Shaman: A Novel of the Paleolithic Era

Chapter 21

Now they could occupy their fall days in eating, in finishing the smoking and drying of the caribou and salmon meat, in gathering and leaching nuts, plucking seeds and berries and leaves, and getting all the food properly stored. Also, while they sat around the fire, they made new clothes and tools, and new toys for the kids. Also went out trapping and hunting, especially for the ducks before they left. And did the fall initiations.

Once again Schist took on his most intent air. Pine nuts were spread on old deerskins in the sun for three days before being bagged for storage in cedar boxes, and every nut had to be inspected to see if there were any little breaks or insect holes marring their smooth surfaces. Dried meat and bags of oil were stored in pits floored with pine needles and covered with bark, dirt, and then stones. Thorn helped Schist and Thunder pack these supplies away, marking a stick like a yearstick with his counts, and calculating what they had against their needs for the coming winter. Schist would not be satisfied unless they had stored up an amount that would feed them all to the end of next spring. Almost certainly they would be able to trap some winter animals, indeed in some years the snowshoe hares were so common that they could almost have lived on them alone. But other years it wasn’t so. They had been through some hard springs, as Schist often reminded them. Thorn and Heather and all the older people of the pack were in agreement: better safe than sorry. Store is no sore. If they happened to waste some nuts by having too many, and could not eat them before they went bad, then they would have something to give if other packs came asking, or they could give them to the ravens at the end of the spring, with thanks for another year passed without hunger. Besides, it was more likely that they were going to end up counting nuts next spring, just as they had in this last one. Two score and three people ate a lot of food.

The women declared full moon of the tenth month to be Loon and Elga’s wedding day, and on that morning when the sun came over the hills they were all down by the river on the sand bank, Elga dressed in something from each of the other women in the tribe, with her hair braided around her head, so that she looked immensely taller than Loon, and more elgish than ever. Thunder and Bluejay and Heather and Sage presided, running the two through their oaths to each other and the pack in a quick singsong that nevertheless included the pack women’s promise to the groom that they would stab him to death if he ever mistreated his wife; and this was spoken by Sage, standing right in front of Loon and looking him in the eye with something like the wolves’ long stare. Loon shook that off, and also noted with relief that while Thorn had not said anything at all about this marriage, and wore a black look throughout the ceremony, he still put on his bison head and played his flute at the end, and through the day of dancing.

That night Loon and Elga took their bearskins to the edge of camp beyond Heather’s bed and mated through the night, pausing to nap or to talk.

After that Loon was completely lost in the night world of Elga and their mating. It was all that mattered to him. He ignored Thorn during the days, and went out on short hunts or to check traps, but often Elga came with him, and they interrupted whatever they were doing to lie down and kiss and get their clothes off and mate. Loon fell directly into a dream at certain things Elga did or said, things like her murmured,—I’m hungry for you. They got better and better at pleasuring each other, and he learned to feel the differences between his spurts through the course of the night, the way the first was so prongy and tingly, the third so deep and profound, a kind of soul-slinging into her. He could scarcely believe the seizure of love that came on them when they came together, the spurt and clench pulling them together so tightly, something that happened in their eyes looking at each other, in the way they clutched each other, the way they felt they were meant for each other, had found each other among all of Mother Earth’s many creatures, and would be happy in each other for as long as they lived, and were only sorry they would not live longer in such bliss, and each hoped to die first so as not to live beyond the other.

After moments like those, they lay next to each other intertwined, and sometimes talked. Loon felt a need to tell her everything that had ever happened to him that mattered, and he wanted to learn the same from her; and although she was still a quiet person, she sometimes pleased him by falling under a similar compulsion to tell her stories. She had been born into a pack that lived far to the east, she didn’t know how far, but had on the appearance of her monthlies been married out to a pack farther west, still well to the north and east of the Urdecha.

—Some bad things happened in that pack, she said once, looking away and frowning.—I don’t want to talk about that. There’s no need. I plan on forgetting it. My life begins with you. With a sleepy little smile she would pull him back into her.

Loon’s story was a bit more complicated, at least to him.

—My father Tulik was Thorn’s real apprentice, he told her.—He was the one who was supposed to be the next shaman, not me. If he had lived, Thorn might already have given it over to him, and gone off to be a woodsman or something. But my dad was killed by a skelg kick during a hunt, and my mother died that following spring, some say because she was too sad to get fat enough for winter. But Heather says it was a fever. Anyway, with both of them gone, Heather and Thorn took care of me more than anyone else. So eventually Thorn started treating me like his apprentice, although I never asked him, and I don’t like it. But everyone just seems to assume that’s what I am. They know I don’t like it. Moss would be better at it. But now I’m stuck with it. But now I have you, so it doesn’t matter. I’ll be a lot better at it with you, I hope.

Elga smiled her little smile and kissed him.—That’s right, she said.

In the eleventh month they hurried around every day as if forestalling a doom. Which was true, as the swiftly shortening days made clear. It was getting colder, leaves swirled east on winds that filled the gorge at night with their fateful chorus. How big the world grows in a wind!

Stinging nettles for net twine. Lily bulbs. Birch bark. Cedar roots. Pine pitch. Spruce gum, spruce inner bark. Mistletoe berries. All these had to be gathered in the fall.

Often while out gathering, Loon and the others would bring the kids along. To keep the kids amused when they weren’t gathering, Loon would bend and weave a hoop, and roll it along for them to throw sticks through, or set up targets for throwing rocks. He carved knots into toys, and hid them for the kids to try to find. He had to think like a squirrel or a jay to recall where he had hidden these things, because often the kids would not find them. There was no point to making something and then hiding it where no one could see. Don’t hide your gift in the forest, they said, don’t tell your story to the forest. Though he often did just that, even if he never spoke.

Full moon of the eleventh month was the time for the pack to make its annual visit into the cave in the hill above them, after which it would be abandoned to the bears for their winter sleep. It was one of the smaller ceremonies of the year, but as it came at the end of the fall, an important one: a time to say thanks to Mother Earth for the year’s bounty, and weave themselves together for the long winter to come.

This time, when the ceremony in the big room was done and the other members of the pack had left, Loon was supposed to stay in the cave with Thorn, and for the first time penetrate farther inside, down the shaman’s passages to the secret rooms that only shamans entered. All fall Loon had wondered if Thorn would do it, he seemed so disgusted with him for marrying. As the eleventh moon approached, Thorn had said nothing about it. Loon was tempted to ask him but did not want to show that he was concerned, so he didn’t.

On the morning of the eleventh full moon, Thorn said,—Do you have the paints and brushes ready, and your lamps?

—Yes.

—Remember you’re not going to be painting anything in there this time, and for many years to come.

—I know.

He would only help Thorn. Possibly Thorn would let him etch some old painted lines. It didn’t matter. He had Elga, and he was going down into the shaman’s part of the cave. All was well and more than well.

In the twilight of the eleventh full moon the pack made its way up from Loop Meadow to the clay ramp that was incised into the cliff as if by a giant burin. The paintings on the back wall of this abri ramp welcomed them, the animals leading visitors up to the cave entrance. The entrance was a wide gap in the cliff, about a man’s height above the bench, and fringed by a brush overhang. The animal paintings on both sides of the entry showed the animals returning to the underworld that had birthed them. They were mostly red to the left and black to the right, with some red and black mixed in every animal, in a way that the colors were not mixed inside.

Though night was falling, the remaining twilight and the rising full moon illuminated the cave for a good distance in, and the first big chamber’s walls were still clear to their sight. This chamber was left unpainted; it was not yet considered to be in the cave, but rather the last part of the outside. In Mother Earth’s body, it was not the sabelean but the baginaren.

When they were all in the big dim room sitting on the floor, Thorn spoke to them in an almost conversational tone, unlike his more usual shaman’s voice.

Thorn paused, looking around at the cave walls surrounding them.

—And here we are again, he finished abruptly.—Let me show you.

They lit the pine torches they had brought along, and by their big wavery light walked deeper into the cave. In the next chamber it was dark, and they saw only by the yellow of the torches, a light which caught the red of the animals on the walls of this first painted room. Here the animals were dominated by red lions, and so this room was called either the lion room or the red room, or sometimes simply the first painted room. Thorn said every pack who visited this cave had its own names for the chambers, and the shamans involved couldn’t corroborate them.

When they were all in the first room, they gathered in a circle around Thorn, and he passed around his lit pipe for everyone to breathe in on. Through the smoking and coughing some of the men shook rattles and huffed into big gourds. The women sang the thanksgiving for the year which they always sang during this visit, and then Thorn set the torches together in the middle of the floor, so that as they danced around them their shadows were cast out onto the walls, black figures moving over the red animals, who after a while themselves began to move. So they danced with the animals in there, slowly so as not to spook the beasts’ spirits, then approached the walls and touched the animals’ flanks and their own shadows’ hands, connecting thereby with their cave spirits.

Then they all sat down near the torches and watched the walls pulse around them in silence, holding hands. It got so quiet that they could hear each other breathing, hear their own heartbeats tocking at the back of their open mouths. All the oh-so-busy year came to a still moment of silent thanks. It went on for a long time; watching the animals pulsing redly around them, looking as if they were in their women’s initiation, it felt like the longest moment of the year, something like the spindle the stars turn around.

Then Thorn set a tone, by humming it loudly, and they all hummed it with him; and humming their good-byes, the rest of the pack stood up and filed out of the chamber, back up to the day room and the cave opening, through the baginaren of the world to be reborn yet again into Loop Meadow. They left their shamans Thorn and Loon inside to speak further for them.

Chapter 22

Thorn used their torches to light oil lamps, and when the little wick flames were burning, he ground the torches out in the wet clay underfoot. For a while it was shockingly dark, and then Loon could see again, although never as clearly as he had when the torches were lit.

They continued down into the cave, Loon following Thorn’s black back. Their lamps flickered in their hands with every step, so that their shadows danced on the flickering walls, and the whole cave seemed to tremble.

As Loon’s eyes adjusted to this, he saw the walls more clearly. The whitish rock often glistened wetly, and it bulged or receded away from him, making the stone appear glittery or darker. In places the stone looked to be coated with a thin clear layer of wet stone, like ice; in others it was covered with smooth sheens of mud; in yet others it was spalled as cleanly as if it had been recently knapped.

Suddenly a black lion appeared out of the wall to his right, leaping right at him, and he started back in fear. He could hear Thorn’s low laughter ahead of him; Thorn had seen his lamplight jump.

