Shaman: A Novel of the Paleolithic Era

Chapter 1

We had a bad shaman.

This is what Thorn would say whenever he was doing something bad himself. Object to whatever it was and he would pull up his long gray braids to show the mangled red nubbins surrounding his earholes. His shaman had stuck bone needles through the flesh of his boys’ ears and then ripped them out sideways, to help them remember things. Thorn when he wanted the same result would flick Loon hard on the ear and then point at the side of his own head, with a tilted look that said, You think you have it bad?

Now he had Loon gripped by the arm and was hauling him along the ridge trail to Pika’s Rock, on the overlook between Upper and Lower Valleys. Late afternoon, low clouds rolling overhead, brushing the higher ridges and the moor, making a gray roof to the world. Under it a little line of men on a ridge trail, following Thorn on shaman’s business. It was time for Loon’s wander.

—Why tonight? Loon protested.—A storm is coming, you can see it.

—We had a bad shaman.

And so here they were. The men all gave Loon a hug, grinning ruefully at him and shaking their heads. He was going to have a miserable night, their looks said. Thorn waited for them to finish, then croaked the start of the good-bye song:

—If you ask nicely enough, he added, slapping Loon on the shoulder. Then a lot of laughing, the men’s eyes sardonic or encouraging as they divested him of his clothes and his belt and his shoes, everything passed over to Thorn, who glared at him as if on the verge of striking him. Indeed when Loon was entirely naked and without possessions Thorn did strike him, but it was just a quick backhand to the chest.—Go. Be off. See you at full moon.

If the sky were clear, there would have been the first sliver of a new moon hanging in the west. Thirteen days to wander, therefore, starting with nothing, just as a shaman’s first wander always started. This time with a storm coming. And in the fourth month, with snow still on the ground.

Loon kept his face blank and stared at the western horizon. To beg for a month’s delay would be undignified, and anyway useless. So Loon looked past Thorn with a stony gaze and began to consider his route down to the Lower Valley creekbed, where knots of trees lined the creek. Being barefoot made a difference, because the usual descent from Pika’s Rock was very rocky, possibly so rocky he needed to take another way. First decision of many he had to get right.—Friend Raven there behind the sky, he chanted aloud,—lead me now without any tricks!

—Good luck getting Raven to help, Thorn said. But Loon was from the raven clan and Thorn wasn’t, so Loon ignored that and stared down the slope, trying to see a way. Thorn slapped him again and led the other men back down the ridge. Loon stood alone, the wind cutting into him. Time to start his wander.

But it wasn’t clear which way to get down. For a time it seemed like he might freeze there, might never start his life’s journey.

So I came up in him and gave him a little lift from within.

He took off down the rocks. He looked back once to show his teeth to Thorn, but they were out of sight down the ridge. Off he plunged, flinging the thought of Thorn from him. Under his feet the broken gritstone was flecked with pock snow, which collected in dimples and against nobbles in a pattern that helped him see where to step. Go as agile as a cat, down rock to rock, hands ready to grab and help down little jumps. His toes chilled and he abandoned them to their cold fate, focused on keeping his hands warm. He would need his hands down in the trees. It began to snow, just a first little pricksnow. The slope had big snow patches that were easier on his feet than the rocks.

He tightened his ribs and pushed his heat out into his limbs and skin, grunting until he blazed a little, and the pricksnow melted when it touched him. Sometimes the only heat to be had is in hurry.

He clambered down and across the boulder-choked ravine seaming the floor of Lower Valley, across the little stream. On the other side he was able to run up the thin forest floor, which was all too squishy, as the ground was wet with rain and snowmelt. Here he avoided the patches of snow. First day of the fourth month: it was going to be trouble to make a fire. The night would be ever so much more comfortable if he could make a fire.

The upper end of Lower Valley was a steep womb canyon. A small cluster of spruce and alder surrounded the spring there, which started the valley’s creek. There he would find shelter from the wind, and branches for clothing, and under the trees there wouldn’t be much snow left. He hurried up to this grove, careful not to stub his senseless toes.

In the little copse around the spring he tore at live spruce branches and broke several off, cursing their wetness, but even damp their needles would hold some of his heat against him. He wove two spruce branches together and stuck his head through a middle gap in the weave, making it into a rough cloak.

Then he broke off a dead bit of brush pine root to serve as the base of his firestarter. Near the spring he found a good rock to use as a chopper, and with it cut a straight dead alder branch for his firestick. His fingers were just pliable enough to hold the rock. Otherwise he didn’t feel particularly cold, except in his feet, which were pretending not to be there. The black mats of spruce needles under the trees were mostly free of snow. He crouched under one of the biggest trees and forced his toes into the mat of needles and wiggled them as hard as he could. When they began to burn a little he pulled them out and went looking for duff. Even the best fire kit needs some duff to burn.

He reached into the center of dead spruce logs, feeling for duff or punk. He found some punk that was only a little damp, then broke off handfuls of dead twigs tucked under the protection of larger branches. The twigs were damp on their outsides, but dry inside; they would burn. There were some larger dead branches he could break off too. The grove had enough dead wood to supply a fire once it got going. It was a question of duff or punk. Neither spruce nor alder rotted to a good punk, so he would have to be lucky, or maybe find some ant-eaten wood. He got on his knees and started grubbing around under the biggest downed trees, avoiding the snow, turning over bigger branches and shoving around in the dirt trying to find something. He got dirty to the elbows, but then again that would help keep him warm.

Which might matter, as he could not find any dry punk, or any duff at all. He squeezed water out of one very rotten mass of wood, but the brown goo that remained in his hand resembled dead moss or mullein, and was still damp. The firestick’s rough tip would never light such shit.

—Please, he said to the grove. He begged its forgiveness for cursing as he had approached it.—Give me some punk, please goddess.

Nothing. It became too cold for him to keep kneeling on the wet ground digging in downed logs. To make some heat in him he got up and danced. With this effort he could warm his hands, and it was important they not go numb like his feet had. Oh, a fire would make the night so much more comfortable! Surely something could be found here that would burn under the heat of his firestick’s tip!

Nothing. His belt contained in its fold many little gooseskin bags in which there were spark flints, dry moss, firestick, and base. Dressed and carrying all his things, he could have survived this night and the fortnight to follow in style. Which was why he had been sent out naked: the point of the wander was to prove you could start with nothing but yourself, and not just survive but prosper. He needed to come back into camp on the night of the full moon in good style.

But first he had to get through this night. He began to work hard in his dance, throwing his arms around, spinning his hands in big circles. He sang a hot song and wiggled all over. After doing this for a while, everything but his feet began to burn. But he was also getting tired. He tried to find a balance between the cold and his efforts, walking in a tight circle while also inspecting the forest floor for likely punk and duff shelters. Nothing!

In every grove some wood will burn.

This was one of the sayings that Heather often repeated, though seldom when talking about fire. Loon said it aloud, emphatically, beseechingly:—In every grove some wood will burn! But on this night he wasn’t convinced. It only made him mad.

Dig!

He went at the underside of a log which had broken over another one in its fall, a long time ago. They were two crossing mounds of dirt, almost; not an impossible source. But at this moment, wet through and through. And cold.

When he saw how it was, he beat his fist on the soft wet logs. Then he had to start walking in circles again.

Later, more digging into another log gained him only a knot that was still hard, with two spurs extending away from it at an angle much like the angle needed to make a spear thrower. He replaced his first firestarter base with this flat knot, which was better. His alder firestick still looked good. All was ready, if only he had something dry enough to catch fire.

And if only it would stop raining so hard. For a while it pelted down, cold enough to be a little sleety, and all on a gusty wind. In the hard gusts it was like getting hit with cold sand. He simply had to take shelter, and so he crawled under a spruce with big branches right against the ground, where he could snuggle in tight around the trunk and feel only a few drips on him, a few tickles of wind. The spruce needles were scratchy and the ground was cold, but he flexed his shoulder up and down, and sang a hot song and swore vengeance against Thorn. Talk about bad shamans!

But all boys have to become men one way or another. Their wanders had to be trials of skill and endurance. Hunters’ wanders were just as bad. And other packs’ shamans insisted on even harder trials, it was said.

Loon banished Thorn again. He tested all the branches at the bottom of the spruce. If a dead one could be broken, a dead one well dried but still a little resiny, possibly he could pulverize a spot in it with a rock point and make a mash of splinters fine enough to catch fire under the spin of the firestick. Worth a try, and the effort itself would help keep him warm.

But it turned out there didn’t seem to be a branch around the bottom of this tree that he could break.

When the rain let off, he squirmed back out and crawled around under the other spruces looking for such a branch. His hands were so cold he could scarcely grasp the branches to test them.

After a while he had broken off a few likely-looking branches. If he could get a fire started in one of them, the others would be good wood to feed to it.

He found an adequate hearth rock, and a better smasher rock. He took the best one of his dead dry spruce branches and placed it on the hearth, then hit it with the smasher. It resisted, and it was clear it would take a while to get it right, but it seemed promising. Smash smash smash. He had to be more careful than usual not to catch a finger, his hands were so clumsy. Once two years before he had smashed a fingertip, and it was still fat and a little numb at the end, its flat claw lined with grooves. He called that finger Fatty. So he hit his smasher on the side of the broken branch very carefully, once or twice hitting the hearth instead. A spark or two from those accidents made him long for his flint firestrikers. A few scattered sparks were not going to be enough to do it on a night like this. The wet wind whooshed its laughter at him, loud in the trees.

Eventually a spot on the side of his target branch was squashed into a splay of splinters, perfectly dry. He sat cross-legged with his body arched over the branch, and it seemed like the mash of splinters might burn. Breathing hard, warm except for his feet, he crawled under the best of the spruces in his grove and arranged his new kit around him. Smashed branch on the hearth rock, held there between his feet; firestick placed almost upright in the mash of splinters on the branch, held at its tilt between his palms. All set: spin the firestick back and forth.

Back and forth, back and forth between his hands, gently pushing the point of the stick down into the branch. Back and forth, back and forth. His palms ran down the stick with the force of his pushing down, and when they reached the lower end of the stick he had to grasp it with one hand, put the other against the top, and move up and catch it and begin over again, with as little a pause as he could manage. Meanwhile it kept raining outside the shelter of the spruce, and under it, even right against the trunk, drips were dripping. Really it began to look impossible, given the conditions. But he didn’t want to admit that. It would get an awful lot colder the moment he admitted that.

After a long time, maybe a fist or more, he had to give up, at least on this branch. The mash of splinters was a bit too massy, and after a while, a little damp. He could get the spot just under the firestick so hot that it slightly burned his fingertip to touch it, and the splinters around that spot had even blackened a little, but they would not burst into flame.

Loon sat there. This was going to be a hard thing to tell Thorn about, assuming he survived to tell the tale. The old sorcerer would flick him on the ears for sure. You had to be able to start a fire, anytime, anywhere; the worse conditions were, the more important it got. Thorn, like most of the shamans at the corroboree, was exceptionally good with fire, and had spent a lot of time with Loon and the other kids, teaching them the tricks. He had put a firestick to their forearms and spun it, to teach them how hot the spinning got. Eventually Loon had learned how to make fire no matter how the old man complicated the task. But there had always been some dry duff, one way or another.

Now he crawled out from under the spruce and stood up, sobbing with frustration, and danced until the cold was held off him by a thin envelope of sweat. When the rain let up a little, he steamed. Already he was hungry, but there was nothing for it. Time to chew on a pebble and think about other things. Chew a pebble and dance in the rain. Cold or not, this was his wander. When daylight came at last he would find better shelter, find some dry duff, find an abri or some smaller overhang. Begin outfitting himself for his return at full moon. He would walk into camp fully clothed, belly full, spear in hand! Clothed in lion skins! Beartooth necklace draped around his neck! He saw it all inside his eyes. He shouted the story of it at the night.

After a while he sat again under the best spruce, his head on his knees, arms wrapped around his legs. Then he got back out and shuffled around in the grove, looking for a better tuck, finding one after another and testing them. If they were good, he added them to a growing little round of camps, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. He chanted for long stretches, cursed Thorn from time to time. May your pizzle fall off, may a lion eat you… Then also from time to time he would shout things out loud.—It’s cold! Thorn would sometimes howl his thoughts that way, using old words from the shamans’ language, words that sounded like the things themselves: Esh var kalt! Esh var k-k-k-kaaaal-TEE!

He stubbed a big toe and only felt it in the bone; the flesh was numb. More curses. May the ravens shit on you, may your babies die… Lie on the ground under one big spruce, only his kneecaps and toes and the palms of hands and his forehead touching the earth. Push himself up and down with his arms, staying rigid. If only he could fuck the earth to get warm, but it was too cold, he couldn’t get his poor pizzle to antler, it was as numb as his toes, and would hurt like crazy when it next warmed up, prickle and burn till he cried. Maybe if he thought of that girl from the Lion pack, a raven like him, therefore forbidden to him, supposedly, but they had made eyes anyway, and it would warm him to think of plunging her. Or Sage, from his own pack.

That line of thought trapped some time: seeing it all inside his eyelids, seeing her spread her legs to him. Be there inside her kolby, forget this cold rain. Her kolby, her baginaren, her vixen. Start a little fire behind his belly button, get his prong to spurt. But it was too cold. He could only mash the poor flesh around and make it burn a little, warm it in the hope it would not get frostbit. That would be so bad.

After a time the rain relented. The sky’s cloudy dark gray seemed a bit lighter. No moon, no stars to tell him how close dawn was. But it felt close. It had to be close. It had been a long, long night.

He stood and swayed. It was surely a lighter gray overhead. He sang a hot song, he sang a song to the sun. He called for the sun, the great god of warmth and good cheer. He was tired and cold. But he wasn’t so cold he would die. He would make it to dawn, he could feel it. This was his wander, this was how a shaman was born. He howled till his throat was raw.

