Shaman: A Novel of the Paleolithic Era

Chapter 3

In the chill dawn Loon woke under a blanket of ash flecks, mouth parched and head aching. His wander was over, he was back in his pack. Thorn was groaning and calling for water. The old man’s gray braids hung over his dark face, their broken hairs sticking out everywhere. His eyes when he opened them were red and gooey. He stared at Loon suspiciously; he looked like he was still wondering what had happened to Loon on his wander. Loon decided never to tell him. His wander was his. One of Heather’s sayings finally came clear to him: no one else can live your life for you. He felt the solitude of it, the loneliness. Another lesson of his wander.

Thorn growled, as if seeing Loon’s secretiveness and disapproving it. Then he grunted like a rhino and crawled across camp to its sunrise end, where Heather kept her nest. All her stuff was tucked around her on wooden shelves which made a tight little wind shelter. She was in there now, and when she saw Thorn she moved to stand in her entry, blocking him. Thorn reached between her legs for her water gourd and she kicked his forearm.

—I don’t speak to unspeakables, she said,—but everyone knows to stay out of my nest.

—I just want a drink of water, he whined.

—No one touches my things. They stay away from my nest. I’ve dusted it with poisons that will make you sick, everyone knows that.

Thorn lay there defeated.—Loon, he said,—get me a bucket of water, please. You can take it from Heather here.

—You get it, Loon said.—I’m not your apprentice anymore.

—You just became my apprentice, didn’t you notice? Do what I say and don’t be insolent. He laid a red eyeful of command on Loon.—That’s what your wander should have taught you.

Loon dug in a net bag for his real clothes, which Heather had kept for him.—It taught me I’m not your apprentice.

But of course that was just what he was. Unless he quit the shaman’s way entirely, which would probably mean leaving the pack. Thorn’s heavy red scorn speared the point home.

Loon got dressed and stumped around camp doing things for the old sorcerer, feeling like he had let himself get snared in a snare he had known to avoid. It made him sick as he saw it happening. Mornings after a big night could be like that, just a raven-shitted kill site, sunlight slivering the eyes, the camp all ashy and sordid, its people disgusting. Best to get out of camp on mornings like that, go down to the river and jump in.

So Loon did that. The one lead of open water had iced over in the night, but it was easy to crack through the thin clear layer and make a hole into the black water below. What a luxury it was to plunge into the sandy shallows of the lead, rub himself until he began to shiver under the shock of the black water, all the while knowing that the campfire would be there to warm him back up, and his clothes right there on the bank. Ah the luxury of home!

Except for the people. Although it was true that last night he had been very glad to see them. People are more wolf than wolverine, people are more lion than leopard, because they run in packs. Seeing all their faces in the firelight: he had to remember the feel of that, so intense and comforting. Where had it gone already? There was so much to remember from his wander. He would be asked to tell the rest of it, and he wouldn’t; but he had to remember it. It was his, it was what he had. And it had taught him some things. If he could remember them. Already it was getting to be like a dream he had had.

He limped up the side of Loop Hill to the flat spot that ledged around to the tail of the Stone Bison. This was a fine prospect, with views up and down the river gorge, and over Loop Meadow to the gray rise behind it, where their camp was tucked at the bottom of a little abri.

From here their camp was as small as a child’s toy. The pack house was a neat round thing of spruce logs and hides, smoke rising from the hole in the high point of the roof. People were still coming out of it, stunned by the day, or rather the previous night. In the doorway of the women’s house Chamois and Bluejay sat where they always did. His friends Hawk and Moss were still asleep in their furs, on the ramp under the abri. There were Thorn and Heather, and across the camp Schist and Ibex, putting wood on the big campfire. Every person down there was known to him so well that if he could see them at all, no matter how small they were, he knew just who it was, also what they were likely to be doing, and what they would say if you spoke to them. It was enough to make you scream.

Heather was holding up her blowdart tube and aiming it at Thorn. Her darts were tipped with poisons that would kill in just a few heartbeats. Thorn had his hands up, but was clearly berating her. His words could be as poisonous as her darts. He had cursed people to death at the festivals.

Loon stared down now as if looking at some other pack. Rising smoke, people grubbing in the morning chill. Out on his wander he had wanted to be home, now he wanted to be back on his wander. But of course, Heather would say if he told her this. You only want things you don’t have. Things you do have, you forget to want. We’re stupid that way.

Their camp was laid out like most abri camps Loon had ever seen. Quite a few had cliff overhangs even better than theirs, many of them upstream and down on the gorge walls of the Urdecha, others in other river canyons east and west and south. The cliffs backing these camps were usually painted, as theirs was. From the Stone Bison the paintings were tiny, a jumble of red and black spots. Loon could just make out the long stretch of painted wolves on the hunt, something like four score of them overlapping in a run toward the camp. They were the Wolf pack. Two score and two of them, this spring.

Schist was standing by the fire telling Ibex something. Schist was broad-shouldered and deep-chested, not tall but nevertheless big, shaped like a river stone but light on his feet. A very clever hunter, and very accurate with the javelin. A mild friendly look, attentive to everyone in the pack, an easy manner. He made jokes often but at heart was very serious, because he took on himself the task of making sure they had enough food to get through the winters and springs. That was his version of being a headman, and it was something women usually did, but he joined them in their work and suggested what everybody do. So every summer when the birds returned and they had not starved, he became briefly cheerful; but after midsummer day he returned to his beavering.

Now the birds had not yet returned, and their saved food was getting low, and he was very intent as he talked to Ibex. He was always talking food: cooking and fishing with Thunder and the women, hunting and trapping with the men. He had dug their storage pits himself, and was always lining them with new things. He spoke with people from other packs to see what they knew. He and Thorn had worked out an accounting system similar to Thorn’s yearsticks, using clean lengths of driftwood to notch marks for their pokes of animal fat, bags of nuts, dried salmon steaks, smoked caribou steaks; everything they gathered to eat in the cold months was stored and marked down. He knew how much every person in the pack would eat, based on the previous winter’s markings and adjusted by everyone’s summer health, by how much fat they had put on, and so on. He knew better than you how hungry you would be.

The thing that made Schist complicated was that he was married to Thunder, sitting there by the women’s house. She along with her sister Bluejay were the headwomen of the pack, as involved as Schist in the running of things. And Thunder was a bruiser. She and Schist had grown up together in Wolf pack and married young, which was said to explain everything about them. But Schist was relaxed and agreeable, while Thunder was so intense and overbearing it was said her mother had eaten otter meat while pregnant. And her sister Bluejay was even worse, and the two of them were close. People joked that Schist had married two women, both meaner than him. How could he be headman of the pack when he wasn’t even headman in his bed? But somehow the necessary things got done. Their pack didn’t really want a headman anyway, he was always suggesting with his manner. They were better off this way. Except when it came to food. With food he was a boulder that could not be moved. Thunder and Bluejay left that to him, to avoid a push coming to a shove they would not win. And so he spent his days going from one task to the next, asking for help when he needed it, and people gave it when he asked. It looked like he was asking Ibex for help right now, although he was more agitated than usual. People said he had been good to Loon’s father when Tulik had married into the pack.

Looking down at the tiny people, Loon realized he could close his eyes and still see them all. Everybody knew everybody. The adults were married, the children were not, the young people were in between, thus on the lookout. Their bodies had begun to bleed or spurt, the older ones were putting them through their initiations. There was no way out of that, no place to hide.

Hunger shoved him back down to camp. He was not happy.

Chapter 4

Hawk and Moss were sitting in the sun, straightening their tusk javelin tips with a bone-point straightener, Hawk laughing as he inserted the white point into the hole, miming a spurt into a kolby, in and out, in and out. Then a gentle twist on the bone handle to lever the point back into true. Mammoth tusk was strong and light, but it warped as it dried, also when it got wet. Point straightening was always a pleasure, it meant they were about to go out on the hunt again. But Loon was too hurt to go.

When you know a man you know his face, not his heart. Never help a person who doesn’t help anyone else. The more you give, the more you get.

To Loon these sayings seemed to suggest he should spend most of his time helping women. Heather often said it: find the right woman and do what she says. A woman will cook for you, and then you can hunt. And he dearly wanted to go with his friends on the hunt.

Heather told him he would only hurt his leg worse.—Real friends wouldn’t let you go, she said. She didn’t like the pack’s men. In her constant muttering Loon sometimes heard her quite clearly, though he didn’t always understand her:—Bunch of drunken old spelunkers, you shamans, and you hunters mere pig-stickers and jerk-offs, all your splendiferous vainglorious buffooneries and assholeries, hootenanies and corroborees, wandering around thinking you’re men, just get the meat! Get the nuts! Get the firewood! Do your work! Quit with the lies and the boasts and the tall tales, the flat-out undeniable fucking stupidity! Do your work and then brag if you have to, otherwise I shit on all your brave talk, it’s just the slubgullion left at the bottom of the bucket!

The people of Wolf pack had long ago stopped listening to Heather, as she knew very well. Sometimes she would shout at them just to see them turn their backs and move away. But Loon had to stay. After his parents’ deaths Heather and Thorn had raised him, and now, between them they had him trapped.—All these widows and orphans, I’m tired of it! Heather told him whenever he complained about this.—Quit getting killed and then it won’t happen! Heather the midwife, the herb woman, the loudmouth, the witch, the crone, the horrible hag, the deadly poisoner. A very busy and bossy old woman, small and bent and proud to have three teeth left, two opposed. The spider was her animal, and it was said she turned into one sometimes.

Now she was dismissing him with a wave, staring up into the hemlock over her nest. The cat that hung around their camp, enticed by Heather’s gifts, had climbed into the branches over her and was daintily eating the tree’s new spring leaves, even the new twigs. It seemed uncatlike.

—Get out of here, I have to talk to Schist.

Chapter 5

He couldn’t go out on the hunt. All that day and in the days after, a feeling of doom grew in him, the weight of the sky weighed on him.

If he killed everybody in the pack he would be able to go out on his own, find a high place to sleep at night, and have a fire always, everything he needed, a cave to paint, new people when he wanted them; come and go, drop in on festivals, no duties to a pack or to anything at all. A traveler, a woodsman, a green man. He could do the deed in the night before dawn, before Heather woke up; kill her first because she would be the one to know, the hardest to surprise, catch her asleep, a blow with a chopper to the back of the head or to the temple, go around to those who were always first to wake, then to the heavy sleepers, the late sleepers, they would be late indeed on that morning! And in the sunrise, with all of them dead, walk out on a wander that would never end. Live a lifetime every month.