Now black animals drawn in full emerged from the walls on both sides of their passage. Stepping slowly through them, Thorn and Loon came into a big irregular room where clusters of animals were drawn on all the walls, from about chest height to easy arm’s reach above, making for a kind of belt of paintings around them. Thorn stopped in the middle of this room and turned in a slow circle, and Loon turned with him.

Underfoot the floor of the room was damp, in a few places muddy. Depending on the flickering of the lamplight and shadows, different animals seemed to shift or slide. There was a black hole at the foot of one wall, from which a faint gurgling sound came. Otherwise it was very quiet.

For a long time they looked at the paintings, some of them three-liners, most fully fleshed. All the sacred animals were there, bear and lion, bison and horse, mammoth and rhino; they all both stood still and moved a little, and as they were overlaid one over the next, and at very different sizes, there was an intense quivering movement inside their stillness. In the end every beast held its place, and only quivered a little with the lamplight.

Thorn laughed shortly and moved on. Loon followed him, staying in his line of footprints as instructed, which was apparently out of respect to the goddess, although it also allowed him to avoid sinking into the mud covering much of the floor.

The passageways between rooms were narrow. The rooms were big in comparison, bigger than any house’s interior. Though irregular, and thus full of black shadows, they were fully present to the eye, flickering with the flicker of the lamps. Red lines and spirals marked some walls, and when Loon looked closely at these, they crawled under his gaze until they detached from the wall and floated out ahead of him among the shadows, like floating bubbles of paint lodged right on his eyeballs. Even when he closed his eyes he still saw these dots, and a web of red lines connecting them, all jigging up and down with his pulse. When he opened his eyes again, everything had become a matter of woven red and black patterns, variously fine or large in their weave. Mother Earth’s womb was woven like a basket.

They walked on, very slowly, for what seemed to Loon like a long time. Going down in a twisty passage, they stepped once onto a big square stone that had obviously been placed there by someone who had come before, to break a big drop into two parts. Farther along it briefly got so narrow they had to squeeze through sideways, feeling the earth give them a clammy squeeze before allowing them passage.

Now they were truly in the womb of Mother Earth, the kolbos, the sabelean. I like her kolby, men would sometimes say, adding things like, It’s just like a deer’s, so inviting. But down here was too deep and dark and cold for that. This was the womb of Mother Earth, who had birthed the sky along with everything else. They were moving inside her. The walls around them were slightly slick with damp, just as it was in Elga’s vixen. Their paintings were impregnating Mother Earth with her most sacred animals; it was as clear as could be. Thorn would paint her kolby’s walls with his paint, and she would birth the animals he painted, and on they would go.

Thorn sang a song that said something much like what Loon had been thinking:

Thorn sounded more relaxed in the singing of this song than Loon had ever heard him. It was almost like a different voice, or a different person inside the voice. Apparently this was Thorn happy; Loon had never seen it before.

—You’re making them come to us, Loon said.—Mother Earth gives birth from here. We’re in her womb.

—I’m telling the great mama that we love these animals in particular, Thorn said.—She gives birth to all the creatures of the sun, no matter what we do. But we can show what we love. So in here we paint only the sacred animals. It’s nice to hang them up there on the wall like they’re floating, as if you’re spearing them to the sky. That’s what Pika used to do. He would even paint them with their legs hanging and their hooves round. The heavier they are in the world, the more he would do that. He had a lot of little tricks like that, little jokes for himself and whoever might see them.

Thorn’s voice was relaxed even now, when he was speaking of his bad shaman. His shadow jiggled against the wall like a living painting, or as if his spirit was dancing before them. The echoes of his voice seemed to indicate a space around them much bigger than what the lamps’ light revealed. The walls of the room were pulsing in and out, very distinctly, and not in the rhythm of Loon’s pulse, which beat much faster inside him. The sounds and sights around him did not cohere in the way they would have in the world outside. The cold mud sometimes squished under his feet, then firmed to cold wet stone again. When it went soft it felt like he would slide down into the rock, and once, looking down fearfully, he saw he was in the floor up to his ankles; somewhat desperately he hopped from one foot to the other to free himself.

Thorn noticed this, and he reached out and took Loon’s right hand and pulled him by it over to the wall, and put his hand against the cave wall.

—Touch it. Hold still.

He put a little hollowed bird bone to his lips, like Heather’s blowdart branch, and blew a cloud of black powder over the back of Loon’s hand. It disappeared into the new black splotch on the wall, and Loon felt the stone swallow his hand, felt himself jerked forward, pulled by the hand. The wall could suck in his whole body; his wrist had been pulled in, and now he started pulling back hard. He was too frightened even to cry out.

Thorn put an arm around Loon’s middle, and together, with some difficulty, they pulled Loon back out of the wall, grunting and heaving. When Loon popped free he held his pale palm up to his face amazed, staring at it and trembling with relief to have it back. Thorn led him away with uncharacteristic gentleness. There on the cave wall behind them, an open hole the shape of Loon’s hand showed where he had almost been sucked in.

—Now a part of you will always be here, Thorn chanted.

Loon thought, So now I really am a shaman, and immediately he had to contain a little ember of fear burning at the center of that thought, trying to flare to a blaze in his chest.

Thorn kept holding Loon’s hand, and pulled him deeper into the cave.—Duck your head here, we’re almost to the black room.

The descending passage soon opened up again, and they walked into a large chamber, with a ceiling that was low and obvious in some places, sheer black emptiness in others. Thorn set their lamps carefully on the floor, illuminating a bare part of the cave wall curving to the left of a big crack that might have been a passage to yet deeper rooms, but was too narrow for a human to pass through. Cool air wafted out of it. There was a sound like distant voices reverberating up from chambers below them through another hole in the floor. Loon shivered hard as he set to helping Thorn unpack their gear, putting things around the paint bowl. Thorn picked up the charcoal sticks and inspected them closely; the burnt ends of these sticks were so black they did not appear to Loon’s eye in the lamplight, but were rather holes in his vision of the cave floor.

Farther down the wall, to the right of the crack, a stone in the shape of a bison’s pizzle hung from the ceiling. Drawn on the side of it was a woman’s kolby, again so black it was another hole in the rock, triangular this time, the black wedge tucked between legs that went pointy below the knee. The vertical slit of the kolbos was an intense white; it had been cut into the bottom of the triangle, etched with a burin, so that against the solid black of the vixen it was a glowing white line. The crack, the slit, the kolby, the baginaren, the way-to-bliss.

To the right, hovering over this naked woman’s legs, loomed a bison man about to mount her, his left leg hooking at her left leg, about to pull her legs apart and plunge into her. It was clear as could be.

Thorn laughed when he saw Loon goggling at it.

—That was Pika, he explained.—He would do anything.

Thorn lit a spill of dry pine needles from his lamp flame, and straightened up and used the flare to light his pipe. He breathed in his smoke deeply, then breathed it out onto a blank part of the wall. He hugged that part of the wall with his arms spread wide, and Loon feared he would merge into it and leave Loon all alone. But he came back and sat down, and they prepared the paint in a bowl, mixing some black powder Thorn carried in a sachet with water from his water bag. He was going to use black paint and charcoal sticks both, he explained. He began humming a deep resonant hum, which seemed to resound from first one part of the recess and then another.

He stood again and kissed the rock wall, then rubbed his hands over a bulge he declared to be a lion’s shoulder, feeling each little crack and declivity with his fingertips, then his lips. The wall was covered with fine cracks, but otherwise it was a very clean face.

Thorn sang his exhales:—Ahhhhhh, ahhhhhh, ahhhhh, always in a steady tone. The cave hummed back,—Ahhhhhhhhhhh. Loon felt the sound in his skin, and then his bones. He too hummed, it seemed involuntarily, as if he were a drumskin helplessly vibrating. It was like a kind of shivering, as if the chill of the cave was penetrating him and making a sound like river ice in the sun. Everything in the cave at that moment was humming that same Ahhhhh, and the vibration helped Loon to fight the cold, which flowed up from the floor into his feet like a flood of water. Ahhhhhh, ahhhhhh, ahhhhhh…

Thorn was still attending to the wall, head cocked to the side. He drew a line with his charcoal stick, stepped back and took a huge breath in, exhaled loudly.—Ha, he said.—Good. Let’s get started then. Oh now we come to you, mother, sister! A hunt I saw myself, on a midsummer day.

He chose the stick he wanted to start with, and flattened one side of it with his blade, working gingerly so that he wouldn’t break the brittle charcoal. When he was done he dipped the tip in their bowl of black paint and stood up.

When he pressed the charcoal end of the stick over the blank wall, he sang,—Ahhhh. The wall sang back,—Arrrr. Thorn’s head tilted to the left as he drew, and his whole body tensed like a cat on the hunt, then relaxed, then bunched up again as he drew some more. He moved smoothly, made each line in a single continous motion. The round bulge in the wall became the shoulder of a lion. Then a head, as in a three-liner. Ears were blacked on their insides, rounded and pointed forward: the big cat was listening. Both eyes were visible at the front of his face, gaze very intent to the left. Then another head in front and beneath that one, long and scowling, ears flattened back on the head, a foreleg reaching ahead. Then a foreleg almost horizontal ahead of that, detached and by itself; clearly the same foreleg in the next instant. The lion was making her dash for the kill.

Loon gaped as he watched Thorn work. Another head emerged before the charging lion, mouth open and eye round, pupil placed most carefully to show where the lion was looking. Then a giant head, the biggest of them all, leading the way: this one slobbered with hunger as he stared ahead. Then a three-liner of a smaller head, and another one.

When those were completed, Thorn sat on the ground behind the lamps and stared at what he had done. Then he jumped up with a newly prepared stick and began again.—Ahhhhhh.

More lions, and some smudging with both fingers and stick ends, to darken certain parts of the heads. He dipped his fingers, or a little pad of moss, into the black paint, then applied it very gently. Now the lions were flowing left in their dash, six lion heads, bigger and smaller, blacked or three-lined, with some free squiggles and detached forelegs to emphasize the flow. In the lamplight they all quivered together.

Above these Thorn added two lions who were ignoring the hunt, touching noses the way cats in a pack did. Above them then, a lion with a snout almost elongated into a cave bear shape, slobbering eyelessly. That was the hungriest lion. To its right another one appeared both in profile, as was normal, and yet also turned toward the observer, both in the same head space.

