Shaman

  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.

  We had a bad shaman, he pinched us

  And beat us with sticks till we bled,

  He stuck bone pins through our ears

  And pulled them out sideways to make us remember.

  You see what I have on the sides of my head,

  Nothing but holes straight into my brain.

  It wasn’t right but I’ll admit this:

  I do remember things very well.

  One thing I remember is how he led us

  Into this cave for the first time

  To paint the sacred animals.

  It was one of his sorcerer things.

  He had us all painting the cliffs

  Under the abri at Ordech-Meets-Urdecha,

  Using charcoal and bloodstone

  To paint just like he did,

  Not just lame tries like kids on a lark,

  But true three-liners and colored paintings,

  And all the tricks you see in here now,

  To make the brothers and sisters look real,

  And move in the light like they’ll jump in your face.

  I remember he took me and his other boys

  And made us eat his sorcerer’s dust,

  A ghastly mix so bitter we puked

  And afterward walked knee high off the ground,

  Which is very hard to do without falling.

  And he hauled us into the depths of the cave

  Singing a spirit song announcing our presence

  To the great mother goddess whose body we stand on,

  Whom he said we were mating by walking inside her.

  We were the spurtmilk that night, he said.

  A full moon it was, and Pika the shaman took an oil lamp

  And led the way into the kolby of Mother Earth,

  Warm and damp just as you might expect,

  All opened to us, and pulsing not so much pink as orange.

  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.

  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:

  Now we come to you, mother, sister

  Singing and bringing you some of your people

  Bison and horses, favored by the sun

  Hunters and hunted, cats and mammoths

  Every manner of brother and sister

  The ones you love, the ones we love

  Talk to me, mother. You are the one I listen to

  You are the one I want to speak. Not me

  But you. You speak to me and through me

  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.