Chapter 6

Better to be lucky than good. The cat had seen that many times. A sound snapped in her head like a thunderclap and she was far up the tree overhanging camp before she understood it was one of the humans stepping on a dry twig. Better to be safe than sorry. The humans would kill anyone, and then not only eat their kill but tear off its fur and tear out its teeth and wear them afterward, macabre trophies that were part of what made humans so awful, along with their smell, and their ability to kill at a distance by throwing rocks and sticks. None of the other animals could do that. The cat disliked all the other animals, including her own kind. Cats at least liked to stay away from each other, they had that basic courtesy. All except for the lions. Lions acted like they were wolves, it was sickening. The biggest of every kind of animal were gregarious, which the cat found mysterious. All the littler wolves were solitaries: fox, coyote, mink, weasel. So were all the littler cats. But the biggest of both kinds, wolves and lions, roamed in groups. There’s safety in numbers. So they clumped and safe they were. And their prey, the big herd animals, clumped together too. The lions should have known better.

Bears left their little sisters alone, wolves likewise, but big cats would eat little cats. Anyone would eat a little cat if they could catch one. Thus her jumpiness. To see the biggest cats ganging up in packs was a little disgusting, a little embarrassing, also terrifying. They looked like cats in every other way, then there they were, hanging around like wolves. How could they do it?

All the animals had been the same in the beginning, then things happened and they became sun and moon, northern lights and thunderstorms, and all the various animals, still the same inside and sharing an outlook on things. But some killed and some got killed, and many did both, like cat. Best be careful. Hiss at the storms and they might go elsewhere.

Another thunder crack of a twig snap and cat’s fur stood, her tail grew fat with unease. Another pair of humans were now under the tree. These were the two dominant males in the herb woman’s pack, deadly men with rock or stick. Cat peeked over the side of the branch to observe, and saw that the two humans were talking to another pair of them, from the pack that cut off their little fingers and gave them to the cats. Naturally cat liked these humans better, but they did not have an herb woman like cat’s, so she stayed mostly around the woman. It was a pack with a lot of camp mice, and the oddments left out by the old woman were interesting. The old woman teased cat with weird gifts.

Now the men were arguing, pointing up- and downcanyon. It was territorial, and they were chest to chest and swelled up. In such a state they would never notice cat, and she poked her head out to see better. Possibly they would drop something in a fight, or something would remain after to be scavenged, anything from drops of blood to dead bodies.

But the finger cutters were backing down. They did not want a fight. Their territory was off under the sunset, they indicated that with their gestures. The herb woman’s pack leaders accepted this and the finger cutters left, heading upcanyon.

Then the two men remaining argued with each other. Something about the meeting had left them at odds. Cat followed them as they went toward their fire, hopping nervously from branch to branch. Best be careful. Curiosity killed the cat. Despite which she was curious enough to watch from afar as the men entered camp and went to the dominant male’s wife. This big woman listened to them with a scowl that did not spare either of them. When they were done she cursed them and they slunk away abashed.

Chapter 7

Once when they were boys Loon and Hawk and Moss had gone out on a hunt and come upon a pack of lions in a meadow, eating a big horse they had killed. As the boys had watched from the shelter of a rocky ridge above, a flock of ravens had swirled in on the wind from the west and begun swooping and shitting on the lions, and even more so on the open dismembered body of the horse, as became obvious when the snarling lions backed away to get out of the spew. The ravens kept shitting and peeing on the dead horse until it was little more than an uneven mound under the curdled white of their shit. The lions padded sullenly off. After that the ravens descended to beak through their mess and eat the body of the horse themselves.

The boys had crowed themselves at such a great opportunity, and when the lions were gone they charged down and drove the ravens off, and then threw rocks at the black birds when they dove back in their counterattacks. The boys were more dangerous to the ravens than the lions had been, and after a brief skirmish, filled with curses in both languages, the ravens had flown off heavy-winged, hoarse with unhappiness.

The three boys had been very pleased with themselves, and had quickly hacked chunks of the horse free, and carried the two rear legs and the head down to the river to wash them off. They had washed them and rubbed them with sand in the cold flow of the upper Ordech for more than a fist of the afternoon, then carried them home and on Hawk’s urging told the people at camp that they had killed the horse woman themselves and brought back this meat. Thorn had taken up one of the rear legs and sniffed it and nibbled it like Heather’s cat, and then whacked Hawk with it as if swinging a branch, knocking Hawk to the ground. Hawk cried out and everyone gathered and Thorn picked up the leg and gave it to Heather. Heather bit into it and scowled.—When ravens shit on a kill the meat changes, she told the boys.—You can’t just wash it off.

—Oh, Hawk said.

The three boys must have looked pretty foolish, because all of a sudden Thorn started laughing at them, and then everyone was laughing. Although then the boys had been slapped around a bit too.

Chapter 8

Today you mix paint, Thorn croaked one morning.

—I always mix paint.

—Then clean up my spot.

—No! Loon said, frowning.

Thorn grinned in a way that revealed he had wanted to get a rise out of Loon.—So mix paint. I’ll teach you how to make it so it won’t run in the rain.

This was just what Loon wanted to know, so he stared at Thorn suspiciously, and Thorn laughed at him.

Heather watched the two of them unsmiling.

—How is your leg? she asked.

Loon shrugged.—All right.

Although he worried about that. Next month they would head north to the caribou, and by then he would have to have his legs.

Now he limped after the old man to his nest, picked up his leather sack of earthblood and charcoal, and followed the shaman to the painted part of their cliff.

Thorn stood in the morning sun squinting at a wall of the cliff that had been drawn over many times. He ignored the many erect spurts and open kolbies, including a pretty great series depicting a man whose spurt was so long that he had to bend it back down to his mouth to be able to suck himself off. Instead Thorn regarded a grouping of ten russet cave bears. He liked these bears: they were clumped in a pack, in a way they never gathered on the land, with some of them standing, some shambling, some sniffing the air with their incredible noses. Each bear revealed its mood or purpose by a deft turn of eye or ear, or furrows on their sloped foreheads. A few of the bears were three-liners, but most had been painted fully, with charcoal stumped and smudged over underlying red paint, making precisely the russet shade one saw when the bears wore their late summer coats. And they were all fat. So in the painting it was autumn; and by the looks on their faces, it seemed something down by the river had caught their attention. Bumps and hollows in the stone of the wall were incorporated into several of their shoulders and rumps and foreheads. It was as if the painters, whoever they had been, had seen these bears emerging from the cliff and then drawn them on the surface. The paintings were beginning to chip away, and Thorn had talked about recoloring them. Now he pointed at the rearmost bear.

—Fixing that one was your first day of painting! Loon preempted him.

Thorn tossed a pebble at him.—Be quiet. I’m still your master. I’ll beat you and you’ll have to take it. Even though you’re strong enough now to beat me. You’ll hate that but you’ll have to take it to stay in the pack. So shut up and let me show you something you don’t know.

—For once, Loon said, and dodged another pebble.

As Thorn pulled out a few chunks of earthblood, and a selection of chopflints and burins, Loon settled down and stopped the needling. He had hungered for this, and now the old man was willing to feed his hunger.

Earthblood was friable, like sand soaked in something’s blood, which then had dried and turned into a rock. You could scrape a little of its surface off under the curve of your claw, but underneath that first scrape it got much harder. You needed to scrape that part with a flint burin, using the pointed edge of the burin to scrape off chips and granules until you had a pile of them, then grind the pile under a flint pestle, in a granite grinding cup or on a slate metate. So: scrape away with one of the biggest burins, its sharp flint point and edge turned as needed. Push where the red stone was weakest, which was where the darkest earthblood clumped like scabs within the sandier parts of the rock, which were also red, but mixed with blacks and browns. The rock broke best where scabby and sandy met. Once broken away, the scabs were softer than the sandy parts, like a very hard mud.

—You want mostly that, Thorn said, pointing at the finer powder from the scabs.—The sandy part makes the paint too grainy. You can have a little, but not too much. It has to be just the right thickness for wall work, like a thick soup, or a very thin paste. It has to be thin enough to spread, of course, but not so thin that it runs.

—So you add water to the powder.

—Of course, don’t be such an insolent youth. You also add something to bind the water and the powder together, and that’s what you don’t know. It has to bind it without clumping it. There’s a number of binders will do it, some for body paint, some for wall paint. Today we need a little spit and some deer marrow fat, which I brought along for the occasion.

He pulled a gooseskin bag from his belt pouch and untied it carefully, then poured a little of the semi-liquid fat into a wooden bowl.

Loon stared at the bag; he had not known there were binders.

—It’s better if your powder is even finer than this you have here. You haven’t done a very good job, but let’s use it so you’ll see.

He picked up Loon’s metate and tipped the powdered earthblood on it into the bowl.—Swirl that around, then wait twenty beats, and in that time all the biggest grains of sand will sink to the bottom of the bowl. Then pour the paint into another bowl, but stop in time to leave the dregs in the first one. Like this.

He poured.—See, the coarsest red stays in the first bowl. Now we’ll let a finer powder settle to the bottom of the second bowl. That will take a while. Most of the red will just float forever. So, when it’s ready, pour off that water carefully. Later when these dregs in the bowls dry, they will be two cakes of earthblood powder, one coarse, one fine. You can cut the dried cakes into sticks and draw with them, like you draw with a stick of charcoal, only red. Or you can put a dried cake back in some water and break it up while adding more marrow fat, or spit, or pee, or hide glue, or spurtmilk. Then you’ll have it back to paint again. Or you can crumble a cake and mix it into beeswax, and that’s how you make the crayons you see some people using.

Loon nodded.—Heather makes a good glue. He had often watched her cook down the last remains of butchered animals into a white goo in a bucket, combining cartilage, fat, sinews and ligaments, and little bits of bone and muscle, along with some dried and crushed plants known only to her.

Thorn nodded.—She must put something special in her glue, it dries so hard. I add a few drops of it to my cliff paint. Won’t run in the rain later. Here, stir this fat in, then grind some more rock.

