Loon’s clothes were well made and clean. Loon had stitched them, but for the most part Heather had cut the parts, and she had her own style. Loon liked the way his clothes felt and looked, and when compared to the makeshift equipment of his wander, he felt superbly comfortable and well dressed.
He wore a woven reed cap that had a good sun brim, and a strap to tie it under his chin in a wind. He had made it himself and would wear it until his abuse wrecked it, after which he would weave another one.
On his back, outside everything else, he wore a woven reed cape, which took such a beating from water and sun that he needed a new one every summer. He folded and stuffed it in his sack when he did not need it, and that too was hard on it.
Under that he wore a parka made of caribou hide, with ruffs of marten and marmot fur around the hood and bottom and sleeve ends.
His middle was covered by a skirt of deer hide turned inward, with a crotchpiece of rabbit fur cradling his pizzle when it was cold.
He had chaps of caribou hide, but kept them in his pack except during the bitterest cold or the thorniest brakes; he liked his legs free as much as possible.
He often went barefoot, but his shoes, worn on rough ground or during long walks, were some of Heather’s best, with bearskin bottoms and deerskin uppers, big enough to take a layer of fine straw stuffed in their tops when he wanted that warmth.
Over his arms were the hide straps of his backsack, and in his sack were his fire kit, some duff and punk and fungus tinder, an ember bole, and some bearskin butt pads. In the fold of his waist belt were flint and antler points and needles, a burin, some blades, a tassel of leather strings looped in a bone ring, a blade retoucher, and some assorted lucky pebbles and teeth, including his deer’s teeth.
These things were really all one needed, along with a javelin and spear thrower. One could become a traveler with just them. They took all that away from a boy going out on his wander, supposedly to make him prove he could get by on his own; but now it occurred to Loon that if the boys were allowed to leave with their things, a lot of them might never come back again.
Loon made up a riddle of his own:
Wait, I see something:
My head is covered by reeds.
Marten and marmot make my fur.
Reindeer and saiga cover my legs.
I walk on a bear’s back with deer on my feet.
I can break stone cut wood start fire,
Etch bone paint cliffs glue cuts,
Kill any animal except one,
Sing like a bird drum like thunder.
What am I?
I am Loon the wanderer.
ELGA
On the seventh day of the seventh month they began their summer trek, walking up Upper Valley and over its head onto the moor to the north, then over three low divides into the valley of the Lir. Everyone carried a sack on their back; some of these were lashed to wooden frames strapped over their shoulders, to take on heavier loads and the new kids too small to have a name.
River valleys and their feeder canyons were often thick with brush or blocked by boulder fields, so they walked almost entirely on ridge trails. These had obviously been used forever, they were so well marked. Always in the land they crossed, when you succeeded in finding the best way you would find a trail there already, in some places trod ankle deep. When the trail ran over rocks it would be a matter of cairns marking the way, cairns ranging from two or three stacked stones to rockpiles taller than a person, and including many carefully stacked stone figures of one sort or another. One also saw bits of colored yarn tied to branches, in places where there were trees.
On the last pass before the head of the Lir, they came to a spring that poured out of a broad spot in the pass itself. In most of the summers they visited it, its water ran down into the valleys on both sides. Around this double outlet spring the meadow was trampled by hoofprints and paw prints. They drank there, and then dropped into the Lir valley, for the spring was considered dangerous to camp at.
So in the waning of the day, near the end of the long summer evening, they came to their traditional first night’s camp. It was the same every year, unless something untoward happened to slow them down. This first camp had an open prospect to the north and west, and the late sun slanted off the nearest ice cap, which from here loomed well over the ridge to the west. This was the northernmost of the four ice caps that rested on the highest parts of the highland to the west of the Urdecha. Even in summer these ice caps stood there, smooth snowy white hills, with parts of them the creamy blue of bare ice. The two smallest ones farther south they called the Ice Tits, the larger ones to the west and north, the Big Ice Caps. Whenever the people of Wolf pack saw these big ones, they knew they were on the way to the salmon and caribou, so the sight always filled them with the sudden thrill of distance, of knowing they were in that moment of the year and on their trek over the great big world, like all the other animals in summer, journeying from one place to another in search of their livelihoods.
On the third day of their journey, low dark clouds poured over the western horizon on a cold wind. The ridge trails were headed mostly downhill now, and mainly northward. Once they got to the north end of these ridges they would be on the open land of the steppe, but now they were still in the hills, on an exposed ridge trail, and this summer storm was coming in on a raw wet wind. So they stopped early that afternoon and dropped into a protected high canyon to the east, and chopped up branches and made a shelter in a grove of oak and hemlock and white spruce and yew. It was a big storm for summertime, but these things happened.
