Whether this day proved to be warmer than the night or not, he was going to have to keep moving to stay warm. There would be no relief from that until he got a fire lit. So he gathered his unsuccessful fire kit and held the two pieces of it in his left hand, and clasped a good throwing rock in his right hand, and took off downstream. He wanted a bigger copse of trees, with a good mix of spruce and pine and cedar and alder. The ridges and hillsides and valley slopes, and the upland behind and above them, were mostly bare rock dotted with grasses, and now covered by old snow; but in the valleys against the creeks, trees usually grew, making ragged dark green lines in the palm of any valley. Downstream a short walk, where Lower Valley’s creek was met by a little trickle down its eastern flank, a flat spot held a bigger clump of trees, surrounding a little oval meadow and climbing the slopes to each side.
He made his way around the wet part of the little meadow and went to the thickest part of this grove. He slipped between the trees, grateful for their shelter. It was windier now, and there was more rain falling than he had thought when he left his night copse. In this larger grove things were very much better. He was well protected, and now that it was day he could see what he was doing. A broken cedar at the center of the grove had exposed a big curve of its inner bark, which he could pull free and use to make some rough clothes. A couple of snow-rimmed anthills spilling out of the end of a decomposed cedar log gave him sign of potential punk. There was a small hole at the end of the log; he bashed it in with his rock and tore the hole deeper, then reached in and up: on the underside of the still solid wall of the log was a section of punky duff, quite dry—Ah mother! he cried.—Thank you!
He pulled out a big handful and carried it quickly to the lee of a gnarled old pine.—In every grove OF SUFFICIENT SIZE some wood will burn, he said aloud, shouting his correction. He was going to tell that to Heather in no uncertain terms. She would laugh at him, he knew, but he was going to do it anyway. It was important to get things right, especially if you were going to make sayings out of them.
He left the dry duff well protected in a cleft at the base of a broken old pine tree, and quickly gathered a bunch of branches and broke off several more. He stashed these with the duff and then broke off ten or twenty smallish live branches and arranged them around and behind and over the broken pine tree he had chosen, making its wind protection even better. Bush pines like this old one had multiple trunks, and were thickly needled; this one was a great tuck to begin with, and with his branch walls added, hardly any wind or rain was making it through to his fire area.
After that he gathered the pile of firewood next to him, then sat down with his back against the trunk, curled in a crouch to make his body the last part of the windbreak. He crossed his legs and placed his unfeeling feet against the sides of his base.
He chopped at his firestick’s tip until it was a little cleaner and sharper, then placed it in the dent on the knot base, very near his new duff. When all seemed right, he began to spin for dear life, back and forth, back and forth, feeling his hands sliding slowly down the stick, feeling also the pressure of the stick against the base as it spun, trying to hold the combination of speed and pressure that would make the most heat. There was a feel to that, and a dance with each return of the hands from the bottom of the stick to the top, a quick little move. When he had it going as well as he could, and had made several swift hand shifts from bottom to top, he toed some of the duff closer to the blackening cup spot, a little depression in the knot which was what had caused him to pick this base in the first place; it was just what you would have cut with a blade in a flat base.
He watched the duff blacken, holding his breath; then some of the newly black spots glowed yellow and white at their edges. He gently blew on these white points, contorting so his face was closer to them, breathing on them in just the way that would push the white away from the cup into the bigger mass of duff. He bent his backbone like Loop Meadow and blew as gently as seemed right, coaxing the white heat to grow, feeding it a little wind that would not blow it out, giving it just what it needed, emptying himself out to it, puff puff puff, pufffff, this he could do, this he knew how to do, puff puff puff, puff puff puff, pufffff
and the duff burst into flame. FIRE! Even this tiny flame lofted a little waft of heat into his face, and he sucked in a breath and blew even more ardently than before, still very gently but with a particular growing urgency, like blowing in a hole on the flute when you want to make a wolf’s cry jump. As he did this he also shifted to his knees and elbows, using his face as the closest windbreak for this gorgeous little flame, and breathing on it in just the way that made it bigger, making love to it, oh how he wanted it to feel good, to be happy and grow! He gave it his breath, his spirit, his love, he wanted it to spurt, to leap up like the spurtmilk out of a prong, to burn in his face: and it did!