Grind the chunk of earthblood with the burin. Scrape scrape scrape. Warm morning air. He liked this part: the redness of the rock, its friability. Hold the block to his nose: it even smelled like blood. Sun hot on his neck.

The morning passed while he ground the rock. So pleasant to sit in the sun, soaking in its heat. He made sure Crouch and Spit were in the sun, it made them happier. It got so nice he fell asleep and sat there scraping earthblood in his dream just as he would have been if he had been awake, so that he could hardly tell which world he was in, and it wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t. Oh give thanks for the warmth of the sun!

All the time as he worked, Thorn moved around muttering to himself. He and Heather were a matched pair in that regard. In so many ways it was a contest between them. They were like a bad marriage, indeed some people said they had been a bad marriage, had split back before anyone else in the pack had even been born. True or not, Loon saw their ongoing fight up close. Indeed he worked them against each other, to crack a space for himself.

Neither of them ever stopped talking. If Thorn stopped it was almost always because he had fallen asleep. This morning he was retelling the story of the long winter, one of his favorites. All the awfulest stories were his favorites, but only told in their right time. Loon listened as he scraped, or rather let it wash over him, like the sound of the squirrels chittering in the trees.

Thorn’s croaky low voice was much like a raven’s hoarse cawing:

The grimness of Thorn’s croak as he intoned these phrases was something to hear. This part he always said the same, standing upright and facing the sun.

Then he moved around again as he continued, listing with morbid gusto all the ways those poor summerless people had starved, the suffering and hurt, and all the strange things they had been forced to eat to survive. Thorn loved lists at all times, their threes of threes of threes, all the names he mouthed as if spitting out stones, tasting each name with evident satisfaction. So he spoke the lists in the hunger stories, naming foods of every kind, and of course right in the month when they themselves were down to their last bags of nuts and fat, and out every day checking empty traps and hunting snowshoe hares and ptarmigans, and eyeing the sky to the south hoping to see the ducks return. When the ducks came back the hunger months would be over, but that was usually late in the fifth month, sometimes the sixth. Until then they would be doling out their food by the mouthful, and feeling a little pinch in the gut all the time.

—You like to hurt us, Loon observed.

—Yes! That’s what a shaman does! You tell the hunger stories when they’re hungry. That’s when you really have them seized in your grip. It’s never easier to make them weep than when they’re on the brink already. I’ve seen that many times. Now, tell me the list of what they had to eat during the ten-year winter.

Loon could never remember the poems except in the very moment he heard Thorn saying them, when he recognized them, even though he could not find them in himself. So now he sighed heavily to indicate his protest and said,

Thorn nodded, his mind somewhere else already, which was good, as Loon’s list was so woefully short compared to any of Thorn’s. Loon scraped the earthblood to powder and stretched in the sun, feeling the sunlight penetrate his leg, where it began to make Crouch happier.

He saw that this was his life he was scraping, his fate. The world would scrape him down just like he scraped this chunk of rock. It would go on until Thorn died, and then the pile of granules that was Loon would replace him, and do all things Thorn had done, including scraping down some apprentice of his own; then he would die, and the apprentice would go on and do it to his apprentice, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on it would go, the earthblood and their own blood ground up together under the sun.

The thought of that, when held up against the memory of his wander, was like Crouch moving up into his chest and flexing there. Oh the pain suddenly squeezing his chest! How could it be? In the fourteen days of his wander, entire months and even years of life had sometimes crushed into every beat of his heart! Surely that was how one should always live, surely it would be better to make every fortnight a wander, and thereby live for scores and scores and scores of years.

Scrape the rock to powder, sitting in the sun.

Restless nights by the fire and in his bed, remembering his wander and wanting it back. Came to him the terrified eye of the deer he had killed, in the moment of her death. Was there ever a moment they ought not live in that fear, not quiver with a desperate hope to live on? That deer, how he had loved it. Loon loved to see deer almost as much as he loved to see horses. He kept the teeth of the deer he had killed around his neck, and kept her hide among his bed furs, though it had not been properly dried.

All the young men had necklaces crowded with the teeth of animals they had killed. Heather said it was always that way until the first time a necklace tooth punctured face or neck in some accident, and then the teeth went away. And it was true none of the older men wore them.

One morning Loon woke from a dream in which he had been sleeping with his deer in her lay-by. His chest and belly had been against her back, and his hard spurt was pressed against her fur; he had had his arm across her belly. Very slowly and delicately he had slipped his thumb up into her slightly damp and slippery kolby, moving very carefully, so that she still slept. He could have stayed like that forever, the two of them together, but with his spurt pronging so hard against the top of her rump, he had finally tried to thrust down and up into her; but in removing his thumb from her to make room for his spurt, he had woken her up, and she had looked over her shoulder and then leaped out of the lay-by with a single convulsion of her body. Looking back down at him with her giant wide-set brown eyes full of alarm and disbelief, she said to him,—You want too much, and then deered off through the forest, white rump flashing.

Awake, remembering the dream, the feel of her body, he felt bad. He wondered if he had managed to succeed in mating with her, if she would have gotten pregnant and given birth to a stag-headed person. Thorn had shown him a painting of one of those on a shaman cliff on the other side of the ice caps. Maybe that was what had happened out there to the west. He ached with love for the deer he had killed.

The light in the hour before sunrise. He woke to see the sky had gone gray, the eastern horizon a dull red topped by a band of yellow, and knowing day was coming he promptly fell back asleep, warmed by the thought. It was in those dawn sleeps that he dreamed most of the dreams he remembered. All through the night he dreamed, as he knew because whenever he happened to wake up it was from some busy effort in the dream world, which could range from lovely sexual encounters with girls or cats or horses or deer, to convoluted efforts to escape being eaten by cats or girls, sometimes even horses or deer.

If Thorn woke him in the morning, it was usually with the quiet question:—What are you dreaming? And as Loon pulled himself up into the waking world, he would look back into the dream world and tell Thorn what had been happening there. These were his best moments with the old man, who was more relaxed in the early morning, and would sit there nodding as he watched Loon’s face, prodding him with questions, clearly interested, no matter how trivial or strange Loon’s dreams got.

—The dream world is different, Thorn would remark when Loon finished.—It’s writhing with our wishes and our fears, but we lack good judgment in that world, and that’s why so many odd things happen. If you can, try to dream your dreams without any desires. Just watch. Except if you see a chance to fly in a dream, then fly. That’s the first thing you should want. There’s no point in wanting sex in a dream, because the people in dreams never really touch you. You might come but usually you won’t, and if you do it’s because you’re fucking the ground. You can do that anytime. In dreams you should focus on flying, because you can’t fly in this world, but you can in the dream world. And when you fly in the dream world, that gives you practice for when you fly in the spirit world. The spirit world and the dream world aren’t the same, but they come together in the sky. The dream world is inside this world, the spirit world is outside it, but you can fly in both. And they meet, too, out beyond the sky. So you can fly back and forth. The spirit world is where all the worlds meet, that’s why shamans go there. So when you’re there you can be in all of them at once.

Loon would nod as if he followed this, still caught up in the dreams he had been dreaming, or simply falling back asleep. But with Thorn’s questions he got better at remembering his dreams, and when he woke in the night, he could often look back into them without confusion, and even fall back asleep intending to resume where he had left off, and it would happen. And when he flew he knew it was good, and so tried to fly more, tried to enjoy it, even if in the dream he was flying for his life somehow, as it so often seemed to be.

Chapter 9

Afternoons after painting they wandered back to camp gathering armfuls of firewood from the slope below the painted cliff. Heather had saved some midday nuts for Loon, and their winterover taste reminded him that summer was almost on them. He was running out of time for his leg to heal.

He limped around the riverbank to the beach under the Stone Bison, following Moss and Sage. They fanned through the shallows plucking new sedges for baskets. The tender white sedge bases in the mud broke off with a snap. Female stems were required by the basket weavers; male stems would be thrown back at you.

Sitting under the great stone span over the river, they processed the leaves so there would be less to carry home. Remove the outer leaves, peel off the inner ones, split the inner ones lengthwise in half by running a thumbnail down the midrib. Pieces not split right down the middle had to be discarded. Squeeze the half leaves between the fingers until they were flat and flexible. Be careful not to cut one’s fingers on the sharp edges. Tie the processed leaves in bundles of a few score, then take them back to the weavers in camp, who would spread them to dry, dye, and ply. Their women made very fine baskets, very highly regarded at the eight eight festival. Heather had a lot to do with that, being good with dyes.

Heather’s spirit animal was not actually the spider but the wolverine, and this was so right for her. Wolverines were very solitary, and demonstrated an intelligence and rancor second to no other animal. Same with Heather. She did have her good moods, and it was probable that wolverines did too, but in both cases it was a private feeling, because company itself dispelled it.

Although Heather was not completely predictable in that regard. Sometimes she would breathe in some of Thorn’s pipe smoke and slump down by the fire baking herself like a cat, chatting with whoever was next to her. Sometimes when it was raining, in that heavy gray way that said nothing different was going to happen the rest of that day, it was she who would begin to sing some happy song, in a bright tone completely inappropriate to the moment; thus obviously sarcastic, sung to make fun of them; but as they all sat under the abri watching the rain piss down, eventually it could make you laugh.

Loon’s spirit animal was the loon, of course. Apparently he had gotten so excited when he was a little baby, hearing a loon singing one night out on the river and waving his little arms, going red-faced as he tried to sing their weird songs with them, that they had given him his name that very night. And all his life since, at night when the loons talked to each other in their unearthly language, which outdid even the wolves’ for liquid strangeness, Loon still felt a sizzle down his spine, and tears would start hotly in his eyes, and he would get up out of bed and stand at the edge of camp and cry back, ooping and looping in the hopes that the big gorgeous black-and-white birds with the red eyes would hear him, and understand that even though he didn’t know their language, he loved them. And in fact sometimes they did hear him and reply to him, which Thorn said was one of the greatest honors a man could be given, as a loon’s cry was the greatest voice a human could hear. How lucky to have your spirit animal sing back to you in the night, and fling your spirit up into the stars!

Crouch kept complaining, so it was best to stick around camp and pray to the sun for faster healing. Flex it in the sun bath over and over, ask Heather for one more rubbing. Rest it, she would say. Massage it, and feel exactly where it hurts, and how. Press starting from where it feels good, and very slowly press into the hurt. And keep it in the sun as much as you can.

