Shaman: A Novel of the Paleolithic Era

Chapter 18

On the seventh day of the seventh month they began their summer trek, walking up Upper Valley and over its head onto the moor to the north, then over three low divides into the valley of the Lir. Everyone carried a sack on their back; some of these were lashed to wooden frames strapped over their shoulders, to take on heavier loads and the new kids too small to have a name.

River valleys and their feeder canyons were often thick with brush or blocked by boulder fields, so they walked almost entirely on ridge trails. These had obviously been used forever, they were so well marked. Always in the land they crossed, when you succeeded in finding the best way you would find a trail there already, in some places trod ankle deep. When the trail ran over rocks it would be a matter of cairns marking the way, cairns ranging from two or three stacked stones to rockpiles taller than a person, and including many carefully stacked stone figures of one sort or another. One also saw bits of colored yarn tied to branches, in places where there were trees.

On the last pass before the head of the Lir, they came to a spring that poured out of a broad spot in the pass itself. In most of the summers they visited it, its water ran down into the valleys on both sides. Around this double outlet spring the meadow was trampled by hoofprints and paw prints. They drank there, and then dropped into the Lir valley, for the spring was considered dangerous to camp at.

So in the waning of the day, near the end of the long summer evening, they came to their traditional first night’s camp. It was the same every year, unless something untoward happened to slow them down. This first camp had an open prospect to the north and west, and the late sun slanted off the nearest ice cap, which from here loomed well over the ridge to the west. This was the northernmost of the four ice caps that rested on the highest parts of the highland to the west of the Urdecha. Even in summer these ice caps stood there, smooth snowy white hills, with parts of them the creamy blue of bare ice. The two smallest ones farther south they called the Ice Tits, the larger ones to the west and north, the Big Ice Caps. Whenever the people of Wolf pack saw these big ones, they knew they were on the way to the salmon and caribou, so the sight always filled them with the sudden thrill of distance, of knowing they were in that moment of the year and on their trek over the great big world, like all the other animals in summer, journeying from one place to another in search of their livelihoods.

On the third day of their journey, low dark clouds poured over the western horizon on a cold wind. The ridge trails were headed mostly downhill now, and mainly northward. Once they got to the north end of these ridges they would be on the open land of the steppe, but now they were still in the hills, on an exposed ridge trail, and this summer storm was coming in on a raw wet wind. So they stopped early that afternoon and dropped into a protected high canyon to the east, and chopped up branches and made a shelter in a grove of oak and hemlock and white spruce and yew. It was a big storm for summertime, but these things happened.

When they were all tucked out of the wind, under a woven spruce branch shelter, they rekindled their fire from embers they had carried from the previous night’s fire, and huddled and ate some of the last of their nuts and the newly caught ducks of this summer, delicious straight from the fire. Schist and Ibex and several other men went out setting snares and looking in likely dens. Thorn and Heather took over the fire, and, given the look of the night to come, laid it long and hot, to build up a bed of embers to sleep by. The clouds rolled in thicker and thicker, until it looked like evening all afternoon. When night finally fell, little chips of snow flew sideways on the wind, sailing over the branches of their grove and the smoke of the fire. It was going to be a stormy night.

—The unspeakable one should tell the story of how the animals got summer, Heather said to Thorn.—That’s one he always tells on this walk.

—You tell it, Thorn said unhappily. His bones hurt him in any unexpected cold.

—In the beginning the sky came right down to water, Heather said in her clipped harsh tones, as if she were recounting a story she didn’t approve of.

—Fine for them, Thorn remarked. But tonight we’re just going to be cold.

—You still have to tell the story, Heather said.—What kind of a shaman are you?

Thorn did not reply.

As they took a day’s rest to wait out the storm, Loon saw Sage talking to Hawk again, and he could see the interest there in both of them. After that, when they continued north and west down the Lir valley’s east ridge, he thought about it, and what Heather had said about jealousy and envy, and when they came to the next river crossing, he helped Ducky across. She was the best-looking of their women after Sage, indeed many called her the beauty, because of her rounded figure, which was indeed a little ducklike, even now that she had grown up. Sage would not care about this, he judged; but it would be possible also to ask Ducky to take Moss’s spear thrower back to him, now that Loon was finished carving a horse’s head into it. Moss always camped next to Hawk, and when Ducky took him his spear thrower, Hawk would see her, and they would talk for a while. And indeed it happened just that way. This pleased Loon. He thought something might come of it.

The ridges got lower, and the ridge trails passed now between valley bogs that were often covered with moss. The women plucked a lot of it and took it with them.

Then it got stormy again, a warmer storm, wet and windy. Weather really mattered when they were on their trek. They didn’t want to lay by any more days, so they put their capes over their sacks, and over the kids being carried, and hiked on underneath ever-taller black-bottomed thunderheads, enduring the wind and the occasional pummeling of hail. When thunder rumbled to the west they made camp fast and hunkered down in it. Getting the fire going was hard, keeping their beds dry was hard. In so many ways, rain was worse than snow.

Thorn, perhaps stung by Heather’s words, held his hands out to the fire when it got going and intoned,

The next day, walking north and west, they came to where a knob on the ridge they were walking gave them a view to the great salt sea. Always so vast, with a sunbeaten blue unlike the sky or anything else. An awesome sight.

The ridge trail turned right and headed straight north, running along the hills edging a flat coastal plain that stretched to the great salt sea. The hill route was easy walking, with occasional knolls providing high points to camp on and keep a good lookout. The biggest problem was crossing the rivers that here and there cut between the hills, flowing west toward the great salt sea. But over the years a number of rafts had been built, used, and then pulled up on these rivers’ banks at the best crossing points. So they could usually paddle across on these.

This year when they came to the first big river, they found that their crossing point had been dammed by a log jam, a truly enormous log jam consisting of many scores of logs, most of them giant tree trunks, and all wedged together like the branches of a beaver dam, but much bigger.

—Big Beaver must have done this, Thorn said.

There were many stories about Big Mother Muskrat, the mother of all the muskrats, who lived in her lake on the way to the ice caps; and the log jam did look like the work of a beaver twenty times normal size, so they laughed at Thorn’s joke. However this log jam had gotten started, now it was snagging every floating tree swept downstream, so that it was always growing on its upstream side. It was hard to see what would ever move it, except the rotting of the trees, and since new ones were arriving so much faster than the old ones could rot, it seemed like it might last forever, like the Stone Bison over their river.

Carefully they walked over this new dam, stepping from one stripped battered log to the next: up, down, over, holding the little ones by the hand, hefting them over branches that blocked the way. They followed Schist’s lead, which he marked with ties of red yarn, and the route was solid; not a single log moved under them. They might as well have been walking on fallen logs on the forest floor, even though through the many holes underfoot they could see the river bubbling west. It was strange and beautiful, and they talked about it all that night by their fire.

Still farther north, out on the coastal plain itself, the kind of landscape features they used around their home camp to locate themselves were no longer to be found, so they spoke of their route in ways that at home they would only use to talk about the wind: they headed north, on low land to the east of the great salt sea.

Overhead, shifting lines of geese spear-tipped the way for them, also heading north. It was the twelfth day of the seventh month now, and every living thing on earth was moving, it seemed, including them. There was a thrill in that you could feel in your spine. SUMMER. They woke at dawn and ate by the fire, packed up, went downstream to shit and pee, gathered the little ones up one way or another, and headed north. The morning moment of taking off was as effortful and squawky as the geese when they flapped and ran over a lake to get off water into the air. There were many sharp words from Schist as he got them on their way, but also encouragements, and direct help to those who were lagging. Something about him made his encouragements more encouraging than other people’s. He was good at making you want to do what you hadn’t wanted to do.