Finally dawn came, wet, gray, dull, cold. Under the storm the colors of things did not quite return, but he could see. Low clouds scudded in from the west, cutting off the ridgetops. The undersides of the clouds hung in fat dark tits. A sheet of rain fell on Lower Valley downstream from him, a black broom standing in the air between cloud and forest. With the big snow patches everywhere, the ground was lighter than the sky.

Then in just a few blinks everything got much lighter, and a white spot glowed in the clouds over the east ridge. The sun, wonderful god of warmth, over the ridge at last. Cloudy or not, the air would almost certainly get warmer. Only the worst storms had days colder than the previous night. And now the sky didn’t look too bad to windward; the clouds tumbling over the gray hills had little breaks between them that were bright white. It was still windy, however, and the rain began to come down in little freshets.

Whether this day proved to be warmer than the night or not, he was going to have to keep moving to stay warm. There would be no relief from that until he got a fire lit. So he gathered his unsuccessful fire kit and held the two pieces of it in his left hand, and clasped a good throwing rock in his right hand, and took off downstream. He wanted a bigger copse of trees, with a good mix of spruce and pine and cedar and alder. The ridges and hillsides and valley slopes, and the upland behind and above them, were mostly bare rock dotted with grasses, and now covered by old snow; but in the valleys against the creeks, trees usually grew, making ragged dark green lines in the palm of any valley. Downstream a short walk, where Lower Valley’s creek was met by a little trickle down its eastern flank, a flat spot held a bigger clump of trees, surrounding a little oval meadow and climbing the slopes to each side.

He made his way around the wet part of the little meadow and went to the thickest part of this grove. He slipped between the trees, grateful for their shelter. It was windier now, and there was more rain falling than he had thought when he left his night copse. In this larger grove things were very much better. He was well protected, and now that it was day he could see what he was doing. A broken cedar at the center of the grove had exposed a big curve of its inner bark, which he could pull free and use to make some rough clothes. A couple of snow-rimmed anthills spilling out of the end of a decomposed cedar log gave him sign of potential punk. There was a small hole at the end of the log; he bashed it in with his rock and tore the hole deeper, then reached in and up: on the underside of the still solid wall of the log was a section of punky duff, quite dry—Ah mother! he cried.—Thank you!

He pulled out a big handful and carried it quickly to the lee of a gnarled old pine.—In every grove OF SUFFICIENT SIZE some wood will burn, he said aloud, shouting his correction. He was going to tell that to Heather in no uncertain terms. She would laugh at him, he knew, but he was going to do it anyway. It was important to get things right, especially if you were going to make sayings out of them.

He left the dry duff well protected in a cleft at the base of a broken old pine tree, and quickly gathered a bunch of branches and broke off several more. He stashed these with the duff and then broke off ten or twenty smallish live branches and arranged them around and behind and over the broken pine tree he had chosen, making its wind protection even better. Bush pines like this old one had multiple trunks, and were thickly needled; this one was a great tuck to begin with, and with his branch walls added, hardly any wind or rain was making it through to his fire area.

After that he gathered the pile of firewood next to him, then sat down with his back against the trunk, curled in a crouch to make his body the last part of the windbreak. He crossed his legs and placed his unfeeling feet against the sides of his base.

He chopped at his firestick’s tip until it was a little cleaner and sharper, then placed it in the dent on the knot base, very near his new duff. When all seemed right, he began to spin for dear life, back and forth, back and forth, feeling his hands sliding slowly down the stick, feeling also the pressure of the stick against the base as it spun, trying to hold the combination of speed and pressure that would make the most heat. There was a feel to that, and a dance with each return of the hands from the bottom of the stick to the top, a quick little move. When he had it going as well as he could, and had made several swift hand shifts from bottom to top, he toed some of the duff closer to the blackening cup spot, a little depression in the knot which was what had caused him to pick this base in the first place; it was just what you would have cut with a blade in a flat base.

He watched the duff blacken, holding his breath; then some of the newly black spots glowed yellow and white at their edges. He gently blew on these white points, contorting so his face was closer to them, breathing on them in just the way that would push the white away from the cup into the bigger mass of duff. He bent his backbone like Loop Meadow and blew as gently as seemed right, coaxing the white heat to grow, feeding it a little wind that would not blow it out, giving it just what it needed, emptying himself out to it, puff puff puff, pufffff, this he could do, this he knew how to do, puff puff puff, puff puff puff, pufffff

and the duff burst into flame. FIRE! Even this tiny flame lofted a little waft of heat into his face, and he sucked in a breath and blew even more ardently than before, still very gently but with a particular growing urgency, like blowing in a hole on the flute when you want to make a wolf’s cry jump. As he did this he also shifted to his knees and elbows, using his face as the closest windbreak for this gorgeous little flame, and breathing on it in just the way that made it bigger, making love to it, oh how he wanted it to feel good, to be happy and grow! He gave it his breath, his spirit, his love, he wanted it to spurt, to leap up like the spurtmilk out of a prong, to burn in his face: and it did!

When he saw that the little spurt of flame was holding, he began placing the littlest and driest twigs over it, in a way that would catch as much of them alight as possible without harming the blaze below. It was a delicate balance, but one very well known to him; something he was good at, Thorn having forced him to practice it twentytwentytwentytwenty times. Oh yes, fire, fire, FIRE! Almost everyone was pretty good at fire, but Loon thought of himself as exceptionally good at it, which was part of what made the previous night’s failure so galling. He was going to be embarrassed to tell the story of that first night. He would have to emphasize the terrible power of the storm, but then again, as his pack had spent the night just one valley over, they weren’t going to believe much of an exaggeration. He would just have to admit he had had a bad night.

But now it was morning, and he had a fire started, and the first twigs were catching and adding their burn, so he could add more, including some bigger ones. Soon there were ten or twenty twigs alight in a fiery stack over the first burn, and their flames were a tangible yellow. Very soon the moment came when it was safe to put a pretty large handful of dry twigs gently atop the little blaze, and they would all catch almost immediately. He did that and said—Ha! Ha! and put on some larger branches. Finger sticks, then wrist branches. Happily he watched as the growing flames blackened the rounded sides of so many twigs and branches. A fire makes all right with the world.

Smoke now flew up, and the hiss and crackle from the wood showed how hot the fire was getting. The heat smacked his naked chest and belly and pizzle, which burned horribly as it warmed, in the usual agonizing tingle. He squeezed it in one hand to hold the pain in, and felt that it was a good pain, so good it was easy to feel it as a harsh form of pleasure; ah, the too-familiar burn of numbed flesh coming back to life, the itch deep under the skin, the painful tingle of being alive! Now he was going to be able to warm up even his feet! They would burn like mad as they came back to him. Ah fire, glorious fire, so friendly and warm, so beautiful!

—Such a blessing, such a friend! Such a blessing, such a friend! One of Heather’s little fire songs.

Now things were really looking good. The previous night was put in its place as a mere problem, a dark prelude. With a fire lit, the storm still blowing overhead did not matter anything like as much. He could keep this fire going for the whole fortnight, if that seemed best, or he could take it with him a certain distance, if he wanted to move, and reestablish it elsewhere. He could focus his efforts on food, shelter, and clothing, and no matter how those went, he would always have the most important thing. And it was only the first day of his wander!

He sat on the windward side of the fire and stretched out his legs around it, held up his arms over it. Hands catching the heat from right in the smoke. Oh the tingle of life coming back:—OW! It was a very different howl than the ones of the night before. Like the wolves, like his namesake the loons, he had a whole vocabulary of howls. This was the happy one, the triumphant one:—OWWW!

When he was warmed right to his toes, and had several big logs burning on a broad bed of red-hearted gray embers, he walked the perimeter of his little grove, then spiraled in through it, inspecting it. There was that cracked cedar at the edge of the little meadow, and in the shallows of the creek he found a block of flint with one sharp end and a length of rough edge, so that it resembled a massive clumsy burin. It would make an adequate chopper. He took it back to the cracked cedar and began to hack at the split in the trunk, detaching the bark and then peeling off the inner layer in sections as big as he could make them. Some of the strips were longer than he was.

When he had stripped the tree of all the inner bark he could get off, he took it back to his tuck, added some branches to the fire, and then in its glorious warmth sat down to tear the inner bark into strips. This was slow and meticulous work, but very satisfying as the strips grew to a considerable pile.

By midday he had more than he thought he would need. After tending to the fire again, he arranged the strips on some snow-free ground near his tuck. He had four or five score of them. He laid six in a line on the ground and then wove six more across them, pleased at the simple but effective over-and-under pattern. He used longer strips for the ups, and shorter ones for the arounds, and he offset the starts of the arounds each from the next, so that the resulting tube would not have a weak line down it. Finally he reached under and pulled the weave up the middle, then wove more arounds around the back, bringing the ups that had been farthest apart together; and after that he had a tube. A legging.

He did that again, and had leggings. Then a triple-stranded length to serve as a belt to hang the tubes from; then hangers, and a simple crotch strap to cover his cold pizzle. He stepped into the leggings and tied them to his belt, and felt them catch his warmth immediately.—Ha!

After that a vest; then a hat; lastly, out of the remainders, a ragged short cloak. In rain these clothes would get wet and then tear easily, but meanwhile, in his shelter, they would give him some warmth, and when it stopped raining they would give him some protection too. What he needed for proper clothes was fur skins, of course, but that would take some getting. For now his bark suit was the best he could do, and far better than being bare, or so he hoped.

Now, being warm, he felt a real pinch of hunger. He had spotted some berry patches back in the meadow, so after putting three more big branches on the fire, he ventured out in his clothes to relocate them.

It was still windy, but the rain had stopped, and the clouds were breaking up. The verge of the meadow was furred by a bramble of duck’s eye berries, and he reached in carefully and pulled some of last year’s dead berries off the ground. These were black and flat, but they would give him something.

Then he went to the place where the creek left the meadow. As often happened, he saw trout in the water there, tucked under the last curve of the bank above the outlet. He was not far from his grove; through some trees he could see his fire blazing merrily away.

He walked downstream until he saw a shallow spot that would work. He heaved rocks from the bankside into the stream until he had made a little dam across it. The creek poured through the gaps in this dam so easily that the water didn’t rise the slightest bit behind it; but a fish of any size could not get through. Then he hurried back upstream to the meadow.

There he took off his new clothes, stepped into the creek, and walked downstream. When he was upstream from the last meander, he pulled a big rock from the bank and threw it hard into midstream, at the same time jumping up and down and shouting. No fish flashed by headed upstream, so quickly he sloshed downstream, still shouting. He saw there were no fish under the bank at the last turn; presumably they had escaped downstream.

He waded downstream toward his dam, a rock in one hand, a stick in the other. He hit his rock against rocks in the water, yelling as he went.

Then he came to where he could see his dam. Ahead of him in the water, caught between him and the dam, were three trout. He dropped his rock in the stream and reached up onto the bank and as quickly as he could pulled rocks into the water and built another dam. As he finished he had to fend off a couple of upstream rushes by one of the fish, but even that one was too frightened to try to flash past him, and the other two didn’t even try. With the second dam built up well above the level of the creek, he had them in a little fish pen.—Ah! he cried.—Thank you!

He sloshed upstream to give a quick look to his camp. His fire was still burning well. He got out of the creek and walked downstream and stepped into his fish pen. He stalked one fish, he thought the one that had rushed him, moving into a position where he could reach down with both hands, very slowly, until they were next to the fish, which was trying to hide by staying still. With a single scoop outward he splashed water and fish together up onto the bank, where the fish flopped till it died. He stifled his shout, to keep from scaring the other fish, and moved slowly to the next one, tucked under the bank. He stuck his hands down very slowly, scooped again, and the second fish flew up in its mass of water and thrashed out its life.

The last one darted about and evaded several of his scoops, but then he caught it, and it too died on the bank flopping this way and that. After that he had three nice trout, each well over a hand long. He sang the fisherman’s thanks, got out of the creek and put his clothes back on, then carried the fish to the fire.

Old alder sticks broken with a twist eventually yielded an edged point sufficient to cut the fish and gut them. Then he stuck them on longer pine branches and held them over the fire until they were cooked and sizzling at their edges. They tasted great, unseasoned but trouty. He would pluck sprigs of rosemary and mint to add to later meals. As he ate, it occurred to him that he should have opened the upper dam of his fish pen before leaving it.

But that would be something for tomorrow. With his stomach full and his body dressed, sitting there by the warm fire, he was suddenly sleepy.

In another short tour of his grove he gathered more spruce branches for bedding and blanket. He made the bed right next to the fire, and when the softly needled branches were piled to his satisfaction, he went to the creek’s bank and gathered wads of moss and took them back to dry them by the fire. While they dried he gathered more firewood for the night, then laid the dried mosses on the branches of his bed. He lay down on the padded bed and pulled spruce branches thick with needles over him, still wearing his bark clothing. He would keep the fire high. It would be a very comfortable night. It was still twilight, but he lay there anyway next to his pile of firewood and watched the flames, feeling happy. Only his second night, and he was fed and clothed, and in a bed by a fire! Now that would be a story to tell.

He lay there, comfortable and warm. The moon was on its second night, nicely thicker than the curved line of a first night. A fortnight goes fast, as they said. Soon the crescent set, and the night went full dark, stars pricking the black above a few remaining clouds. The undersides of the trees above him flickered together in their firelight dance. Second day of the fourth month, a wet chill in the air outside the bubble of fire warmth. Sleep took him away.

Around midnight wolf cries from a distant ridge woke him, and he threw a few branches on the bed of embers, pulsing redly under fluttering white ash. Splash of sparks; watch a branch blacken, watch it catch fire, that sudden yellow pop into the world, that hypnotic transparent dance, and he was out again.