So he went down to the riverside, where the sun blazed down and bounced off the water too. The sand was warm under him, and it felt like the sun was kissing him.

So when Sage showed up on the bank by herself, and sat by him, he tried kissing her too. He leaned toward her, and saw she saw what he was up to, and then saw the eager look come into her eye, and seeing that he fell in love with her. Again. So many times it had happened, ever since they were little children, and this time his spurt was hard, and she rubbed it as they kissed until he spurted, and in the moments of kissing, when he could remember to do it, he rubbed her little vixen until she too spasmed, scrunched over her pulsing belly and squeaking into his neck.

—Do you spurt inside? he asked.

—I clutch.

She grabbed his arm in her hand and squeezed rhythmically to show him, and at that his spurt started to harden again. Women bison and deer clutched like that when they wanted a bull or a stag, their kolbies pulsing pinkly. The way Loon and Sage would fit together was extremely clear: finger in glove, antler in cleft, heron and vixen. But Sage was very strict, having recently been red-dotted in the women’s house. She would never allow his spurt into her. So they only kissed some more and then sat talking in the sun, feeling pleased and generous. The glitter of the current off the river sparkled in his eyes and he could feel himself glowing in his afterglow. He knew he was healing fast. Even Crouch was healing.

—Did you hear Schist is going to give some of our food to the Lions?

—No!

—He is. Bluejay is really mad at him. He says there’s enough, but he didn’t ask anyone else about it, he just did it.

—But we’re down to eating ten nuts a day!

—I know. Bluejay and Thunder are really mad at him. His sister Moony married into the Lions, they say it’s all because of her, that he doesn’t care about us.

—The ducks better come on time.

—No lie. If they don’t they’ll be cooking him over their fire.

And they laughed. The ducks would come.

So that was good, but meanwhile his friends were going out hunting, and he couldn’t go with them, not yet. He would make up for it later.

But he could see that Hawk was growing fast. At the end of almost every hunt Hawk came back with something, even now in the hunger month. He was getting good at it. When they were kids, Loon had been better than him at all the things it took to be a good hunter. They had raced and chased together, played and wrestled, threw rocks and little javelins they made, and he knew he had been better at these things because they tried them so many times. Hawk knew it too. But now, maybe not. Now Hawk was broad-shouldered and lean around the waist now that all his fat was gone; he stood tall and had a fine head with tightly curled hair and a squarish set of teeth, very handsome. Very strong and graceful.

Then one night across the fire he saw Hawk and Sage slip away in the night, and his throat went tight and his feet cold. Well, she wouldn’t let Hawk do very much either. Still, it meant what it meant. He would have to fool around with Ducky and make Sage jealous too. Little looks, bad jokes, sharing food or braiding hair.

Stuck in camp, he helped Heather and Bluejay make shoes. This was meticulous work, and Loon plied the bone needle slowly, following Heather’s awl punches, which were all at the same angle and distance from each other, in a curving line that would sew together the bearskin bottoms and the deerskin uppers.

One day when Bluejay wasn’t around, Loon muttered something about Sage going off with Hawk.

—So what’s your problem? Heather asked.

—I guess I’m jealous.

—Jealousy is when you don’t want someone else to have what you have. Envy is when you want something that someone else does have. So it sounds like you’re feeling envious rather than jealous. Because Sage is not yours.

—It doesn’t matter what you call it, Loon muttered unhappily.

—Yes it does. You’d best know all the words and what they mean, or else your thinking will just be mush.

Heather returned their attention to the shoes. She thought marmot fur uppers were worth trying for winter boots. She liked to try out new things that occurred to her. She made things backwards sometimes, especially for Thorn. She seldom spoke directly to Thorn, and looked at him as she would look at a hyena or one of the other worthless animals.

He would glare back at her as if looking at a wolverine.

Now when he walked past she grinned horribly at him and said,—Here, unspeakable one, have this gift from me!

It was a pair of shoes made of porcupine skin. Porcupine mothers had the easiest births of all, so little toy porcupines were slipped carefully down the front of a pregnant girl’s dress for good luck. Now Heather had made shoes of a porcupine’s skin, with the smooth side outward and all the needles pointing into the foot. They were finished, so had to have taken a fist or two of work, and yet completely useless except for this moment of her sharp laughter.

—All yours! she cried to Thorn.—May they lend wings to your travels!

Thorn glared at her, then took the shoes from her and looked inside them.—Wait, I see something, he said.—You made your vixen into shoes for me!

He fingered one of the bear claws on his necklace and thrust it in and out of the shoe in a copulatory manner.—That was us, he said, and threw the shoes back at her.

—At least you got the size of your prick right, she said as she dodged the shoes.

—I was just keeping it proportionate, since you shrank your mammoth kolby as much as you did.

And they glared at each other before Thorn stalked away.

Chapter 10

Another morning in the sun, grinding earthblood. Thorn sitting nearby, sewing something or other. When not biting off ends of the sinews, his face a mere thumb away from the hides as he needled them, he talked as always. From time to time he told Loon to recite one of the stories he was supposed to know.

—Start with the seasons to get your mind going. You’ve known that one since before you had a name.

Or not known it. Loon sighed and tried:

—No no, Thorn said.—It’s,

—Why would you get that part wrong, of all things? Also, it’s

—Try it again.

Loon repeated it, keeping it the way he had said it the first time.—Summer is when people lie in twos, he pointed out.—I like it better that way.

—But that’s not the way it goes!

—I’ve heard it that way lots of times.

Thorn gave up and went back to talking to himself.—Ah, see how this shirt I’m wearing is something I made the year before last, it was in the ninth month and we were back home, and I was sitting right in this very spot. So I can know an action from the past. And here it is now. And when I come back here next summer, the shirt will be here again. So now is now, but in this now there is some mix of the past and future, right there inside things, and blowing around in our thoughts. Everything keeps rolling around. Because there will be a now next year at this same day of the year. Nineteenth day of the fifth month. We know that. So every day is the birthday of all the days in the years to come that are this day.

—I don’t understand you, Loon said.—Have I got enough powder here yet?

—No, Thorn said without looking.—Of course you understand me. Because I’m talking to the you in you that is the birthday of the yous that will follow. So if you understand me then, you understand me now. By then I’ll be dead and just a white point in the night sky. I’ll wolf your heels, boy, like Fools the Wolves wolfs the Firestarter.

—So I’m going to be the Firestarter? I thought Firestarter was Firestarter.

—I’m not talking to the you that is here right now, you are too insolent.

—Just tell me how to etch a curve like that bison’s neck you did. How do you get the line to curve so smoothly when it’s stone cutting stone?

—It’s not stone cutting stone, it’s flint cutting whitestone, and that’s how. You chisel it out grain by grain. Just keep your eye on the line you want, and make it happen.

—So you have to see it before it’s there, is that it? No wonder you need birthdays from the future.

—Well exactly. See, you did understand me.

—No. Not at all. Show me how to make the line. Show me how to start it.

—Let your future self show you.

—Is that why you keep your yearsticks? To tell your future time what you were actually doing when you did it?

—Yes, exactly.

—But that’s silly. Stupid. Backwards.

—That’s why I’m the shaman and you’re not.

Thorn was very insistent about the importance of his yearsticks. Every morning he took one of the obsidian blades that had been glued into sticks to make fine cutters, and cut a line in his yearstick, which was always a nice piece of river-worn oak driftwood. On every new moon day, he cut a loop on the top of the line marking that day. At the eight eight festival he would get together with the other shamans, a very crazy and obnoxious gathering, and during the days they would do their corroborations. Thorn already had Loon marking a yearstick of his own, supposedly separate from Thorn’s, but as Thorn never forgot and Loon sometimes did, it was not a very happy arrangement. Thorn thought that Heather should join them in doing it, to provide a third so they could corroborate within the pack, but she declined to do it. To Loon the yearsticks resembled many of Heather’s other pursuits, but she didn’t like doing anything that would please Thorn, so it didn’t happen. And so Loon was always wrong, and if by chance he wasn’t the one who was wrong, then they would really have problems when it came time for the corroboree.

—I don’t think Firestarter is starting a fire, Loon said.—I think that’s his antler pronging down at us. He’s on his back trying to mate with Mother Earth, and he can’t get close enough, and the Spurtmilk came from him.

—But the Spurtmilk is in the summer sky, Thorn pointed out.

—That’s right, he came so hard that his spurtmilk flew right around into summer.

Thorn laughed in a way he had never laughed at Loon before, truly amused.

—I don’t think so, he said at last, shaking his head.—The firestick is just at the right angle. And then there’s the base too. Those stars can’t be his nuts, they’re too far apart.

—Those are his hip bones, Loon explained.

Again Thorn laughed.—All right, good, he said.—A new story to tell.

Chapter 11

The eyes speak what the tongue can’t say. Force begets resistance. Even a mouse has anger. After dark every cat is a lion. In spring Mother Earth is pregnant, in summer she gives birth. Children are the true human beings. The good-looking boy may just be good in the face. Danger comes without warning. Every fire is the same size when it starts.

Such an itch for something different to happen. How he wanted his wander back. The ducks kept not showing up, and Thunder and Bluejay began to roast Schist daily for giving away some of their food to the Lion pack. Schist ignored them, his face hard. He turned his back on them and walked away. No one got to complain to him about their food, even though they were the ones feeling the pinch in their guts.

Eventually Loon just had to go back out on the hunt again, Crouch or no Crouch.

—You’ll be all right, I think, Heather said doubtfully.—If not just come back. You can’t push the river. Hurry the break-up and bring on a flood. So be careful. Let your good leg carry you. If you can do it at all, it will be good for you. You need to get out there for it to go completely away.

So he went off with Hawk and Moss and they went upstream, over the low ridge between Loop Meadow and the confluence where the Ordech ran into the Urdecha.

Hawk and Moss were happy to have him back with them on the hunt, and after asking once or twice about his leg they stopped mentioning it, as being an unwelcome reminder. This was the usual courtesy among men on the hunt. They went neither slower nor faster than normal, and when they came to Mother Muskrat Meadow on the Ordech, they went silent and took the west ridgeline around it, single file and heads down. Loon focused on the ground, and on dancing over it in a way where good leg carried bad. His javelin served as Prong had in his wander, and its cupped back end took a little beating; hopefully it would still fit onto his spear thrower cleanly when the time came. Best not to jam it down onto rocks, and to hit the ground cleanly with the whole rim of the cup. Ah yes, it was going to work. His friends were happy and he was happy.