Thorn then did some scraping with a burin to get the space around the black heads even whiter. One big lion head had three rows of whisker spots dotting its muzzle, over a tight mouth. They looked just that way out in the world; when hunting they were very intent and serious people, and pursed their mouths like unhappy old men thinking something over. Now Thorn dotted whiskers on the one above also, an afterthought it appeared.

—Wait, I see something, Thorn said.

—The animals they’re hunting, Loon guessed.

—Exactly. They were hunting eight bison.

As far as Loon could tell there was not room for eight bison on the left end of the lions’ wall, where a fold tilted away into darkness. Loon watched curiously as Thorn worked, first taking a caribou shinbone and scraping the lower part of the space left, then drawing a bison with a rhino’s horn, some kind of joke or odd perspective. Above that a clutch of bison heads, all in profile except for the one to the farthest left, who looked straight out at the viewer with a suspicious round white eye. All the bisons’ nostrils were pinched shut unhappily, and they squinted, except for that one looking out at Loon from under its sweet curve of horns. Animals were seldom painted front on, but Loon enjoyed seeing the characteristic double curve of horns one saw when a bison was regarding you: out, in, out.

Now Thorn was almost climbing into the wall as he used a pad of moss to stump-black some of the bison heads. His nose appeared to touch what he was doing, as if he were blacking with it. The three bison heads at the top were the darkest masses on the whole wall, it almost seemed as if they were coming out of the wall, perhaps to evade the lions, whose flowing pursuit seemed to dive slightly into the wall. Yes, they were making their escape: it was as clear as could be.

At the far left edge of his painting, Thorn took up a new charcoal stick and quickly blacked the entire wall where it curved away, giving the whole scene something like a black riverbank containing it. Now the vision of the hunt hung in space before them, melting into Mother Earth, emerging from Mother Earth. Loon found he was standing; he couldn’t remember standing up. His arms were wrapped around his chest.

Thorn moved back beside him and regarded his work.

—Ah, good, he said.—They were really coming tonight. What a thing, eh? Lions on the hunt.

—I can see them move, Loon said.

—Yes, good. Do you see how I did that? It’s a thing you can learn. They have to be each in their own space, and a little stretched in the way you want them to move. Different sizes, and a little elongation, and some extra lines.

—And like that foreleg. Just there by themselves, I mean.

—Yes, that’s right.

—Those two lions touching noses don’t make sense.

—But cats are like that, Thorn said.—You know how they are. There are always some in a pack who aren’t paying any attention to what the others are doing. Raven messed them up, they’re not very good at being pack animals. They have a hard time staying on the hunt long enough, and they don’t care what the rest of the pack thinks of them.

—That’s true, Loon said, remembering lions flopping around in their meadows ignoring each other.

—So, that helps make it look real. I did it just as it came to me. It always has to be more than just your idea of what you want. It’s not just your plan. You have to think how it would really be. Also, see how that lion and the bison just to its left are on the same bulge? They’re like a combined animal, looking like both at once. Of course if the lion catches the bison, that’s what would happen. And at the moment of attack you often see both tells at once, mixed together. Like a two-headed sheep in a herd. Or bison man over there, about to mount the woman. See how the left leg could belong to either one of them? Things overlap.

—It really moves, Loon said, growing a little fearful when he couldn’t make the lions stop moving.—I feel like I might trip and fall.

—Good. That’s what you want to feel. It’s the painter’s trap. They’ll try to move forever and they never will. People will come in here and see them move. How I wish I could see Quartz when he sees this! He’s always wearing his lion head cloak. This will blow the top of his head off. He will shit in his pants, he will run away blubbering, maybe knock his head on that bull pizzle over there, slam his head right into that girl’s big old kolby. He wouldn’t be the first man to knock himself senseless on a woman’s pubic bone. Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m hungry.

Chapter 23

Loon in the days after that:

Mix up a batch of charcoal dust and water and go down to the river cliff to three-line some animals, working on the curves that marked each kind of beast, their proportion and flow. Spring’s high water washed the wall clean most years.

More detailed drawings he reserved for flat pieces of sandstone he collected for their surfaces—flat, rippled, crackled, each had their possibilities. He spent a lot of time knapping blades he liked enough to mount on sticks and use to etch, continually seeking a finer burin tip and edge to cut into things. There were so many ways flint could break wrong, it was a little maddening. There was no such thing as a perfectly edged burin. The angles involved were not flint’s natural angles. You could get a good point or a good edge, but not both on the same rock.

Still it was interesting to try. The trick was patience. It was like throwing spears through a hoop; you had to do it twentytwenty twenties, until you knew what would happen when you did it, if you could.

Silence is a prayer.

Sit in the morning and whack rock on rock, careful to squint and look away at the moment of the strike. A single splinter can blind you. Check the results in the light of the sun, fingering shards and chips and splinters. Sometimes the most remarkable blades would lie there in the dust after a lucky knock. Girls would give you a caress and a friendly look forever in exchange for blades perfect for what they needed. He already had needles he liked enough. So knapping was good. The better you make things, the better they are to you.

Heather would tax him with plant lore. Every little twig she put before him was bursting with its life story, its uses and dangers, twig after twig, until it began to seem to him that their variety was infinite, that no two plants in the world were the same. Of course this was not true, there were lots of samples of every type out there to be found when walking around, often bunched by type in their favorite places, like thin soils, or shady areas, or whatever might be their characteristic ways. Loon saw that better as he learned more with Heather, and it gave him some pleasure, these habits in the way living things made their living. They grew, they flourished, they died and fed their descendants, who used them as ground and food. Plants were mute people, stuck in their one spot.

It was in tasting that Heather went too far. She wanted him to accompany her to all these places and bring back samples of everything, and then she wanted him to help her eat them! He might as well be her camp robber of a cat, vomiting strange meals she set out. Added to what Thorn demanded that he learn, it was almost too much.

Although he liked it better. He was more interested in what Heather wanted him to know than in what Thorn wanted him to know, all except for the painting. He could see her things, touch them, put them cautiously to his tongue. Thorn on the other hand was always going off into the realm of numbers, stories, poems, songs, and all of it to be memorized, sometimes word for word. Words words words! That was what made it too much.

But even Heather wanted him to memorize words. She would have him recite the qualities of three different twigs as he looked at them, following her lead, and the next day ask him to do it by himself, and he would stare at them and try to remember what they were. It didn’t always come to him.

—You are not very good at this, Heather observed one time.

Another:—Why are you so bad at this?

—I don’t like it! Loon said.—You can’t make me do everything.

—Everyone does everything, haven’t you noticed?

—No they don’t. No one else does the shaman stuff. And not many people have the plant knowledge. Mostly women at that.

She stared at him.—Well, but are you a shaman or not?

He heaved a sigh.

—So, she said.—You need to know all this stuff. The plant stuff you will need if you are going to try taking care of sick people, and that’s what shamans do. Maybe our unspeakable one doesn’t like that part, but believe me, it is shaman work. What I do for sick people would go a lot better if they had a shaman teaching them what to try for. So, stick it in your head! Put it in there as a song or something! Practice! You memorize things by associating them in strings and clusters, like tunes. Pick your own method, or try more than one. See something like the riverbank, and put each thing in a different spot on the riverbank, that’s what I do. It’s a skill as well as a talent, so you can get better at it if you try.

Another big sigh.

—Go away you big baby, you’ll huff out my fire. Go cry in the river.

She would let him off, in effect. With Thorn it was never like that.

—Tell me the story of bison man, Thorn would demand.

Loon gritted his teeth and took a deep breath. Thorn was a bison man, Pika had been a bison man. They were all assholes. Making your wife mate with a bison, trapping the son that resulted in the cave, sending girls in to find him, it was all bad news, therefore one of Thorn’s favorites. If Loon told it in a way that made it sound as bad as it really was, Thorn would flick him hard on the ears. Loon was getting tired of that.

Chapter 24

It’s forbidden!

—Oh, sorry, I didn’t know.

Twentytwenty prohibitions in Wolf pack. Elga was sick of them. The pack she had grown up in had had them also, but not so many. You can’t eat sucker fish, they’re such thieves! You can’t eat pike, they’re too mean! Although you can ward off bad spirits with a ring of pike jaws and teeth hung over the door. Hang a goose wing in a golden spruce to show respect to the birds. Never eat newly killed fish when you’re bleeding, they’re not yet all the way dead and it will make you bleed more. Never butcher an animal when you’re bleeding. If you want a baby and it won’t come, eat a bear penis, it works every time. Catching sight of a weasel or a flicker means good luck. Don’t ever touch a raven! Ravens will take away your luck.

In other words: be afraid! Everyone in the forest knows more than you do! Elga knew from her first pack that it wasn’t right. All these Wolf women were too much like their leaders Thunder and Bluejay. The fish rots from the head.

If you really want to know someone, find out what animal they are cousin to. The strong spirits are bear, wolverine, lynx, wolf, and otter. Don’t drink too much water, it makes you heavy-footed.

This was true. Elga nodded and listened, nodded and listened some more. She asked questions even when she knew the answers. She asked all the women one thing or another, even Thunder who usually spoke before there was time to ask her a question. How do you make that sauce? What is the moon?

The sun is a young woman, the moon her brother who slept with her and turned to stone. If the northern lights are strong in the fall, there will be many caribou the following spring. Dreaming of a bear means a storm is coming. But don’t call them bears, women call them black places.

—Do you ever hunt boars?

—Don’t ever say the names of bad things! What, are you crazy?

And so they called poisonleaf the evil shrub, bitterroot the one not used, shit-soon the ugly one, boar the unspeakable, lynx black tail, or something-going-around; otter was the black thing, hyena the one-beneath-notice.

Beneath notice because they acted too much like people, Elga thought when she heard this one.

—Never eat fish with porcupine! Thunder yelled at her. The fish will be offended!

—Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.

Glacier milk will give you the runs. When the fuzz from willow catkins floats in the air, the salmon are coming. You catch the first salmon and brush it with willow, while asking for more salmon in the days to come.

They had twentytwenty recipes for preserving salmon, all delicious. Different kinds of salmon were better with different sauces applied. When they went to the salmon rivers to wait for the salmon to arrive, she was told, the Wolf women would sing them up from the ocean, naming all the rivers and streams the fish would have to swim to get to their rendezvous with Wolf pack. The oldest women would eat the first salmon caught, while doing their best not to move a single bone of it, and the way the bones moved or didn’t would tell them things about the year to come.