Later he dreamed of running up a crease under a ridge to catch a glimpse of three ibex, seen as they were topping the rise. He came on the animals right there before him, all three facing him foursquare and at ease, their neat curved horns poking the sky. Rockdancers; his mother’s favorite animal; and suddenly she was there beside him, and his father too. They were looking at the rockdancers in the time of the caribou on the steppe, when the low rumble of caribou hooves sounded like distant thunder. His mother was raven clan and his father eagle, but they both clearly loved the ibex; this was what Loon remembered from that moment. He knew that being with his parents was unusual, and this knowledge woke him.

The stars had circled, it wasn’t far from dawn. He tried to dive back into the dream, failed; tried then to grasp what memory of it he could, before he was exiled from it for good. All of it stood before him at once; then he tracked it from faintest moment to boldest moment; then from beginning to end. Some dreams want to be remembered, but others don’t and have to be chased down. This was one of those.

So, his mother and father had visited. That had not happened for a while. He tried to see in his eye what they looked like, or understand how in the dream he knew so well who they were, even though they were just standing there beside him, not saying anything he could precisely recall. Sometimes he recalled dream conversations, other times not. This time he had known their feelings without them having to talk. They had been filled with benevolence and concern for him, and with love for the rockdancers. Loon whimpered at their absence from the living. What was it like to be in the spirit world only, how did they live there, why couldn’t they cross back? Why had they died, why did things die? The mystery of it all swept through him, and he felt tiny, pierced by a vastness. If it weren’t for the fire his desolation would have been complete. With the fire there beside him he could look at these matters, allow himself to feel the hurt in them, the vastness.

Right after dawn it clouded up again, but the cloud layer was thin and had no rain in it. The wind blew in fitful gusts, tearing away flakes of ash from his bed of embers. His tuck was mostly protected still, and although the side of him away from the fire was chilly, it was easy to turn and feel the radiance singe his cold skin. This was the second day of his wander; but now, despite his comfort, he felt sad and alone. He sighed. This was his initiation as a shaman, after all. He was walking into a new world, a new kind of existence; it was not meant to be merely time spent alone. This was what his parents had come to tell him: he had to face something, learn something, accomplish something. Change into something else: a sorcerer, a man in the world. Of course his parents were dead.

He went down and drank from the creek, foraged for more firewood, hefted and carried back a big chunk of old log that would help keep the fire going, becoming first its roof and then part of the ember bed.

Then it was time to find more food. He walked over to the meadow, looking for prints or scat or other sign, maybe a place for a snare. Snares were best when made of hide thongs. Bark ropes were not often strong enough. On the way past the meadow outlet, he removed the upper dam on the creek, checked and saw there were no fish in last meander to scare, so he continued across the meadow, avoiding the old snow. There were watering spots on the banksides there, with many animals’ prints, but they tended to be open places, and a snare would be hard to hide. He needed a tight passage between bushes, so that an animal scared away from water would perhaps rush through the passage without looking. Eventually he found such a place. The material of the snare itself remained a problem. He went to an alder with his choprock and cut a number of switches, flexible and strong and long, and split their ends and braided them together in a triple weave. These tied low above the ground could serve as a snag that might trip a young deer or goat. It was the best he could do that morning, so he laboriously set up the snare between the two bushes. If it even tripped a small beast while he was watching, that would give him time to leap on it. He would have to lie in wait and be there when it happened, or whoever got caught in it would thrash its way free. He would return at sundown, then, and hope to scare a drinking deer into a dash.

When the snare was as good as he could make it, he walked back toward the fire looking for good throwing rocks. Even a snow hare or a grouse would be very welcome. When he had two good rocks, he foraged up the sunrise slope of the valley, looking for more of the previous year’s berries on the ground. He saw some mistletoe up in a bare-branched tree and considered climbing to it and chewing its white berries; this would make a sticky stuff that could be stranded between branches to catch small birds sticking to it. But there were no small birds yet. He came on a blackberry bramble, and while eating some old dead berries also swallowed some little white mushrooms he knew to be safe. Then he hurried back to see how the fire was going.

The fire was fine, and he placed another log on it and went out again in the other direction. Downstream, Lower Valley deepened but did not get wider, and its east ridge gapped where Lower’s Upper dropped into it. Lower’s Upper was a higher canyon leading northeast. Where the east ridge rose again, beyond that gap, a tall rock called the Skelk’s Antler overlooked a short broad cliff. Below the cliff a steep forested slope dropped to Lower Valley creek, still mostly snow-floored.

Loon headed down to the confluence of Lower Creek and Lower’s Upper, where a little frozen flat above an alder brake might have something interesting on it. There would surely be tracks.

A crashing among the trees on the slope froze him in place, and he was perfectly still when a young doe burst out of the trees up there, pursued by two brown bears. The doe had a broken rear left shank, and three-pointed down the slope slower than usual. The lead bear on the other hand ran downhill with startling speed, and caught up to the doe and knocked her to the ground and went for the throat like a wolf. Loon had seen other bears bite down on the back of the neck, like a cat. But bears would do anything. They were almost like humans in that way, which made sense, given that they had been human in the old time. And they still looked human: big dangerous people in furs.

Loon stayed still, watched the first bear take a few bites of the deer’s throat and lick up the blood. Loon’s mouth was watering as he watched. The deer was still shuddering through its death; bears had no regard for propriety when it came to that.

Then the other bear attacked the first one from behind. Two young males, Loon saw, now fighting, mostly with ferocious snarls and swipes that did no damage. It looked like the continuation of some ongoing fight. They were totally oblivious to anything else, so Loon threw his two rocks at them, and hit both. They were startled by the sudden pain out of nowhere and ran off together into the trees without looking around. After that it sounded like they were fighting each other still.

Loon ran hard to the deer, completely intent and trying to see in all directions at once. He surely didn’t have much time before the bears came back, or someone else came along. None of the rocks lying around had edges sharp enough to skin the deer, and the first bear had only gotten started on eating it. He pulled the body onto its belly with its legs splayed out, and with a Thank you began to hammer at the rear hips with one of his throwing rocks, soon enough breaking the hip, then separating the leg from spine, and cutting skin and ligaments, smashing the joint apart with the idea that he could carry away a leg if he had to flee. For sure the smell of blood was on the wind, which was blowing upcanyon.

He was still pounding away at the deer’s hip, but it was not quite free, when a movement upslope caught his eye. It was worse than bad; three lion women were there in the trees, approaching in their easy padding way.

Loon leaped out of the little clearing and ran doubled over between trees, up the other side of the canyon and over some boulders, where he threw himself flat and tried to catch his breath without gasping.

The lions had stopped at the deer and were sniffing it as they looked around. They knew the deer had just been killed. Loon picked up two more rocks under him. If he could get back to his fire, he could probably hold these lions off, although if they saw he was alone it would be difficult, if they wanted him; they were very good at assessing their chances in any possible hunt, and would know they could kill him if they didn’t care about first taking some punishment from thrown rocks. Lion women would run right into a rain of rocks if the notion took them. Hopefully the dead deer would take their attention, take the edge off their hunger.

He crawled for a while on the two held rocks and his toes, like a lizard. When he was far enough away to stay out of their sight when standing, he got up and ran as quickly and quietly as he could to his fire.

It was still burning well, banked down but ready to light any wood thrown on it. He threw on branches of all sizes to generate a quick burn, also to prepare some torches for a better defense.

That done, he hustled back toward the kill site, but on a traverse that took him above it. An open snowy stretch on this slope gave him a view down to the little flat and the lions.

The deer was now substantially eaten, but what remained would still be a feast to Loon, and the skin and bones very useful too. He had to be like a raven, if he could, and shit on them until they abandoned the remains, while not getting swatted out of the sky. So he slipped down the slope toward them, completely on point, skin tingling, the whole valley present to him, everything looking fine-edged and particular, as if he had become a hawk. Boulders glowed with light from within, and trees quivered and hummed on the breeze, which still flowed upcanyon.

The lions, each one as big as a small bear, now lolled by the remains of the deer, cleaning their bloody muzzles with their paws like any other cat. Lions with full bellies could be driven off a kill by a rain of rocks, but usually this was done by several men also holding spears. A single man was different. The lions might decide such a presumptuous fool would make a good dessert, when they wouldn’t have bothered if they weren’t being annoyed. So it was important to gauge their mood and the bulk of their bellies, now splayed beside them like pale tan water bags. Loon stopped behind a fallen tree and watched for a while. The lions were big and beautiful, glowing with the magical presence they always had—immense cats, the same in form as the little ones that hung around camp, except these biggest ones, as heavy as two or three men, ran in packs like wolves. That was an awesome combination, terrifying in what it meant for any other creature. Beautiful gods wandering the world, hunter gods who feared nothing.

A rock of the right size, thrown hard and striking the head, was a terrible blow, especially coming from well above. But it was more likely he would hit them in the body, if he hit them at all. Would they then slope off, hurt and affronted, or would they charge to kill the nuisance? This was not a question he could get wrong.

For a long time he waited and watched the lion women groom themselves. Certainly they were among the most beautiful of animals, one of the nine sacred creatures, and how could it be otherwise? What living creature could be more godlike, with their indolent grace and murderous power, their feline wolfishness? The way they looked around with their black tear streaks dripping away from their eyes like festival paint; the way their gaze would come to rest on you, and you would quail and shrink; no, there was nothing like it. They could kill anything they wanted to.

This time, one of them got up after a while and wandered down to the creek to drink, and the others followed. Thus they were now some distance away. Loon judged the distance sufficient, and dashed down and chopped free the sad remnant of the leg he had intended to take originally, also with a great two-handed blow he severed the chewed head, then he grabbed both up and ran back up the canyon all the way to his fire, fast enough to sweat and gasp most of the way. When he got to his camp his heart was pounding hard.

He built up his fire again, and through the rest of that day and well into the dusk, he chopped and pulled the skin and ligaments away from the deer’s leg, roasting and eating scraps of meat as he worked. When the leg was completely broken down, he moved on to the head, and feasted on the remnant of the tongue, the brains, the fat pads behind the eyes, and the jaw meat. The leg skin and its bone and ligaments he took down to the stream and washed, working by the light of the bowl moon, third night of the month. He took it all back to the fire to dry, hoping these parts would not be attractive enough to bring in any nocturnal scavengers big enough to challenge him.

Again he built up the fire enough that it would last till midnight, and slipped under his branch blanket with the deer bits right next to him and the patch of leg skin as his pillow, its short hair soft against the side of his face. He rested then in his spruce bed and felt how full he was, how tired. It was the feeling of a good day; but he was uneasy, too, when he thought about falling asleep with no one else to keep watch over him. Those lions were out there somewhere, and they hunted at night. They would know what the fire was if they saw it or smelled it. But he was too tired to stay up all night. Sleep kept flickering out of the fire and washing over him. He could not resist it, but only gave a last order to his inner eye, to stay open and on guard. He slipped under with a rock in his hand.

That night in his dreams the lion women were hunting him, and he woke groaning several times, feeling the dread of that. When dawn finally grayed the sky he felt like he hadn’t slept at all. He was sandy-eyed, and hungrier than ever.

There were new heavy clouds to the west, briefly pinked by sunrise, coming in on a new wind. Another storm, maybe. Third day of his wander, second storm. But he could stay by his fire through this one and work up the deerskin scraps into some clothes and kit.

So, back out into the cold. In the rocks bordering the creek he found a squarish block of flint that would serve as a source for blades and points and choppers. For a knapper he chose a big long chunk of chert. He carried these rocks back to the fire, and then went to the creek’s meadow outlet. There were trout again under the bank at the curve, so he took off his leggings and splashed in and scared them downstream, then reconstructed the upper dam. He clambered over the dam into his little fish pen and patiently scooped four fish onto the bank, growling wolfishly as each one flew up in a sploosh of water to flop out its life. Cooked trout; and this time he was going to add some meadow onions he had seen sticking out of the melting snow at the upper end of the meadow. They would accompany every bite of trout. His mouth watered, his stomach pinched. He went to the patch of meadow onions and dug up some bulbs using the deer’s leg bone, then returned to the fire and ate the four fish with the onions. He emptied the fish guts and cooked them on the embers and ate them too when they were black; they were a bit grainy, but good.

When he was done he took the rocks he had collected and found a flat bedrock to work on. Every strike of knapper against flint he performed with the utmost care; he couldn’t afford to have a smashed finger this fortnight. With that extra caution the knapping didn’t go particularly well, as he was striking small and mashing flakes off. But eventually he cleanly knapped some rough blades, and one was right enough to hold in his hand and slice the deerskin. Even uncured the skin would be strong and flexible. He wanted some of it to make a proper belt to hang his leggings and crotch strap from, because what he had for a belt and ties would soon break and the leggings fall down. Other than that the cedar bark weave was holding up pretty well. A good belt would have a fold in it too, which he could use to wrap and carry his kit in. Not that he had much of a kit.

Slowly he cut strips of skin. When he had made a good belt and replaced his cedar one with it, he tied two scrap strips together to make a necklace, then punched three holes through the strip with a sharp point of flint, so he could fit some of the deer’s teeth through the holes. This was not a good design for a necklace meant to last, but it was something he could make now with what he had. If the chance came later to make a better necklace, he would, but at least he had this one, if that chance never came. He wanted to return to his pack looking as good as he could.

The next morning he woke before dawn and considered the possibility that the lions might track him by his scent, or by blood that had dripped from the deer parts. It was also true that his grove was running out of easy firewood. It would be safer to move. The storm seemed gone for now, the western sky only lightly clouded. So he slipped out of his tuck to see if anything was drinking in the meadow where he had set his snare.