The rest of the day was a matter of walking north, with some young men tapped to bring up the rear. Loon was happy to do that. His bad leg was not so bad when going at the pace of the pack, across a coastal steppe. Clumps of grass and stretches of bog covered the flat land, with shallow ravines full of low bushes and gnarled little trees. There was a lot of old snow still on the ground, so soft and suncupped in the afternoons that it was hard to walk on it. The trail stayed slightly higher than the bogs, sometimes on low bluffs overlooking the great salt sea, other times inland at the first real rise, running from ford to ford over the rivers. It had been a snowy year, and some of these fords were running too high to walk across, and they had to find the old rafts if they could. This year the rivers here seemed to have swept them all away, so they had to make new ones. While some of them made these rafts out of driftwood, a few of the young men would run upstream to see if they could find something to eat; this was so seldom successful that they came to understand how much they relied on traps and snares at home. So they set snares every night, but snares worked better when they had more time. During the day hunts, they tried to come back with some eggs or mushrooms at least. The truth was, they were all still hungry. The ducks, delicious though they were, were not enough.

But the farther north they walked, the less the land held. The rivers had to provide, if anything was going to; but these rivers were not yet full of their salmon and sea trout, coming back home to die. One of the fords worked as a fish weir, and there were signs on both banks that it was often frequented; but they saw no one this time.

When the seventh full moon came, they were at the river called Deer Ford. This was the moon when the caribou were going to arrive nearby, at the western end of their annual trek. In effect these caribou and the people of Wolf pack made treks from different winter homes and converged here.

This year the caribou were nowhere to be seen, however. Thorn warned the pack that it might take longer in such a snowy year, and they would just have to be patient and spend the time making a good chute to run their caribou through. That was all very well, and they set to the task with spirit, but they were again getting down to the last of their food. It was just as well when it came to the nuts, as they were beginning to go beyond the satisfying oddness of their winter fermentation, to something truly rancid; and the pungent liquid fat they had in their sealskin bags was taking on the taste of the bags. They needed fresh meat, like the ducks but more of it. Hopefully it would be coming soon.

One night while they huddled around in the smoke of the smudge fire of birch fungus, which was the only thing that would hold off the mosquitoes, Thorn went into one of his vision trances, first eating his mushroom and artemisia preparation, then vomiting like Heather’s cat, then lying back in the beginning of his trance, snorting and muttering. No one bothered him as he lay there spirit traveling.

He came back to them the next morning, and said the caribou appeared to be less than a week away, but it was hard to judge when looking down from so high in the sky. In any case they only had to get through a few more days.

Then wolves began to appear on the ridgelines of the low hills upstream.—See, Thorn said.—They’re here to tell us the caribou have almost arrived.

—They’re here in hope, Heather said.—They’re saying to themselves, the humans are here, so the caribou must be coming.

—Well of course, Thorn said.—That’s only right.

Wolves and humans were cousins, just like bears and porcupines, or beavers and muskrats. Wolves had taught people to hunt and to talk. They were still the better singers by far, and hunters too for that matter. What people had taught wolves in return was a matter of dispute, and depended on what stories were told. How to be friends? How to double-cross and backstab? The stories were divided on this.

Then one evening at the end of the twilight, with the ribbon of the river next to them the lightest thing on the dark land, a great horned owl flew over hooting its hoo, hoo, which means yes.

Thorn stood and shouted,—They’re here! The owl saw them, and I can feel their hooves in the ground!

No one else felt anything, and the land remained dark and empty, the light band of the river pouring through it. The moony band on the river surface was the only movement, the river’s chuckling the only sound. Thorn sat back down grumbling.—You’ll see, you’ll see. The owl always knows.

And in the morning they came. The first ones ran up and crashed into the river and swam to the other side, then some stopped in the big meadow inside the swing of the river to nuzzle into old grass and new, both revealed by the melting snow. Caribou ate better in winter than summer, and so now were fat, and still wearing their long winter coats.

While on their summer trek, the caribou were always in a terrible hurry. They followed each other in loose lines, speeding up in sudden little panics, and hesitating impatiently if another line cut in front of them, or just surging into them, impelled to keep moving. There were many scores of them, filling the meadow and the low hills around it, hurrying and hurrying, as if they had lost all restraint and could do nothing else. When they finally did stop to forage and look around, they seemed surprised and uneasy to find themselves not in a hurry. But here was their summer home. They migrated west and east, unlike the birds who migrated north and south. And when they arrived at their summer destination, there to meet them every summer were mosquitoes, deer flies, wolves, and humans, each of these packs dangerous and full of pain for the caribou, and therefore to be flicked away, or avoided, or faced up to, in lines of broad-chested bulls with lowered heads and sharp antlers. Why they came nobody was sure, but it was said that their summer food grew first here and they came for that.

The Wolf pack’s method for trapping and killing caribou almost always happened in the same area and the same way. Thorn sometimes said this was the way it had been done since the old time, but on other occasions claimed it had been his own idea, which had come to him as a child, watching the men running around the steppe chasing down the beasts one by one.

In this region the steppe was flat as always, but with low lines of hills running north, and boulders scattered all over. Many were too big to move, but there were lines of smaller stones, and these lines sometimes came in twos. The Wolves chose one of these paired rubble lines, as they always did, and cleaned up the ground between the two knee-high walls until they had made an inviting passageway.

The caribou as they arrived in their scores crossed the land somewhat like flocks of geese, in loose ribbons of twenty or so. They joined other ribbons or separated as the land shoved them this way or that. They were all rushing to get somewhere, and none of them knew where. Considering the distance they had come, which was many days to the north and east, so far that no one knew for sure where they wintered, it looked to the humans like they were hoofing along as fast as they possibly could, maybe even faster than could be sustained. They were strong and fast creatures, fore-weighted like a rhinoceros or hyena or bison, with heavy shoulders and a long heavy neck and head, and big antlers on the males. They seemed to hurry at least in part to catch up with their heads before they tipped and fell forward.

In that hasty careless state, so unlike their usual wariness, indeed as if they were possessed by some spirit not theirs, it was relatively easy to spook a ribbon of them into the chute the pack had made with its paired walls. And at the western end of the chute, under a small drop which the caribou normally would have jumped down without any problem, and so would not be afraid of, the pack had placed some poles across rocks, then also some antlers, until they had built a trap line that was certain to trip some of the beasts when they tried to pass over it.

When the trap was ready, the men went out with wolf skins on their heads in groups of three, and began running around trying to spook a line of running caribou into the eastern end of the chute. This took some crouched running and frenzied leaping on the part of these men, wolf heads flopping on their foreheads to give the caribou that first alarming profile on which they made their snap judgments, like every other animal. Meanwhile the people not out there hid behind the low rock walls, listening for the thump of hooves on the sod that would announce the beasts’ arrival. Loon stayed with this second group, as his bad leg was hurting a little, and the runners often had to get crazy to spook the beasts. So he sat there with the rest of the pack in ambush, salivating heavily as he listened for the signal whistles or the thumping in the sod.

Then the thumping sound came, and the hoarse breathing that one always forgot year to year, and the unhappy neighing of the first beasts as they tried to stop rather than risk a jump down onto the poles, and their squeals as they were pushed over from behind by other beasts; then Loon stood with the rest who were in ambush, his javelin end cupped onto his spear thrower and his arm raised.