When he saw that the little spurt of flame was holding, he began placing the littlest and driest twigs over it, in a way that would catch as much of them alight as possible without harming the blaze below. It was a delicate balance, but one very well known to him; something he was good at, Thorn having forced him to practice it twentytwentytwentytwenty times. Oh yes, fire, fire, FIRE! Almost everyone was pretty good at fire, but Loon thought of himself as exceptionally good at it, which was part of what made the previous night’s failure so galling. He was going to be embarrassed to tell the story of that first night. He would have to emphasize the terrible power of the storm, but then again, as his pack had spent the night just one valley over, they weren’t going to believe much of an exaggeration. He would just have to admit he had had a bad night.
But now it was morning, and he had a fire started, and the first twigs were catching and adding their burn, so he could add more, including some bigger ones. Soon there were ten or twenty twigs alight in a fiery stack over the first burn, and their flames were a tangible yellow. Very soon the moment came when it was safe to put a pretty large handful of dry twigs gently atop the little blaze, and they would all catch almost immediately. He did that and said—Ha! Ha! and put on some larger branches. Finger sticks, then wrist branches. Happily he watched as the growing flames blackened the rounded sides of so many twigs and branches. A fire makes all right with the world.
Smoke now flew up, and the hiss and crackle from the wood showed how hot the fire was getting. The heat smacked his naked chest and belly and pizzle, which burned horribly as it warmed, in the usual agonizing tingle. He squeezed it in one hand to hold the pain in, and felt that it was a good pain, so good it was easy to feel it as a harsh form of pleasure; ah, the too-familiar burn of numbed flesh coming back to life, the itch deep under the skin, the painful tingle of being alive! Now he was going to be able to warm up even his feet! They would burn like mad as they came back to him. Ah fire, glorious fire, so friendly and warm, so beautiful!
—Such a blessing, such a friend! Such a blessing, such a friend! One of Heather’s little fire songs.
Now things were really looking good. The previous night was put in its place as a mere problem, a dark prelude. With a fire lit, the storm still blowing overhead did not matter anything like as much. He could keep this fire going for the whole fortnight, if that seemed best, or he could take it with him a certain distance, if he wanted to move, and reestablish it elsewhere. He could focus his efforts on food, shelter, and clothing, and no matter how those went, he would always have the most important thing. And it was only the first day of his wander!
He sat on the windward side of the fire and stretched out his legs around it, held up his arms over it. Hands catching the heat from right in the smoke. Oh the tingle of life coming back:—OW! It was a very different howl than the ones of the night before. Like the wolves, like his namesake the loons, he had a whole vocabulary of howls. This was the happy one, the triumphant one:—OWWW!
When he was warmed right to his toes, and had several big logs burning on a broad bed of red-hearted gray embers, he walked the perimeter of his little grove, t
hen spiraled in through it, inspecting it. There was that cracked cedar at the edge of the little meadow, and in the shallows of the creek he found a block of flint with one sharp end and a length of rough edge, so that it resembled a massive clumsy burin. It would make an adequate chopper. He took it back to the cracked cedar and began to hack at the split in the trunk, detaching the bark and then peeling off the inner layer in sections as big as he could make them. Some of the strips were longer than he was.
When he had stripped the tree of all the inner bark he could get off, he took it back to his tuck, added some branches to the fire, and then in its glorious warmth sat down to tear the inner bark into strips. This was slow and meticulous work, but very satisfying as the strips grew to a considerable pile.
