Shaman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Favorite parts of roast head while they work:

  Jowls, nose, ears, tongue, lips, lower jaw.

  The lower lip is forbidden to all but old m
en

  Whose lips already slack in that same way.

  Brain for eating or tanning hides.

  Neck meat eaten, except for the first joint,

  Forbidden to all but old men

  Because caribou are so slow to turn their heads.

  Scapula dried and used to make the caribou call.

  Shoulder meat eaten, leg muscles eaten.

  The shinbones used to scrape fat from hides.

  Feet boiled and the tissue eaten by old people only.

  Leg joints pulverized to make a grease.

  Backbone meat eaten, spinal cord eaten.

  Back sinews dried and used for sewing

  Wherever one had a need for strength.

  Pelvis meat cooked or dried for eating,

  A real delicacy; tail the same, but for the old only.

  Upper hind leg excellent, lower hind legs too sinewy.

  Leg marrow eaten, joints used for grease.

  Rib meat the best of all, dried or cooked.

  Brisket tender, prepared by boiling.

  Belly meat dried or boiled a long time,

  Another favorite delicacy of some.

  Lungs and liver, cooked and eaten with meat.

  Omasum boiled and eaten.

  Lower intestine turned inside out,

  Boiled with the fat inside, happily eaten.

  Kidneys and heart, roasted and eaten.

  The bag that holds the heart, dried and used as a bag.