Panicked caribou were being pushed from behind and pitching over onto the beasts already below. Loon chose one beast teetering on the brink and threw his spear as hard as he could. It was a very close throw, but downward, so he had to adjust accordingly, and he did: the spear slammed deep into the beast right behind its ribs, and Loon shouted to see it. Quickly all the men cast their spears into the mass of struggling beasts, and the women and children threw rocks at them, and the big beasts thrashed and bled and screamed, the air filled with the smell of their blood and shit and piss. The human screams were as loud as the caribou.

In a matter of twenty or two score heartbeats they had about twenty dead caribou lying at their feet, which was as much as they could deal with at once, or more. It was a bizarre and awful sight, shocking and exciting. Everyone was cast into a kind of blood lust; their mouths ran and their faces were red and pop-eyed. Some of the boys and girls were sent racing to the chute’s eastern end, to drive away any beasts that might run into the trap. Thorn went with them to help them construct a block.

Loon limped up to the top of the little hill overlooking their trap, and saw columns of smoke in the distance, rising from the distant fires of other packs of people. They were all out there doing the same thing. The smoke from every fire was black with burned caribou fat.

Some of them started a fire from their embers, and the kids were sent out to find old caribou dung to add to the fire, as the steppe had so little wood. The rest of them set to breaking down the animals. But before they began, Schist led Loon and Nevermind and Ibex in the performing of the caribou sacrifice, and Thorn tagged along. Never take the first of anything was their constant rule, and so here they took the westernmost body and eviscerated it, then placed a big stone up inside the ribcage, and together carried it down to a deep spot downstream in the nearby river. There they threw the caribou in, chanting the thank you chant, and Thorn threw in some painted stones after the body, asking the caribou to return the following year, and thanking them for this year’s gift of themselves. Then they went back to the kill site and the hard work of breaking the animals apart.

Everyone worked for as long as there was light, and ended up with blood all over them; but all the while there was a fire roaring that allowed them to cook favorite bits of the beasts, and burn the parts they could not use, which were admittedly few; but it helped fuel the fire. And disposing of these parts helped to keep scavengers from descending too hard on them in the night. Even after night fell completely, not long before midnight, they continued by firelight.

First they skinned the beasts, chopping out the useful ligaments and tendons as they went, and eating as they worked, getting into a bit of a frenzy, working without clothes on to avoid all the blood, so that the women looked like they were at their coming-out dances, the men from their hunting initiations, all of them streaked with grease and blood, and euphoric with the sudden ingestion of all the fat and muscle of the beasts. They bathed downstream in the narrow but deep river that ran next to the hill they were working on, immersing themselves briefly in the snowmelt water, knowing that with their bonfire they would be able to warm back up, and would stay warm as they kept on butchering. They set a big night watch to guard the meat, and were faced with so much of it that they deboned the legs so they would have less weight to carry when they left. It was a long hard day and night of work. And the next day and night would be much the same.

Schist and Ibex howled when they came back from making the river gift to the caribou, and Thorn grinned to hear it. Loon saw suddenly that Thorn liked the pack’s ceremonies that did not require his leadership; this was something Loon had not realized before. Loon put that away to think about, and went back to chopping through hip joints, sitting down as he worked to give his bad leg a break, and trying to be careful as he got more tired. He made each cut like it was a test in a trial, or a contest at a festival, judged by something stricter even than Thorn: which was to say pain. For it would be all too easy, with everything so slippery with blood, and every muscle getting tired, to cut oneself on a turned blade; it often happened on this first night of the slaughter. On a journey of twentytwenty days, that treacherous last step. It was easy on this long night to feel how that could happen.

But no one was hungry anymore, indeed they were all stuffed, and the fire was sizzling and cracking and airily roaring, and between the remaining work, the feasting, the dancing, and, for some, the quick slipping off into the night for a spurt, the entire pack was laughing and singing. Groups went down to the stream to strip off and plunge in screaming, rubbing off the blood and guts, splashing each other, and when clean, hiking gingerly back up to the fire to face it and get warmed up again. It always happened this way; they were at this day of the year again, around full moon of the seventh month; the long winter and the hungry spring were over, and they had reached the time when they were fully fed again, and would be eating well for several months to come. There wasn’t another day in the year as giddy as this day, as full of relief. They had made it through another spring.

Loon danced by the bonfire, staying off his bad leg. He fronted the fire and caught its heat, then spun away to laugh at the night, which was very chill, except in the bubble of their fire. But you never feel as warm as when some part of you is still cold.

Sometimes the fire burst with fat exploding. Loon watched all their women, all wearing nothing but skirts, or waist wraps and necklaces, and even knowing every body there, muscle by muscle, move by move, still it was something to see them in the firelight, moving high on the fat in their tummies, swinging around their flat summer breasts, their bodies each known to him curve by curve by curve. His eye was always caught most by whatever seemed at first to make their bodies somehow wrong, but which over time eventually made them right, or made them them, each to her own self. Then too there were the ones who had no flaws or oddities, Sage, Chamois, Thunder, each perfectly proportioned in each her own way.

He danced or sat down from time to time to give the bad leg a break, and wiggled his toes and drummed with the boys for a good long time. Who knew how long these times were, when you were lost in moments that you hoped would go on forever. Although of course the moon always told. Loon drummed away watching Sage dance, and she looked so good his spurt antlered in his wrap, and he stood up and danced with it thwopping side to side, a little pole of pulsing pleasure leading him toward Sage as she danced, her breasts nowhere near as big as they would be in the fall, but even so, their curve and bounce on her ribs as she danced, her arms in the air to left and right of her, her butt dipping and spinning, two big round muscles like the rumps of mountain sheep, known so well to him, their layer of fat hardly there in this month, just pure muscle and the promise of fat, maybe the best look of all; such a long-legged girl, so rangy, so graceful and smooth. Oh yes, Loon would have been very happy to stumble off with Sage into the night, go down by the stream where the chuckle of the water would sing them along and cover their noise as their kissing and rubbing took them away into the realm of helpless cries indulged. It had happened the year before, and this indeed was the thought that was causing his spurt to stand all athrob.

But tonight Sage was not making eye contact with anyone, and was clearly intent to stay in her dance. This was perhaps a response to Hawk as much as to Loon, indeed every man there had a happy eye for Sage, and she by dancing with none of them danced with all of them, which was nice, and appreciated. And no doubt it was the same for the other women, Likes Mash and Chamois and Ducky and Bluejay and Thunder, each of them the favorite perhaps of different men, and Sage by no means the only beauty of the pack’s women, but just one of the sisters. Oh yes their pack had such sisters. One had to be fierce to defend such women from the otters of this world; and yet at the same moment one had that worry, one could recall that all the other packs were similarly blessed, and so one could rest easier. It was a world of beautiful women, and the whole world ran for them. A twenty of packs would soon meet for the eight eight festival, and all the men and women would mingle, everyone in their finest clothes, and there would be fires and dances like this one; there many young men and women, and boys and girls too, would find each other for the first time, members of the proper clans for each other or not, and they would stick together afterward, and the packs of the steppe and the highlands and the canyons to the south would mix and become more related yet again. There were packs from the frozen north who stole each other’s women, it was said at the festivals, but among the packs who lived south of the caribou steppe, from the great salt sea in the west, to the great salt sea in the south, to as far to the east as anyone had been, they were all interrelated, so there was very little thievery of that kind.

