had been at Beryl’s traditional arts camp in Montana for some weeks. We were sitting in a circle under some ponderosas. Most of the women were beading but I was not. I don’t remember why but my idle hands were noticed. Beryl, not looking up from her own work, said something like There’s a hide there going stink. That’s all. She didn’t look up. No one looked up. Everyone kept beading. In my head I went Oh and then got up and went to get the hide.

I dumped over the large plastic garbage container that held the water and the hide and let the stink water wash out onto the grass. The smell was of rot not quite yet to the stage where the hide would be unworkable, but close. I was given a draw knife and as I knew where the scraping poles were, I just started working. Meat side first, was my only initial instruction. I dragged the wet deer hide over to the scraping poles, lifted it up on the alder pole and started peeling strips of meat and fat from the hide underneath. Within the first few minutes I smelt of slightly raunchy deer hide. It was a smell that I was to come to dream about.

After the first day—or many hours of scraping—the meat side was clean right down past that grey filmy, almost checkered, layer that is the last to be scraped from the meat side. I put my nose to the skin and could still smell the stink from the, as yet, unscraped hair side, but there was another smell now. Maybe it had been there before, and the incipient rot just hid it, I don’t know. Now though there was also this sense of spiciness, a kind of sweet intensity that could only be smelt if, holding the hide close to the face, breathing slow and even, the smell had a chance to gather. At the end of the day, I slid the hide into clean water and jumped into the cold creek, after stripping off most of my very dirty clothes.

The next day I started scraping the hair side. It was hard work. It took me two days (a good tanner would have finished considerably less time) and I got very dirty. The combination of the sweat from the physical labor, the remaining dirty water from the hair side and the deer hair sticking to my arms, legs and hands was enough to drive me the ten miles down to the closest public shower facility. I really valued hot water and the smell of soap that day.

Once the hair side was clean, the next stage—soaking the hide in gently cooked brains, stretching it, wringing it out and then scraping it dry—took two more days, and at the end of each day my hands were so sore from holding that scraper that I had to pry the fingers of my right hand open with the left and force them backward, stretching out the muscles. Once I got the hide dry on the second day, it was the softest thing I ever felt and all the smell of stink had gone, replaced by the spice of healthy animality. I didn’t smoke that hide. I kept it white so that I could keep that smell as it was.

Once done, I brought the hide to Beryl’s hands. She felt it, made a soft grunting sound and handed it back. Nothing else was said, but some time later, in that circle of women while I was somewhere else, she made me a pair of moccasins. I was called back into the group; she handed them to me smiling. Everyone else giggled. I wore them until I put out the bottoms from so much walking.