Thunder was as mean as a pike or a leopard. Cats were the fastest of the hunters, they struck faster than you could see the strike. When a red fox is heard barking near camp, a death will come soon.

Elga didn’t like Thunder or Bluejay, and she saw that none of the women did, but only endured the two of them, and worked around them as they could. Elga was used to this kind of situation; she hadn’t liked the Jende pack either, and their women had been horrible to her. Thunder and Bluejay were better than that, but they had under them a cowed and unhappy group of women. So Elga kept to herself and worked very hard for them. It would take many months to become a silent counterweight to the headwomen, if she did it right. It would happen one question at a time, one sympathetic glance at a time, after someone got yelled at.

So she worked and she asked questions. When others asked her questions, she asked what the questioner thought of the matter. This always worked to turn the talk around. She could see that Thunder and Bluejay considered her pliant, even a little slow. It was only later they would see which way the wind was blowing. By then it would be too late.

Never fall asleep when your meat is on the fire.

Chapter 25

Loon saw that Elga appeared to be on good terms with Sage, which made him a little uneasy. Once he approached Sage alone by the river, even tried giving her a kiss, as he would have before, and with a quick scowl she smacked him on the ear and knocked him back a few steps.—No!

—I just wanted to.

—You want too much!

Hearing that, he remembered the dream in which the deer had said that very thing to him. Shocked by the echo, he stared at Sage.—You were the deer! he said aloud, and then left her alone, feeling a pang of loss.

But all that was a kind of spillover of his feelings for Elga, and left him when he was with her. In her presence he had a hard time taking his eyes off her, and during the day, if he spotted her down below in camp, he would watch her and prong at just the sight of her walking, so long-legged and slow. His wife. It was the oddness in her proportions that drew his eye, as with all the women he watched so lustfully, their particular oddities exactly what caught him and drew him to them. A woman was never bad-looking, as far as he could tell. If they were round, like Ducky, roundness was good. If they were mannish, like Thunder, then their mannishness was exactly what made them a more attractive woman. And so on. He was hopeless in that regard.

By day Elga only occasionally glanced his way, with a little hello in her eye before she returned to her affairs. From a distance Loon saw her talking with one person at a time, usually the girls, but also Thorn and Hawk and Schist. He didn’t like her talking to Hawk, but there was no sign that anything was going on there. And the pack was the pack, after all. You had to be able to talk to everyone, or there would be trouble. And enough trouble could split things up, and that would really be trouble. Like when the Fox pack split and many of their younger people moved west of the ice caps.

At night Loon and Elga met at their bed, behind Heather’s place against the backing cliff, and got under their furs and took off each other’s clothes, first one stripping the other naked, then the naked one stripping the one still clothed; either way was great, a time filled with kisses and caresses; and then he would slide into her and off they would go.

One day in the twelfth month, warmer than most, he found her down by the river alone. The last birds around were singing in the low midday sun, giving the news that there were no cats or bears in the area. Elga saw him approaching and simply pulled her cloak off, untied her skirt and let it fall. Her dark skin gleamed like flint in the sun. She stepped back into the stream and immersed herself in the water and stood again, and the water beaded and fell from her sparking with sunlight, all her fall curves there for him to see as he hurried to her untying his jacket. He took her in his arms, embraced her and lifted her, made her laugh with his eagerness. She tore his pants down his legs and squeezed his spurt with both hands, and then fell into the sandy shallows tucked in the outer bank of the river behind a snag. Ah blessed union. He kissed her all over, intent to kiss every surface and crevice of her body. He licked at her like a stag licking a deer, licked her until she gasped and helplessly rocked her hips, the sign she was about to come. What he liked then was to have his tongue as far up her as possible. The squeeze of her clenching on his tongue was the best feeling of all, better even than his own spurt, because while spurting he was gone from himself, whereas when her kolby was squeezing his tongue he was still there to feel it. Nothing else in the world made him feel as alive as that. His own spurt, which she so easily drew out of him afterward, was a kind of excess of happiness. After that his body glowed, and he wanted to nuzzle her dark skin, feel her heat, smell her on his muzzle. Crawl over to the creek and plunge his face in the stream and suck down swallows of clean cold water that still tasted like her when he licked his lips. This winter would not be so bad with Elga to warm him.

—It’s so good with you.

—Because you love me. She said this with a fond look at him.—You love me and I love you.

—Yes. I didn’t know it could be like this.

—Neither did I.

It made him so happy that he could barely stand to be with Thorn, all his stinky dishevelment, his reproaches and remonstrations and orders, his picky and convoluted lessons. Learn how to calculate the relation of the months to the year, so many scores of days, all the ugly little slash marks on the yearsticks and the tally sticks. Recite one of the five great poems or one of the ten lesser poems, and always the one he was weakest at. Ducking away to avoid the swift middle finger snapping off the thumb onto his poor ears. Ending long fists of nonstop effort with his ears buzzing nevertheless.

—Quit it! he would complain.

—You quit it. Start thinking, start remembering.

—I am already. Just leave me alone!

But he seldom ran off, because then the night by the fire would be bad, and the next day as well, until he apologized and got back to it. Painfully he had learned that his least bad option was to sit there and try to get through his lessons.

—Wait, I see something. Thorn was not impressed by his unhappiness.—A face looking left and down turns his head until he’s looking up and right.

—The man in the moon, Loon said,—looking around every month.

—Yes. And full moon is when the moon’s face is looking right at us. How many days in a month?

—Twenty-nine and a half days, new moon to new moon.

—Yes. So what do we do about that?

—We alternate the months and call them either hollow or full, meaning either twenty-nine days or thirty days. Twelve of those in alternation leaves us short of the winter solstice by eleven or twelve days, so the shamans at the corroboration add a thirteenth month every two or three years.

—Yes. And it still doesn’t work, Thorn added with a gloomy frown.—The error builds up fast. Vole thinks he has a splitter that makes it better, two score and nineteen over two, but even that loses a day every three years or so, and besides, what kind of a split is that? It has no shape, no one can see it. It’s cat vomit.

—Maybe Heather should taste it.

Thorn laughed.—I wish she would. I would be interested to hear what she thought of all that, but she doesn’t care about matching the sky to the seasons. Month to month is fine for her. People think just like they fuck, women inward and men outward. And women are naturally very monthly because of their bleeding.

—Everyone is monthly, Loon pointed out, thinking of their nights under the full moon, that world of light so clear and pale, a different world, almost like the world of dreams, but one they were awake in.

Thorn shook his head.—Everyone is yearly. Monthly is a matter of more or less.

—But the way you can see on full moon nights! It’s so bright you can even see the colors still, a little bit.

—There you are, thinking outward. You don’t think inward when it comes to the moon, but women do. So it’s different. I should have thought that as a married man you would have figured that out by now.

Jays while bathing grew ever more disheveled as they managed to get their feathers wetter and wetter. Never did you see a bird’s feathers in such disarray, except in their bath. It was as if they took their jacket off by briefly disassembling the weave of it. The blue of a jay will go away. Soon all the jays would be gone for the winter. There were only a few left now.

Sitting with Heather, splitting cedar roots for basket making. Being with Heather was far more relaxing than being with Thorn. She went out for a walk every day, to seek out her own plants in their little tucks. She joined the nut-gathering groups and helped them, then took Loon as a lookout and helper, on rambles even farther away. He often came back laden with small fragrant twigs or entire plants, and she crushed the leaves under his nose so he would learn the scents. Indeed a smell was a very distinct thing, seemingly right there inside his head, so that it almost always called up a name from him.

—When you need to memorize something, she said to him,—sniff this rosemary. It will help you remember, you’ll see.

Loon took from her the fragrant brittle twig with its short pale green needles. It had a very particular scent, part of the smell of the south-facing slopes.—Thanks, I’ll try it.

—Bears have by far the best sense of smell, she told him.

—Is it true you should never eat a bear’s small stomach?

—Who says that?

—Hawk and Moss. They say that if you eat it, you’ll end up slipping and sliding around in your shoes when you walk in forests. They say they tried it and Nevermind and Spearthrower didn’t, and they started slipping and falling when the others didn’t have any problem.

Heather shook her head.—I don’t know. It’s possible something about that small stomach might make you a little sick, hurt your balance somehow.

—So it’s true?

—It could be, I guess.

Loon made a fire with his firestarter, and they heated water in cedar cups held in the forks of branches and brewed spruce tea. Taste of spruce filling his throat and making his insides bigger. Watery eyes. Spruce had a big spirit, it helped them in all sorts of ways. Thorn wore a spruce top in his hair when he went into the caves, to bring a little luck in there with him.

Different firestarter kits used different woods: red cedar, bitter rose, elderberry tree, alder root.

—Find out which kind works best, Heather instructed him, gesturing at several kits she had assembled.

—How?

—Try them all and see which one goes fastest! She stared at him as if he were feeble-minded.

He nodded.—All right then, I will. When did you think of this?

—Last winter.

—And how long were you alive before you thought of this?

—Go. Do it.

He took the kits out into the low sun and put them each to the test, using the same starter in every case, made from a dried duff and moss mix commonly used by the pack. Thorn could drill up a fire almost as fast as you could sit down and get comfortable. Loon was not that fast, but he was good at it, as indeed most people were. It was that which made his failure on the first night of his wander still rankle. What a night that first night had been.

All Heather’s kits worked about the same speed, it seemed to him. The alder root was almost black, its firestick much lighter. The elderberry stick was made of a dried tip of new growth. The hearths had to be hard and with a tight stubborn grain to their wood, so the cup for the firestick tip would hold. The firesticks had to be hard enough to hold their tips as they were spun, but soft enough to make them hot. Putting a little sand in the cup would make them hotter too, but for the sake of the test Heather didn’t want him to do that.

—They’re close to the same, he told her when he was done trying them.

She frowned.—Do it again, I’ll sing the time. So as he lit fires, his arms beginning to burn with the effort, she turned away from him and sang the reed-splitting song, which was very short and repetitive, sticking out her fingers every time she did it five times, and marking the results on a tally stick with a blade. When they were done, she looked at her tally stick and nodded.—The cedar is fastest. We can tell people at the next festival.

—They won’t believe it.

—They will have to believe it. She gestured at the kits.—They can try it and they’ll see we’re right.