When Loon sat back down, and began to nod off over his little drum, the dancers and bonfire flames blurring together in his eyes, so that he was about to crawl off to sleep, or simply to tip over and sleep where he sat, Sage grabbed him by the arm and pulled him off into the darkness over the hill. He had been just far enough away from the fire that no one would necessarily have seen them going off. They fell onto Sage’s fur skirt spread over the cold ground and started kissing wildly, and though Sage didn’t let him inside her, which would have shocked him in any case, they rubbed each other as they kissed, and Loon whispered,—I love you, in her ear, and she squeaked, and they came at the same time, laughing a little afterward, immensely pleased with themselves. Sage gave him a last nip and a light slap to the face and pulled her skirt from under him and was off into the night. Loon proceeded to his bedding, and saw she had gone back to the dance by the fire, still full of spirit, indeed it looked not at all unlikely that she would soon drag some other boy off into the night to ravish. Loon was both pleased and displeased at that thought, a little aroused, too tired to see the harm in it. He lay down and fell asleep feeling gloriously empty and full.

It took them many days to cut up their caribou and smoke the meat. They worked hard, because the eight eight was coming soon, and by then they needed to have finished and hiked the way east to the festival grounds. So it was caribou all day and all night.

Smoking the meat was essential to preserve it, and a lot of them worked at building a long fire, creating a hot bed of embers so that green wood or wet dung would burn and their smoke rise with the heat, passing up and through strips of rib and haunch meat strung on thick hide lines, which were completely covered with meat chunks so that they would not themselves burn. They smoked as much meat as they could carry, while also eating as much as they could. It took a bit of care to keep from making oneself sick by eating too much fat at one time, and they all groaned a bit when they had to go downstream to the shitting ground, and on their return. It was hard on the gut to eat so much meat, hard on the asshole to shit so much shit. Despite that they ate with a real will. There is a hunger inside hunger, as the saying had it. This inner hunger kept them eating long past the point where their bellies were round and hard. They all wanted to get some fat on them for the hard months next spring, which right now they remembered so well. They sent the kids out to the berry brambles around their perch to gather berries to add to their meals and stew into the mash that would get them drunk at the festival.

The new moon of the eighth month came on them fast, and they were all anxious to get to the festival. The festival site was a few days’ walk away, an immense meadow on the southern edge of the caribou steppe, surrounded by a low ring of hills that became part of the encampment. As always, they now had many big strips of smoked meat, also sinews, ligaments, hides, bags of grease and of liquefied fat: they had more than they could carry. But they were going to drag it.

They found alder thickets in the steppe’s shallow river ravines, and cut many three-year-old shoots, long and straight and springy, and lashed them together to make travois, which could haul loads over the steppe much larger than what could be carried on one’s back. When the travois were lashed together and loaded, the young men and women got in the harnesses and did the hauling, while the elders dawdled behind them, joking about how easy it was to get kids to haul when the eight eight lay at the end of the path; which led to the jokes about how impossible it would be to keep up with them, if they didn’t have travois tied to them to slow them down. Same jokes every year, same everything; and that was very, very satisfying.

Chapter 19

They came to the festival site from the west, and from a long way off could see the low hills surrounding the site, each hill topped by a cluster of big spruce trunks, stripped of branches and bark and stood top end down, so that their root balls waved at their tops like hair or antlers, with animal skulls hanging from every other root end. Thorn claimed to remember the emplacement of these tree trunks in the time of his childhood. It was stirring to see them first pop over the horizon, and then as they approached become a strange sight, the mark of their meeting, and of their existence as more than just packs out on their own. They could hear the drumming from a long way off, first the low thunk of hollowed tree trunks, a sound which seemed to come out of the ground, and then the hide drums of various sizes, battering the air and quickening the blood. FESTIVAL!

They always camped at the same spot, on the south side of one of the low hills, next to the Eagle pack whose home was two confluences downstream from them on the Urdecha. Wolf people who ran traps often ran into Eagles out on their own rounds, and now some of these men came over and helped get camp set, around the same fire ring as always. Smells of dung smoke and burning fat lay heavy in the warm and buggy summer air, and the people in the camp next to theirs were playing bone flutes, a little band of them playing as loudly as they could, working against the drumming from the meadow and filling the air with several notes at once, creating harmonies and then dissonances in a rapid oscillation reminiscent of wolf howls or loon cries. The sound of it made Loon’s cheeks burn and his blood thump in his fingertips. From the top of their hill, looking down on the meadow from the upended tree trunk, he saw bonfires all over, people all over. There were maybe a twentytwenty people, or even two twentytwenties, anyway far more people than they ever saw together at any other time, which was all by itself astonishing and exhilarating. And then almost all of them were dressed in their finest summer clothes, including many feather capes and skirts; and their faces painted, their hair braided and tied up, and tooth and shell necklaces ringing every neck. Many of them were already dancing around the fires, and those who weren’t dancing moved as if they were. Loon and his friends howled at the sight, and that set off more howls from all over the meadow. EIGHT EIGHT!

Some of them stayed in camp to finish setting up and to keep an eye on things. Everyone else went out to look around. Some went to the music circles, or visited clan fellows they always sought out. Some joined little maker’s circles, where they shared new tricks and told about their winters. The shamans got together to do their yearstick corroborations, sing songs, and tell stories. The eight eight was not a shaman thing, and the shamans obviously enjoyed that, and took the opportunity to get drunk and make fools of themselves. Traders went to a barter circle to offer things for trade and to look for things they might want, under one of the biggest upside-down tree trunks. Away from this barter tree people mostly gave each other things, or made regular annual exchanges of this for that. People from the Flint pack from the basin in the ice cap highlands called the Giants’ Knapsite simply gave away dressed blocks of clean hard flint, the brown gleam of these near-cubes flush with a very handsome dark red. In return the Flints would take whatever people gave them, nodding and smiling to indicate that these return gifts were not necessary but were appreciated, scoops of mash most of all. Good fellowship all around, love all around, human cleverness all around, celebration of their genius compared to the other animals all around; another year passed successfully, the kids mostly fine, no one starving quite. Have another scoop! Eight eight!

Thorn said to Loon,—Come by the corroboree and meet all the shamans as a young shaman. You’ll have to tell a story to them.

Loon shook his head at that.—I’m not ready to tell them a story.

—That’s too bad, you have to do it anyway. You’ve had your wander and it’s time.

—No, Loon said, and walked away as fast as he could. At the eight eight no shaman would want to be embarrassed by having to punish his apprentice, and so he felt like he could get away with it. The eight eight was like that.

Loon wandered from bonfire to bonfire. This was one of his favorite activities of the entire year: wandering at the eight eight. People dressed up, hair braided and top-knotted, faces painted or just red-cheeked with excitement. Just looking was such a feast for the eyes, he reeled as he walked and saw others doing the same, he tried to dance it and halfway succeeded. The young women were showing a lot of skin, and a lot of it was painted red but a lot of it was just bare brown skin, still summer slender but still knocking him back glance by glance.

He came on the area where they held most of the festival games, which was something else he enjoyed watching. Elders from the local packs set up the games for the boys and girls, from the simplest rock-throwing contests to the very popular throwing of javelins through hoops rolling down a slight hill. This last was a frequent camp game of every pack ever, and so now a great number of boys and girls were throwing light javelins through hoops that rolled and bounced down a gentle hill, and the air was loud with their yelling.