Above the meadow they came on some of Mother Muskrat’s children, splashing in the inlet turn. Their black heads swam around in the water, their whiskers cutting little curls in the sides of the nose wave. If they thought the three young men were interested in them, they would dive and take refuge in a muskrat house emerging from the water near the far bank. Possibly the humans could have descended behind trees close enough to throw a javelin, but it would be a long throw. Better to remember and come back and set a trap underwater. They wanted something bigger anyway.

Bigger, they said to each other, and hiked onto the upland at the top of the Ordech saying bigger, bigger, bigger. And today luck was with them; the hunger month was almost over, and some of Mother Earth’s creatures were in trouble. On the rim of the upland stood an elg, thin under its enormous splayed antlers, looking out of place on the broad moor, where you could see so far that the Ice Tits were visible over the horizon to the west.

The three hunters had frozen on seeing this elg, and after that they moved without moving, flowing like snakes into a alder brake that filled a wet seam in the moor. Inside the brake they had to move over the alder branches without moving any of them enough to squeak, or even quiver. The elg themselves were unexpectedly good at this complicated procedure, despite their immense size, so it would be a coup to use the method to creep up on one. And it would also be a coup to bring back to camp that much meat and hide. Indeed they might have to make two trips home with it all, and hope for the best concerning what got left behind.

But this was getting ahead of the game. For now they had to flow through the brake toward the elg without revealing themselves to it. Elgs didn’t have much of a nose, and the hunters were downwind of it. So for a long time they slithered through the net of alder branches, making sure their javelins never got hung up. Sometimes finding a spear’s way was harder than getting through oneself. Some of the thorny vines that grew under alder were so intensely thorny that they could pass over one’s skin without pricking it at any point, the many tips making a surface of sorts. If one could pass these without snagging… but so often they snagged. One had to accept the poisoned little scraping and slip on, indomitable as an otter.

Loon came to the edge of the brake, and through the last net of branches saw the elg still where it had been. Its hide was unbroken, free of sores on the back, and yet it was gaunt. Probably sick, or old. It would still be well worth bringing back. Hawk and Moss appeared to his left and right, and they had a little eye conference. The problem was clear: how to get the javelins deployed on their spear throwers, and then throw them, without revealing themselves to the elg. It wouldn’t be possible unless it had its back to them, in which case it would be hard to kill with javelins. If they hit it and then it ran off, they would lose their spears to it. So, two of them should throw, hope to wound it, and the third chase it and rush in for a more direct throw or thrust. Hawk wanted that part, so Loon and Moss twisted and contorted until they had their javelins cupped on their throwers, and aimed. Loon eyed his throw space, got ready to throw; the convulsive jerk would have to be just right. Looking into each other’s eyes one last time with a mad glee of anticipation, they counted it out with their moving lips—one, two, three, throw!

Hawk immediately burst out onto the moor and ran toward the elg, which was trotting away, both spears hanging from his right haunch. So they had both hit him, but now they had to get him. Loon and Moss crawled out of the brake and followed Hawk, who was chasing down the elg with his javelin held in his right hand just over his right shoulder, ready to throw. It would take a thrust to the gut to bring him down, so Hawk would have to outrun it, and to Loon’s surprise he was actually doing that, running faster than Loon had ever seen any human run.

Then the elg suddenly stopped and kicked back at Hawk, who had to tuck and roll over his spear, then stop on one knee and thrust the tip up into the exposed gut and roll away, dodging a kick of the elg’s foreleg. That too missed, and Hawk had stuck him deeply in the gut. For a time the beast stood there, breathing heavily and bleeding from Hawk’s puncture, which was so close to the ribs that it might have hit a lung.

—Die brother die, they implored it, looking around for rocks of the right size to make a useful blow to the head. It might also be possible to withdraw one of their spears from the right haunch, but that would risk another vicious kick, and backward rear leg kicks were dangerous. And the last kick is the worst.

There were rocks ready to hand almost everywhere on the moor, and as soon as they all three had both hands full, they threw six rocks in a flurry, and Loon’s first throw caught the elg right on the ear, causing him to bellow and turn as if to charge, but this was too much for him. He stood there quivering and bleeding more than ever from the gut stick, as the spear was dragging on the ground. Moss dashed around him like a mink and darted in to pull out one of the spears from his haunch. The elg did indeed kick at him, but feebly. Moss got his spear out and prodded briefly to spur another weak kick, and after Moss ducked away from that he came back in with the returning leg and stabbed deep at the gut just in front of the haunch, twisting it at the end of the thrust and then leaping back to avoid another kick. It was just like when they had fought as kids: Moss was a counterpuncher.

The elg began to bleed from the mouth and nose, which meant one of them had punctured a lung. They cheered as the elg went to his knees and snorted out his last breaths.—Ha! they shouted, slapping each other with a huge delight.—Thank you brother! they shouted at the dying beast.

The elg crashed onto his side and gurgled his last breaths. When he was gone they could tell; there was always a noticeable difference when the spirit departed a living thing. Immediately it was as inert as a stone. The spirits sometimes stayed nearby, and there were certain proprieties and taboos about eating creatures too soon after they had died, just to respect these hovering spirits. But the bodies were empty. And none of the taboos obtained when it came to getting meat back to camp before scavengers arrived to complicate things. Indeed this was a time to hurry.

They had to work hard to cut up such a big brother. Their spear tips could be used as cutters, and though they weren’t as good as real meat blades, they were immensely better than the choprock Loon had used to break down his deer. Even so it was hard sweaty work, and they huffed and puffed as they speared the joints apart and cut hard at the ligaments.

They cut the haunches entirely away and then gutted the body, then cut the head and neck off just in front of the forelegs. The head would be the most awkward of the three pieces they wanted to carry back to camp.

As they were working the sun went down and quickly darkness fell, as always on the moors of the upland. And they were covered with elg blood. So they were not comfortable being out there, as several wolf packs regularly passed by here. The closest pack to their camp ran a ten-day circuit around its land, and had not been seen for most of a fortnight, so they were due back anytime.

When the waning half moon rose they hefted their pieces of the elg and began to run toward the mouth of the Ordech. They traded the elg parts during brief rests, to alter the kind of load they had to carry. It had already been a long day and night, and at a certain point Loon felt the weariness in his thighs and calves, and all through him. He had to limp pretty hard to keep his bad leg quiet. He breathed deep and fast, working to call up his second wind. There was a period between when you called for the second wind and it came, when you felt like shit and simply had to bear down and slog through the weakness; that bearing down was the call for the second wind, and the sign that it was on its way. And as often happened, when the second wind came he forgot he had ever been tired at all; the night could go on for as long as it wanted, it didn’t matter. He was eating his own body at that point, Heather said, so there was food enough for a long haul.

But Loon had to admit, as the night wore on, that his bad leg was bad. He also had a good one, however, and because the good leg was so good, he could do it; he could favor the bad leg and in time it would get better. So tonight, the trick was to see how well he could get along on the good leg, and not hurt the bad leg further in this run home.

They came into camp around a fist before dawn, and most of the pack woke up and cheered them, and built up the fire and ate a little roasted meat, while breaking down the elg into parts that would preserve better. Hawk and Moss and Loon were congratulated and cosseted as they told the story of the hunt, and Loon didn’t say anything about his leg, but he couldn’t help protecting it around the fire, and both Heather and Thorn saw it, and glared at each other as if each thought it was the other’s fault. It almost made Loon laugh, but he was too worried to laugh.

Chapter 12

The next day Loon looked down at his body and pinched the skin over his hip bones. The lobs of fat that had been there through the winter were completely gone. His skin was the same brown as certain horses’ manes, a particular brown lighter than most of his pack’s skin color. People said he had some lunkhead in him, that that was why he was so stupid. There was no fat in the ring around his belly button either. He couldn’t have packed on much more fat last fall or it would have slowed him down. Some men got so that they almost looked pregnant, but of course they never really did, because they carried the weight low and looked like dropstones in the river, whereas women carried their kids right under their ribs and looked beautiful. It was a stark contrast, and sometimes struck Loon’s eye very strongly when he saw a bag-bellied old man; which was rare, as usually he only had eyes for the women. Men he evaluated with the same dispassion he gave to himself; how was that one doing, how was his body faring in the daily struggle? Not bodies but motions he admired in men, in the way he would admire his own leaps and jumps when they surprised him, coming so fast he could only witness them after the fact, as memories. Things happened so fast he could only remember them. When he saw the other men move like that it was beautiful. They were capable creatures, tough animals among the other animals. They could outlast any animal in a long chase, and that said a lot.

But the women—the women were beautiful. They were as beautiful as horses. Their hair, either braided or flying free from their heads, looked like manes. They tossed their manes like horses, they worked in groups and chattered like squirrels and looked at you; they looked at you, they looked at everything with a most piercing glance. They were the most curious animals of all, even more than their sisters fox and cat. They could spear you with a look.

There was a grove with some soap trees scattered among the spruces, just over the pass at the head of Upper Valley, in the north-trending canyon they called the Lir. Loon spent some days after their hunt walking slowly over there and cutting off some straight soap-tree branches. It was a hard wood, but filling the core of new shoots was a soft pulp that could be hollowed out. The hollow stick that remained could be used as a dart blower, or made into a flute. Other pieces could be split into four lengths, and each quarter polished and its ends sharpened and fire-hardened and polished again, and the result be two pair of knitting needles, one for Heather, the other for Sage.

Doing that took a few days of sitting in the sun, back against a warm boulder, talking with the kids and eating elg steaks and elg head stew. The moon was almost gone, and they worked by firelight on the things they were going to take to the eight eight festival. The soap-tree leaves he had brought back with him were mashed in a log trough, and on the sunniest mornings they washed their clothes in the foamy water. After that the smell of spring cleaning was in the air, and they knew their summer trek and then the eight eight were coming soon. The hungry month would end, the ducks would be here any day. Their remaining nuts had their overwinter flavor worse than ever, but they were still there at the bottom of their bags. Schist could have pointed this out to the complainers, but that was not his style. Besides, it wasn’t over yet. Until the ducks came out of the south he would definitely not be telling anyone I told you so. When they came, the hard care in his face would finally relax, replaced by a satisfied gleam in the eye, almost a smile.