She grinned fiercely at this thought. She liked to be right about things, he saw, and in ways no one could argue with. Like hitting a rabbit with a thrown rock and killing it dead. No arguing it had been a good throw.

Thorn only snorted when Loon mentioned this later.—Hers aren’t the interesting things to be right or wrong about. Those are just the way things are.

—But that’s what she wants to know.

—Sure. So does everyone. But things we can know in that way are a very small part of what matters. So it’s a form of looking away. You get to the hard questions, Heather just looks away.

—I wonder what she would say to that.

—Ask her! But I’ll tell you what she’ll say, because she’s always saying the same things; she’ll say, first things first. First know what you can know, then take a look at the harder things.

—Isn’t that right, though?

—Not at all. The hard questions press on us the whole time, youth, no matter what we know or don’t know. You have to face up to Narsook. The hard questions can’t be avoided, not if you want to really be alive.

The flexible young cedar withes could be woven into strong ropes, and that was one of the things people did around the fire during the long nights, weaving and tugging them and making sure they were strong. They could be even stronger than rawhide cord. Any withes that were brought in would be put to quick use. When Loon went with Hawk and Moss out to check their snares, he brought a hand blade and cut as many of the new young branches as he could fit in his backsack. Everyone tried to come back from their day’s walk with something useful for the handwork at night around the fire.

That end of the year Loon became a five-strand rope maker under Ibex’s guidance.—What did you do to that finger? Ibex said, pointing to Fatty.

—Caught it knapping.

—Ow. I bet you won’t do that again.

—It wasn’t so bad, Loon lied.

Chapter 26

They went out on the hunt one morning, headed downstream and then across Lower Valley and up its east ridge trail. On the ridge they had to stop and retreat, as a bear was devastating a beehive, and looked like she would be a while. Between the bear woman and the angry bees it was not worth waiting for it to be over. Spearthrower wanted to try to kill the bear, but a ridge was not a good place to try, and the others already had all the bear claws they wanted and did not want to risk harm to get more. Spearthrower gave them a hard time about it, but the others ignored him and descended to the Lower Valley floor by way of a deer trail Loon had not noticed before. Spearthrower still had a neck cord hung with a great number of bear and lion claws.

On the valley floor the creek’s flow had dropped enough to make walking up the creekbed easy. And near the head of the creek they saw a herd of horses. They stopped and bowed to the creatures, then stood and watched for a while.

The horses were beautiful, as always. About half of them were spotted, either black on white, or white on black; the rest were brown. Their colors were as vivid as birds’ colors, and they had a little of that same fastidious quality, so much finer than caribou or saiga or elg. Their footwork was light and neat, like a cross between women dancing and the swift trotting of the unspeakables in the forest. Big glossy haunches, short stiff manes. Lower Valley was pinched to a gorge at its top, so it wasn’t clear whether they would pass through the gorge or return downstream to continue their grazing in the Urdecha.

Again Spearthrower wanted to kill one, and again the others declined. Horses were only to be killed when people were really hungry. Not to mention they were hard to get near.

—Spearthrower wants to kill. Let’s find him a wolverine and let him do it.

They laughed at Spearthrower, and he said,—All right then, let’s find a deer, if that’s what you want.

—That is what we want.

They traversed above the horses in order not to disturb them, and crossed Quick Pass into the top of Upper Valley. As they came over the rib of rock that marked the Lower side of the pass, they were hailed from the ridge trail across the valley.

—Look, he’s short-handed, Spearthrower said.

Loon saw it. All of the men in the Raven pack, who lived south of the biggest ice cap, were missing their left little fingers. This was a little worrisome, but other than that they seemed like any other people. Loon recognized the man they were approaching, a traveler named Pippiloette, which was the Ravens’ name for red squirrels.

Pippiloette waved as he approached.—Well met! he called.

—Well met, they all said.

He was much friendlier than a squirrel, but quick and inquisitive in their way.—Have you seen a pack of spotted horses? He said his words farther back in his mouth than they did, so that they came out of his nose a little.

—Yes, they’re just over the pass in the first meadow. Why, do you want one?

Pippiloette grinned.—I do. Our big mama wants one of their spotted hides. I’m trying to find out their grazing circuit, so we can set up an ambush.

This was the only way to kill horses; they were very fast and had good endurance, and stuck together in packs very hard to split. And they saw traps that caribou would run right into. No, horses were hard, and being sacred, were only hunted for sacred reasons.

—We’re hunting deer, Hawk said.—Do you want to join us?

This took Loon by surprise; Schist would not have asked, nor Heather. But Pippiloette was pleased.

—Yes, thanks, he said.—Those horses will be there tomorrow too, I’m pretty sure.

So they were five, and they discussed where deer had last been seen. Pippiloette had seen some that morning down by the top ford on Lower’s Upper Creek, so they made a plan as they went over there, and Hawk and Spearthrower slipped ahead to get downstream and get settled into an ambush. Loon was left with the traveler, to beat downvalley after a fist of sun had passed.

—You’re Thorn’s apprentice? Pippiloette asked.

—Yes, that’s right.

—Hard work! the traveler said, and laughed at Loon’s expression.—Our shaman likes him a lot. But he’s a handful even for other shamans.

—Your shaman is Quartz?

—That’s right, Quartz the magnificent. A very good shaman. Well, odd. A little scary. But I had a sickness last winter, and he made a steam that almost choked me, but he pulled the bad thing right out of me, I could feel it leave me, right here.

He pointed to his diaphragm.

—You’re lucky, Loon said.—It’s good when that happens.

—Can Thorn do that? Are you going to be able to do that one day?

—I hope so, Loon lied.—I’ve been on my wander, and gone with him to the end of the cave.

The man nodded. He was happy for Loon, interested. He had a lot of stories about the Raven pack and Quartz, and Loon offered that he had recently married a girl he had met at the eight eight festival.

—Oh very nice, congratulations on that. Where did she come from?

—From north of the caribou.

—North of the caribou! Those people, well, you tell me, I shouldn’t presume, but I hear they are wild?

—She’s actually pretty quiet, Loon said.—But maybe wild is still the right word.

The man grinned at Loon’s expression, such that Loon couldn’t help grinning himself.

When a fist had passed they clomped down the creekbed whacking things with their javelins, and Pippiloette emitted some very realistic lion roars. Any deer in the brakes below would surely have bolted downvalley to avoid either lions or, worse, humans acting like lions. Although if the deer heard the falsity they would know it was a trap, and take off sideways on a traverse over the ridges bounding the valley.

Lower’s Upper was steep and narrow, with not much in the way of meadows, curving out to the west so that it caught a good afternoon light. The wind was picking up, the pine trees roaring in their big airy needle chorus. Pippiloette sang and yet Loon could barely hear him.

Then they heard a frightened bleat cut short, and after that the triumphant cries of their brothers of the hunt, who clearly were celebrating a kill. Loon and Pippiloette ran down to join them, saw it was true; the men were standing around a stag splayed on its side, two spears stuck through his ribs and the men busy trying to catch some of his leaking blood in gooseskin bags. When he had stopped bleeding they started a fire and began to break down his body for carrying back to camp. Pippiloette knew the proper disposal rituals for the parts of the body they weren’t going to be taking back, and he chatted amiably before they burned the guts, then chanted the deer death chant, and took the unusable bones and set them at the bottom of a little eddy in the creek, stuck in a little circle so they would have fish for company. This was Pippiloette’s version of the water burial, and one he assured them would result in much better luck with deer afterward. So the others did it willingly, and the bone circle looked good there in the water, like something beavers might do.

After that they had the quarters and body and head, and they were five, so all was well, and Pippiloette joined them cheerfully.—I’m almost going that way anyway. It will be good to see your people.

He came by once or twice a year, as he spent much of his time walking a circuit, like a wolverine’s but much larger. He liked to drop in on packs in a particular order, trading for things people elsewhere would like, moving them along region to region and holding on to a few things for his return home.—It can be lonely, it’s often dangerous, but it’s interesting, he said.—I get to talk to so many people, in so many packs. There are salmon people everywhere you go, so I’ve always got my clan’s people to look out for me, and they help me make my trades. And then in between visits I’m out and about, just like the rest of the animals.

—Always alone? Loon asked.

—Almost always.

—But isn’t that dangerous, to go alone?

—No, not so much. Best be quick at making fire, of course. I try to always carry a live ember, kind of go from fire to fire to make that happen. But if you’re good with fire, and keep an eye out, you’ll be left alone.

—Even when you sleep?

—It depends where you sleep, right? Don’t you think so?

—I was out on my wander back in the spring. It seemed hard to find a safe place to sleep, especially with a fire. Sometimes I slept in trees. Other times I made a huge fire. I would even sleep by day and stay awake all night.

—I’ve done all that, Pippiloette agreed.—You have to take care.

—What about woodsmen, or old ones?

—You have to take care. It depends what you think is worse, the animals or the woodsmen. In different areas it’s different. Woodsmen are skittish, they’re almost all up on the plateau, or in the ravines of the highlands, up where no one else will live. The lunkheads aren’t like that. They have their own regular camps, usually at the top of kolby canyons, or else on islands in rivers. They’re not very dangerous, compared to lions or hyenas. They’re not real happy around people, but they are polite. Woodsmen are usually crazy, and most want to keep their distance. They’re out there because they killed someone, or ate a dead person when they were hungry or something. Lots of times when I’ve run into one, it’s seemed like they forgot how to talk. A couple of them talked all the time, but never to me. They had invisible friends. They spoke languages I’ve never heard.

He shook his head.—It wouldn’t be good to be alone all the time. I like it when I’m out on a trip, but I like it because I know I’ll be talking to someone soon. If it were to go on forever, I wouldn’t like it. I don’t think the woodsmen are any different in that way, or not much. It’s true that a few I’ve met seemed really happy. Although it’s the happy ones you’re most likely to run into. The other kind, you hope you don’t.

He came with them to their camp and joined the evening by the fire. They cut up the stag and the women stuck some herbs into the brisket, and marinated the ribs and haunches and coated them with spiced fats. Everyone ate well that night.

As they sat watching the fire bank down, Pippiloette gave out some gifts from his sack, shells and carved sticks of antler and tusk and black wood. Those in the pack who had handcrafts to trade at the eight eight gave him some of their littler things as something to pass along to other packs. In this way people knew what to look for at the festivals. So they gave him things that would fit in his sack, like baskets, spoons, waterproof bags, fur liners, or hats.