Just as popular were the contests in which men threw javelins with spear throwers. This was the basic young hunter’s game, and every boy had thrown twentytwentytwenties of throws to get used to the way a spear thrower lengthened one’s arm. This extra reach made for throws so strong that the javelins visibly bowed and flexed under the pressure of the sling. To see such a quivering flight lance into a distant musk ox hide stuffed with grass was a beautiful thing, and Loon cried out with the rest when throws flashed through the air and struck all the way through the targets, which were traditionally musk oxen, so much smaller than a mammoth, an easier target to sew but a harder one to hit. When one of these was transfixed from as far away as a javelin could be thrown, a roar went up and the thrower reared in a little dance.

Beyond the throwing meadow rose a steep hill used for hill races, a favorite with all the boys and girls who were swift-footed and strong. Every year the elders set the starting place somewhere new, and from there you could take any route you wanted to the top. The hill was riven by intersecting ravines, so a clever route was crucial to winning the race. Loon with his bad leg could not join this race, though as a boy he had enjoyed it and been good at it. Wistfully he turned his back on the hill and took off in the other direction.

Across the meadow, the bird’s eye view makers were shaping their patches of sandy ground to conform to the festival grounds and various areas around it. Loon didn’t know the lands outside their home or region well enough to appreciate these contests, which were usually dominated by travelers and shamans, or elders who had traveled for one reason or another.

On a south-facing sunny bank near the bird’s eyes, the shamans were having their corroboree, waving their yearsticks at each other and arguing loudly, as usual. Anytime you got more than two shamans together it was not going to be a shaman thing, so it quickly became a drunken mess. So here, by tradition, they tried to get the year straight before they got crooked, as people said.

A good number of the shamans at this eight eight were earless old snakeheads like Thorn, thus either apprentices to that same Pika who had taught Thorn, or to other shamans who had used the same memory strengthener. Heart sinking a little, Loon spotted Heather and a number of other women sitting among the old snakeheads; some of these women were shamans to their packs, others were herb women with an interest in the corroboration, or friends with the shaman women.

—Anyone can end up being a shaman! Thorn had once explained to Loon.—It comes on you and you have no choice! The question is, who can escape it? And the answer is, no one! Nor man nor woman, elder or child, human or animal. Becoming a shaman is a fate that can strike anyone. Even you.

Remembering that remark and Thorn’s scowl, regarding all the earless old crazies laughing and hitting at each other with their yearsticks, Loon turned and walked away. Such a bunch of rasty old men, he couldn’t stand it. Because of his wander, at some point during this festival he was supposed to join the shamans and receive their congratulations at having become an apprentice to Thorn, and he was then also supposed to recite one of the old stories, as Thorn had demanded. Maybe the swan wife, but he didn’t have a line of it in his head. Best to walk away before Thorn saw him.

So, he couldn’t run the hill race, couldn’t make a bird’s eye view, couldn’t talk numbers of moons per year, or recite a story. Best to go back to the throwing range and try a few throws with his new spear thrower. This one he had carved in the shape of a ibex’s head, and it had a great cast; he felt like he might be able to enter the throw at the longest distance and have a good chance of hitting the musk ox.

Or better yet, he could sit down with the drummers and drink some mash and beat on his drum with the others. That he could always do, it was thoughtless fun, and one of the best parts of the festival. Drink, smoke, drum, laugh right through a beautiful smoky sunset; then, when night fell, go to the bonfires and dance.

At the bonfires in the first dark, some men and women held a contest to see who could make the prettiest fire spectacle. Many circled around to see these players take up very long travois poles and tie little sachets of cloth or leather to the thin end of the pole, then hold their sachets out away from them, into the highest flames of a bonfire, at which point many of them turned their heads away; and all watching would wait, until the sachet caught fire and flared green or blue or purple, sometimes with a quick splash of fire, or a crack like a little touch of thunder. Since everyone spent every night looking into fires, the sight of something new and unexpected flashing out of a blaze was enough to make them laugh with surprise and delight, and when the whole crowd did that together and as one, it was exhilarating. All the firebangers saved their biggest ones for last and poled them into the fire together, and the quick sequence of bright loud colorful cracks was enough to hurt the ears and provoke a huge cheer.

After that it was drinking, drumming, and dancing. Loon wandered over to a bonfire circled by dancers. Because of Badleg, as he had started naming it during the trek north, he first sat with the drummers and put his little wood and hide drum between his knees and drummed. The farther people traveled to get to the eight eight, the smaller the drums they brought. These little drums took the fastest parts, and Loon quickly got into the groove of the fives, and then switched between the fives, fours, and threes, as the spirit of the piece moved them all around to different emphases. These drum sessions were led by no one and yet could make quite sudden shifts in pace and flow, like flocking birds in the sky. Those moments were really something to be part of, to feel so clearly that there was a group spirit that could seize them all and take them off in a new direction. Time after time it happened. That it could be so easy was astonishing to feel, right there in hands and ear and body. And they drummed this astonishment too! And so it would go, all night long.

Sometime before midnight Loon came out of his drumming trance and could see everything from all the way around. It was like the way owls must see, with the distance to everything much more exact than usual. And so much more than usual was dancing before him: the flames in the fire, the sparks and smoke pouring up, the dancing people dressed like birds. The scene flowed in bumps tied to his pulse, a palpable bump moving one fire-flick moment to the next. Mother Owl was inside him, it seemed, and he watched the dance flicker in a way he had never watched before, not just at this eight eight, but in his whole life.

There were young women dancing, of course, wearing their furs and feathers, their necklaces and bracelets and anklets, all bouncing up and down barefoot in time to the drums, across the flicker of the firelight, snapping hand clacks and weaving circles with each other as they circled the fire. Red and white body paint had been applied to their skin in dots or snakes or weaves, and their birdskin hats or cloaks usually came from the most beautiful parts of birds, such as the heads of mallards or the chests of flickers, many such sewn together so that the cloak or headdress was much bigger than any actual bird’s. There before him spun a cloak of flicker chests, rising over breasts painted white with red nipples. The sight flickered like a flicker. Another dancer wore a cloak of loons’ backs and necks, and that dense superb weave of black and white was so striking and beautiful that Loon could not look elsewhere.

The young woman wearing it was someone he had never seen before. She was tall and heavy-boned; the elg would be her animal, and her dancing was correspondingly slow and simple. Slimmer faster women were dancing circles around her, she was ungainly in that company, and this was precisely what snagged Loon’s eye and quickly became her most beautiful feature, the thing that arrested him and compelled him to watch. She knew what she could do, and did it. She was enjoying the dance. She was big and slow, but had excellent proportions, long legs, strong rump, nice tits, broad shoulders. Hair the color of the flints from the Giants’ Knapsite, gleams of firelight glancing off it. Thick triple-braid of it down her back, tied with a strip of loon neck feathers at the tip: her friends had done well by her hair. She clumped around and slapped at people freely as they passed her. She had a carefree smile, unselfconscious and relaxed. She had no cares at that moment, she was herself and wanted nothing. So it seemed looking at her.

Loon hung his drum on its loop on the back of his coat and stood up. It was time to dance.

He joined in next to her. Even favoring Badleg a little he could dance rings around her, and he did.

—Hi there, he said to her,—my name is Loon, so I like your cloak. Who are you?

—I’m Elga, she said.

—Ah good, he said.—That’s good.

—It is good, she said, drawing herself up with elgish dignity and taking a neat little turn.—And Loon, is Loon good too?