By midday he had more than he thought he would need. After tending to the fire again, he arranged the strips on some snow-free ground near his tuck. He had four or five score of them. He laid six in a line on the ground and then wove six more across them, pleased at the simple but effective over-and-under pattern. He used longer strips for the ups, and shorter ones for the arounds, and he offset the starts of the arounds each from the next, so that the resulting tube would not have a weak line down it. Finally he reached under and pulled the weave up the middle, then wove more arounds around the back, bringing the ups that had been farthest apart together; and after that he had a tube. A legging.
He did that again, and had leggings. Then a triple-stranded length to serve as a belt to hang the tubes from; then hangers, and a simple crotch strap to cover his cold pizzle. He stepped into the leggings and tied them to his belt, and felt them catch his warmth immediately.—Ha!
After that a vest; then a hat; lastly, out of the remainders, a ragged short cloak. In rain these clothes would get wet and then tear easily, but meanwhile, in his shelter, they would give him some warmth, and when it stopped raining they would give him some protection too. What he needed for proper clothes was fur skins, of course, but that would take some getting. For now his bark suit was the best he could do, and far better than being bare, or so he hoped.
Now, being warm, he felt a real pinch of hunger. He had spotted some berry patches back in the meadow, so after putting three more big branches on the fire, he ventured out in his clothes to relocate them.
It was still windy, but the rain had stopped, and the clouds were breaking up. The verge of the meadow was furred by a bramble of duck’s eye berries, and he reached in carefully and pulled some of last year’s dead berries off the ground. These were black and flat, but they would give him something.
Then he went to the place where the creek left the meadow. As often happened, he saw trout in the water there, tucked under the last curve of the bank above the outlet. He was not far from his grove; through some trees he could see his fire blazing merrily away.
He walked downstream until he saw a shallow spot that would work. He heaved rocks from the bankside into the stream until he had made a little dam across it. The creek poured through the gaps in this dam so easily that the water didn’t rise the slightest bit behind it; but a fish of any size could not get through. Then he hurried back upstream to the meadow.
There he took off his new clothes, stepped into the creek, and walked downstream. When he was upstream from the last meander, he pulled a big rock from the bank and threw it hard into midstream, at the same time jumping up and down and shouting. No fish flashed by headed upstream, so quickly he sloshed downstream, still shouting. He saw there were no fish under the bank at the last turn; presumably they had escaped downstream.
He waded downstream toward his dam, a rock in one hand, a stick in the other. He hit his rock against rocks in the water, yelling as he went.
Then he came to where he could see his dam. Ahead of him in the water, caught between him and the dam, were three trout. He dropped his rock in the stream and reached up onto the bank and as quickly as he could pulled rocks into the water and built another dam. As he finished he had to fend off a couple of upstream rushes by one of the fish, but even that one was too frightened to try to flash past him, and the other two didn’t even try. With the second dam built up well above the level of the creek, he had them in a little fish pen.—Ah! he cried.—Thank you!
He sloshed upstream to give a quick look to his camp. His fire was still burning well. He got out of the creek and walked downstream and stepped into his fish pen. He stalked one fish, he thought the one that had rushed him, moving into a position where he could reach down with both hands, very slowly, until they were next to the fish, which was trying to hide by staying still. With a single scoop outward he splashed water and fish together up onto the bank, where the fish flopped till it died. He stifled his shout, to keep from scaring the other fish, and moved slowly to the next one, tucked under the bank. He stuck his hands down very slowly, scooped again, and the second fish flew up in its mass of water and thrashed out its life.
The last one darted about and evaded several of his scoops, but then he caught it, and it too died on the bank flopping this way and that. After that he had three nice trout, each well over a hand long. He sang the fisherman’s thanks, got out of the creek and put his clothes back on, then carried the fish to the fire.