There was; a young ibex was standing in the shallows. Loon crawled to the side of the meadow opposite the snare, then jumped to his feet and shouted. The ibex leaped at the sound and charged right up the passage between bushes, hit the snare and staggered, then burst through the ropes and bolted away, leaping right up the steep rock side of the valley. She didn’t stop until she was high on the slope, pronging upward from rock to rock in leaps that only an ibex could perform. Far above she turned to look down at him, offended; shook her head, as if dismissing Loon’s plan for her; hopped in another quick prong up, and disappeared over the ridge. Rockdancer indeed.

Loon found a stone resting in his hand. There hadn’t been time to throw it. It was very hard to make a good snare without leather ropes. This one had always been a long throw.

You can only kill disappointment with a new try.

He went out to scout a new camp. He knew the area pretty well; they had crisscrossed it many times when out on the hunt. At the upper end of Lower’s Upper, its creek passed through a draw and entered a high basin called Hill In the Middle, where the creek split and ran around both sides of a rounded hill that was as tall as the basin’s ridges. The east ridge of this high canyon was an edge of the uplands, the west ridge dropped to a shallow valley rising farther west, up toward the ice caps. In terms of camping suitability, the creekbeds had the trees, but also the hunting animals. Possibly some kind of protected nook high on the valley walls would be better, or even a point on a ridge, overlooking a confluence. With a fire it would be impossible to hide, unless he were to find a perfect cave. The cliffs in the area were dotted with caves, but they were for the most part known, and used by both people and animals. Finding an unknown one did not seem too likely. And a big fire was his best defense, really. So, best perhaps to get a bit of height above a confluence; or head to the top of a drainage, the steeper the better, and camp in the highest copse of trees, as the place that would get the least passthrough.

He fed his fire with a big section of dry log, then took off at a fast pace, watching his footwork carefully. He was on the hunt, skin tingling, everything big and sharp in his eye, be it ever so far away. Up the frozen creek of Lower’s Upper, staying clear of the bramble beds to both sides of a small icy waterfall, trying as he climbed to imitate the smooth flow of the ibex who had scorned him. Help me up, sister, make me a rockdancer. The creek lay back, and a small line of trees led to a copse under the headwall, thickest around a spring, with a flat spot overlooking the spring. Lots of downed wood, not too much snow or damp. Black spruce and bush pine for the most part, both good burners if the wood was seasoned. Quickly he searched the copse and assembled on a flat rock over the spring a pile of firewood and a mass of twigs. He even set a ring of stones and the first twig stack, with a hole for his arm to reach in to place the live ember on the flat stone in the center. All very welcoming.

Then he ran back to his old site, pacing himself to what Thorn called active rest, and gathered up into the flap of his new deerskin belt all the little things he wanted to take. He built up his fire one last time, ate some meadow onions, then coaxed a glowing pine branch, burnt through but otherwise whole and entire, out of the fire onto the ground next to it. With his choprock he broke off a piece of this ember branch about twice as long as it was wide, and pinching the yellow piece between two rocks, he placed it on a handful of fresh spruce needles, then wrapped this hissing mass into a ball and put it inside a hollowed burl he had found. Shells from the great salt sea were best for carrying embers, but those were rare, and always owned by women. Women were as good with fire as men were, and better at moving a fire from camp to camp. But his mass of needles in a burl was pretty good for a fix-up; he could hold it in one hand, keep a throwing rock in the other, and carry his fire kit and the remnants of the deer in his belt flap.

Off he ran to his new camp, pushing the pace hard this time. Every step had to be watched into its place. Overhead giant white clouds floated east on a mild breeze. It was cool in the sunlight, chill in the shade. A perfect day for moving camp.

Chapter 2

So he was happy as he ascended Lower’s Upper to his new nest. But as he approached the flat over the spring he saw that his prepared hearth had been swept clean of the wood he had left there.

The sight froze him instantly, and in his stillness came the jolt of fear, when the most likely explanation for the change struck him fully. He slipped to the ground behind a rock as smoothly as he could, feeling more afraid heartbeat by heartbeat. Everything in the little canyon quivered in his sight. It was quiet, no squirrels in the area chittering away. Gurgle of the spring’s water sliding out of the spring. The air was flowing downcanyon, and he sniffed repeatedly, tried to sniff like a bear, tried to identify and locate by smell whatever was out there lying in wait for him. If there was anything. Actually, to have swept his fire rock clean of wood was a strange move.

Then a sniff gave him the answer he most feared, a waft of smoke and grease almost like his own smell, but different. Old ones. They smelled different than people. Thorn had forced this knowledge on him once when they had come upon a dead old one, lying in one of the shallow cliff caves downstream in the gorge. Thorn had grabbed the dead one’s bearskin cape and held the collar of it to Loon’s nose. Lunkheads always smell like this, Thorn had said, flicking him hard on the ear.

Now Loon was sweating from his face and palms. The day had suddenly become one of his nightmares: a silent still world, stuffed with dread, something unseen in it hoping to kill him. Stories about boys on their wanders being eaten by old ones had always seemed like just stories; all the men Loon knew had come back from their wanders. And if you ran into an old one, they always seemed about as harmless as any woodsman.

But woodsmen could be dangerous. And the old ones were burly people, as strong as bears or wolverines. One of Thorn’s stories told how an old one had married a bear by mistake, and neither of them had noticed; their daughter told them about it years later, not at all pleased with them.

They definitely knew how to hunt. They didn’t use spear throwers or javelins, and they only used stone for their points, never antler or bone or tusk; but their spears were stout, made for thrusting and short throws. They were experts at ambush, that was their way. When they were in pairs or trios, one would sneak around while the other watched from a blind. They hid better than any other animals, even humans.

So setting up his firewood stack had been a mistake. It would only have saved him a few moments anyway. Something to remember. If he survived.

He regarded the live ember there in his hand, still glowing in its needles and burl. It would be giving off its own smell, he realized. There’s nothing like the smell of a fire! as the saying had it.

He put the ember on the ground, the open end of the burl down, so that it would perhaps suffocate the ember. Now it could be a decoy.

He crawled back downstream as smoothly and quietly as he could. It was like hide and seek when they were kids, now horribly suffused with nightmare dread.

Where there were trees and boulders big enough to hide among, he moved up the west slope of Lower’s Upper. Lower’s Upper fell into Lower over a short cliff; the waterfall there was called Old Piss. Probably the old ones would know about the cliff, but if they didn’t, and tried to follow him directly down the creekbed, they would be briefly held up, and he might get away.

When he had traversed high enough that the trees were shorter than him even when he was crouching, he lay in a moss-filled hollow between two of the gnarled little pines and looked back down toward the copse with the spring.

There they were: three of them. Danger comes without warning. Big-headed, hairy, heavy under their fur capes. Spears at the ready, thick short things with perfect leaf blade tips of red chert: spears made to stick in mammoths. Loon shrank down as far as he could. The nightmare world had jumped into day. And just as it would have happened in his dreams, one of the three old ones suddenly pointed at Loon and skreeled like an angry hawk.

Loon leaped to his feet and dashed for the ridge above him. The three old ones croaked to each other like ravens as they clambered after him, somewhat slowed by their spears. Loon had a good jump on them, and was close enough to the ridge to reach it while they were well below. He ran south on the ridge to make them think he was going that way; if they angled to cut him off, they would hit the ridge where it was cliffed on the other side, the same cliff that made the Old Piss waterfall farther down.

But the old ones were much faster than he had thought they would be, and closed on him despite his panic speed. When they saw he had crested the ridge and would soon be out of sight, all three threw their spears, which lofted up toward him with awful quickness. People said they never threw their spears, and yet here they were! Two were going to hit below him, but one was flying right up at him, he had to jump off the other side of the ridge to dodge it, something he watched himself do, feeling amazed he was making such a leap, down the first little drop of the long cliff.

He landed and felt something twist in his left ankle, rolled to keep it from twisting worse, and at the end of the roll smacked that same ankle against a tree. The two pains merged to one, and together they made it hard to run, but he had to, so he ran down the slope into Lower Valley, each landing on the left leg a shocking burst of pain, despite which it was necessary to run on at full speed and in complete silence. He ran open-mouthed, sucking in and blowing out in a way that made no noise. It took a lot of air to run all out, and he had to set a pace he could hold for a time, but it also had to be faster than the old ones, no matter what, even if they burst a sprint. Old ones were supposed to be a slower than people, but now Loon didn’t trust anything he knew about them. They were so strong, no doubt they could run uphill as fast as people. But now Loon was heading downhill in Lower Valley, limping hugely and hoping nothing was broken in his left leg. He had always felt fast before, but not now.

By the time the old ones topped the ridge he was almost down to his old site, where his fire was still burning. They had indeed hit the ridge too far down, and were looking down the cliff at him, so now they had to backtrack up the ridge. Loon saw that and came into his camp and looked around. They could easily have come upon him here and killed him before he knew they were nearby: it had been a bad way to camp when alone. He knocked at the fire with a stick, wanting to make more smoke to mask his scent, also to disturb their sense of what was happening. Possibly they would stop to ponder why he had done this, they were said to be slow thinkers, so he took a burning branch and threw it across the creek, then three or four more in different directions, then continued pegging downcanyon, past the confluence under Old Piss, along the creek trail, feeling his muscles burning almost as much as the hurt in his ankle. He was not bleeding, not leaving a blood trail, although his right big toe had been abraded and was beginning to bleed enough to leave drops. He bared his teeth in dismay when he saw that, and paused to sit on the ground and suck the first flow of blood out of the cut, run his tongue back and forth to start the stanching, then press some creekside sand into the broken skin, after which he hopped up and away. For speed and endurance both he should have these old ones beat. They would know that too, and hopefully give up. But he had to go on to make sure. It was time to shift modes, find his second wind, pace himself for a run down Lower Valley, then up one of its slopes to east or west. Climbs to the valley’s ridges could not be made everywhere, in fact both sides of the canyon had long low cliffs right at the ridge, making it a hard valley to get out of. But he knew there was one break in the cliffs to the east, so he headed for that, hoping the old ones would continue downvalley. Once over the east ridge he would be on the high etched tableland overlooking the gorge and its canyons, and could find some kind of tuck that would keep him hidden.

He ran favoring his left leg, breathing hard, really sucking it in, needing the air. After a while, he felt the second wind catch him up: that was good. He looked back often; no sight of them. Hard to know if they would continue their pursuit for long. They had had to recover their spears. Why mammoth spears down in the canyons? Maybe it was true they had nothing else. And they hadn’t used spear throwers. Almost-people, nightmare people, crossed over into the day world. Or he had crossed over into theirs.

The ramp he was climbing was clean. He could see the break in the cliffs that would get him to the ridge. The cliffs were the usual white rock, flecked with black lichen. He was bleeding a little again from his right toe, so he stopped as he climbed to shove dirt into it again to clot the blood. He was working so hard that his blood was shooting out of him, even though the scrape was not very deep.

The ramp cut through little cliffs, and the slope lay back and gave him a clean run to the ridge, well covered by head-high trees. He sped over the ridge, which was broad here. Surely now he was clear of the old ones. They would not come up to this particular spot just to look.

Still he kept on, impelled by the memory of that spear flying up at him. It had been spinning on its axis like a firestick. The long chert blade would have pierced him right through. Think what that would be like! He had seen it often with small animals, speared them himself and watched them writhe, heard them shriek before they died. Best to keep running. Run in the same way one would run on the hunt, just as hard and steady, just as long. Indeed given what was at stake it made sense to go much longer than when on the hunt. Run right through his second wind, run until the rare and elusive third wind filled him, then run some more.

Finally the long afternoon of running slanted to its close. The moment came when afternoon became evening, a matter of failing light in the still-blue sky. He kept on through the dusk that followed, and even when darkness began to fall. The moon was now a day less than half there, thus almost directly overhead. Still over half a fortnight to go before he could return to the pack! He could not imagine getting comfortable enough with his situation to start another fire, not with old ones somewhere nearby. And his ankle still hurt. He could not move his foot without pain.

But he was alive. And he could go a week without food if he had to. And a week without fire, too, at least if it did not storm again. Even if it did storm. Anyway the important point was that he was alive. This was his wander, it was not meant to be easy. He had escaped three old ones! If he had. Now he would really have a story to tell! If he could bring it home.

He gathered some dry leaves and branches and pulled them after him into a nook of boulders under a dense cluster of ground-hugging spruce. The trees had been splayed over the rocks by the force of the constant downslope wind. He ripped a tear in his bark vest getting into the nook, and his leggings were already in tatters. But he was able to make a rough bed, and he felt he was well hidden. Spruce gum daubed over his chest masked his own scent, although he ended up sticky, and felt pricked everywhere by spruce needles stuck to his skin. He was going to be cold, and his ankle throbbed with every heartbeat. He needed some artemisia tea to suck down, some mistletoe pollen to smoke. As it was, he could only clench his teeth. He named his hurts, as Thorn had always insisted he do; the cut in his toe was Spit, the hurt inside his ankle he called Crouch. Spit and Crouch sang their little duet, and he listened past them to the wind in the pines, nervous at any other sounds. There were some rustlings, and some of these made his heart pound; he wondered if he could leap out of his lair before the spears plunged through it and pinned him to the ground. Probably not. Loon had speared snow hares through just such cover. He knew just how it would go. Probably the rustlings were only hares or grouse, or even squirrels or mice. But the image from one time he had speared a snow hare through the neck was a hard one to fall asleep to.

He slept lightly, and when he stirred to huddle in a new position against the cold, cuddling chilled parts and thus inevitably exposing warm parts, he would listen, and sniff the air, and worry a little, before dipping back under. Sleep with one eye open. Thorn claimed you could do it. It meant he did not so much dream as think, but in a jumpy disconnected way. A moment came when he surfaced to full wakefulness, both feet cold, ears and pizzle cold, even though he had wrapped his arms around his head when he fell asleep. He began to shiver, and realized he would therefore not be able to fall back asleep, and indeed could not even continue to lie there; he was shivering too hard.