Loon gave him an antler carved to have a man’s body and a lion’s head, much like the knot he had carved in his wander, and Pippiloette laughed out loud as he inspected it and shook Loon’s hand, saying—I’ll keep this myself, I tell you, but I’ll show it to everyone and tell them you made it.

—Thank you, Loon said.

Several of the girls clustered around Pippiloette, and because of that a number of the women did as well, some keeping the girls in hand, others just joining the general pleasure, because the traveler was a good-looking man, and his stories often brought news. Even Heather was relaxed around him, which was a good sign, because usually she regarded such men and muttered,—A face is just a face, what do you do in your place?

But Pippiloette seemed to do quite a lot in his place. And also he was good at being friendly without actually coming on to the women; he was charming but a little distant, and intent to speak also to the men he had hunted with. If there was ever an awkwardness, he took his flute from his sack and played them his tunes, which were the same every time he visited, and ones they only heard from him. He had a haunting way with the flute, different than Thorn’s. He sang their songs with them in a high nasal voice, buzzy and penetrating, but perfectly pitched. A really musical person. A spirit took him up when he sang or played, just as one saw in certain morning birds. He even stood up when these moments came.

Tonight he agreed to tell them a story, and they settled in around the fire happily. He stood by the fire, and looked at them as he spoke.

—That is my story for tonight’s fire, Pippiloette said.—I have chewed off a bit of this long fall night for you.

After that they talked some more, and it seemed to Loon that Pippiloette had a way of not looking at Sage that seemed to indicate that the two of them had an understanding. Late in the night, when the fire had died down and everyone was asleep, Loon wondered if those two did not find each other. Also, if it might not be that Pippiloette had a similar arrangement with women in each of the packs he regularly visited. Heather had suggested as much one time with a remark under the breath.

When he thought what that must be like, Loon wanted to be a traveler too. Sage was the best-looking woman in their pack, the most desirable, with her big autumn tits ploshing together at her every move. It was not chance Pippiloette had made his arrangement with her. What would it be like to lie with a woman like that in every pack, each one different?

But these were just the spillovers of his feelings for Elga, which were so filled with spurting that the feeling extended from him in every direction. He loved all the women of the pack, and all the women of other packs as well. They were all people he wanted, and so were the female animals. He wanted the deer and the vixen and the ibex and the bear women, and the horse women of course. It was simply a world of desirable females. Sometimes the feeling flooded him, like the break-up of the river in spring. So when the nights came and he pulled all these feelings back together and poured them into the body of his wife, there in their bed and the whole world nothing but Elga, he felt like he had fallen into a dream where love was all in all.

And one night after they had fused and melted into each other in their nightly way, she nuzzled his ear and said,—I’m going to have a baby. Heather says it’s true.

Loon sat up and stared down at her.—You are?

—Yes.

—So. We did it.

—Yes. She grinned at him and he suddenly felt his face was already doing that. They kissed.

—We have to take care of it, she said.

—Does Heather know if it’s a boy or a girl?

—Not yet. She said she will in a few months.

—When will it come?

—Six months from now. So, the end of the fifth month. Right in the spring, the best time. Unless it’s a bad spring.

Loon tried to understand it, but couldn’t. It felt as if clouds were filling his chest. Or as if he had plunged over a waterfall he had not seen, into a deep pool. This Elga was his. The night when she had shown up at the eight eight bonfire, everything had changed—not just at once, although that too, but also more and more over the months since, with everything else that had happened, each step along the way finally leading to this entirely new place.

Chapter 27

As Elga grew bigger with child that winter, she gained in influence among the women, like the moon over the stars. Sage didn’t like it, Thunder neither, but Elga had a way, even with them, of calming people. They felt her power in a reassuring way. Her silence could have been a withholding, but it wasn’t; it was more like an assent to the other person and her story. Often they told her things while she was helping them with their work, because she asked questions, and remembered the answers too. It was hard to resent such a person.

And now she was bringing a new child into the pack, which was a big thing. Normally the grandparents would be celebrating such an arrival, so there would be two or even four strong advocates of the new pack member, and there would be a discussion lasting through the whole winter as to which clan the new babe would become part of. In this case there were no grandparents, but as Heather and Thorn between them had taken Loon in when he was orphaned, it was their role to be like grandparents to this child.

Heather, however, was not interested in such things, and Thorn didn’t like Loon’s marriage to begin with. So it was a matter of Elga’s ability to put the other women under a telling, and she did this without looking like she was trying; it was just her being herself. And so in her last few months the other women helped her in the way she helped them. And a pregnant woman in the end of her time was the focus of all their efforts.

The short days, the cold; the storms rolling in from the west, low and snowy. Ice on the river and the creeks, snow over that. The white world. The midday sun just peeking over the southern gorge wall. All the birds gone except for the snow birds; all the animals sleeping or hiding under the snow, or caught in the people’s traps, quietly enduring. White fur. The pack in its house, sleeping away. They were used to snow, they liked snow. They had their stored food and the daily tasks, the long nights sleeping like bears. The long stories told around the fire.

Heather would be the midwife for the birth, as always. She grumbled about this in the way she did about every task she performed for the pack, but in this case she seemed to really mean it. She didn’t like being the midwife.

—It will be fine, she told Elga gruffly.—You’re a big girl, there won’t be any problems. I’ll give you the right teas and infusions and we’ll have that kid out of you before you know it. There’s some work you have to do to push it out, of course, but we’ll help you. Mostly the work does you. You just have to ride it out.

And so the end of the winter passed with something for them to think about, and to watch happening. Tucked in their house or under the abri, they ate their food and watched the sky, went out on clear windless days to check the traps. The strike of the sun’s warmth on a body cut through all but the coldest days. But even the sunniest days were short, and in the afternoons they scurried back to their big house like muskrats or mice.

Chapter 28

One morning Loon went out with Moss to look at some of their traps downriver, set in the ravines off the canyon one loop downstream.

They made good time on the trail climbing the ridge between the two loops, and were on the ridge by sunrise. All the sky to the east was orange, and they agreed this meant it would probably snow two mornings later. Then Moss laughed and said,—Does it ever happen that way?

Loon laughed too. Moss’s laugh was particularly infectious. He was slighter than Hawk, with a narrow handsome face under a thick tangle of black curls. His face was very flexible and expressive, one moment as sharp as if knapped, the next slack-lipped and foolish.

—I do think snow comes after the sun shows its ears, Loon said.

—Or the moon, Moss agreed.—It’s the snow in the air getting lit up. The light bounces off the snow in the air just like off any other snow.

The light was definitely bouncing off the snow on the ground. They pulled down their caps to their eyebrows and tilted their heads down and to the side to hike up the ridge into the low winter sun. Loon’s cap was edged with marten fur, Moss’s with wolf.

When the snow warmed up in the sunlight enough to soften a little, they stopped and tied their snowshoes to their shoes and continued on to the first traps, set in the ravine mouth where Steep Creek ran into the main creek of Next Loop Down. There was a giant rock called the Robin’s Nest standing in the little meadow at the confluence of these two creeks, sticking out of the blanket of snow so tall that its top was still over their heads as they passed it. The creeks under the dips in the snow were frozen, the land silent. No birds, no animals; snow everywhere, except on the rock faces too steep to hold snow. These ragged gray walls breaking the snow blanket here and there were just begging to be painted, Loon felt, and two or three they passed were: the sight of the sacred animals in red or black, vivid in all the white and blue of snow and sky, caught his breath in his throat. The air was cold, and Moss was singing a little hunter’s ditty to himself. In places the snow was so feathery they sank knee deep even with their snowshoes on. Big lumps of soft snow balanced on every bunch of pine needles in the trees around them.—You should bring some of this feathery snow back for Elga, Moss said.

Drinking water melted from such snow would make her child light-footed. Loon laughed and said,—Good idea.

They came to the first trap, which was a pit Moss and Nevermind had dug the summer before, down into the soft dirt of the meadow. At the bottom of the pit they had put sharpened sticks and blades of knapped rock, and then covered the hole with light poles and leaves. It was only under a blanket of snow that this kind of trap was likely to catch an animal, and now as they snowshoed into the meadow, they could see that something had crashed through the roof of the pit, leaving an odd hole in the land. They rushed to the edge of the hole and looked down. A big red stag had fallen through and broken a foreleg at the bottom of the pit, and after that frozen to death. Now its dead eyes looked up at the sky as if the beast’s spirit were nearby, and using its old eyes to get its bearings.

—What is he doing here! Loon exclaimed.

—Helping us out. Thanks old man! But couldn’t you have jumped out of this pit and died up here?

Moss clapped Loon on the arm. It was an excellent bit of luck, though it meant a hard afternoon for them, first getting down safely into the pit, and then hauling the stiff body onto a frame made of trap poles that held it barely chest high, from which position they could get under it and shove it up together, out of the pit. They were just strong enough to push it up, and in their first try the stag’s body crashed back down into the pit and they had to skip away through the stone shards like squirrels to get out of its way. It stared up at them with its fixed cloudy gaze. The second time they were more careful and it went better. All the while the beast kept looking at them.

—What do you think he was thinking at the end? Loon asked.

Moss shook his head and frowned. Loon only said things like this when he was alone with Moss; the others would just joke at such questions. But Moss regarded the stag’s big weird eyes, which somehow conveyed so clearly its mute endurance, and pushed his mobile face through any number of expressions to show he was thinking, before venturing,—Maybe he was just thinking he should have been walking one leg at a time to test the snow. That’s probably what I would be thinking.

—But not only that.

—No. No, he was probably sad. Maybe thinking of his wives. It’s strange how deer have rectangular pupils, isn’t it? They look like they’re from somewhere else.

—Thorn says animals’ eyes show they don’t have human souls. There’s no flutter or movement, they’re always just stuck there in one position looking.

—So our soul is in the whites of our eyes? I don’t believe it. This deer looked at you just like you looked at him. There’s no difference except the square pupils, but even so you can see just what he’s thinking, I mean look at him! Hey, we’re sorry about this, brother, he said to the frozen deer,—but we need to eat. So thanks for helping us out!

And with that he plunged his spear between two neckbones and began to slice between them. After that they took turns in the low sun skinning the body and cutting it up with their spears. Under the spear tips the frozen meat had its usual hardness, crystalline yet flexible; they thrust between joints, bent them apart with twists from the end of the spear, cut back and forth at the meat. The blood still frozen in the beast’s veins was going to be much prized by their women back at camp. It took hard work for most of that short day to get the body into pieces they could carry in their sacks and haul behind them through the snow, using its own halved skin as a rough rope to drag them along.