Though no human could really imitate a loon’s arching of its wings to the sun, Loon put his arms out and stretched, stretched, stretched, and Elga laughed to see it. It was actually quite a fun dance style, and fit the firelight’s blink-blink-blink, so Loon kept it up for a while, thinking about how birds courted, the cranes, the doves, yes even the loons, such a display! He relaxed to get it to a more human style as he circled around her. She rotated inside his circles with a dreamy smile, like an elg chewing on a sunny day. She was taller than Loon, and heavier too. Her loon cloak was gorgeous, and yet the body it was draped over, the shoulders, collarbones, breasts, ribs, belly and hips, arms, back, legs, all of them were much more gorgeous even than a loon’s back. With his owl sight he could see that her face was a perfect image of her self, just as it was with all the people in his pack. People’s faces were three-liners of their nature, that was all there was to it; somehow their essential natures got stamped on the front of their heads, as if it was a game Raven played when he put them all in their mothers to be born. Their natures were there for all to see. And now Loon was seeing with owl sight, and here dancing before him was a woman calm, straightforward, maybe a little dreamy and withdrawn, all right there to be seen in her eyes and the set of her mouth, and the whole shape of her face, oval and big-eyed. A little mouth, lips thick and rounded when in repose or suppressing a smile, but now she was smiling, so he only caught glimpses of her mouth at rest, as she thought over a dance move or looked out at the night thinking about something. Her teeth when she smiled were neat and small, more otter than elg, which was nice too. No, she was herself; he loved the way she looked, loved her slow neat dancing inside his circles. And she seemed content to stay there, she danced to face him and circled the fire at a speed that accommodated his looning around.

—Where do you come from? he asked.

—From north of here, she said, and saying this caused a little frown to crease her brow, and he saw better than ever the little flower her lips made when she was thinking.

—North? Loon said.—Are you an ice person?

—No, she said, but looked away as if this weren’t the whole story, and added—Not anymore. My pack winters to the sunrise, but we take our caribou north of here, caribou and saiga. What about you?

—We take our caribou two rivers to sunset, and winter down south of the ice caps.

—What’s your clan?

—Raven, Loon said proudly.—And you?

—Eagle, said Elga, looking pleased; it was best if couples were from different clans. Seeing her expression, Loon danced in and pecked her on the cheek with a kiss.

—Well met, eagle woman, he declared, smiling, and when he saw the pleased look still there in her eyes, he smiled for real, he could feel the difference in his face.

—Let’s dance, she said, as if they weren’t already, and raised her hands over her head and shimmied. She was more graceful than an elg, and her loon cloak bounced and flickered in the firelight, and Loon with his owl vision danced with her with his gaze cast down, watching her legs and hips and hands, keeping his gaze from hers as she kept hers from his, except for a moment now and then, when a move made them laugh or they bumped together hard. Right now they couldn’t look at each other, but once in a while they would both look up and their eyes would meet. Are you here too? their gazes asked, and then answered, Yes, I am here. We are here, together in a bubble of our own, which has all of a sudden popped out of nowhere around us. Isn’t it exciting? Yes it is! And then they would look down and dance, almost as if abashed, or a little shocked, needing a little time to take it in.

And there was no hurry. The night was young, midnight had not yet come overhead, the bonfires were still growing their big mounds of embers, with immense heaps of steppe dung piled around them to be burned. Most of the people there were going to dance the night through and then sit watching the sunrise together. This was the eight eight, peak of the year, it was meant to be like this, and Loon found himself comforted by that, it made the strength of the sudden new feeling in him all right. This was the place where this kind of thing happened. He glanced up at her face again, watched her looking into the fire; he knew he didn’t know her, and yet at the same time it felt like the look on her face told him everything about her. Everything he needed to know. A northern woman, she would be tough and hard and hot. She would enjoy the south and its mild air.

On they danced. A pack from the east formed a dance line, each of them holding a stout stick in each hand, and their drummers took over the rhythm and moved it to a heavy four beat. Their dancers began to dance with all their footwork the same, a kick left kick right, while they smacked their sticks together, mostly hitting their own but also trading hits with others in their group when they all spun around at once, a beautiful sight and sound, nimble and clacky and quick. While they all watched, Elga came to a stop beside Loon, and the sides of their upper arms touched, and Loon felt the touch like a beam of sunlight on a cold morning. A big howl of approval went up when the stick dancers brought their routine to a sudden halt, and they clacked their sticks lightly in return and took the ladles and cups of mash offered them. The drummers shifted back into a four-and-five, and the general dancing took off again.

Loon and Elga went back into their bubble and danced with the rest until well past midnight. Loon’s feet were getting tired, and Badleg was asking for relief. When the drummers switched to a big heavy two-three beat, Elga turned to him and put her arms over his shoulders. She was distinctly taller than he was, and in feeling that a sizzle started at his ears and ran down the back of his neck and up around through his guts to his spurt, which began to rise heartbeat by heartbeat. She leaned down to him and kissed him on the ear, and the sizzle turned to a little bolt of lightning running right down his spine to his prong.

—I’m tired, she said,—and I have to pee. Come with me to the stream and then let’s find some place to rest.

—All right, Loon said.—I have to pee too.

—I’ve eaten so much this week, she said as they stumbled across the meadow away from the firelight, to the slow looping river that drained the festival meadow. Down this way were the shitting grounds, and they had to go slowly to dodge the holes and trenches dug into the wet ground. Elga stepped down to the streamside by herself, and Loon went behind a tree and managed to pee successfully through what was more spurt than pizzle, peeing up at the stars as he began, which made him laugh.

That done they wandered back toward the camps, and Elga stopped at hers, and rejoined him with a bearskin rolled up over her shoulder. She was also wearing a long fur coat with a wolverine-fur collar. Off into the night then, upstream into the hills. On the south-facing sides of these hills, low tangles of brush made for many small lay-bys. It was only necessary to find a good one that was not already occupied. During the last couple of eight eights Loon had taken a look at these hillsides in the mornings, wondering if he would ever have reason to want such a shelter, telling himself it might happen, it might happen. And here it was. He could not find the nook he had discovered two summers before, but then Elga saw a knot of white spruce that she liked, a little tuck of stunted trees, such that they had to crawl to get into it. They paused as they did to make sure no one else was already in there; but it was empty.

And then they were inside their lay-by and on Elga’s bear hide, on the thick fur lying together kissing and getting their clothes off, squeezing and caressing each other, and then he was on her and her legs were open to him, and with a couple of thrusts he was up and into her. They were both gasping. Loon, who had mated only with Mother Earth, was shocked at the incredible smoothness and warmth of her, the way they fit together and slid against each other with no drag; it felt so good he couldn’t really tell where he ended and she began, it was just a big blur of good feeling down there, a back-and-forth sizzle of good feeling.

She stopped him with a hand over his mouth.—Don’t come in me, she said.

—Oh. All right. But I’m about to.

Indeed at the very thought the glow of pleasure flooded back from his spurt all through him, his whole body one great thrusting mass of pleasure, he was thrumming with it, and then bursting. Her knees were up to each side of his ribs and she was squeezing him between them, and as he felt himself begin to spurt he pulled out of her and thrust himself convulsively against her belly, and feeling that she grabbed him by the hair and kissed him again and again as he moaned.

They lay there for a while and then she rolled over onto him. He grew hard again faster than he had realized was possible, but she rubbed her vixen over the top of his spurt this time, kneeling on him and kissing him as she did, until she too moaned and pressed herself down on him, crushing him down into the bear fur and the lumpy ground under his back. The female covering the male! He had never seen any animals do that, so it had never occurred to him. Now he thought it might be the best way of all.