Thorn showed Loon where to cut the holes to make a flute sound right, and how to blow in the upper end of it to make the notes. After that Loon was like a baby owl hooting, or like a jay squawking if he blew too hard. He would have liked to sound like a loon, but the sounds broke differently inside the flute. Every night in his bed he played. After half a fortnight or so he could make the notes reliably. He wanted to play it inside their cave.

They went out on the hunt again, looking for more animals suffering the long hunger month, in a larger group that included Spearthrower and Nevermind and Thorn. Thorn always brought up the rear, but was smart about the animals, and interesting to have along. Loon thought he might be out there as a drag on the group to help Loon’s leg, but of course he would never admit to that, and Loon didn’t show any sign that he suspected it.

They killed an old bison hiding alone in a brake, and were near the end of the task of breaking it apart for carrying, and had buried its bones and guts in the deepest part of the creek, and jumped in upstream themselves to wash up, when they started teasing Nevermind about his recent marriage to Rose, a good-looking eagle girl from the Lion pack. Moss made one of the usual cracks about getting less of the vixen after marriage than before, and Nevermind parried by claiming he was getting more than ever. When they all laughed disbelievingly at this he got huffy and said that when he wanted it he took it. She didn’t really mind.

A dubious silence followed this assertion.—And how did you find out this would work? Thorn asked.

Nevermind was nervous answering Thorn about a matter like this, but his friends were around him listening, so he said,—Because I just did it! She said no one night when I wanted to, and I said, Oh no you don’t, and made her. After a while she liked it.

Another silence.

Finally Thorn said,—Why would you be so stupid? Now you’ve given her all the power in your marriage, don’t you see?

—What do you mean? Nevermind asked, sullen and offended.

—You have to do what she tells you now, Thorn explained,—or she’ll tell the other women what you did. And if she does that, they’ll kill you. So now she has all the power between you.

—The women can’t kill me.

—Of course they can, Thorn said. He stared at Nevermind with his chin tucked back into his neck, miming a look of exaggerated astonishment. The younger men all stared at him. He said,—How could you say such an ignorant thing? They cook your food and put what they want in it. They give you life they give you death. They bleed and they make you bleed. Talk about the monthlies, they can make you bleed daily, bleed from your pizzle and your asshole and your ears and your nose, even your eyes. Maybe it’s poison in your food, maybe just from the way they look at you. After a bit of that look you’ll wish you’d never been born. You’ll jump off the cliff into the gorge to be out of your misery. That’s the kind of power they have. They have the sky behind their eyes, you can see it when they look at you. So now you have to do just what Rose says, or she’ll tell them, and then you’re a dead man. I’m surprised you would give over that kind of power to anyone, especially just to get a spurt. You could have done it yourself, or just been polite and waited your turn. Even husbands only get their turn.

—How would you know? Nevermind asked, trying his best to fend off the old man.

Thorn waved this weak riposte aside.—I was married. Back in the dream time, before you boys were even born. Now I don’t have that burden or that blanket. You should enjoy it while you have it, be thankful. Mother Earth speaks through those silly girls. I’m surprised you weren’t taught that, growing up in this pack. Mama mia, if Heather ever hears of this! Shit. Really, the way it is now, any of us could get you killed with a word to the old hag. So you are the weakest lunkhead in the whole pack.

With that Thorn hefted his chunk of the bison meat and headed toward home. The others followed, at first subdued, then enjoying the prospect of bringing such a load back to camp. Even Nevermind cheered up; he was well named. And killer goddesses or not, their women would be pleased to see this much meat, and the cooking and smoking and drying would go on long into the night. Some of the young hunters would give meat to young women who didn’t have it, and some of those would give them a spurt in return, that was just the way it was. So in the slant light of late afternoon they got more cheerful, and ran back to camp dancing with their own long shadows, singing a particularly rude song to irritate Thorn, who after his outburst had retreated to wolverine silence, surly and brow-furrowed. Then as they came over the last low pass and dropped into camp, they heard the women singing the sunset song. And their hearts were filled with a fearful joy.

Chapter 13

The wolverine nearby lived under a boulder in a south-facing tilt of boulders overlooking the river. His home was warm and dry, and over the years had been made into a comfortable nest of a home. It had four entrances, uphill, downhill, upstream, and downstream.

No one bothered the wolverine. This was not because of his size but because of his ferocity. Besides which, if you did manage to kill him without getting killed yourself, his flesh was fatless and tough as roots. He wasn’t worth the trouble. Only very hungry wolves or lions would even consider it.

So wolverine walked the gorge by day, or under the moon when it was big, looking around for food. Berries were just green dots now, but he ate a few just to get their taste to start the day. Berries in the morning and meat in the evening, this was wolverine’s routine. Bears were big fools who bumbled along eating whatever they found, they didn’t bother with a plan. Wolverines had plans. This one was going to walk his big walk. He would go down the river gorge, up the second loop creek, up that creek’s left fork, and then over the pass at the top of the fork, and down the first loop to the river gorge again, after which a short stroll would bring him back to his boulder.

This circuit provided his food and allowed him to view his territory. Of all the animals he shared it with, all the cats, raccoons, weasels, foxes, bears, horses, porcupines, beavers, muskrats, ibex, chamois, elg, skelk, rhinos, hyenas, lions, leopards, mammoths, squirrels, and all the rest of the various beasts, the pack of humans was by far the most dangerous, to him as to everyone else. But they were also the most interesting. Not interesting enough to take him near their camp, but he knew all their traps and snares, although it was true he had to keep sniffing out new ones, which they kept making because of the other animals they caught. He kept his distance. Regularly, however, he would walk the gorge wall at a part that allowed him to look down onto their warren, and sometimes he tracked them when they left it. As with all pack animals, they were not as dangerous on their own as they were in groups. A single one would avoid him on sight, unless it was a young male with a spear, in which case the wolverine definitely kept his distance. The rest were just as happy to keep their distance from him. No one bothers wolverine.

On this morning, near the ridge at the top of second loop’s west fork, he was surprised to hear a small moan. He stopped and sniffed, then smelled one of the long-headed humans, who were mostly heavier and slower than the ones from the warren, and mostly lived toward the sunset, except for some solitaries. This one’s arm emerged from a thicket as if reaching for him, and wolverine hopped upslope, landing on all four paws in his usual way, ready to bite and claw. But it was not necessary. The human male held only a loop of birch bark in his long-fingered hand. His blunt flat claws were useless compared to wolverine’s. The arm hung there out of the thicket forlornly. Behind it, through the leaves of the brush, he could see the human’s eyes looking at him, watery and sad. It was hurt. In a day or two it might be an easy meal. Trying to trap a wolverine with birch bark: it was desperate. Its wound smelled bad.

The human whistled a perfect imitation of a female wolverine’s hello. Wolverine, startled at first, then impressed, stepped closer to see if the human would do it again. He did: a truly inviting hello. The long-headed humans were really good vocal mimics, wolverine had heard that before. Now this one shifted into a whistle like a lark’s, liquid and burbling. Again very impressive. Wolverine sat up on his haunches like a big marmot, settling in to hear more.

The human whistled and hummed for quite some time, giving wolverine the calls of several birds and animals—even the wet smack of a beaver tail on the water.

Finally it quit.

Wolverine got up and went on his way, wondering what would become of the human, and if it would be worth returning on the following day before moving on in his big walk. Humans tasted strange, but that made for an interesting change. The long-headed sunset people were exceptionally dense and heavy in their meat. Well, he could decide the next morning, depending on hunger, weather, the little sprain in his right foreclaw. On whim.

But then he came on a female human he knew. He smelled her before he saw her, and that was enough to be sure. Old female often out alone, now wandering upslope with a basket hung over one arm. Herb woman; no one else in the forest smelled like her.

Today she appeared to be interested in the new mushrooms. First mushrooms were thin and bland. She fell to her knees in front of them and plucked them up and sniffed them, then either put them in her basket or dropped them. She got up by putting a hand down on the grass and shoving herself up, like a three-legged thing. No other creature did this.

When she straightened she saw him and raised her basket above her head, then pulled up her dress and displayed her sex to him. This was her usual hello. Wolverine stopped and raised his head to sniff hard two or three times, which always made her laugh. She put down her dress and looked around the hillside above her, confident that wolverine would go on his way. And usually he would have. He had seen this human kill a bobcat that was leaping at her by putting a hollow stick to her mouth and blowing something into the cat’s face; the cat had run off howling, and over the next hill died, writhing and frothing from the mouth. Wolverine had been afraid to eat it.

So he left this human alone. When they happened to pass each other in the forest, they always said their brief hellos, and she laughed, and that was that. But today wolverine was still thinking of the male human who could sound like so many other animals, and he thought the herb woman would be interested to know about him. So he stood up on his rear legs like a marmot again, and caught her eye, and then jerked his head toward the pass, just a short stroll above them.

The woman laughed at this and said something agreeable. Wolverine led her up the slope of the forest to the pass, ignoring the switchbacks that she used, but always making sure she could see him. When she reached the pass he whistled her down the western slope, which was thick with trees, to the little copse holding the longhead. When he saw that she had seen this person in the thicket, whose eyes were round at the sight of his return, he veered back up the slope, working his away around her. For a moment he tarried, peering down to see how the two humans were getting along. They were whistling back and forth in a friendly manner. Wolverine strolled back up to the pass and wabbled off on his way.

Chapter 14

Heather came into camp and asked Thorn and Loon and Hawk and Moss to help her, that she was treating a wounded old one over Lower Upper Pass.

She didn’t want the old one moved into their camp, she told them. Everyone was relieved to hear that, because she had brought all kinds of wounded creatures into camp before, which was why her nest was located out on the edge away from the fire. This time she just wanted their help getting this wounded old one into a protected spot.

What that turned out to mean was building a shelter right over him, because he was too hurt to be moved. So they wove a spruce shelter around and over him, while he stared at the ground and occasionally glanced at them, sometimes emitting a cooing whistle.

—We say, thank you, Heather told him.

—Tank oo, he said.

Weaving the spruce branches into position took them a while, and during that time Heather sat Loon down beside her to help her care for the old one.