When they were all tucked out of the wind, under a woven spruce branch shelter, they rekindled their fire from embers they had carried from the previous night’s fire, and huddled and ate some of the last of their nuts and the newly caught ducks of this summer, delicious straight from the fire. Schist and Ibex and several other men went out setting snares and looking in likely dens. Thorn and Heather took over the fire, and, given the look of the night to come, laid it long and hot, to build up a bed of embers to sleep by. The clouds rolled in thicker and thicker, until it looked like evening all afternoon. When night finally fell, little chips of snow flew sideways on the wind, sailing over the branches of their grove and the smoke of the fire. It was going to be a stormy night.
—The unspeakable one should tell the story of how the animals got summer, Heather said to Thorn.—That’s one he always tells on this walk.
—You tell it, Thorn said unhappily. His bones hurt him in any unexpected cold.
—In the beginning the sky came right down to water, Heather said in her clipped harsh tones, as if she were recounting a story she didn’t approve of.
It was winter all the time.
Squirrel mama came out of the tree crying.
Went down to the forest floor to collect her frozen babies.
That kept on happening to her.
Winter is too cold, she said to the other animals.
Every once in a while all my babies just freeze.
Raven said, we should steal summer from the summer people.
Summer is on the other side of the sky.
We only have to break through the sky
And take a bag with us,
And kidnap summer and bring it back.
So they decided to do that.
To break a hole in the sky
They put a leech to it, to bite that first hole.
Then next wolverine clawed through that little hole,
And while he was at it
He pulled through a seal skin to use as a bag.
Once on the summer side, wolverine found
All the people were away from home,
And he started to stuff summer into the seal bag
To take it back to the animal side.
But there was an old man there tending the fire,
An old man not as stupid as some I know,
And he said to wolverine, Don’t take all of it
Or it
will be winter all the time here,
And all the people here will freeze.
Just take part of it with you, then it will go back and forth.
So wolverine brought back part of summer to the animal side,
And broke the bag open and all the summer things came out.
Pretty soon the snow melted and they had a summer too.
So now when the animals have summer,
The people have winter. But when people have summer,
The animals have their winter again.
So it goes, back and forth, winter on one side,
Summer on the other. Every time the animals bust the bag,
All the summer comes out.
—Fine for them, Thorn remarked. But tonight we’re just going to be cold.
—You still have to tell the story, Heather said.—What kind of a shaman are you?
Thorn did not reply.
As they took a day’s rest to wait out the storm, Loon saw Sage talking to Hawk again, and he could see the interest there in both of them. After that, when they continued north and west down the Lir valley’s east ridge, he thought about it, and what Heather had said about jealousy and envy, and when they came to the next river crossing, he helped Ducky across. She was the best-looking of their women after Sage, indeed many called her the beauty, because of her rounded figure, which was indeed a little ducklike, even now that she had grown up. Sage would not care about this, he judged; but it would be possible also to ask Ducky to take Moss’s spear thrower back to him, now that Loon was finished carving a horse’s head into it. Moss always camped next to Hawk, and when Ducky took him his spear thrower, Hawk would see her, and they would talk for a while. And indeed it happened just that way. This pleased Loon. He thought something might come of it.
The ridges got lower, and the ridge trails passed now between valley bogs that were often covered with moss. The women plucked a lot of it and took it with them.
Then it got stormy again, a warmer storm, wet and windy. Weather really mattered when they were on their trek. They didn’t want to lay by any more days, so they put their capes over their sacks, and over the kids being carried, and hiked on underneath ever-taller black-bottomed thunderheads, enduring the wind and the occasional pummeling of hail. When thunder rumbled to the west they made camp fast and hunkered down in it. Getting the fire going was hard, keeping their beds dry was hard. In so many ways, rain was worse than snow.
Thorn, perhaps stung by Heather’s words, held his hands out to the fire when it got going and intoned,
The shadow of the night spreads gloom,
It blows from the north.
The ground is wet and cold.
Hail, coldest of seeds,
Falls upon the earth
And makes life miserable for poor puny people.
The next day, walking north and west, they came to where a knob on the ridge they were walking gave them a view to the great salt sea. Always so vast, with a sunbeaten blue unlike the sky or anything else. An awesome sight.
The ridge trail turned right and headed straight north, running along the hills edging a flat coastal plain that stretched to the great salt sea. The hill route was easy walking, with occasional knolls providing high points to camp on and keep a good lookout. The biggest problem was crossing the rivers that here and there cut between the hills, flowing west toward the great salt sea. But over the years a number of rafts had been built, used, and then pulled up on these rivers’ banks at the best crossing points. So they could usually paddle across on these.