They lay there and kissed and petted. Her belly was gooey with his mushroomy spurtmilk but she did not care, she rubbed it into her skin and into his skin, she kissed him and caressed him, rubbed herself against him, humming; when he got hard again she kissed his chest and his belly and then took his spurt in her mouth and sucked on him until he came again, feeling it more powerfully than ever. She hummed approvingly throughout, and then stretched out and kissed him again, and he tasted his own seed there in her mouth, shocking to his tongue and then he wanted to taste it again. She turned and rolled and presented her vixen to his face, all wet and musky, and he licked her in the way he had seen wolves lick their mates, it was obvious what to do, but also shocking in the new way it felt, the slick smoothness of that interior skin, the tight curl of the hair around it under his tongue, the taste of her.

They lay there again, wrapping up to stay warm. They kissed, they made love. The sky turned gray in the east, then the red flush of dawn lined the horizon.

—No, Loon protested.—I don’t want this night to end.

She hummed her agreement, burrowed her face into his neck. She appeared to fall asleep for a while, and Loon lay there feeling her breast rise and fall on his arm, her leg thrown over his middle. He was not even the slightest bit sleepy; in fact he wanted to wake her up and slip inside her again. He did not, however. He let her sleep, and watched sunrise with his head lying right on the ground, cradling her head and feeling her body’s weight and warmth, smelling her, soaking her in. This was what he wanted. He had never wanted anything the way he wanted this.

In the warmth of the morning sun, he too fell asleep for a while. When he woke she had her loon cloak rolled and tied with a thong. She looked him in the eyes, in a way she hadn’t during their dance.

—Can I come with you? she said.

—What do you mean?

—I just joined my pack last year. I ran away from the one before, because they took me from the one I grew up in. But I can’t find that first one anymore. I lived like a woodsman trying to find them, but when I couldn’t, I joined the pack I’m in now. But I don’t really fit there, and a lot of them wish I wasn’t there. It makes some problems I guess. Anyway I don’t like it.

—Sure you can, he said.—Sure you can come with me.

They went to his camp together, and he went straight to Heather and told her about it. She hissed and said,—You wait a minute before you talk to Thorn.

After a quick hard look at Elga, she turned her back on them, clearly displeased with the situation, and dug around in her traveling selection of baskets and bowls and gourds and boxes. No one carried more around in her backsack than Heather did, it was always taut with its internal weight, and hung from a tumpline that pressed a livid mark on her forehead when she hiked. Now it looked like she was having trouble finding what she wanted, knocking things around like a jay beaking through leaves.—I knew this was going to happen, she muttered.

When Thorn came into camp he was mashed and smoked, red-eyed and roaring. Loon might have chosen some other time to tell him, but Thorn immediately saw Elga and stared at her and said,—Who’s this then?

—We’re getting married, Loon said.—She’s joining us. Her name is Elga.

—No, Thorn said, and with a snarl he leaped at Loon and hit him on the ear and then in the gut. After that Loon held him off with straight-arms and shoves, until during one shove Thorn grabbed Loon’s right hand in both of his and quickly twisted Loon’s little finger. Loon felt the bone break, and after that it hurt so sharply that he stepped back and kicked Thorn hard in the belly. Thorn fell back and picked up a burin and was about to attack Loon with it when Heather screamed,—STOP IT!

She was slightly crouched over Thorn’s stuff, and peeing on it.

—Hey! Thorn shouted in outrage, and turned to leap at her, raising the burin; but instantly she was holding up her little blowdart tube to her lips and aiming it right at him.

He stopped in his tracks.

Tipping it slightly away from her mouth, she said,—Stop it or I’ll kill you right now. You’ll die inside twenty breaths. You’ve seen me do it before, don’t think I won’t do it to you, because I will, and you know it.

—Fucking hag.

Thorn stood there, eyeing the blowdart uneasily. The little darts were tipped with a poison Heather made which definitely killed animals fast, even lynxes and hyenas, her chief victims. They had all seen it. And when she was angry she was capable of anything. Thorn knew that best of them all, and he stood there pushing his lips out into a disgusted knot. He said sidelong to Loon,—You’re on the shaman path and you can’t get married now, you have too much to do, it would be wrong. You didn’t even come to the corroboree!

—I’m not going to do it the way you did it, Loon said.—I’m going to do it better. You had a bad shaman, and I didn’t. So I know better than you what to do.

He held up his right hand up to Thorn and straightened the little finger with his left hand, feeling the bone in there grind against itself, a gut-wrenching moment that caused a wave of light-headedness to pass through him, but after that the finger only throbbed, and his head came back to him, though his forehead was dripping sweat. He would have to make a splint and get someone to tie it on for him. He kept his voice steady and cold as he said,—I’m going to marry Elga, and be a married shaman. There’s no reason not to. Lots of packs have them.

—They’re not real shamans.

—Yes they are.

—As to the girl, Heather put in sharply,—it’s the women’s decision whether she joins the pack or not. Neither of you have anything to do with that, or with who marries whom in this pack for that matter! Those are women’s decisions.

Thorn stood there glowering. His boxes were wet with pee, he had to wash them soon. Meanwhile Loon stood there nursing a broken little finger, which was the new leader of all the hurts in his body, although he could tell already that it was not a serious thing like Badleg, because a little finger could be splinted and left alone to heal. The pain itself didn’t matter now that he had his head back. The main thing here, he saw, was that Elga be accepted by Heather, which now she seemed likely to do, even if it was just to put Thorn in his place. And so Loon began to feel happy.

Of course it was complicated, Heather having peed on Thorn’s stuff and threatened to dart him to death. Their ancient reverse-marriage would no doubt snarl worse than ever. On the other hand, how much worse could it get? And Loon didn’t care anyway. Indeed the worse Thorn and Heather were getting along, the less time either of them would have to tell him what to do. They would focus on each other, and Loon would slip to the side. And he would have his Elga.

He looked at her, smiling to try to convey all this to her. She had been staring at him uncertainly, but when she saw the way he was looking at her, she relaxed. She glanced around at the Wolf women with a beseeching look.

At that moment Sage came back into camp.—Who’s this? she said.

All eyes fell on Loon.—This is Elga, he said, moving to her side.—She’s going to join us, if the women agree. We are to be married, if the women agree.

That gave Sage a start, and for a moment her eyes flashed. Elga meanwhile was looking serenely at something in the sky, as if not really there. Loon saw suddenly that this would be her way, that she would slide away from trouble if she could. That the struggle might be to keep her around.

In the last days of the festival, around the eighth month’s full moon, many had been celebrating for so long that they now lay prostrate right through the day, and the drumming and dancing was mostly taken up by boys and girls. Many men stretched out in camp or with clan friends, stuffed with mash and steak, and even the women sat around preparing the meals a little stunned. They had proved yet again that too much feast is worse than famine, that enough is as good as a feast, and so on. But there were very few who could resist throwing off all restraint just once in the year. Sometimes you just had to let go.

In the wreckage of that particular morning’s light, Loon built himself a finger splint, and with Heather’s help attached it to his hand. She said he hadn’t set the bone between the two knuckles straight, which he could see, and feel too, but he didn’t want to do the pulling and twisting it would take to straighten it properly, knowing how it would hurt. Heather offered to do it, but he shook his head.—It will be all right.

—It will heal crooked.

—That’s all right. That will mark this fine occasion! And he smiled at her, feeling the prospect of Elga staying with him.