Old alder sticks broken with a twist eventually yielded an edged point sufficient to cut the fish and gut them. Then he stuck them on longer pine branches and held them over the fire until they were cooked and sizzling at their edges. They tasted great, unseasoned but trouty. He would pluck sprigs of rosemary and mint to add to later meals. As he ate, it occurred to him that he should have opened the upper dam of his fish pen before leaving it.
But that would be something for tomorrow. With his stomach full and his body dressed, sitting there by the warm fire, he was suddenly sleepy.
In another short tour of his grove he gathered more spruce branches for bedding and blanket. He made the bed right next to the fire, and when the softly needled branches were piled to his satisfaction, he went to the creek’s bank and gathered wads of moss and took them back to dry them by the fire. While they dried he gathered more firewood for the night, then laid the dried mosses on the branches of his bed. He lay down on the padded bed and pulled spruce branches thick with needles over him, still wearing his bark clothing. He would keep the fire high. It would be a very comfortable night. It was still twilight, but he lay there anyway next to his pile of firewood and watched the flames, feeling happy. Only his second night, and he was fed and clothed, and in a bed by a fire! Now that would be a story to tell.
He lay there, comfortable and warm. The moon was on its second night, nicely thicker than the curved line of a first night. A fortnight goes fast, as they said. Soon the crescent set, and the night went full dark, stars pricking the black above a few remaining clouds. The undersides of the trees above him flickered together in their firelight dance. Second day of the fourth month, a wet chill in the air outside the bubble of fire warmth. Sleep took him away.
Around midnight wolf cries from a distant ridge woke him, and he threw a few branches on the bed of embers, pulsing redly under fluttering white ash. Splash of sparks; watch a branch blacken, watch it catch fire, that sudden yellow pop into the world, that hypnotic transparent dance, and he was out again.
Later he dreamed of running up a crease under a ridge to catch a glimpse of three ibex, seen as they were topping the rise. He came on the animals right there before him, all three facing him foursquare and at ease, their neat curved horns poking the sky. Rockdancers; his mother’s favorite animal; and suddenly she was there beside him, and his father too. They were looking at the rockdancers in the time of the caribou on the steppe, when the low rumble of caribou hooves sounded like distant thunder. His mother was raven clan and his father eagle, but they both clearly loved the ibex; this was what Loon remembered from that moment. He knew that being with his parents was unusual, and this knowledge woke him.
The stars had circled, it wasn’t far from dawn. He tried to dive back into the dream, fail
ed; tried then to grasp what memory of it he could, before he was exiled from it for good. All of it stood before him at once; then he tracked it from faintest moment to boldest moment; then from beginning to end. Some dreams want to be remembered, but others don’t and have to be chased down. This was one of those.
So, his mother and father had visited. That had not happened for a while. He tried to see in his eye what they looked like, or understand how in the dream he knew so well who they were, even though they were just standing there beside him, not saying anything he could precisely recall. Sometimes he recalled dream conversations, other times not. This time he had known their feelings without them having to talk. They had been filled with benevolence and concern for him, and with love for the rockdancers. Loon whimpered at their absence from the living. What was it like to be in the spirit world only, how did they live there, why couldn’t they cross back? Why had they died, why did things die? The mystery of it all swept through him, and he felt tiny, pierced by a vastness. If it weren’t for the fire his desolation would have been complete. With the fire there beside him he could look at these matters, allow himself to feel the hurt in them, the vastness.
Right after dawn it clouded up again, but the cloud layer was thin and had no rain in it. The wind blew in fitful gusts, tearing away flakes of ash from his bed of embers. His tuck was mostly protected still, and although the side of him away from the fire was chilly, it was easy to turn and feel the radiance singe his cold skin. This was the second day of his wander; but now, despite his comfort, he felt sad and alone. He sighed. This was his initiation as a shaman, after all. He was walking into a new world, a new kind of existence; it was not meant to be merely time spent alone. This was what his parents had come to tell him: he had to face something, learn something, accomplish something. Change into something else: a sorcerer, a man in the world. Of course his parents were dead.