Fearfully he pulled himself out of his tuck and looked around. The near-half moon was about to set in the west, so the night was half done. Unhappily he began to bounce up and down in place, staying always on his right leg; also to bunch his fists, and twist side to side. At first it felt like he was too tired to be able to dance hard enough to warm up, but by the time he had gotten the shivering to stop, he was fully awake, less tired, and interested to see what he would not have seen in the tuck, which was the plateau in the last of the moonlight, shadows stretching across it broad and black. Nothing moved. The night was still. He rearranged his bark clothing as best he could, trying to tighten it around him, and after a time burrowed back into his nest. Any tuck is better than none. This was his wander, he told himself, he was becoming a shaman, it was supposed to be a trial. He had not only to survive, but survive in style. Now with Crouch, and the old ones wandering about, his task was made more difficult. But he was halfway through, almost. Eight days left at most, maybe nine. He was actually having trouble keeping count. But the moon would do it.

Whatever he managed in terms of style would have to come later, and be accomplished by day. At night, to avoid both the old ones, who might spot his fire, and night-hunting animals, who were only held off by fire, he was going to have to find a better refuge than this one, which was both cold and exposed to view. Some hollow, some cathole or marmot house where he could keep a little warm, and yet see anything approaching him. Under a boulder, perhaps, with some boughs dragged in for warmth. Live like a marmot for half a fortnight.

Crouch was barking and it was hard not to groan. The memory of his big bed of embers, radiating heat so intense he had had to keep a distance from it, now struck him as an incredible gift. Luxury is stupid: another of Heather’s favorites. It goes too far, she would explain. Enough is as good as a feast. But tonight he didn’t have enough.

He had been acting as if the womb canyons etching the border of the uplands would be empty, just because no packs made their camp in them. His own presence should have told him he was wrong. Old ones, woodsmen, travelers, lions, any could have wandered by and killed him by his fire. Starting in the storm had apparently frozen his wits. Wrong from the start. In the storm itself one could assume everyone would be hunkered down. After the storm, no. Strangers could always pass by. You have to beware. He had forgotten that, seduced by his fire. Fire was a giveaway, there was no denying it. Although perhaps a very little one, down in some hollow, lit at twilight, kept barely alive, fed just before dawn: surely it would be all right?

No. Not really. Just hop in place and sing a little back-and-forth song, right right left, right right left, on and on. No real weight on the left. All the while looking at the moon, trying to see it fatter than it was. He truly had lost count of how many days he had been out, but ran back through them in as much detail as he could recall, to recover the number. He kept track with his fingers, using them like one of Thorn’s yearsticks. He had been out five days. Yes, five. He had gotten a fire started on the second day; watched the bears kill a deer on the third; made deerskin clothing on the fourth; tried to shift camps on the fifth. This was going to be the sixth day. He almost groaned aloud, but let Crouch do the talking. He was going to have to find a way to stay warm without a fire, and he was going to have to find something to eat. He could forage, but it would be best if he also found something to kill. Some animal with fur.

The moon set, ever so slowly. Best not to look, it went so slow. But he did look. The stars creeping down blinked out over the furred black horizon, one after the next. He danced from time to time, in a kind of waking, standing sleep. Let it all settle into one’s breathing. Let Crouch do the talking.

At some point he opened his eyes and saw that the eastern sky just over the horizon was a pale gray. Just a fist or so to sunrise. Always coldest before dawn. But he could endure. He felt the life in him, barking like Crouch.

When it was light enough to see, he limped across the plateau, downslope to a trickle of a creek that ran to a drop into the gorge of their river. He braided some tallgrass and set a small snare near a grass bank marked with hoof and paw prints. After that he stood behind a downed tree that served as a blind, rock in hand, and waited.

The sun rose. A pale watery light filled the air over the plateau. Where sunlight struck his skin he could feel the warmth like the burn from a fire. Please prosper, oh radiant god. Come back to summer again.

For a long time he sat there, sleeping lightly in the sun. Then a crashing sound launched him to his feet and when he saw the deer in the snare he threw the rock in his hand as hard as he could, and hit the deer in the rear leg at the knee, a solid clunk that buckled the deer just long enough for Loon to throw himself across the log onto her. He grabbed her short antlers from behind and twisted as violently as he could, trying to break her neck or choke her. She rolled to keep her neck from breaking, and he rolled with her, snatching up the same rock he had thrown and swinging it hard onto her head between the antlers, trying for a clean hit. He missed the spot and hit again, over and over as fast as he could while the deer thrashed and rolled, but his were glancing blows, while he took a hard kick on the thigh, then missed outright with the rock, and then at last connected: a desperate swing crunched into the skull. The deer slumped, and he smashed her on the forehead several more times, just to be sure. The deer lay there quivering as she breathed her last breaths, bleeding from her eyes and a big gash on her forehead.

—Thank you sister! Loon cried, joy filling him like a drink of water.—Good deer!

Immediately he set to breaking her apart. A young doe. He would not be able to defend the whole body, indeed he needed to leave the scene as soon as possible, and without dripping blood as he went. He wanted the rear legs still linked at the spine, so he could carry them over his shoulders; then also the skin and the heart and kidneys. He ate as much of the brains as he could while he cut away with his clumsy choprock, frustrated at the lack of a good blade, which would have made this work ever so much easier. As it was he had to bash away. It was a ruination of the poor deer, and he apologized to her, explaining his need for speed. He smashed and pulled and cut as best he could with the tip of his bad chopper. He was going to take the hide with him, no matter what kind of scent it cast. He would find a good place and hide in this hide, and although uncured it would keep him warmer.

Even at speed the skinning and breaking up took a couple of fists, and when he was done he was sweaty, bloody, exhausted, but full of food. He had had to cut away the skin in two big parts. The doe’s heart and kidneys he bundled in the two pieces of hide, which he could tie to each other and hang over his shoulder with the two legs. He was almost completely covered with blood. Under a dead pine he found a walking stick to help keep Crouch happier. In his other hand he held Chopper, large enough to crush but small enough to throw, a nice heft to feel in one’s hand. A rain of thrown rocks could make even a solitary man dangerous. No animal is safe from a man with a good arm! He was floating a little with the joy of the kill.

He limped downstream with the deer’s rear legs and her organs wrapped in her hide, all slung over his shoulders. Sometimes he walked in the little creek itself. His walking stick he named Prong. When he was far enough away, he stopped and washed the deer’s hide in the creek, and the legs too, also himself.

He had taken the hide off in two sections, because given the bluntness of his chopper, he could not get the hide cleanly off the spine. But two pieces was fine. He would probably cut the leg skin off later to make patches. He chewed away at a bite of the deer’s heart. Normally hearts were cooked, but this wasn’t bad. Raw meat had to be chewed for a long time, and starting with small chunks was best. Loon liked the taste of heart, and enjoyed chewing for such a long time.

The creek was cold, and he sat on its bank and wiped his legs dry before working further on the hides. Uncured as they were, it was not so easy to cut them straight. Nevertheless, out of one half of the deerskin he cut parts for a rough vest and a skirt. The remaining half would serve as cape and blanket.

This day was almost done, it had flown by as if the sun were a bird headed west. He needed to find a place where the night hunters on the plateau couldn’t reach him, and that was going to be hard. A cave with an entry he could block with a rock would be so nice; or a tree that only he could climb. These were both very unlikely things to find. But where the plateau began to break toward its drop into the canyons, it did ledge off in a way that provided low walls and wind-gnarled trees. If he could find a good refuge before night, this would have to be counted a great day; but now the sun was tilted hard west, the half moon palely visible in the afternoon sky, just east of overhead.

Under one little bluff dropping toward the river gorge, he found an overhang. There was no cave at its back, so it was exposed, but only to half the world, and that half was really on the opposite side of the gorge. A tiny abri, in effect. And in fact someone had painted a bison and horse on the flat back wall at the bottom of the overhang. Loon was heartened to see this, and examined the paintings closely. The painter had smudged the animals’ coats to a very handsome blackened red or reddened black, the same color for both bison and horse. Thorn always kept the two colors separate. It was good to know that another human had been here.

Looking down toward the gorge, which was not visible except as a line between the foreground and the next stretch of plateau, he saw under him a broad squat bush pine that had broken off and then grown again, in a swirl around the break point, which had become a hollow of exposed heartwood all filled with leaves. That hollow would not be out of the reach of climbing cats, but he might be able to defend it from them; and nothing looking up at the tree from below would see him. He would have to try climbing it to see if he could, so he pronged down to its foot and looked up at it. Climbing was not an activity that Crouch was going to like.

Loon did his best to work around the hurt, using his left leg only to hold positions, never to lift him higher. That put a lot of strain on his good leg, but that one could take it. Eventually he grunted up into the high hollow and slumped there, pleased to find that it must have been cracked at its bottom, for it was dry. Indeed it would make a comfortable bed of leaves and duff. And good views in all directions. Awkwardly he moved around his nest, and with his choprock broke off a large dead branch to use for protection. Refuge! He thanked the Raven, and curled around like a cat until he had found the least bumpy position.

That night a wolf pack howled at the half moon, and Loon listened with his skin goose-pimpling, as silent as the rest of the animals out there listening. The old ones would not be out and about on this night, not with wolves nearby. And tucked in the wrap of his big piece of deer hide, he was warmer than he had been since being forced to give up his fire. That night he slept as well as he had during the entire wander.

What to do?

No answer is also an answer.

The next day he stayed in his nest, and either slept or chewed on the deer’s legs. Same with the day after. Gibbous moon, oh yes. Nights mostly lit by the pale fuzzed light of the pregnant goddess. He supposed there would come a day when the deer’s legs went too off to eat, too smelly to stay near. Until that happened, he had no reason to move. And getting down from the tree was going to be painful. He was content to rest, and hope for healing.

Thus four days passed, and the moon swelled fatter every night. Big pregnant belly, soon to give birth. Give birth to a new shaman.

On the fifth night in the tree, however, the rustling below resolved into a catlike shape, and he stood in his nest and shook his big branch at the black shape with its scarily wide-set, starry eyes. A big head on a big cat. Lion, or worse yet, a leopard. Dappled in the moonlight in a way that suggested leopard. Either way, disaster. Again his heart pounded so fast he burned. He had to seem bigger than he was, so he stood on the highest branch he could balance on, deerskin blanket over his shoulders. When he had a clear view he threw a few thick branches he had cached down at it, and saw it dodge some, even get hit by one. All the while he cursed the cat viciously, waved Prong overhead as he made all the bad sounds he knew, animal or human; not the fearful sounds, but the angry sounds, the hungry sounds. He cursed in a rage till his throat was raw.

When dawn finally came, the cat seemed to be gone. He waited until midday, but never saw it again. He climbed down the tree, letting his left leg hang mostly free. It seemed both that he had just arrived a short while before, and that he had been up in the tree for years. Either way, it was over. Crouch was quieter now, but still hanging around. It would be a long time before Crouch left, he could feel that.

As soon as he started walking he had to stop and shit, and after that effort he felt a little sick, but emptier, and then better, and ready to limp on through the day. Wash in the creek, find some berry patches in the sun, eat as many old berries as he could. Newly awakened bears would be doing the same, he knew. But better bears than cats. Bears will keep cats away. Still, Loon didn’t stay long at any berry patches. The berries were nearly goners anyway.

He came on a bare knob of rock protruding from a low ridge crossing the plateau, and he went to it and found a break on its far side that served as a way up it. The broad top of the knob gave him a view down into a short curve of the river in its gorge, and some canyons dropping to the river on its other side. He could see where the two big loops in the river seamed the plateau; his pack’s camp was hidden beyond them, on the other side of the Stone Bison, also invisible from this vantage. The plateau behind him was revealed from here to be a snowy moor, its point-and-bowl edge dropping toward the river. Many of the most dangerous animals would not go up onto the moor. And there were big boulders up there scattered about. Almost certainly there would be one he could crawl under, into a space too small and low for wolves or big cats to fit. It would also be possible to cross the moor westward, uphill toward the Ice Tits, a particular pair of the ice caps out that way, and then descend into the western head of Upper Valley, and from there drop down to his pack’s camp, when the time came.

So he walked north onto the moor. The snow on it was old and hard, and held his weight even in the afternoon. Up there he could look back south across many ridges and valleys, like gray hands cupping the river gorge. Lines of green, patches of white. Crouch was really barking now, crying Hi! Hi! Hi! with every step. Loon had his deerskin cape rolled and tied around his waist, Prong in one hand, a clutch of needled branches in the other. He limped along, looking at the hollows under each big boulder he passed.

In the sunset he found a hollow that he liked the look of, and crawled under the boulder into it, through a gap just big enough to let him pass. The open space under the boulder was just taller than his prone body. The boulder rested on the stone ground on four big points, like a giant tooth. He pulled his branches in after him and arranged them into a bed. It was going to be cold up here. Prong was now a spear to defend him in his rocky burrow. The moon was full gibbous, bright in the mid-twilight. It cast distinct shadows.

Wolves howled somewhere again that night, and his sleep was often disturbed by them; but when he woke and listened, he liked hearing how far away they sounded. He also liked how much their presence would discourage other hunters, especially old ones. Old ones mostly stayed off the moor anyway, people said. He believed it, as the moor had very little shelter from the wind. So, taken all in all, this was really the right place for him on this night.

During each interval of wolfsong he would wiggle all his muscles, starting with his numb toes and moving up to his jaw, and thus fall back asleep with the weird singing of the wolves as his lullaby, often before he had wiggled his muscles even as high as his rump.