He was broad-shouldered and squat. Once he had been strong, but now he was emaciated. It gave Loon a quease of disgust to be so close to him. He smelled like an old one, and had that old face, a real saiga of a face, distended and foolish. His skin was mushroom pale, so much lighter than normal skin that it apparently was translucent, as Loon could see blue veins under his pale skin. This was truly disgusting. One or both of his legs was badly hurt. His coat was roughly sewn, his fur skirt made of a fur Loon couldn’t identify. His shoes were simple bearskin wraps.

He did not meet their eyes, but while looking at the ground, glanced up at them from time to time. He had a huge beak of a nose, big furry eyebrows, and a forehead that receded to a balding head, somewhat like Thorn’s but much longer and paler. His ugly face, which might have somewhat resembled a beaver’s if it were not for the great nose, held an expression attentive, intelligent, concerned. In a speechless face the eyes do all the talking. What these eyes said was clear enough: this old one was sick and in trouble, but trying to be hopeful about their intentions.

They finished building the shelter over him. He whistled and clicked and hummed at them, and Heather said reassuring things in return, and even whistled something he appeared to understand, one of his words it seemed. Immediately he whistled away at Heather, but she shook her head and repeated a few low warbles, and words in their language. Eat, drink.

—Tank oo, he said.

After that Heather sent the boys up to guard him and give him some of the worst overwintered nuts, and she worked her medicine on one of his legs. It was mostly a matter of rest, she told Loon.—Injury needs rest, you can’t take things too fast. Healing happens, but it takes time. So you have to give it time. A moon and fortnight for that hurt you had, and him too.

She appeared to whistle a similar message to the old one, for he did lie around for most of a moon, eating and drinking what Heather and Loon brought him. She taught him a number of words in that time, but the one she said the most was,—Slowly, slowly, with her hands and movements illustrating what she meant by it. He nodded from the waist when assenting to her, and with a visible effort said,—So-ly, so-ly.

When he was finally getting around on his feet pretty well, he came to her one morning after dawn and held her hand in both of his, whistled briefly, and took off toward Lower Upper Pass. After that they saw him from time to time in the distance, in the way they occasionally spotted other local woodsmen, who mostly tried never to be seen, but sometimes got careless. And from time to time there was an offering of snow hare or baby goat, or flowers, left in front of Heather’s nest. And she left things out there near the old one’s broken shelter as well, in the same way that she left things out for her cat.

Because Loon slept near Heather and helped her, he got more of a chance to see the old one than many of the group; and because he went out with Thorn, or on Thorn’s behalf, to gather chunks of earthblood from the spot under Northerly ridge called the Giants’ Knapsite he continued to see the old one out on the land. The old one was like a woodsman, it seemed: cut off from his pack, if he had ever had one. He bumbled through his rounds like a bear, setting traps for little animals and birds, eating berries and grass seed along the way. He moved strangely, and his smell was as if a little fermented. His beard was like a saiga’s beard, straggling under his chin, providing a point to balance the massive shelf of his eyebrows. His beaky nose had perhaps been smashed to the side at some point. His hair was held back by a leather band, and hung down freely over his shoulders. He wore a fur cape all the time, and now went barefoot, as if his bearskin shoes had worn out and he could not make new ones.

Thorn believed one could not become a good engraver without learning to make good tools. A good straight burin, some good blades, and a nicely edged scraper made all the difference. When it was rock against rock, you wanted your cutter as hard and sharp as possible.

So they sat in the sun and hit blocks of flint with choprocks of granite and schist.

Thorn stretched like a cat in the sun, and said,—Wait, I see something.

—Not another one of your riddles.

—They are not my riddles. They are the world’s riddles. Listen:

—You are the second wind, Loon said, thinking of his recent night return from the hunt with Hawk and Moss, and pleased to have seen the answer so readily.

Thorn laughed.

—What, aren’t I right?

Thorn tipped his head left then right, which was his sign for yes and no.—It’s like the second wind, he allowed,—but you think small.

—The second wind is never small, Loon objected.

People said Thorn had been a very strong hunter in his youth, but Loon had not seen it. Maybe he had forgotten what the second wind felt like when it came into you.

—Granted, Thorn allowed.—The second wind is big. But it’s even bigger than that.

—I’ll think about it.

—And smaller too, don’t forget. Most boys posed that riddle say it’s about a grasshopper. And he laughed at the look on Loon’s face.

Thorn spent a lot of his mornings taking care of the kids on the flat at the east end of camp, where the trees gave them a mix of sun and shade. He was much different with the little ones than he was with adults. He sat among them playing with their toys and goofing around, while also running them through their lessons.—They’re so much easier than you, he would say to Heather and Loon.

—Children are the true human beings, Heather intoned, whether sarcastic or not Loon could not tell.

—Well, it’s true. They’re not old enough to have problems. I’m so tired of you all and your problems. Men and women are just big bags of problems.

—You should know, Heather said.

—Indeed I should, watching you and all the rest. My time is much better used with the kids.

—A pinch of mother is worth a pack of shaman, Heather reminded him.

Thorn only waved her away with the back of his hand.

But with the kids in the morning sun it was different.

—Wait, I see something: little dots in the distance.

—The birds are coming back! the kids would say.

—That’s right. Our summer friends. We’ll see that again real soon. But wait, I see something: little wood crumbs falling out of a tree.

—The grouse is up there eating, one of them said. If just one of them spoke up, it was usually Thunder’s daughter Starry.

—That’s right. Some people call them rock pounders because of the funny whirr they make when they run. You’ve heard that sound. On the coldest nights they sleep under a blanket of snow. You can walk around on a snowy morning and surprise them sometimes, catch one for breakfast. But you have to be fast.

The kids assured him they were fast, and he agreed.

—Wait, I see something: tiny bits of charcoal scattered on the snow.

Silence.

—No? It’s one of the white-in-winters. The beaks of ptarmigans. They’re so white in the winter, all you can see is their beaks. It looks funny. Wait, I see something: we are wide open in the bushes.

Again silence.

—Another white-in-winter! It’s the eyes of the snowshoe hare. They watch you when they’re hiding, and their eyes are the only part of them you can see. How about this; wait, I see something: a bit of charred wood waving around in the air.

—Same again! Starry said triumphantly.—The ermine’s tail in winter.

—Very good! And then wait, I see something more: far away yonder, a fire flash comes down.

—Fox in the summer, Starry declared.

Thorn tousled her head.—You’re going to be a handful, kid. All right, last one. Wait, I see that the river is tearing away things around me.

—Is it you? Starry asked, eyes round.

Thorn laughed.—Yes, you bad girl. But it can be an island too. But we’re all islands.

And they decided to make a toy village on a puddle island and then drown it all in a terrible flood from a bucket. They all loved that game, Thorn most of all.

Chapter 15

Out with Sage, at the bog where the Edich dropped into the Urdecha, to collect herbs for Heather.

Sage filled her basket slowly, distracted by thoughts of her own. She had long legs, and the hair on them was a fine black down, nearly invisible against her dark skin. Her shirt was loose, and when she bent over to pick a sprig of mint or thyme her breasts were revealed, swinging together like udders. Loon hummed happily and begged a kiss, but she wasn’t in the mood. She picked green moss for the two babies’ diapers, but it was also for the next full moon, when the women’s house was crowded, and so Loon pretended not to notice. Full moon was an odd time, because so many women would retire to their shelter and do things on their own, while at the same time the young men gulped down berry mash and went out to see things in the full moon’s pale but revealing light. In other packs it wasn’t like that; in some, most women bled at new moon, and huddled together in the starry nights around the fire, waiting it out. Either way they would need a lot of dried moss.

They watched a mother porcupine lead four little balls of needles across a patch of open ground. Bears and porcupines were cousins. They lived alike, and helped each other. Otters had no relatives, they would kill anything. Otters were very intense. Farther down river a family of them slid around on the mudbank that dropped into the river, and even in their play they were intense. Women couldn’t eat any part of otters, or else their children might become nervous and uncontrollable. Once Loon had passed a beaver pond with its beaver house just behind the dam of logs they had felled. It all looked fine, but strangely quiet. Then an otter emerged from the water next to the beaver house, sleek and round-eyed as it looked around, its muzzle still bloody. Loon had shuddered, imagining the carnage in that round house, a whole pack comfortably at home and then a swift black thing swimming in and killing everyone with bites.

But everyone had to eat.

Up on the ridge above the big cave Loon saw a flicker between trees. Not red, so not a fox. Could have been a woodsman. Every once in a while they appeared in the distance, usually in forests, which was why they had their name. Most of them had lost their luck, Thorn said, lost it so bad they had lost their pack too. Because luck was real.

Thorn always said that he didn’t have any luck anymore, nor any spirit powers of his own, but had learned to ask the spirit powers out there to visit him and take him over. It didn’t look like a comfortable thing. Sometimes he sighed heavily on the days when he woke to realize it was a day for one of his spirit travels. He drank berry mash all day and trembled as the time came for the visitation. He would flick Loon on the ear for no reason. The spirits who visited him were Bison Man, Birch Woman, the Night Colors, and another he would never name. Telling others about one’s abilities could sometimes make them go away, so Thorn was usually reticent and even secretive about that part of his life. But Loon was his apprentice, and although Thorn did not think much of Loon in that regard, he had to train him or find someone else. It would have pleased Loon to be rejected and allowed to go his way. He kept trying to make that happen, just on the off chance it might work. As the ducks kept not coming and everyone got more stretched and thin, Loon was ruder and ruder to Thorn, or he just left camp all day, every day, just as he had so often as a child. But Thorn seemed determined to keep him, and the truth was that Loon liked etching stones, and carving wood and antler and tusk, and making the paints and painting. He wanted to paint the big animals inside their cave when the time came for him. In that way he wanted to be a shaman. And Thorn knew that and used it against him. And he reminded Loon that being a shaman was a good way to know lots of women too, even if they were sick when you knew them. Loon found that idea horrible. A lot of what shamans had to do frightened and disgusted him.

Not only did the ducks not come, but one day the air went so cold that the sun showed its ears, and everyone returned to camp and began to prepare for a cold snap. It was the worst time of year for one, because the last snow was melting and all the little creatures’ tunnels between the snow and ground were flooded. It was already the most dangerous time of the year for every animal, much worse than winter itself; to add a freeze at the end was a hard thing. But the sky was frosted, and the sun’s ears gleamed in a circle around it. Cold was surely coming. At this point firewood was more important than food.