By the time they were ready and on their way, the sun was low in the west, casting long black shadows over the snow, which was hardening quickly back to a surface they could walk on without snowshoes. They were a long way from home, and when the sun went down behind the hills to the west, the air quickly got much colder. But there’s always heat in hurry, as the saying had it, and without discussing it they picked up their pace and cronched over the snow side by side. It was only when it was this cold that they could hike this hard without overheating. It came on them again; they were made to run in cold like this.

Behind them the moon rose. It was the first night after full, and the fat moon turned the sky a thick twilight blue, which then infused the white snow under their feet. A world of blues: when they came to the broad ridge between loops, and could see far up and down the gorge of the Urdecha, and over the hills on both sides of it, the sky and the land were still so lit by the blue moonlight that they felt they could see everything. It was Mother Earth at her most beautiful, her every curve and declivity glowing distinctly; though blanketed by snow, it was in these moony nights that she looked most naked, the bare blue flesh of her hillsides smooth and curvaceous.

Before the last drop to Loop Meadow they stopped and looked around wordlessly at it for a while. Nothing moved, no wind, no sound. It was like a spirit world, a world beyond the sky, where the stillness quivered with a mystery. The few stars were fat and blurry, and they swam about as Loon blinked and blinked in the cold. They stood inside a black starry bag, on a white body, and everything was much bigger than could be grasped. So many times they had gone out at night during full moons to see things look like this, all the way back to when they were little boys, slipping out of the big house when most of the women were in the women’s house and there was no one to catch them. Loon and Moss were the two who liked it most.

Now they glanced at each other, smiled and nodded: time to go. The cold air was chilling them quickly. They dropped toward camp almost at a run, skidding down the hard snow where it was steepest. As they came into Loop Meadow, Loon smelled the fire, and realized he was returning to Elga, who was pregnant with their child, and they were bringing in some unexpected meat, so that most of them would stay up late, eating some meat while the women worked on the rest of it. The cold air expanded in his chest, and he let it out of him in little loon cries that Moss laughed to hear.

Chapter 29

Late that winter Elga got huge, and her time came one morning and the women took her off to their birthing hut, which was a shelter they had built next to their monthly house. They all gathered there and shooed the men away, and Thorn gathered the men around the fire and started a round of smoking his pipe, even though it was not yet noon.—New kid in the pack, he explained with his snaky grin,—our duty to welcome it.

He did not congratulate Loon as the father, but he didn’t glower at him either. Loon took up a blade and stick and carved it with nervous precision, making a little birthday toy for the newborn, in this case an ibex, which used a couple of knobs at one end of the stick for its horns. From time to time they heard the women singing, and then for a while they heard some yelps, which were hard to believe came from Elga; Loon’s scrotum tightened and he felt a flash of pain in his gut, as if his body were feeling what Elga felt.

—Getting the head out, Thorn said.—It’ll be over soon.

—So, what clan? Hawk asked.

Thorn stood.—The new one should be from the eagle clan. That will give us an eagle in a few years, and we need one. And Elga is an eagle. So eagle it is.

—Don’t the women have to agree? Hawk asked.

—No, Thorn said, glaring at him.—I’m the one who sees the clans in this pack. I had a vision the other night that showed me which one this one was.

—I’m an eagle too, Moss offered.

—That’s right, but you and Schist are the only adult eagle men in the pack. We need younger ones. You and Schist will have to get together to choose the newborn’s clan name, if it’s a boy.

Moss laughed and came over to give Loon an embrace.—Now I’m your kid’s clan uncle. Did Heather ever say whether it will be a boy or a girl?

—She wasn’t sure, but she said probably a boy, Loon replied.

—Either way, we’re brothers more than ever now.

Loon nodded, his stomach still tight.—That’s good.

He finished the birth stick, which as it turned out was only the ibex’s head, to take advantage of a whorl that could be made into its eye.

It was Sage who came down to give them the news, with a sly smile.—Elga’s child is born. It’s a boy.

The men cheered.

Later Heather said to Loon,—It was harder on her than I expected, because your child has a big head. I had to scare her into pushing him out. There’s a point that sometimes comes, where if the babe doesn’t come out, there’s going to be trouble. The mom’s getting tired, losing heart, and the babe’s neither in nor out, which is a bad place to be caught. So before I have to do anything worse, I try to scare the mom into pushing harder than she has up to that point. I tell her what will happen to her and to the babe if I have to get drastic, and how wrong that could go, and usually by the time I’m done telling them that, they’re so scared that they are really pushing hard. That’s what happened with Elga.

Chapter 30

Every once in a while when out on a hunt, they would run into hunters from the packs that lived nearby. The Lions were downstream where the Urdecha ran into the big river, and the Lynxes were up under the ice caps, the Foxes and Ravens south and west of that. Meeting any of them was cause for a quick little party. They would share some food and a pipe of smoke, and sit by a stream and drink and talk for a while before heading on their way. If they were both trailing the same animals they would sometimes join forces to finish the hunt, but that seldom happened. The Lynxes were very easygoing and even a little sleepy, more like cheetahs than Lynxes, and they liked to travel with little sacks of mash to tipple from, so some said it was because of that.

Once Loon was out gathering plants with Heather when they encountered two Ravens, who had been walking along hand in hand on the plateau’s edge trail. After they had gone on their way, Loon said,—I’ve seen those two before.

—They’re always together, Heather said.

—What do you mean? Loon said.

—They’re a pair, like swans.

Loon looked through the forest after them.—Really?

—It’s just their way, Heather said. She gave him a look.—Like Hawk and Moss, right?

—What?

—Or Thunder and Bluejay.

—What?

She stared at him. Finally she said,—You and Elga are lucky, right?

—Yes.

—A lot of people feel that way.

—But…

She dismissed his puzzled frown with a wave.—We’re deeper than we can see. There are other people down inside us doing things. We get carried along by what they do. That’s what it looks like to me.

—I was in love with a deer once, Loon confessed, blurting it out with a sudden flush of relief, even pride.

Heather nodded.—Once I loved a bison, when I was a girl. It didn’t work out.

Loon stared at her.—Thorn?

Heather shook her head.—No, Pika.

Now Loon was even more amazed.—Old Pika? Thorn’s shaman?

Heather nodded.

—What was he like?

Heather considered it.—Well, he was kind of like Thorn. Only more so.

—Mama mia. That must have been…

—It wasn’t good. Like I said, it didn’t work out. And Thorn was there too, so it was messy. She looked at her hand, sighed a sigh.—But I was there when Pika first started painting in the cave. We went in there and mated and then he jumped up and said he was going to paint me, paint what we had done. I was supposed to be Mother Earth. But then he turned it into the bison man again. He had that bison in him. No, what Thorn says is mainly right. We had a bad shaman.

Chapter 31

He came on a good-looking chert in the open water of the high pond’s outlet lead. The black water was slicing away from it on both sides in a way that showed it was balanced. He took it out of the creek and set it down in his camp on the ridge, between the two big boulders.

One day he ate the last of a boar’s fat from a bag he carried, and slept in the sun for a while and then picked up the creek rock and a knapping rock he had been using for many days, very fine-grained and hard, seemingly unbreakable. He held it in his right hand, and hit things held on the ground with his left hand. Tap until feeling the kind of hit that was going to be needed to make a clean break in the chert, and then: whack.

It took some whacks to find out how brittle the creek stone was. After he got a good sense of that, almost every whack did what he wanted it to.

Breathe in, breathe out, whack.

Breathe in, breathe out, whack.

Warmth in a sunny winter morning. The sheen of the river ice, the chuckle of the little open rapids in the creek, the bubbles swirling downstream. Two breaths and a whack, then three. Three against two was the cross beat of day. Four and three for the dark of night.

The whacking lines were tighter together now, and at slighter angles to what he already had done. He could see the way it was shaping up. It would be like an alder leaf, pointed at its stem and rounded with a little dip on the side farthest from the stem. The balance would be very good, if he could get the last whacks right.

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, whack.

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, whack.

The winter air was warming, strike by strike. His fur lifted a little on the river breeze, his sweaty skin cooled with the waft. The love of stone work, the bliss of it.

Two of the fast ones came by and stopped to visit with him. The old woman and her boy. They were not on the hunt and he regarded them without fear. The old woman had been good to him, and the boy was not on the hunt. They jabbered at him in their hoarse nasal voices, not like any of the other animals’ voices, various and expressive like certain birds. By now he had learned some of the old woman’s words, how are you, good, hurt, hungry, thank you, and he listened to her and tried to make out more, and told her he was good. He showed them his new stone blade and they were suitably impressed. It was almost perfectly balanced, and had as many facets as the grain of the stone could take.

The old woman hefted it and asked him a question. It seemed she was asking him what he did with the blade, or what it was for. And yet there she was hefting it. Shyly he took it back from her and held it in his fingers, turned it over, felt the edge, eyed it edge on to see the balance. He handed it back to her. That was what it was for.

—It’s just to look at, he whistled at her.—I made it just to look at. Our women like to see such things.

She shook her head, not understanding him.

—Good, he said in her tongue. She nodded, glancing at him uncertainly.

Spear tips were also good to make, but he liked these show blades most. It was true you could throw one into a herd, and if it hit an animal and caused them to stampede, smaller members of the herd might get hurt and be easy to track and kill. Boys did that before they learned to spear. But you didn’t need the facets and the balance for that. Any rock with an edge would do.

He knew the fast ones did things similar to this blade. Their clothes were painted and fringed with loops of leather, and they wore leather strings around their necks from which they hung teeth and shells. They painted their skin with bloodstone and char. They painted cliff walls. All that, and yet they did not see what he was doing with the blade. It was too bad they didn’t whistle.

All the things they did. So active around their camp, always bustling around doing things. Going out on the hunt. All kinds of different sizes of group, different directions, different kinds of hunts. They were always in a hurry. Hurry slowly, his mother had always whistled. It was an old tune mothers whistled to children. He had heard his grandmother whistle it to his mother once.

Now the old woman wanted him to accompany them down to the riverbank. He got up and followed them, taking the new blade with him.

They wanted his help in moving a boulder from the bank into the shallows. He couldn’t understand why they wanted it, but after the boy showed him the motion several times, he couldn’t see any other explanation. He got behind the boulder with the boy and together they rolled it into the stream, where it knocked up a mighty splash.