Once, however, the wolves’ chorus woke him and he found himself confused. His father was sitting just outside the entry to his hollow, howling along with them quietly. Come out with me, my son, he said, come out and let me show you which star I am now.

Oh but it’s too cold, Loon protested, and I’m tired. I don’t want to leave the warmth I’ve made in this hole.

It’s all right, I’ll make you warm, his father promised. Loon recalled that his father had said these very words to him once before, when he had hauled Loon out of the river under the Stone Bison, spluttering and terrified after he had fallen through thin ice. His father had held him upside down by the ankles and whacked him on the back, as if he were being born, and as Loon retched and wailed in fear, he had laughed and said, It’s all right, little one, I’ll make you warm. So it really was him.

So Loon pulled himself out from under the boulder and rewrapped himself in his deer hide. The stars were dim in the moonlight, the whole sky as white as the Spurtmilk in summer. His father stood over him, a little transparent, his head touching the sky, his face overlaid on the lopsided grin of the moon. Come walk with me, he said.

Should I bring my things? Loon asked.

No, I’ll bring you back by dawn.

Will you take me to mother?

Yes. She’s where we’re going.

They flew over the moor, down the etched land to a deep valley with a moonbright river. At a tight spot in its canyon the river ran under an arch of stone; it was the Stone Bison, the bridge of rock near where Loon had fallen in as a child.

This is where you saved me, he said.

Yes, his father said.

I have to return to the pack on the night of the full moon, Loon explained. I’m on my wander. I’ve only got three—he looked up at the moon—three or four nights more.

I know. That’s why I brought you here now. Soon you’ll be here again. I wanted you to know that I’ll be here with you. And your mother too.

Show her to me.

And then he saw her, standing on the stone arch over the river, the water sweeping under the black shadow of the bison arch and rippling moonily downstream. She was naked and her arms were outstretched to greet him.

Mother! Loon cried.

That caused him to wake, and he was surprised to find his father had tucked him back under the boulder in the time it had taken him to cry out. He had frightened their spirits with his cry. Thorn always said you had to speak calmly to spirits when you had the chance. They didn’t like noise or hurry; they were beyond that, it offended them.

—Ohhh, Loon said, angry with himself; but then he heard a snuffling around the boulder. Something big, checking it out. Possibly a bear; anyway, too big to get under the boulder. Whatever it was snuffled off, and he was left to sleep again.

When he woke he found a knot in his hand, a twist of hard wood that looked like it had spent quite a bit of time free of its tree. A knob at one end gave it the look of a lion’s head; he could see the indentations between the shoulders and the clean bulk of the neck; it was a male lion, there was the little bump of its spurt lying against its underside, but it was standing upright like a man. It would only take a little carving to bring all that out. This was his father’s gift from out of the dream. Lions were fearless. From his deerskin belt flap he took the flake of flint he had broken off when he made his choprock. It would be better to set the flake in the end of a shaft, but for now he could scrape away at the knot, make the first cuts. There was just enough dawn light, and just enough warmth in his fingertips, to make it possible to do the work, lying on his side with the knot and flake right in front of his nose. The ragged tip of the flake was almost like a little burin. He scraped away, looking deep into the bloodless white flesh of his fingertips, which would take impressions from the flake and hold them until he rubbed them away. Crouch was humming sleepily, Spit was pulsing with his heart, but only right at the broken skin itself, almost outside of him, not in him. These people were not his friends, and needed to be ignored. What hurts you has to be forgotten. The lion man was emerging from its knot quite nicely.

When the sun was three fists high, he crawled out from under the boulder and hiked west over the moor, on its hard snow, to a low ridge where he could look up to the land farther west. His people were to the south, down at the mouth of Upper Valley, where the Stone Bison arched over the Urdecha. He was due back in camp in three nights. He could subsist on dead berries until then, and he had his deerskin vest and skirt and cape, and some of his cedar bark underclothing. So he needed to attend to his wander, finish it in style. He recited to himself the story as he would tell it: the night out in the storm, his failure to make a fire; next morning a fire started from nothing, while still in the storm; the glories of the fire; the fish and onions, cooked to a turn; the sighting of the deer killed by bears, their fight over the meal; the lions that chased him; the dream appearances of his dead parents; the disastrous encounter with the old ones, the arrival of Crouch and Spit, his escape; the interval in the tree nest; the time on the moor, under a rock.

Now he needed to add the story’s spurt: the vision. And up here in the hollows of the moor were little sprigs of ground artemisia, and certain old piles of bison dung, not too fresh and not too dry, in which grew the little gray mushrooms called witch’s nightcaps. He wandered around, gathering some of these sprigs and nightcaps and putting them in his belt flap. He would eat them together on the morning of the day before he was to return. Thorn would be impressed despite himself. They would taste bitter, and were best washed down in a big slug of water. After that one needed to chew a sprig of anise, and be prepared to vomit a fist or so later. Loon touched a nightcap to his tongue, and just the touch put a quiver of dread down his throat, right through him to his pizzle and asshole. It shook him. This wander had already been hard enough: should he do this? Would he be making it too hard? He didn’t even want to be a shaman, that was Thorn’s idea. It was his father who was supposed to have been Thorn’s apprentice. Heather didn’t like Loon doing it. If his parents hadn’t died, Thorn would never have taken him on. He had always been away from camp as a boy, out in the canyons absorbed in the animals, looking for Heather’s herbs. After his parents’ deaths he had almost become a wolf child, brought up by the woods themselves, as if stolen by a woodsman. He followed horses whenever he saw them, they were his animal, he was entranced by their beauty. Heather had had to tempt him back in to camp like she did her camp cat. Thorn had never noticed him by the fire, and Loon never remembered any verses to Thorn’s songs. None of this would have happened if his father hadn’t died.

But it had happened. Thorn and Heather had raised him and taught him, and his wood carvings and slate paintings had all come to him by way of Thorn. These Loon loved. Of course the endless verses also came from Thorn, and Loon hated those. But they were all part of what a shaman did. But Loon did not want to be a shaman. It was too intense, too lonely, too scary, too hard. Thorn’s shaman had been a bad shaman because all shamans were bad.

On the other hand, Loon had left on his wander accepting the challenge. To renounce it during the wander would be a shameful thing, an act of fear. If he had wanted out he should have said so before he left. That would have taken cold blood indeed. But he hadn’t done it. Embarrassing not to have acted on his desires, done something he didn’t want to do and then gotten stuck with it. But there he was.

So on the morning of his last full day out, he sat facing the sun and ate the combination of nightcaps and artemisia sprigs. The aftertaste was as bitter as always, so much so that it made his skin crawl. His stomach began to grumble and burn. Something in the mix rebelled inside him more even than usual, and before too long his body rejected it, he had to vomit. He didn’t want to so soon, it felt like his body was taking over and reversing his decision, but he had no choice; he fell to his hands and knees, arched over, and vomited like a cat spitting up grass, his whole body clenching to eject the offensive stuff, a mass of burning spit littered with chunks of mushroom and little leaves, as bitter coming up as going down; the taste itself made him retch some more, made him run at the mouth and nose and eyes, coughing until he was empty and his belly sore.

Perhaps not a good idea to play these crazy shaman tricks on himself.

He lay there for a while, feeling his body pulse with his heart’s knocking. Crouch yelped in his ankle, Spit was silent. His throat and mouth burned with stomach spit. This was what happened to Thorn too when he ate the mix. Shamans poisoned themselves to launch their spirits out of their bodies, that was what it came down to, and Loon could feel his head throbbing as his spirit tried to burst out of the top of his skull. For a moment he could see himself from above, lying down there on the edge of the plateau puking his guts out. And yet his feet were still numb with cold. He tried to shift the heat around in him. Miserably he chanted one of the hot songs, aching all over, pulsing like the bag of blood he was. There was more blood in him than there was really room for, that was true of every creature; when you hit certain veins blood spurted out like spurts of spurtmilk, released from a confinement that had squeezed it hard. That was why he so often felt like he was bursting. Now he could feel all that blood inside him, pulsing to get out. It was strange really that Spit had ever stopped spitting, that any cut ever stopped bleeding, given that squeeze of the body. Sometimes you saw speared animals spurt blood from the eyes, mouth, asshole; he felt how that could happen, had to close his eyes and rub them hard to keep them from bursting out of his head. That set off a wild shower of sparking red dots and squiggles. Ah yes—he had seen these red stars and squiggles painted in the cave. Dots red and yellow and black, oh yes. Zigzag lines, squiggling right and left all over his sight. He traced them in the dirt under him, as the shamans had on the wet insides of the cave. He remembered the first time he had gone in a cave, right after his parents had died, and Thorn had shown him the wet wall and put his hand against it, leaving its impression there, then led him through his first squiggles, each finger a narrow trough, between them parallel little ridges, the clay of the walls firm but pliable. A hard press made a trough to the depth of a fingertip, and the mark remained.

Not so this dirt under him now, so friable and full of roots and dead leaves. Suddenly he felt hungry, not as a pinch in the gut but as a general weakness, and he wondered if there was any sustenance in this dirt or these dead leaves. Surely the leaves would give him something. Normally it was not thought to be so, but they did eat certain succulent leaves, and all manner of roots and tubers and shoots and flowers and fruits, so surely these dead leaves had something good in them, or anyway would fill his belly. Although when he tried to eat them, he found his belly did not seem to want filling. No, there was nothing to eat here. He needed to shift his burning skin heat down into his feet without food to help him. Best now to stand and chant the hot song, and think about Sage and her big new tits, down by the riverside swinging together as she leaned over washing, like a ewe’s udder magically doubled. Big dark udders hanging down, sloshing side to side, banging together as Sage washed clothes, her ribs as big as any man’s, her back hard and muscled in a way that made her hanging tits more than ever like bags of milk a-swing under her. Oh yes; he was warming up at the thought of her, the heat moving around in him, rising even into his chilled spurt, which warmed as it antlered. He clasped it and squeezed till it felt like a flesh stick, hard as a stick, almost, oh but his hands were so cold, it was only the sight of Sage’s naked body there moving in his eye that could keep him hard, and thus help him overcome the cold. Dance a sex song, mix the hot song he had been chanting with a sex song, seeing how she would look if they were joined in sex, or so it seemed; Loon had never done it with her, or any girl. Both Thorn and Heather made it clear to him, as did all the women in the pack, that it was better to mate with girls from other packs. So the summer festivals were good for that. Your pack was too close, the girls in it like sisters. Except they weren’t, especially if they were from other clans. Loon had been his parents’ only child, and he was a raven, like his mother had been. The girls in the pack included eagles and salmon, and had been only girls to him, and he only a boy to them. Now they were young women and he a young man. They bled and were painted red at their moon time, they had perfect tits and asses and legs and furry soft kolbies, everything really: they were perfect and beautiful. Actually only Sage was perfect in all possible ways, something that everyone saw and remarked on, but in the end they all looked good, and Loon loved them. And Sage was an eagle. To be a shaman was to have a distance from women, but also a closeness; he would be involved with the life of their bodies in ways he wouldn’t as a normal man of the pack, a hunter married to one woman. But not to have a wife! Well, that remained to be seen. Loon danced holding his hard spurt, thinking of Sage naked, and decided then and there that he would not be that kind of shaman. He collapsed to his knees and fucked the dirt, spurted calling out at the sensation of coming, the bolts of pure pleasure streaming out of him onto the ground, and when he was done, still holding himself and pulsing, he scooped up the spurtmilk with some leaves and ate all of it. He would feed himself. It was like a mushroom soup, congealed although still warm with his warmth.

Ah, the slow pulsing of afterglow. He staggered around in a bliss. Vomiting, spurting, they were all part of it. To feel so good in his body; he should have been spurting in Mother Earth as often as he could manage it. Well, maybe he had been; maybe this was the first time in the whole fortnight he had had the time and warmth and strength and spirit. Of course; or else he would have. Afterglow buzzing down his legs from his spurt, up his belly from his spurt, then out his arms to his fingers. A subtle but distinct flow of goodness, there to do battle with all the nicks and scrapes, with Spit and Crouch, and all the days of throbbing cold feet. Well, down at the very ends of his legs it was hard to penetrate with the goodness. Too cold down there. Best to hop again, dance and chant again, say good-bye to Sage for a while and focus his attention on the moment. The sun was high, it was midmorning and the air was warming up. Time to be out and about.

He rolled up his cape and tied it around his waist, retied his belt and skirt, and headed down the plateau’s edge toward the top of his home valley. Upper Valley dropped to the river, past Cave Hill onto Loop Meadow, the filled dry river course that ran around Loop Hill and the Stone Bison, which straddled the river. He was not a great distance away from home, it would be only a day’s walk on the ridge trail between Upper and Lower Valleys. Going down the valley cleft itself it would take much longer, but it would be good to avoid the ridge trail, he judged, to reduce the chances of running into anyone. As he walked he found he had decided to stay just under the ridge trail, on the Upper Valley side.

He limped down the easiest traverse as it presented itself. There were faint trails traversing the slope where animals had chosen, like he had, to make their way without risking a ridge trail encounter, also without descending into the alder thickets filling the valley floor. Up here he could often see over the west ridge of Upper Valley to the distant horizon, a white haze obscuring the ice caps, which were sometimes visible. Many of the hilltops around Upper Valley were white knobs and protuberances, so that the land looked like an immense boneyard. Now it was breathing a little under him, undulating like the back of a living thing. He had to slow down to keep his balance, using Prong more than ever.