Here and there among the exhausted celebrants, some hoarse arguments were breaking the peace that had finally descended after the drumming had been reduced to a few boys trying a slow four beat. Mash headaches made people irritable. But the arguments were only put-down contests, even if people were truly angry. Curses lashed the air, and shocking insults were traded, but blows were not. Because fights were too dangerous to indulge in. Everyone had seen the battles of the male antlered animals in rut, all the clashing and kicking and blood, and although these too were supposed to be put-down contests, accidents often happened, and animals got gored, or broke a leg, and many later died or were killed. From time to time men would fall into the same kind of folly at a festival, usually when drunk, but these too ended in dangerous injuries, and only served to prove how stupid fighting was. Life was dangerous enough; everyone got injured accidentally one time or another, no matter how careful they were. As the saying put it, every path leads to misfortune. Also: when you’re injured, your pack is injured. What it came to was that everyone had enough experience of injury to want to avoid it.

So festival fights were almost always shouting matches. This was part of what made Thorn’s attack on Loon’s hand so shocking. It was almost as if Thorn had been trying to end his painting, to take away the part of being a shaman Loon wanted the most. It didn’t make sense to Loon, and he sucked down bowls of Heather’s spruce tea, and rubbed the finger with a salve she gave him, and thought it over.

To get what you want, get what you need. When the fire is hot enough, there is no smoke. No fear when in your place. Do not allow anger to poison you. Each person is his own judge. It is not good for anyone to be alone. Everyone who does well must have dreamed something. The one who tells the stories rules the world. Burnt child, fire dread. A starving man will eat the wolf. A wily mouse should breed in the cat’s ear. Naught venture naught gain. A friend is never known until a man have need.

Wait, I see something: two red eyes. A frightened old man.

Well, there were so many old sayings, and many of them cut against each other, like blades on the opposite sides of a tree. Eventually the tree falls one way or the other. But in the meantime you still don’t know what to do.

After a while Loon found what he thought might be a way forward. He gathered himself to attempt it, and wandered over to the low hilltop where the shamans always met.

The mass of ash in their bonfire was nearly out, mere pink gleams poking out from strange clinkers, remnants of the weird things that shamans threw into their fire. There were about a dozen of the old men there now, looking even more shattered than everyone else at the festival. They had more endurance for excess, having practiced it more, but as they mashed hard at the eight eight, and dosed themselves with smoke and mushrooms and dancing and flagellation and sleeplessness, they eventually overwhelmed even their own great endurance. Now they were lying around still wearing their animal heads, canted over their faces to cover them from the sun, so that they looked more than ever clowns and fools, frazzled, drunk, splayed out like lions after a kill. Thorn was among them, as flattened as the rest under his bison head. He stared at Loon stone-faced from beneath it.

He and his fellow sorcerers had so painted their bodies with red dots and crescents and wavy ribbons and basketry patterns that they were hard to look at. Their spirit voyages the night before would have cast them out into unions with Wood Frog, Birch Woman, Raven, the Northern Lights, and so on; they had all left their bodies and flown far above or below, become mixes of themselves and their animal spirits. Now it looked like they had not yet completely returned.

Some of them were croaking out an insult contest while still lying flat as moss.

—He’s worth just as much as a hole in the snow.

—He’s so full of shit, if you pinched him your fingers would get brown.

—He’s so lazy he married a pregnant woman.

In the scattered laughter at that last, Loon sat down among them. He stirred their fire, put on a few dung patties and a branch or two.

—Welcome, youth, one of the shamans growled.

Loon nodded his thanks.—This is the story of the swan wife, he said, and stood up and began immediately with the first lines of the old story, which was one of the first Thorn had ever taught him, and thus the one he remembered best. Those first twenty lines seemed to have filled his entire capacity for remembering stories. But his flute was carved with images from the rest of the story, and they would help him remember. He could stop to blow a few notes, and see right where he was.

Loon went on to describe the three helpers the old man then sent the husband to find, to help him get the things that he needed to rescue his wife. Loon particularly emphasized the encounter with Mouse Woman, enjoying how the little creature scuttling around the fallen leaves on the floor of the forest was actually a big headwoman when you got inside her house, a power bigger than the old man, or indeed anyone else in the story. He knew quite a few of the shamans there would recognize Heather in this description of Mouse Woman, Thorn foremost among them: all the little things she knew that made her bigger, like knowledge of poisons, or what roots you could eat. In so many ways it was Heather who kept them all alive, and not these raven-shitted sorcerers sweating in the light of day.

Loon made sure that point was made clear in all the trials the husband successfully overcame, with Mouse Woman crucial to each, until finally the husband was reunited with his wife, in the loon village on the lake above the sky, in the next world over. The various parts of the story came to Loon well, he hardly had to look at his flute; all the threes of threes pulsed through him in a chant, until he came to a good end:

And then he stopped and nodded to them, clapping lightly to thank them for listening.

—Ha, Thorn, one of the other old men croaked, raising his head from the ground.—Your apprentice is well taught, he sounds just like you! Always the heavy moral, always the cliffhanger ending!

The others laughed. Thorn mimed a glower, but he was pleased too, Loon could see.—The highest trees catch the most wind, he reminded his needlers with scorn, and all the shamans groaned appreciatively. It looked like none of them wanted to take on Thorn in a put-down contest, as his tongue could be truly blistering. And his apprentice had just made an adequate entry into their misbegotten little clan, so no one would badger him much on that day.

Loon kept his eyes on the ground. Possibly it was going to work out. His bleary-eyed audience was now grinning their horrible pleasure.

Chapter 20

Then full moon was past and the festival too, and people packed their travois until the poles bowed under the weight, and set out every way the wind blows. The Wolves went south and east, toward the ice caps and home beyond.

Elga was quiet on their trek, and spent more time with Heather and the women than with Loon. Often Loon saw her talking to Heather. She woke as early as anyone, and made fires and washed and cooked and cleaned and carried the babies whenever she could get a turn; she worked like a beaver woman. She seldom met the eyes of the pack’s men, but answered and smiled when spoken to. She took her turn in the harnesses of the travois and hauled longer than anyone else, and not in any suffering way, or as if to prove a point, but just because she didn’t seem to notice the travois dragging behind her. Strong. She was bigger than most of them, and although fatless in the way of midsummer, still solid. She’s like an elg, they said, they must have named her after her animal, it really fits. Hearing that made Loon happy: they saw her as he saw her, at least to that extent. But only he knew what she was like at night under the stars. So: Thorn was not happy; Sage was not happy; but Loon was happy.

On the trip home they stopped at the ford over the Joins-Lir river, and found the red salmon had already arrived.—Let your food come to you, the women sang as they wove and tied together some pole frameworks, and dug out the leather nets they kept buried under rocks near that ford, and the following day they netted twenties of salmon, a big catch. While they were drying their meat they killed three bears, including a stayawayfromit, as a warning to the other bears in the area to keep their distance. Loon helped Ibex and Hawk and a few others to break up the bears, while most of the rest of the pack chopped and dried the fish. The men who had killed the bears gave Loon a bear penis to eat, laughing at him and saying it was clear he needed it.—You’re looking pretty haggard man, she’s sucking you dry, you need to save some for the trail. The penis was chewy and tasted like kidneys.

Hawk was happy for him, and happy too, Loon supposed, at the removal of a rival for Sage. When they left the Joins-Lir, their travois heavier than ever, they trudged south and upstream on the trails running along the Lir. The travois were as heavy as could be pulled, and everyone over five years old pulled one. But that was the right way to come back from the summer trek, down off the moor into Loop Camp again, where they howled and got the houses back up and began settling back in.