—Thank you! they said to him, and made motions as if eating from the river. Ah: the boulder might be the start of a fish trap. They were changing the river to make it easier to catch the fish. Some kind of trap.

—Thank you! he said, and whistled,—Good idea! He ate fish when he could catch them. Mostly it was the red ones who swam upstream to die. Before they died they were still good to eat. After they died they fell apart very quickly.

One day he would go back west to his people, who were at the red fish river west of the ice caps. He would bring them the best blades ever knapped, and show them things to do that he had learned from the fast people. Then his wife might take him back again. Then his father might forgive him. If they were still alive.

Chapter 32

It turned out Elga and Loon’s child had been born in a bad spring. The freeze-no-more moth never showed up, and not long after the child was born they ran out of their winter stores, all the nuts and skin bags of fat, the frozen ducks and smoked fish, the edible roots and dried caribou meat, everything in the final weeks measured out in pinches or one by one. Schist again took on this task, and Hawk and Moss did not presume to interfere or criticize. The shortage was damaging enough to Schist, they did not have to refer to it or add to it, and indeed they could not have done any better themselves: a bad spring was a bad spring.

It meant the men needed to be out hunting more than ever, hoping their snares and traps would catch someone to eat. But this winter the land was bare. In some winters there were enough snow hares to feed an entire pack, all the snow-white little people getting fatter as the rising snowpack lifted them to higher and higher forage on the willow bushes. Snow hares actually got fat in winter, and they were easy to trap. Wait, I see something: two eyes in a bush, caught in a trap.

But this year there were no snow hares to be found. Some years were that way, Heather said. They would be better off looking for ptarmigan and grouse. Wait, I see something: black sticks moving. Walk around in the early morning with a net in hand, ready to cast it as the white birds burst out of their snow beds. You had to be fast, but if you were ready there was just enough time. But this year, no ptarmigan or grouse.

Loon went out with his friends on the hunt, and he went out on his own or with others to check traps, ranging as far as he could. After the stag he found with Moss, no one else seemed to be around. Sometimes he found broken traps, and once a vixen, once a muskrat. Without the snow hares all the little hunter people were just as hungry as the big hunters, and easier to catch. Anything at all was worth bringing back to camp; once he found a dead mouse and brought it back, and no one laughed. But there were two score and four people in the pack, and finding enough food for all of them every day was becoming the only thing anyone thought about. It was the only thing one felt, a sucking of the stomach up and in, until it pressed hard against the backbone, and deep into one’s thoughts.

But it stayed cold. The hunters began to lack the strength to range as far as before, they had to conserve their efforts and save them for what really mattered. The other men considered Loon lucky because Elga could breastfeed him from time to time, to give him a little help keeping going. And it was true that it was a huge comfort to suck her thin sweet warm milk from her, while their baby sucked from the other breast. Once the babe reached out with his eyes closed and patted Loon on the head, as if to bless his participation.—I guess that’s why I have two, Elga said with a little smile.

But Badleg impeded him, and he was no more successful than any of the rest of the hunters. Once he came on a muskrat dead in one of their tree traps, but it looked empty somehow, and it was: the muskrat’s head had been touching the ground, and ground shrews had eaten up through the face and devoured all of its meat and intestines, leaving it a fur bag filled with nothing but bones. Loon brought this remnant back to camp anyway; they would eat the marrow out of the bones, and use the fur.

Another time he went out on a trap circle and came on a wolverine biting through the sinews of a snare in order to release a marten who had been caught. As Loon ran toward the scene, the wolverine cut its little cousin free and they both scampered off on the snow, the marten like an elongated squirrel, the wolverine in its big hops, all four feet landing together under him. Quickly they both disappeared among the trees. Loon had heard of this happening, but had never seen it himself. Wolverines and martens were family. Bear and beaver were similarly family. The bigger ones always left their little cousins alone.

Today, it was really too bad. Nothing to be done about it but repair the snare and set it again, and hope for a better result next time. You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. No cure for disappointment but to try again. Obviously it would be best to visit every trap every day, but that made for a lot of walking. The days were getting longer, but the trap circle seemed to be getting longer too. It was a relief to lie down with Elga and the babe and suckle a little from the breast not taken by the boy. Of course most of the milk had to be saved for their child. But the rich flavor went right to his stomach and quelled his pangs for a while, and made it possible for him to ignore Badleg’s throbbing.

They got so hungry that two of the pack fell sick at the same time, Ducky and Windy. Thorn and Heather laid them in beds at opposite ends of the camps, and went back and forth tending them. Thorn told Loon to come along, and there was in his eyes such a stony look that Loon gulped and decided his insubordinations could be resumed some other time.

Their diseases were very different, as Ducky had a fever and boils, while Windy was simply exhausted all the time, to the point where she could barely move. It could have been just that she was so old. So when they were at Ducky’s bed under the west end of the abri, Loon shivered in fear and watched agog as Thorn put on his bison head, so absurdly big compared to Thorn’s real head; it looked like a black snake was eating a bison’s head from below, like the shrews had eaten the muskrat. To see and talk under this bison head, Thorn had to cant it back so the bison appeared to be examining the sky. Nevertheless, as Thorn staggered about Ducky, and peered down her throat and fingered her in the armpit, then played his flute over her body, he was in such a deliberate flow, like an eddy in a slow river, that Ducky seemed entranced, and Loon felt the pull too. He wanted to help, but kept his distance. He was afraid.

At Windy’s bed, up in the morning nook, he was just sad. Windy’s lassitude was so unlike her manner when Loon had been a child. She had been always rushing around camp tending to little particulars. In his sadness he would think of how later that night he would be with Elga and be so happy. It was strange to feel both these feelings, he felt like he might break from being too full. Windy had been that same frisky woman she had always been, up until this winter. So Loon sat at the foot of her bed with his head on his knees, and thought about Elga, or the black horse, or the herd of bison filing down Lower’s Upper, all of them as big-headed as Thorn, their bodies lean with the work of carrying all that head around. Lions were the same, and he saw in his mind suddenly how they were brothers, lion and bison, the same form made into hunter and hunted, either fast or big. He saw on his eyelids the sweet curves of an ibex horn and an ibex rump, different kinds of curve entirely, both very fine. He wanted to carve.

Heather all this time sat by the sick women, sniffed their breath, put her ear to their chests to hear their hearts, tasted their pee and came back from the shitting grounds with them, shaking her head and thinking things over. She brewed many cups of tea for both women; she dripped it into Windy’s mouth from a hollow reed. Mostly it was artemisia tea, bitter and brown. To Windy’s tea she added mistletoe pollen, and a pinch of wolf lichen. This bright green moss stained Heather’s fingers and made the tea greener than it seemed it should have; the browns it mixed with went entirely away. Wolf lichen was poisonous to wolves, but Heather often fed her people noxious things in small quantities.

With Ducky, on the other hand, she covered the boils with a balm made of bear grease mixed with alder bark powder, and other grits and dried flowers she had in her collection of little colored bags. She fed both women a mash made of honey, berries, and herbs, slighty rotted like the festival mashes. These tasted bad, but seemed to give the sufferers some relief.

One night Thorn put on the bison head and danced around Ducky singing. All of a sudden he shouted and leaped on her and held her by the throat as if strangling her, reached down her throat and pulled out a white mass that he threw down toward the river. Ducky stared at him amazed.

With Windy he only sat by her side and played his flute. One morning when they were walking up to do this, he dismissed Loon with a slap to the shoulder.—Go hunt, he said.—There’s nothing more you can do here.

And there never had been, Loon refrained from pointing out, happy to get away. Windy died the next night. But Ducky lived.

They carried Windy’s wrapped body out to the raven platform, put up the ladders and carried her up, and laid her body out to be eaten. The ravens were as hungry as anyone else, and Windy’s flesh would soon be gone. When her bones were clean they would collect them for their burial in the river, that summer before going on their trek.

Before they left Windy the whole pack sat around her body and cried while Thorn played his flute. They were too hungry for this, their feelings were flayed raw, and everyone had loved Windy and been mothered by her. It was a painful disappearance of one of them from the pack. They were all part of Mother Earth, Thorn said between his flute pieces. Birth, sex, death, they were all petals on the same flower. The goddess eventually pulled all these petals off: birthed them, mated them, took them back in death.

Loon heard inside him the sound like a loon crying in the night. This was his heart’s song, this was the song no one else heard.

So a few lucky ravens had a little respite, but the rest of the people of the river gorge got hungrier. Finally a freeze-no-more moth flew out of one of the brakes near the river, and the sixth month came. At the dark of the sixth moon, Thorn stayed up all night chanting, asking the summer spirit to come, and just as he sang what Loon thought was his most haunting song, the one about the voyage between worlds, the night colors appeared up there among the stars, lighting up the black sky with shimmering waves of green and blue, so beautiful that Thorn woke everyone to see it, and announced that this was a sign that the summer spirit was returning, coming back from the other side of the sky. They all watched for as long as the lights spilled through the stars and poured through the black sky like waves made of dragonfly wings. When the lights went away they fell back asleep.

—Summer had better come, Heather muttered as she stumped back to her bed.—You can’t eat ptarmigan droppings when there are no ptarmigan.

Passing by Loon, she said,—Don’t you drink too much of your wife’s milk. Your boy needs it to grow.

—I know, Loon said.—But if I can bring something back.

Heather nodded.—But do it soon.

They got so hungry that finally Schist and Thorn went upstream to the south side of the biggest ice cap to visit the Raven pack and ask if they had any food they could share. Neither man wanted to talk about it when they returned, but their sacks were heavy with bags of nuts and fat, and they dragged between them a bag of frozen ducks.

—They’re tight there too, Schist said somberly.—This was a good thing they did for us. We owe them now. We’ll have to give them something good at the eight eight, or in the fall.

Then the ducks showed up overhead, quacking their news: summer! summer! summer! The Wolves waited a day and then quickly netted a twenty or two of them. As they did that the geese too appeared overhead, in waves of long ragged Vs, feathers creaking, complainers honking, clonking, ooking, acking, eeking.

The pack’s hungry times were over. Both men and women went out with nets and javelins to hunt geese. Never take the first of anything, of course, but when twentytwenties of a creature arrived at once, you weren’t going to be taking the first. Summer was here. Many of them went out on the hunt weeping with relief. They had been scraped raw by that hunger spring.