He began to feel exhilarated. His afterglow had turned into a benign tingling all through him. It emanated from his stomach and gut. He found he could walk without actually putting his weight down, which caused Crouch to sigh contentedly. Anywhere he looked sprang right to him and resolved as if he were close to it, which was part of what was making him sway as he walked; it was hard to keep his balance when things kept jumping at him. The blue of the sky throbbed with different blues, each more blue than the next. The clouds in the blue were scalloped and articulated like driftwood, and crawled around in themselves like otters at play. He could see everything at once. His spirit kept tugging at the top of his head, lifting him so that he had to concentrate to keep his balance. The problem made him laugh. The world was so great, so beautiful. Something like a lion: it would kill you if it could, but in the meantime it was so very, very beautiful. He would have cried at how beautiful it was, but he was laughing too much, he was too happy at being there walking in it. All right, this was what he had not known: Thorn poisoned himself to get to this feeling. Once you got to it, you saw the puking was worth it, oh yes no doubt about it: well worth it. You would die for this feeling. He reeled a little, trying to turn and take it all in at once, but then Crouch complained, and he went back to traipsing along, as in a slow dance, winding along the narrow ledges that allowed him to walk just a few body lengths below the ridge trail.

Then he heard a noise on the ridge, and he dropped under a fallen log and froze before he had time to think a single thing. Musky smoke smell: the old ones.

Terror ripped through him, and he snuggled farther under the log, trying to shrink to the size of a mushroom cap. They would stick their mammoth spears through him and he would die in a squeal of horrible agony, like a rabbit. His feet went ice cold again at the idea, and the leaf mat under the log disintegrated into whorls of blotchy color, like pebbles seen at the bottom of a swift stream, everything breaking up and bouncing in his eyes.

The sounds above him moved downridge, in the direction he had been going. He heard the old ones croaking to each other in their raven voices. Over any distance they whistled to talk. These two were moving down the ridge trail pretty quickly. If he tracked them he would know where they were, and then when night came he could move away from where they were. As long as there weren’t any others, he would then be safe. It seemed like a good plan.

He floated down through the trees and rocks under the ridge, on the hunt and never more so, not ever in his whole life. He caught sight of them below him from time to time, by putting just one eye around trees to have a look; each sight of them made him tingle. The little trees on this broad ridge rustled and clicked in their own birdlike language, waving their branches to snag his attention. Clouds were swirling out of nowhere into existence overhead. One had to hope it would not rain. Although it felt like rain would only hiss and steam off him. He found he wanted to kill the old ones; that would make him safer, and he could see what they owned. But this was not a good idea, in fact he was surprised it had come to him. One didn’t kill old ones; they were people in their way, almost-people, and never dangerous to humans properly in a pack. Although as he was alone, ordinary conduct did not obtain. But it was still a bad idea.

There was a shallow rill running off the ridge down into Upper Valley; the old ones dropped into the ravine holding this rivulet. Loon wondered what they would do when they came to his pack’s camp, whether they would stop and visit his people or not. In camp people seldom saw old ones, or had any trouble with them if they did drop by. They sometimes showed up at the edges of the eight eight festival, whistling and chirping and clicking curiously, talking to shamans who knew their speech, staying clumped together a little defensively. No, his pack would be all right, no matter what these two did. So he could stay on the ridge above them, come down on the ridge to the gorge overlook, at one of the points on the cliff’s edge where a chute of scree ran down to the river. There he could see if anything approached him, and ride out his spirit wander in peace. Then if his spirit left his body, as it was still trying to do, banging against the top of his skull to get out, then he could deposit his body in a safe tuck, and take flight above the sky. That would be much better than killing some passing old ones. Even if they were the ones who had tried to kill him. Although he didn’t think they were. There had been three of them. A jolt of fear flooded him at that thought, and he regarded the ridge above carefully, listened and sniffed and watched. No one around.

So he stayed on the ridge and sneaked down its trail, peering down the slope into Upper Valley, where the old ones were still descending, clearly in view. There was a lot of open rocky and snowy land here, only broken by the creek’s line of trees, and some isolated groves on the slopes dotting the rest of the valley, with some tilted meadows and scrub here and there.

The other side of the ridge had a short cliff right near the top, then the long forested slope into Lower Valley. As he was feeling exposed on the ridge, spooked by a presence he couldn’t see, he changed his plan again; he decided to take the first chute through the cliff that would allow him to drop into Lower Valley, and then go downvalley to the river, meeting it one big loop downstream from the Stone Bison, then work his way back to camp on the river path. Tonight was not the full moon anyway, but the last night before it, unless he was mistaken. So he needed to find one more good tuck, and he knew of a small cave over the river. He could spend the night there. The old ones were in Upper Valley, he would be in Lower. That was good.

Clouds puffed into existence as the sun went down, inspiraling like fern tips, their whites turning pink in the pulsing blue of the sky. As the sun winked away the moon was big in the east, and slightly red. It was a little less bright on its left side than its right, or so it seemed to Loon. He worried about it: there had been boys who came in from their hunter’s wander a night too early, which made them look eager to return, so that people had laughed at them. On the other hand Moss had come in a night too late, which had made him look tentative. The problem was that full moons were not all alike; they grew a little bigger and smaller, and their glow also shifted a little, so that the perfect ring of bright light sometimes did not surround a full moon until midnight, rather than right after sunset. Worse, the perfect ring of glow sometimes happened a bit before the moon rose in the east. So mistakes were possible, even when examining it most carefully.

On this night the fat bright moon was growing and shrinking with his every heartbeat, jumping in every blink of the eye, but at all times brilliantly huge. By its light he could see down Lower Valley into the gorge in perfect detail, though everything was in shades of gray frosted with moony white. Otherwise it all lay below him like a ghost version of the daytime world, Mother Earth in all her loveliness, and he floated along looking into the gorge, watching moonlight glitter on the open black riffles in the part of the icy river he could see. The gorge walls seemed to glow from within, and yet the shadows were charcoal black, giving the land a decisively hewn look, as if the gorge had been hacked into the hilly landscape by a great sharp blade. Ah moonlight!

The ridge came to a point that gave him a view of the big loop in the river one loop downstream from their camp. It was just the shape of the loop their camp was in, but filled with water instead of meadow. He saw that when the river wore the upstream turn of this loop’s bank away and broke through, there would be another stone bison standing over the flow, and this loop would dry out and become another meadow. Curve of the water around its icy bend, pouring out of shadow into the moonlight. It made little wet noises, audible even up here. The river was singing to itself, as it always did, even now when it was still mostly iced over. Black leads were like long narrow ponds in the gleaming white flat surface, sometimes seeming higher than the ice, other times black holes in white ermine.

In the shadows under the alders at the curve of the bank, something moved and caught his eye. It looked like a person, but when it walked into the white moonlight and stood on the snowy riverbank, Loon could see it had an animal’s head, dark and rounded: huge owl eyes over a feline muzzle, antlers curved like ibex horns… Loon had never seen anything like it, and he reeled a little at the sight. Its eyes were surely owl eyes, they were so big and round; everything would be visible to it. Loon froze against the tree behind him, hoped that he would become part of its blackness. But the thing stared right up at him, and kept its gaze fixed on him as it walked upstream on the riverbank. It raised its right arm, and he saw its hand was a paw, a cat’s paw; and it had a lion’s head, he now saw, but owl-eyed, and with horns that curved above cat ears; the ears turned up at him, listening to his heart pounding loudly at the back of his throat. Then the creature disappeared into the shadow of the gorge wall.

Loon found himself walking backwards without knowing it, up the ridge. Terror had stuck him like a spear through the throat; he could scarcely breathe, and was hot all over. He could feel he was about to shit, like a steppe beast preparing to flee. He had to clench his butt muscles, clench his gut.

Then he turned with a whimper and ran without a thought in his head, without seeing where he was going, without feeling his legs. It was extremely dangerous to flee through the night like that, but I could not help him; in that moment of terror there was nowhere in him for me to enter.

By accident he found himself on the ridge trail again. He stopped because he had to, he was panting so hard. He looked around, afraid of what he might see. And he was right to fear: there was the owl-eyed lion man again, but now above him on the ridge trail, as if he had flown to get there ahead of Loon. With a bleat Loon turned and limped down the ridge, still terrified but back within himself, feeling the pain in his left leg, sobbing as he ran.

There was nothing else to do but follow the ridge trail to the gorge overlook at its lower end. This brought him to the intersection with the trail that ran along the north side of the gorge from Loop Meadow, but he didn’t want to take that trail, as it was exposed. Instead he dropped down a little cleft he knew in the gorge wall, a break furred with shrubs, which forced him to proceed on his hands and knees to get under the lowest branches. Soon he came to a ledge that hung over the gorge wall proper. He crawled onto the ledge. When the ledge narrowed and disappeared into the cliff, there was a narrow slide on which one could lower oneself to another ledge below the first one. He had been here before.

At the far end of the second ledge he came to the entry of a little cave, a vertical notch in the white stone. Yes, this was a spot he knew. His father had first showed it to him. The notch incised the cliff to a certain depth, where there was a short drop to a little platform. Beyond that the cave was unfortunately bottomless, a hole dropping into blackness. In a crack at the back, beyond the hole, a little water trickled down.

His father had showed him this cave to warn him about it; the hole inside it went right down to the river. His father had found this out, he said, by dropping a walnut etched with a sign down into the blackness, and then finding the walnut later down in the river, turning in an eddy.

Now Loon sat on the platform, in the dark, behind a rock. He could still look out the cave opening, which gave him a view across to the south wall of the gorge, its moony white all mottled with lichen streaks and ledges of its own. Black sky over it pricked with stars, faint in the milky moonlight. The night was young.

From behind and above him, on the first ledge, there came a clatter. Loon, shivering now, feeling like he did after getting stung by a bee, crawled to the hole at the edge of the platform and reached down into it. The wall of the hole was damp, but broken. There was a knob sticking out he could step on. No way to tell what else might be down there. But now there was a snuffling from the second ledge, outside the cave, so Loon slithered feet first into the hole and stepped with both feet on the knob he had felt. He toed into the rocks below the knob, really felt them. At this point Spit was his best scout, being sensitive even when cold. More snuffling from above caused him to grope around faster. He found another knob he could grab, squeezed it as hard as he could, lowered himself farther into the hole. He would have to remember where all these knobs were, and with his eyes closed he painted the two knobs he knew of in their positions. With his right foot he toed down, hunting for another knob. There was one, though it was a bit too far down; by the time he had the arch of his foot on it, his left leg was so bent his knee was above his hip. This wasn’t good, the ankle hurt more than it had in a while, but he ignored that and searched for a lower handhold. If he could find another good one, he could take the left foot off and seek something lower for it. There was a crack, discovered blindly by hand, a good crack; he could make a fist in it and the fist would not come out no matter how hard he pulled. That was a hold he could swell or shrink as he wanted, so he let his left foot slip off and probe around next to the one already down there. In the end he discovered that both feet fit well on the same knob, which now felt more like a shelf.

Now he was well down in the hole. He would not be visible even from the little platform, unless the thing hunting him could see in the dark. Or if it smelled him. A lion’s head on a man’s body, with owl eyes, with antlers: no way to guess how well it could smell. A thrill of terror bee-stinged through him again, as he remembered what it had looked like looking up at him. Well, but even if it smelled him, even if it saw him in the pure black, would it climb down into this hole? Without fingers, with paws on its forelegs, would it be able to descend? Maybe not. This was all he could hope for. He could see on his eyelids his way back up, left right, left right. He didn’t want to descend farther. Maybe he would if the thing snuffled at the top of the hole. But in fact he heard nothing but his breathing, and the tock of his heart at the back of his throat. No way to know what the antlered owl-eyed lion man was doing. If it didn’t have a bear’s nose too, possibly it would have lost him. Lions hunted mostly by eye, owls too.

He hung there. It got cold, and his legs grew stiff. He couldn’t feel his feet, except for a little burn from Spit. He let go with his right hand and carefully untied his deerhide cape and arranged it over his head and around his shoulders. He eased his body up and down, up and down, and shifted which hand he had in the fist crack, and hung from each as long as he could. Inside himself he called on the third wind to help him. But that one always came late, if at all. He rubbed himself against the dark rough rock. He was down in a cave. Small though it was, it was still an earth womb, a passage to the spirit world. In their painted caves, one pressed one’s hands through the walls into the underworld, and saw the animals’ spirits dance. So he tried to believe now, but really it was just a cold hole at the back of a little whitestone cave, a hole his father had warned him to stay out of. It was too cold to be a womb, too cold to birth him through to the other side. He could only hang there and endure.

In the blackness before him, the rectangular grids of red dots turned slowly into squiggles, into blobs, into side views of bison and mammoth and horse and ibex, all there hanging before him just as clearly as if they had been snatched off a ridge in the sun. His brothers and sisters. Maybe he had passed through the wall of this hole. Only the three points of it that he touched still seemed real to him. It was as if he held three cold hands, clasping him as he hung in the starless skies of the animal spirits. They pulsed as they floated before him.

He grew weak. I held him to the wall of that hole for a while.

Some twentytwentytwenty breaths later, it seemed lighter above. It was as if the blackness now had one drop of white diffused in it, like blood dripped into a river. More drips of gray followed, and then there was a tint, a gray somewhat like the blood in his eyelids when he squeezed his eyes shut hard. He seemed to see the trickle of water that had been dripping down the wall behind him, when he turned his head to look.

Ah yes: he could remember the way up. First the knob he had had to raise his knee above his hip to get his left foot onto; then the other handhold; and the higher foothold; and then he could grasp a knob at the very edge of the hole, and reach over and curl his fingers like hooks of cedar root, into cracks on the cave floor. And pull himself up, up into the fist before dawn. Crawl out to the ledge, look down into the gray gorge. It was empty except for the iced river, which snaked through it like the big live thing it was. On this quiet morning it was slipping along under its blanket of ice and old snow. Black leads flowing flatly. Nothing else moving. A squirrel, talking to itself: nothing big and terrible could be prowling around this morning. The sky had lost its stars, and was that gray that could be either clouds or clear sky, in that brief time before you could tell which.

