Wait, I see something: two red eyes. A frightened old man.
Well, there were so many old sayings, and many of them cut against each other, like blades on the opposite sides of a tree. Eventually the tree falls one way or the other. But in the meantime you still don’t know what to do.
After a while Loon found what he thought might be a way forward. He gathered himself to attempt it, and wandered over to the low hilltop where the shamans always met.
The mass of ash in their bonfire was nearly out, mere pink gleams poking out from strange clinkers, remnants of the weird things that shamans threw into their fire. There were about a dozen of the old men there now, looking even more shattered than everyone else at the festival. They had more endurance for excess, having practiced it more, but as they mashed hard at the eight eight, and dosed themselves with smoke and mushrooms and dancing and flagellation and sleeplessness, they eventually overwhelmed even their own great endurance. Now they were lying around still wearing their animal heads, canted over their faces to cover them from the sun, so that they looked more than ever clowns and fools, frazzled, drunk, splayed out like lions after a kill. Thorn was among them, as flattened as the rest under his bison head. He stared at Loon stone-faced from beneath it.
He and his fellow sorcerers had so painted their bodies with red dots and crescents and wavy ribbons and basketry patterns that they were hard to look at. Their spirit voyages the night before would have cast them out into unions with Wood Frog, Birch Woman, Raven, the Northern Lights, and so on; they had all left their bodies and flown far above or below, become mixes of themselves and their animal spirits. Now it looked like they had not yet completely returned.
Some of them were croaking out an insult contest while still lying flat as moss.
—He’s worth just as much as a hole in the snow.
—He’s so full of shit, if you pinched him your fingers would get brown.
—He’s so lazy he married a pregnant woman.
In the scattered laughter at that last, Loon sat down among them. He stirred their fire, put on a few dung patties and a branch or two.
—Welcome, youth, one of the shamans growled.
Loon nodded his thanks.—This is the story of the swan wife, he said, and stood up and began immediately with the first lines of the old story, which was one of the first Thorn had ever taught him, and thus the one he remembered best. Those first twenty lines seemed to have filled his entire capacity for remembering stories. But his flute was carved with images from the rest of the story, and they would help him remember. He could stop to blow a few notes, and see right where he was.
A man was son of the chief no one knew
And he had no marten skins to wear.
He went out from his village one day
Following a loon that called to him,
And over the ridge he came on a lake
And there on the bank lay a loon’s feathers
And in the water a girl was bathing.
He sat on the loonfleck of black and white
And said he would not give the girl her clothes
Unless she agreed to marry him, which she did.
And he took her back to the village
Where no one knew his father was chief
And introduced his new wife to them all.
And she was welcomed but would eat nothing,
Bear lips, deer marrow, none would do for her
Until an old grandmother steamed some marsh grass
And the girl happily gulped it all down.
The villagers were hungry too, and seeing that,
The girl promised them food, but every day
She brought them piles of marsh grass
Wet from the lake bottom, and she was wet too.
And people said, She thinks very highly of goose food
And instantly she decided to leave.
She put on the loon skin and flew away,
Looning the cry loons cry when they’re sad.
Hearing it her husband was desolated.
He wandered the village crying all the time,
And asked the old man who lived out of camp,
What can I do to get my wife back?
That old man told him, You have married
A woman whose mother and father
Are not of this world, as you should have known.
Loon went on to describe the three helpers the old man then sent the husband to find, to help him get the things that he needed to rescue his wife. Loon particularly emphasized the encounter with Mouse Woman, enjoying how the little creature scuttling around the fallen leaves on the floor of the forest was actually a big headwoman when you got inside her house, a power bigger than the old man, or indeed anyone else in the story. He knew quite a few of the shamans there would recognize Heather in this description of Mouse Woman, Thorn foremost among them: all the little things she knew that made her bigger, like knowledge of poisons, or what roots you could eat. In so many ways it was Heather who kept them all alive, and not these raven-shitted sorcerers sweating in the light of day.
Loon made sure that point was made clear in all the trials the husband successfully overcame, with Mouse Woman crucial to each, until finally the husband was reunited with his wife, in the loon village on the lake above the sky, in the next world over. The various parts of the story came to Loon well, he hardly had to look at his flute; all the threes of threes pulsed through him in a chant, until he came to a good end:
She was happy to see him,
And after that they did everything together.
And as to whether they stayed that way,
Or whether the husband tired of the sky
And fell back to earth,
Dropped by a raven who didn’t care where he landed,
That is a story for the next eight eight
Or some other eight eight in the time to come.
And then he stopped and nodded to them, clapping lightly to thank them for listening.
—Ha, Thorn, one of the other old men croaked, raising his head from the ground.—Your apprentice is well taught, he sounds just like you! Always the heavy moral, always the cliffhanger ending!
The others laughed. Thorn mimed a glower, but he was pleased too, Loon could see.—The highest trees catch the most wind, he reminded his needlers with scorn, and all the shamans groaned appreciatively. It looked like none of them wanted to take on Thorn in a put-down contest, as his tongue could be truly blistering. And his apprentice had just made an adequate entry into their misbegotten little clan, so no one would badger him much on that day.
Loon kept his eyes on the ground. Possibly it was going to work out. His bleary-eyed audience was now grinning their horrible pleasure.
Then full moon was past and the festival too, and people packed their travois until the poles bowed under the weight, and set out every way the wind blows. The Wolves went south and east, toward the ice caps and home beyond.
Elga was quiet on their trek, and spent more time with Heather and the women than with Loon. Often Loon saw her talking to Heather. She woke as early as anyone, and made fires and washed and cooked and cleaned and carried the babies whenever she could get a turn; she worked like a beaver woman. She seldom met the eyes of the pack’s men, but answered and smiled when spoken to. She took her turn in the harnesses of the travois and hauled longer than anyone else, and not in any suffering way, or as if to prove a point, but just because she didn’t seem to notice the travois dragging behind her. Strong. She was bigger than most of them, and although fatless in the way of midsummer, still solid. She’s like an elg, they said, they must have named her after her animal, it really fits. Hearing that made Loon happy: they saw her as he saw her, at least to that extent. But only he knew what she was like at night under the stars. So: Thorn was not happy; Sage was not happy; but Loon was happy.
On the trip home they stopped at the ford over the Joins-Lir river, and found the red salmon had already arrived.—Let your food come to yo
u, the women sang as they wove and tied together some pole frameworks, and dug out the leather nets they kept buried under rocks near that ford, and the following day they netted twenties of salmon, a big catch. While they were drying their meat they killed three bears, including a stayawayfromit, as a warning to the other bears in the area to keep their distance. Loon helped Ibex and Hawk and a few others to break up the bears, while most of the rest of the pack chopped and dried the fish. The men who had killed the bears gave Loon a bear penis to eat, laughing at him and saying it was clear he needed it.—You’re looking pretty haggard man, she’s sucking you dry, you need to save some for the trail. The penis was chewy and tasted like kidneys.
Hawk was happy for him, and happy too, Loon supposed, at the removal of a rival for Sage. When they left the Joins-Lir, their travois heavier than ever, they trudged south and upstream on the trails running along the Lir. The travois were as heavy as could be pulled, and everyone over five years old pulled one. But that was the right way to come back from the summer trek, down off the moor into Loop Camp again, where they howled and got the houses back up and began settling back in.
THE HUNGER SPRING
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 i
n 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.