This year when they came to the first big river, they found that their crossing point had been dammed by a log jam, a truly enormous log jam consisting of many scores of logs, most of them giant tree trunks, and all wedged together like the branches of a beaver dam, but much bigger.
—Big Beaver must have done this, Thorn said.
There were many stories about Big Mother Muskrat, the mother of all the muskrats, who lived in her lake on the way to the ice caps; and the log jam did look like the work of a beaver twenty times normal size, so they laughed at Thorn’s joke. However this log jam had gotten started, now it was snagging every floating tree swept downstream, so that it was always growing on its upstream side. It was hard to see what would ever move it, except the rotting of the trees, and since new ones were arriving so much faster than the old ones could rot, it seemed like it might last forever, like the Stone Bison over their river.
Carefully they walked over this new dam, stepping from one stripped battered log to the next: up, down, over, holding the little ones by the hand, hefting them over branches that blocked the way. They followed Schist’s lead, which he marked with ties of red yarn, and the route was solid; not a single log moved under them. They might as well have been walking on fallen logs on the forest floor, even though through the many holes underfoot they could see the river bubbling west. It was strange and beautiful, and they talked about it all that night by their fire.
Still farther north, out on the coastal plain itself, the kind of landscape features they used around their home camp to locate themselves were no longer to be found, so they spoke of their route in ways that at home they would only use to talk about the wind: they headed north, on low land to the east of the great salt sea.
Overhead, shifting lines of geese spear-tipped the way for them, also heading north. It was the twelfth day of the seventh month now, and every living thing on earth was moving, it seemed, including them. There was a thrill in that you could feel in your spine. SUMMER. They woke at dawn and ate by the fire, packed up, went downstream to shit and pee, gathered the little ones up one way or another, and headed north. The morning moment of taking off was as effortful and squawky as the geese when they flapped and ran over a lake to get off water into the air. There were many sharp words from Schist as he got them on their way, but also encouragements, and direct help to those who were lagging. Something about him made his encouragements more encouraging than other people’s. He was good at making you want to do what you hadn’t wanted to do.
The rest of the day was a matter of walking north, with some young men tapped to bring up the rear. Loon was happy to do that. His bad leg was not so bad when going at the pace of the pack, across a coastal steppe. Clumps of grass and stretches of bog covered the flat land, with shallow ravines full of low bushes and gnarled little trees. There was a lot of old snow still on the ground, so soft and suncupped in the afternoons that it was hard to walk on it. The trail stayed slightly higher than the bogs, sometimes on low bluffs overlooking the great salt sea, other times inland at the first real rise, running from ford to ford over the rivers. It had been a snowy year, and some of these fords were running too high to walk across, and they had to find the old rafts if they could. This year the rivers here seemed to have swept them all away, so they had to make new ones. While some of them made these rafts out of driftwood, a few of the young men would run upstream to see if they could find something to eat; this was so seldom successful that they came to understand how much they relied on traps and snares at home. So they set snares every night, but snares worked better when they had more time. During the day hunts, they tried to come back with some eggs or mushrooms at least. The truth was, they were all still hungry. The ducks, delicious though they were, were not enough.
But the farther north they walked, the less the land held. The rivers had to provide, if anything was going to; but these rivers were not yet full of their salmon and sea trout, coming back home to die. One of the fords worked as a fish weir, and there were signs on both banks that it was often frequented; but they saw no one this time.
When the seventh full moon came, they were at the river called Deer Ford. This was the moon when the caribou were going to arrive nearby, at the western end of their annual trek. In effect these caribou and the people of Wolf pack made treks from different winter homes and converged here.
This year the caribou were nowhere to be seen, however. Thorn warned the pack that it m
ight take longer in such a snowy year, and they would just have to be patient and spend the time making a good chute to run their caribou through. That was all very well, and they set to the task with spirit, but they were again getting down to the last of their food. It was just as well when it came to the nuts, as they were beginning to go beyond the satisfying oddness of their winter fermentation, to something truly rancid; and the pungent liquid fat they had in their sealskin bags was taking on the taste of the bags. They needed fresh meat, like the ducks but more of it. Hopefully it would be coming soon.
One night while they huddled around in the smoke of the smudge fire of birch fungus, which was the only thing that would hold off the mosquitoes, Thorn went into one of his vision trances, first eating his mushroom and artemisia preparation, then vomiting like Heather’s cat, then lying back in the beginning of his trance, snorting and muttering. No one bothered him as he lay there spirit traveling.
He came back to them the next morning, and said the caribou appeared to be less than a week away, but it was hard to judge when looking down from so high in the sky. In any case they only had to get through a few more days.