Down the gorge a touch of pink indicated the sun was coming soon. Suddenly it could be seen that it was a clear sky, a cloudless sky. Loon clenched the right fist, the one that had held him the most, and felt its flesh groan. He stretched the hand open, wiggled the fingers, twisted one hand with the other. That right hand had gotten him through the night. And as the day grew brighter, the lion man with the owl eyes seemed less and less likely to be out and about; or even to be real. Although in the night it had most definitely been real.

Now that he could see, the ledges he had used to get to his hole were scarily narrow. Stiff as he was, he crawled over them like a lizard, a red water lizard, every limb plopped deliberately in its place. Then up the bushy cleft to the gorge edge. Now he could walk back to the ridge trail, and down into Upper Valley. He needed to take the whole day to get to camp, so he could come in after dark, at full moon. There was lots of time. He knew right where he was.

Daylight chased off the night’s fears. The air was cool and clear. He felt a buzzing in all his skin, all his flesh and bones. Trees were leafing right before his eyes, and the colors of the day flooded him as they grew brighter. A breeze bounced everything up and down in the air, and something inside him opened. He knew he would survive to be a man, a man on Mother Earth, so big and beautiful. There was terror out there too, oh yes, but this day was huge, bigger than terror. Clouds in his chest swelled like thunderheads. Squirrels celebrated the day with their chitters and chirps, and Upper Valley’s creek clattered and splooshed down its icy defile, sunlit moss greening its banks with bright spring greens, vivid against the old snow.

He passed a trickle of snowmelt in the sun, and crouched to drink, and Crouch crouched with him. Crouch was in a bad mood. He had retrieved Prong from above the first ledge, and now it and another walking stick he picked up became part of his arms. He had become one of the four-legged animals again, with very long, double-jointed forelegs. Snowmelt cold in his empty belly, flooding him from the inside, stilling the buzz in him until he could float again, could walk as lazily as a leopard, flowing with the bump and tilt of the rocks underfoot. He moved so slowly that he didn’t move, and the sky’s blue billowed and lofted over him, higher and higher, bluer and bluer. What clouds there were that day were all inside him.

It was a day for animals. Fourteenth day of the fourth month, the days getting longer fast, the sun higher in the sky, the warmth of spring finally burnishing the air of the world. Snow melting everywhere it was left. Everyone felt good on a day like this, they all came out to forage and look around. The gods inside them pushed out into their pelts.

Four-pointing down the valley, floating a little. There was a narrow lane in Upper Valley, above the creekbed so choked by alder, below the valley wall so rocky and snowy. Loon descended to this lane, he floated down onto it. When he got to it, he sat and rested, and felt Mother Earth spin a little under him, undulate up and down with her breathing. The narrow lane was mostly grassy, and where side creeks tumbled across it, the darker greens of sedge and moss striped it. Every creature walking up- or downvalley used this lane, and in the muddy patches Loon saw hoof and paw prints of all kinds.

Around noon he came to a broad open flat, a meadow where the creek slowed down and snaked through grass-green reeds. Loon kept against the eastern wall of the valley, which was here a stack of setback cliffs, with trees on every ledge. He felt safe here, and when a little herd of bison appeared at the top of the meadow and wandered downstream, he hid behind a tree and watched. They were wary and skittish, as if being hunted, and soon they passed out of sight downstream. The bison was Thorn’s animal, which was just right, they were so big-headed and full of themselves.

Now the valley was peaceful again, and the squirrels chirped and dashed about. Overhead a hawk spiraled lazily, one of the few birds to be here so early in the spring; a sprucetopper, seeming too high to be on the hunt, though it wasn’t true. They sometimes dove from so high they only became visible as a dot already diving. A quiet warm afternoon, not as clear as the morning had been, but almost cloudless still. His stomach pinched, and he felt a little weak. He floated not so much from relief as from light-headedness. With every heartbeat the trees moved away and then back at him, and a cloud of bees around a beehive roared in a way that told him he did not want their honey. Although some honey… if he threw rock after rock, blasted them away, knocked the hollow tree apart, splashed them and smoked them… but no. Only smoke would do it. Otherwise they would get angry and attack him in a swarm, he had had it happen before. One more bee sting added to the buzzing already in him and he would burst out of his skin.

Regretfully he left the beehive alone and continued downstream, slower than the water flowing through the meadow. After the stream left the meadow and fell down a forested slope he moved from tree to tree, resting against them as if against friends. They propped him up the way friends did.

The afternoon shadows lengthened in their leisurely way. He was close enough to the pack’s abri that he could stop and crawl under a log. His sleepless night suddenly caught up with him, and he had to give in to sleep, hoping that nothing hungry would come upvalley while he did. On a journey of twentytwenty days you can still fuck up on the last step. Yes, but there was nothing for it, he was helpless to hold it off. Sleep with one eye open.

When he woke it was just a fist above sundown. He pulled himself up, brushed himself off. He went to the river and washed his face, then spotted a chunk of earthblood in the stream and plucked it out happily. A little scraping with a harder rock would yield enough red for some facepaint. He still had his deer tooth necklace, and his knot carved into a lion man, which now gave him a little shiver of dread as he pondered it; also his deerhide clothes and cape. He would use the earthblood to spot his hide cape like his cheeks and forehead. Make a leopard pattern on both, come into camp in style. He would be thin and weak and injured, but clothed and well. Alive. He considered casting aside Prong and the other pole; but if he did he would have to limp, because Crouch was now objecting loudly to every single step he took. He could lose the poles at the last moment, and stop himself from limping for his walk in, if he chose to.

In the last light of the sun he crossed Loop Meadow and slowly climbed Loop Hill. From its top he could see down into the bowl of land they lived in, and up the river gorge to the ridges all round, to the sunset and the moonrise. Camp was down there under the abri that seamed Cave Hill. When night fell he could walk right down to it. It was all coming together just as he had planned in the sleepless nights of his wander. Looking down he saw the smoke from their campfire, curling up through the trees. Ah yes.

In the last part of that day, sunlight slanting down the gorge of the river, there was a motion on the first ridge to the west of him. He saw it was a black horse, standing there looking around. The sacred animal, the most beautiful animal.

The horse stood alone, watching the sunset just like Loon. Loon took the chunk of earthblood from his belt flap and scraped its friable surface with his foreclaw until he had some of it nubbled in his palm. He spit on it and rubbed it around until he had a paste, then applied it in streaks across his forehead and under his eyes. Then he bowed to the horse, and the horse bowed back, nodding his head and lifting it up, nodding and lifting. The god animal was lit by the sun almost from below. Long black head, so etched and fine. The land’s witness to the end of his wander, pawing once, then nodding and lifting. Throwing his great head side to side, his black eyes observing Loon across the gulf of air between them. Black mane short and upright, black body rounded and strong.

Then without warning the horse tossed his long head up at the sky, off toward the sun, and this movement popped in Loon’s eye and bulged out across the space between them, scoring his eyes such that he could close them and see it again; Loon’s eyes spilled over, the tears ran down his face, his throat clamped down and his chest went tight and quivered. He put his hands on his heart. The horse turned away and cantered over the ridge out of sight, disappearing with a final flash of sun on its black upright mane. Loon looked away, still blinking out tears, and for a time he was almost afraid to look west again. He squeezed his eyes shut, saw it all happen on his eyelids. The head leading the body through its turn away, so graceful, so smooth. Last of the sun flooding the gorge, gleaming off the black body as if off a crow’s wing. Rounded shoulders and long legs.

The sun touched the horizon and began to set. At the same moment a spot on the eastern horizon gleamed brilliant white, spread left and right: the moon was rising. In the same time the sun took to set, the moon rose; watching the two, looking back and forth, Loon felt himself expand between them, felt the sky rolling over Mother Earth. Sun down, moon up, all part of one big flight. So it must indeed be the night of full moon.

And as the moon cleared the horizon and hung in the blue sky, it showed the brilliant white glow all the way around it, confirming the true full. It was a huge one, much bigger than the setting sun had been. The last sunset of his wander; as he realized that, a pang pierced him, the world grew to something more immense than he could grasp. Oh that it had to end! Would he ever be this alive again, would the world ever again be so beautiful as in this moment?

No. Never. It was not possible. This was his moment, his alone, the end of his wander, the peak of his gyre. It would never come again. Now he was a man, and a horse had blessed him. Tomorrow he would be back in his pack, Thorn’s apprentice. This huge new feeling, could he hold to it then? Could he remember it?

It seemed very unlikely. He would see when it happened. He had to go home. And it was true he was hungry.

In the dusk he arranged his things, and repainted his face and the palms of his hands. He pronged down the slope of the hill to camp, the full moon pouring its light over everything he saw. At the last moment he decided to discard only the second walking stick. Prong was too much of a friend, sturdy and reliable, stained at the top with the sweat of his hand, the wood at its bottom perfectly rounded by all the times he had stuck it onto the stony ground. He would come in showing how he had got along despite Crouch, showing that nothing had stopped him on his wandering way.

He saw the fire almost the entire hike down the hill. They had made it big to welcome him back. The bee buzz filled him again, and he burned as he floated down the hill, adjusting his clothing and hoping that his facepaint had been applied neatly. If not he might only look as if he had been recently murdered. If so, that too would be fine. He had indeed died, and was returning as someone else. He felt that so strongly he was sure they would see it.

The black trees marking the curve of the meadow’s loop were pulsing upward as if trying to float away, held to the earth by their trunks, but tugging up against them with all their branches. He himself was floating with a nearly perfect buoyancy through the air, pegging down with Prong in a perfect balance for his feet, halfway between landing and flying into the sky. Crouch said to him, I am all right, I will do whatever you ask, I am not really here tonight, good-bye for now. Pleased at that, Loon focused on keeping the three points of his walking in a smooth flow, a dance down to his pack in their camp. The fire flickered through the trees, trying like everything else that night to fly up and away. The moon over the trees was still immense, and superbly white all around its edge: a fuller moon could not exist. Full moon of the fourth month: here they were again. The hunger month was over, summer not that far away. The rabbit in the moon, stirring her bowl of earthblood with which to paint the dawn, was putting her whole body into the stir, and though her head was in profile, he could see she was looking to her left to watch him walk down the hill. She would indeed paint the coming dawn for him, for they would stay up all night to celebrate.

He came into camp and realized at the last moment that he had not announced himself, that he might surprise them, and so he hooted the little roop roop greeting that loons made when they came up after a dive and were locating their friends.

His people heard it and cheered. The men howled like wolves and came out to greet him, grinning hugely and shouting his name. Loon dropped Prong and they lifted him up under his legs and around his back and carried him to the fireside on their shoulders. Loon was glad he was all cried out; he was full but empty, he could see them all with a calm little smile. It was a big bonfire. All the women and girls and boys called his name and hugged him one by one, many hands always touching him, and then the women brought their finest fur robes to drape him.

Even Heather smiled for a moment, then ducked her toothless head and darted away, returned with a bowl of hot spruce tea and some little honey seedcakes.

—Don’t eat too much too fast, she warned him in her ordinary voice.—How did you do out there, are you all right?

—I twisted my ankle, he confessed at once.—There’s something still not right in there.

—Ah. She shot an evil glance at Thorn. She did not like the men’s wanders, nor any unnecessary danger of any kind.

Thorn ignored her, caught up as he was in his own close inspection of Loon. Loon could not guess what the old man was thinking, and turned to the others; but that didn’t feel right, that was too much like before. He didn’t want to fall back into the old habits of his life in the pack, least of all with Thorn. Even though it was a huge relief to be among them again. What a life it would be to be a woodsman or a traveler, hunted night and day, unable ever to let down one’s guard, and no one to talk to!

—Tell us about it! they were saying.—Tell us what you did, what happened to you!

—Wait a moment, he said, casting himself across what seemed an immense gulf of time, back into the present instant by the fire. It was hard. He had to collect himself. There were so many faces, and he knew each one like the palm of his hand.

—Well, I couldn’t get a fire started that first night in the storm.

They groaned and laughed to hear this.

—So I had to dance all night to stay warm.

—Oh too bad! A lot of the men were laughing at him, or with him.—I hate it when that happens!

—Then the next day I got a fire going. He took a deep breath, and they saw it and fell silent, all their eyes on his:

And some of the men nodded, and Heather too, their eyes round. Loon kept glancing at Sage, he was telling this story to Sage most of all, Sage and Heather, and Thorn of course:

This he said to Thorn, but here Thorn shook his head.—Tell me about that later, he said.—That’s shaman stuff.

—All right, Loon said. Although what followed had been the biggest night of the wander by far, and would have made a good story. Later he would tell it, he decided: now wasn’t a good time to defy the old man. Or was it?

Loon pondered this. But yes, now he could see what Thorn meant. He didn’t want to tell just how afraid he had been of the thing on the riverbank; he wouldn’t have been able to convey it, and so he would have had to lie about it, one way or another. And so far he had not lied.

He could see Thorn watching him closely, watching to see if he understood why he should stay quiet about the thing in the night, and the terror; looking to see if he had changed or not, and if so, in what ways. But two could play at stone face, and so Loon merely returned his gaze, happy at the warmth of the bonfire, and the sight of Sage there in the firelight. He was still seeing everything bounce and bloom before him, trying to fly up into the sky, and now the people of Wolf pack were all of them bouncing, on fire with themselves, every face the perfect image of that person’s character, bursting with his or her particular self, and he was among them; and although that meant trouble, it was the best trouble in the world.

Even Heather in her irritable way was pleased to have him back, he saw, and at some point, by the bonfire when she was passing nearby, on one of her perpetual errands, he put out an arm to stop her and give her a hug, as she was the only one who had not hugged him, but only touched his arm.—I made it, he said.

—Yes, yes, you made it, she replied, squeezing him briefly before she moved on.—Now you are twelve.