Cold enough to frost your face, cold enough to freeze your pizzle; everyone got into the big house, even Heather.

Two days later, with frozen little creatures all over the land, it warmed back up again. The day after that it got very warm. They heard the first mosquito, and when you can hear one mosquito there are sure to be ten more around. The day was coming when the river was going to break up.

They gathered on the Stone Bison, where they could see up and down the gorge of the Urdecha a long way, and the flat discolored ice with all its leads against the banks ran right under their feet. Thorn put on his bison head and led them in the prayers to the river, asking it to break up cleanly so that it wouldn’t get dammed and flood Loop Meadow and drown their camp. That had happened. Just in case it did again, everyone had their most valuable small possessions in their belts, and were dressed in all their finest clothes. It was a hot day to be wearing so much, but they would soon be able to swim in the open river and wash off all their sweat and body paint. It was one of the biggest days of the year. And surely after break-up the ducks would have to come.

Upstream and downstream, the river was groaning. In the fall when it froze and made these noises, it was crying out for its blanket of snow. Now it was crying out for release, for the chance to run free and see the sun again. Loon recognized in these low booms and sizzling cracks the very words his own spirit had been crying out inside him since his wander. He sat on the back of the Stone Bison and moaned with the river, as many of the pack did.

Big jagged plates were rising out of the shattered patches of river ice, as if something underneath was pushing up to be free. Some leads were resolving into eddies, with small ice plates jumbling in their downstream ends. Many shards of ice were half black with bottom mud. The booms and cracks became very frequent and loud.

Thorn approached Loon. He looked oddly small under his bison head. He said loudly to Loon,—Let’s say the break-up story together, right here watching it.

—No, Loon said without thinking. He didn’t know that poem.

Thorn’s right hand leaped out and flicked Loon on the ear, the first time he had managed it since Loon’s wander. Loon howled and stood up to walk away.

—No, Thorn shouted, standing in front of Loon and pointing at the ground. His eyes were fixed on Loon like little suns.—Say it now, when it’s happening right before your eyes, and remember! Remember!

After a while Loon bowed his head. He rubbed his throbbing ear and looked at the stony ground of the Stone Bison’s back. Well, when memorizing this one his ear had always been throbbing, it seemed. With a big sigh he began:

—No no, Thorn said.—That’s Fill water fill.

Loon tried to remember what came next. Below them the deepest canyon of the gorge was groaning hugely, as if a big woman in a spasm of birthing pain.

Suddenly Thorn spoke, and Loon listened gratefully, because he had never remembered what came next.

As it happened, Thorn shifted to a different story, one Loon knew much better.

—That must have happened right around this time of year, Loon joked when Thorn was done.

—What do you mean?

—I mean, it didn’t matter what the shaman said or did. The water was going to recede anyway, its time had come.

Thorn stared at him.—Repeat the part I said.

Loon stood and spoke as loudly as he could:

Thorn had raised a fist during Loon’s changes to indicate his displeasure, but the gorge was now cracking and roaring under them very loudly, sounding very much like the cracks and rumblings of thunder overhead. Loon hoped that one day that would happen, that the break-up would come in the midst of a giant thunderstorm, and he had an idea for a poem that hopefully would be ready to tell, if it ever did happen.

Now, in the cloudless sky, with the sound originating below them, it was too awesome a thing to persist in stories, or anything else human, except just to watch and bear witness. The white surface of the river ice was fracturing downstream in a jumble, starting on the outsides of the river’s curves, then flowing downstream from where they began, until big sections of the river were all cracked open, and black open water visible riffling below. Ice plates were detaching from their banks or each other and moving downstream, white rafts crashing into each other and reforming immense masses that flowed downstream until they ran into a bank, or another raft of ice, when plates of ice slid over each other, or broke up and tilted at the sky. Sometimes big ice dams crossed the whole flow from bank to bank, and water built up behind them, floating more ice rafts into them so that they quickly grew, and more water bulged up and pressed higher on them, until with roars louder than thunder the whole white mass roiled down the black chaotic stream, ice plates tumbling and rolling wetly until another dam snagged and held them all again.

Everyone was standing arms outstretched on the downstream side of the Stone Bison, looking down at the spectacle; everyone was shouting and yet no one could be heard. Even Heather was open-mouthed and red-cheeked, grinning hugely. The whole pack of them howled like wolves, and not a voice was heard in the stupendous break-up. When it came upstream, and was happening right under the Stone Bison itself, they danced and hugged each other and spun in circles until they were facing the upstream side, well away from the edge, for it would not do to fall in now; and when the break-up showed under them, and proceeded upstream away from them, they howled louder than ever, and still could not hear themselves in the giant roar of the world.

And then someone spotted a line of ducks in the sky.

Summer was here.

Chapter 16

So they had not starved. They had felt the pinch, and as the very first ducks to arrive were never taken, they had a bit more pinching to go. They devoured the last of the winterover nuts and went out to set the snares that would catch the ducks that came in the following days. But it felt different when you knew it was only going to go on for a while longer: sharper, but less frightening.

With the success of the last four winters, their pack was getting rather large. Two score two was a still good number: not so small that they had to worry about defending themselves, not so big that the food required to feed them was impossible to gather.

Still, the way everyone knew everyone else. Relations, habits, likes, dislikes, abilities, weaknesses, tendencies. Everything. Smells, digestive habits, turns of phrase. They knew each other so well that they were no longer interesting to each other. Part of the excitement of the coming of summer had to do with the prospect of seeing other people again.

After the duck snares were set on the still parts of the river, Loon went out with Heather to help her hunt for her special herbs. Some of them grew only down in wet-bottomed hollows, and Loon could help by getting down into places Heather was too stiff to reach.

Heather’s cat followed at a discreet distance. Heather had found it as an orphaned kitten and kept it alive, but at a certain age it had gone off on its own, and now only came back in the winters to skulk around for food. They had several camp robbers like that, mostly jays and squirrels, but also a minx, some marmots and foxes, even a nearby beaver family who made quick raids on them from the river.

Heather used her cat as an herb tester. She would leave some meats the cat liked most with a sprig of a strange new plant in it, and when the cat ate it Heather would watch to see what happened. She didn’t think any plant would kill the cat, because if it did not agree with the little beast it would quickly cough it back up.

When Heather saw this happen, she would shoo the cat away and go to the vomit and inspect it closely, even take dabs of it between finger and thumb and taste it with her tongue.

Now as she did this Loon said,—Heather, you’re eating cat vomit.

—So what? I can taste tastes that are like other tastes I know. It gives me ideas how this flower might be put to use.

—What if it kills you?

—Cats have very delicate stomachs. It won’t kill me.

Loon said,—I dreamed about some lions last night, a gang of them going after some bison.

Heather wasn’t interested.—I don’t know about dreams. Maybe it’s one of those worlds we don’t see very well. We only see snatches of them. I don’t know what they are. It’s this world I know. Well, know. It’s this world I look at.

—So you eat cat vomit.

—Better than eating shit.

—Well sure, but who would do that?

Heather shook her head darkly.—We all have to eat shit sometime.

Loon didn’t know what to say to this.

Heather gave him a look, laughed her brief hag’s laugh.—When you get hungry enough, you’ll eat anything. And the first time it goes through you, not all of the food in food gets eaten. You shit some of it out uneaten. So there’s some food to be had in shit. Second time through is pretty bad, I admit. You get gas, the runs, it tastes like shit, you bet. But you get something out of it. You can tell that’s true because you do it again.

—Again?

—Not with the same stuff. I mean later. A third time through you wouldn’t work. Your body knows that and wouldn’t let it in you anyway.

—So you didn’t have any other food?

—That’s right. Some winters are hard. Heather frowned as she stared at the western sky.—Harder than any you’ve ever seen.

She picked more of the herb sprigs the cat had thrown up, inspecting them for undamaged flowers.—Hopefully harder than you’ll ever see, she added.—But they do seem to come along every once in a while.

Chapter 17

As the seventh day of the seventh month approached, they began to sort through their gear and decide what to take on their summer trip and what to bury. They would collapse their big house and the women’s house flat, and cover them with big rocks; leaving them intact always got them ransacked. Even when flattened and covered, sometimes it looked like other people or some bigheads had dug into them, and other times it was clear that bears had clawed some rocks away and rooted around, no doubt interested in the scents. But by their leaving the camp as clean as possible, marauders would find nothing but old hides to eat, and although hungry bears would eat old hide, as they would anything that lived or had ever lived, still their downed camp was often left alone, and could be reconstructed that much easier on their return.

Loon’s clothes were well made and clean. Loon had stitched them, but for the most part Heather had cut the parts, and she had her own style. Loon liked the way his clothes felt and looked, and when compared to the makeshift equipment of his wander, he felt superbly comfortable and well dressed.

He wore a woven reed cap that had a good sun brim, and a strap to tie it under his chin in a wind. He had made it himself and would wear it until his abuse wrecked it, after which he would weave another one.

On his back, outside everything else, he wore a woven reed cape, which took such a beating from water and sun that he needed a new one every summer. He folded and stuffed it in his sack when he did not need it, and that too was hard on it.

Under that he wore a parka made of caribou hide, with ruffs of marten and marmot fur around the hood and bottom and sleeve ends.

His middle was covered by a skirt of deer hide turned inward, with a crotchpiece of rabbit fur cradling his pizzle when it was cold.

He had chaps of caribou hide, but kept them in his pack except during the bitterest cold or the thorniest brakes; he liked his legs free as much as possible.

He often went barefoot, but his shoes, worn on rough ground or during long walks, were some of Heather’s best, with bearskin bottoms and deerskin uppers, big enough to take a layer of fine straw stuffed in their tops when he wanted that warmth.

Over his arms were the hide straps of his backsack, and in his sack were his fire kit, some duff and punk and fungus tinder, an ember bole, and some bearskin butt pads. In the fold of his waist belt were flint and antler points and needles, a burin, some blades, a tassel of leather strings looped in a bone ring, a blade retoucher, and some assorted lucky pebbles and teeth, including his deer’s teeth.

These things were really all one needed, along with a javelin and spear thrower. One could become a traveler with just them. They took all that away from a boy going out on his wander, supposedly to make him prove he could get by on his own; but now it occurred to Loon that if the boys were allowed to leave with their things, a lot of them might never come back again.

Loon made up a riddle of his own: