When those were completed, Thorn sat on the ground behind the lamps and stared at what he had done. Then he jumped up with a newly prepared stick and began again.—Ahhhhhh.
More lions, and some smudging with both fingers and stick ends, to darken certain parts of the heads. He dipped his fingers, or a little pad of moss, into the black paint, then applied it very gently. Now the lions were flowing left in their dash, six lion heads, bigger and smaller, blacked or three-lined, with some free squiggles and detached forelegs to emphasize the flow. In the lamplight they all quivered together.
Above these Thorn added two lions who were ignoring the hunt, touching noses the way cats in a pack did. Above them then, a lion with a snout almost elongated into a cave bear shape, slobbering eyelessly. That was the hungriest lion. To its right another one appeared both in profile, as was normal, and yet also turned toward the observer, both in the same head space.
Thorn then did some scraping with a burin to get the space around the black heads even whiter. One big lion head had three rows of whisker spots dotting its muzzle, over a tight mouth. They looked just that way out in the world; when hunting they were very intent and serious people, and pursed their mouths like unhappy old men thinking something over. Now Thorn dotted whiskers on the one above also, an afterthought it appeared.
—Wait, I see something, Thorn said.
—The animals they’re hunting, Loon guessed.
—Exactly. They were hunting eight bison.
As far as Loon could tell there was not room for eight bison on the left end of the lions’ wall, where a fold tilted away into darkness. Loon watched curiously as Thorn worked, first taking a caribou shinbone and scraping the lower part of the space left, then drawing a bison with a rhino’s horn, some kind of joke or odd perspective. Above that a clutch of bison heads, all in profile except for the one to the farthest left, who looked straight out at the viewer with a suspicious round white eye. All the bisons’ nostrils were pinched shut unhappily, and they squinted, except for that one looking out at Loon from under its sweet curve of horns. Animals were seldom painted front on, but Loon enjoyed seeing the characteristic double curve of horns one saw when a bison was regarding you: out, in, out.
Now Thorn was almost climbing into the wall as he used a pad of moss to stump-black some of the bison heads. His nose appeared to touch what he was doing, as if he were blacking with it. The three bison heads at the top were the darkest masses on the whole wall, it almost seemed as if they were coming out of the wall, perhaps to evade the lions, whose flowing pursuit seemed to dive slightly into the wall. Yes, they were making their escape: it was as clear as could be.
At the far left edge of his painting, Thorn took up a new charcoal stick and quickly blacked the entire wall where it curved away, giving the whole scene something like a black riverbank containing it. Now the vision of the hunt hung in space before them, melting into Mother Earth, emerging from Mother Earth. Loon found he was standing; he couldn’t remember standing up. His arms were wrapped around his chest.
Thorn moved back beside him and regarded his work.
—Ah, good, he said.—They were really coming tonight. What a thing, eh? Lions on the hunt.
—I can see them move, Loon said.
—Yes, good. Do you see how I did that? It’s a thing you can learn. They have to be each in their own space, and a little stretched in the way you want them to move. Different sizes, and a little elongation, and some extra lines.
—And like that foreleg. Just there by themselves, I mean.
—Yes, that’s right.
—Those two lions touching noses don’t make sense.
—But cats are like that, Thorn said.—You know how they are. There are always some in a pack who aren’t paying any attention to what the others are doing. Raven messed them up, they’re not very good at being pack animals. They have a hard time staying on the hunt long enough, and they don’t care what the rest of the pack thinks of them.
—That’s true, Loon said, remembering lions flopping around in their meadows ignoring each other.
—So, that helps make it look real. I did it just as it came to me. It always has to be more than just your idea of what you want. It’s not just your plan. You have to think how it would really be. Also, see how that lion and the bison just to its left are on the same bulge? They’re like a combined animal, looking like both at once. Of course if the lion catches the bison, that’s what would happen. And at the moment of attack you often see both tells at once, mixed together. Like a two-headed sheep in a herd. Or bison man over there, about to mount the woman. See how the left leg could belong to either one of them? Things overlap.
—It really moves, Loon said, growing a little fearful when he couldn’t make the lions stop moving.—I feel like I might trip and fall.
—Good. That’s what you want to feel. It’s the painter’s trap. They’ll try to move forever and they never will. People will come in here and see them move. How I wish I could see Quartz when he sees this! He’s always wearing his lion head cloak. This will blow the top of his head off. He will shit in his pants, he will run away blubbering, maybe knock his head on that bull pizzle over there, slam his head right into that girl’s big old kolby. He wouldn’t be the first man to knock himself senseless on a woman’s pubic bone. Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m hungry.
Loon in the days after that:
Mix up a batch of charcoal dust and water and go down to the river cliff to three-line some animals, working on the curves that marked each kind of beast, their proportion and flow. Spring’s high water washed the wall clean most years.
More detailed drawings he reserved for flat pieces of sandstone he collected for their surfaces—flat, rippled, crackled, each had their possibilities. He spent a lot of time knapping blades he liked enough to mount on sticks and use to etch, continually seeking a finer burin tip and edge to cut into things. There were so many ways flint could break wrong, it was a little maddening. There was no such thing as a perfectly edged burin. The angles involved were not flint’s natural angles. You could get a good point or a good edge, but not both on the same rock.
Still it was interesting to try. The trick was patience. It was like throwing spears through a hoop; you had to do it twentytwenty twenties, until you knew what would happen when you did it, if you could.
Silence is a prayer.
Sit in the morning and whack rock on rock, careful to squint and look away at the moment of the strike. A single splinter can blind you. Check the results in the light of the sun, fingering shards and chips and splinters. Sometimes the most remarkable blades would lie there in the dust after a lucky knock. Girls would give you a caress and a friendly look forever in exchange for blades perfect for what they needed. He already had needles he liked enough. So knapping was good. The better you make things, the better they are to you.
Heather would tax him with plant lore. Every little twig she put before him was bursting with its life story, its uses and dangers, twig after twig, until it began to seem to him that their variety was infinite, that no two plants in the world were the same. Of course this was not true, there were lots of samples of every type out there to be found when walking around, often bunched by type in their favorite places, like thin soils, or shady areas, or whatever might be their characteristic ways. Loon saw that better as he learned more with Heather, and it gave him some pleasure, these habits in the way living things made their living. They grew, they flourished, they died and fed their descendants, who used them as ground and food. Plants were mute people, stuck in their one spot.
It was in tasting that Heather went too far. She wanted him to accompany her to all these places and bring back samples of everything, and then she wanted him to help her eat them! He might as well be her camp robber of a cat, vomiting strange meals she set out. Added to what Thorn demanded that he learn, it was almost too much.
Although he liked it better. He was more interested in what Heather wanted him
to know than in what Thorn wanted him to know, all except for the painting. He could see her things, touch them, put them cautiously to his tongue. Thorn on the other hand was always going off into the realm of numbers, stories, poems, songs, and all of it to be memorized, sometimes word for word. Words words words! That was what made it too much.
But even Heather wanted him to memorize words. She would have him recite the qualities of three different twigs as he looked at them, following her lead, and the next day ask him to do it by himself, and he would stare at them and try to remember what they were. It didn’t always come to him.
—You are not very good at this, Heather observed one time.
Another:—Why are you so bad at this?
—I don’t like it! Loon said.—You can’t make me do everything.
—Everyone does everything, haven’t you noticed?
—No they don’t. No one else does the shaman stuff. And not many people have the plant knowledge. Mostly women at that.
She stared at him.—Well, but are you a shaman or not?
He heaved a sigh.
—So, she said.—You need to know all this stuff. The plant stuff you will need if you are going to try taking care of sick people, and that’s what shamans do. Maybe our unspeakable one doesn’t like that part, but believe me, it is shaman work. What I do for sick people would go a lot better if they had a shaman teaching them what to try for. So, stick it in your head! Put it in there as a song or something! Practice! You memorize things by associating them in strings and clusters, like tunes. Pick your own method, or try more than one. See something like the riverbank, and put each thing in a different spot on the riverbank, that’s what I do. It’s a skill as well as a talent, so you can get better at it if you try.
Another big sigh.
—Go away you big baby, you’ll huff out my fire. Go cry in the river.
She would let him off, in effect. With Thorn it was never like that.
—Tell me the story of bison man, Thorn would demand.
Loon gritted his teeth and took a deep breath. Thorn was a bison man, Pika had been a bison man. They were all assholes. Making your wife mate with a bison, trapping the son that resulted in the cave, sending girls in to find him, it was all bad news, therefore one of Thorn’s favorites. If Loon told it in a way that made it sound as bad as it really was, Thorn would flick him hard on the ears. Loon was getting tired of that.
It’s forbidden!
—Oh, sorry, I didn’t know.
Twentytwenty prohibitions in Wolf pack. Elga was sick of them. The pack she had grown up in had had them also, but not so many. You can’t eat sucker fish, they’re such thieves! You can’t eat pike, they’re too mean! Although you can ward off bad spirits with a ring of pike jaws and teeth hung over the door. Hang a goose wing in a golden spruce to show respect to the birds. Never eat newly killed fish when you’re bleeding, they’re not yet all the way dead and it will make you bleed more. Never butcher an animal when you’re bleeding. If you want a baby and it won’t come, eat a bear penis, it works every time. Catching sight of a weasel or a flicker means good luck. Don’t ever touch a raven! Ravens will take away your luck.
In other words: be afraid! Everyone in the forest knows more than you do! Elga knew from her first pack that it wasn’t right. All these Wolf women were too much like their leaders Thunder and Bluejay. The fish rots from the head.
If you really want to know someone, find out what animal they are cousin to. The strong spirits are bear, wolverine, lynx, wolf, and otter. Don’t drink too much water, it makes you heavy-footed.
This was true. Elga nodded and listened, nodded and listened some more. She asked questions even when she knew the answers. She asked all the women one thing or another, even Thunder who usually spoke before there was time to ask her a question. How do you make that sauce? What is the moon?
The sun is a young woman, the moon her brother who slept with her and turned to stone. If the northern lights are strong in the fall, there will be many caribou the following spring. Dreaming of a bear means a storm is coming. But don’t call them bears, women call them black places.
—Do you ever hunt boars?
—Don’t ever say the names of bad things! What, are you crazy?
And so they called poisonleaf the evil shrub, bitterroot the one not used, shit-soon the ugly one, boar the unspeakable, lynx black tail, or something-going-around; otter was the black thing, hyena the one-beneath-notice.
Beneath notice because they acted too much like people, Elga thought when she heard this one.
—Never eat fish with porcupine! Thunder yelled at her. The fish will be offended!
—Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.
Glacier milk will give you the runs. When the fuzz from willow catkins floats in the air, the salmon are coming. You catch the first salmon and brush it with willow, while asking for more salmon in the days to come.
They had twentytwenty recipes for preserving salmon, all delicious. Different kinds of salmon were better with different sauces applied. When they went to the salmon rivers to wait for the salmon to arrive, she was told, the Wolf women would sing them up from the ocean, naming all the rivers and streams the fish would have to swim to get to their rendezvous with Wolf pack. The oldest women would eat the first salmon caught, while doing their best not to move a single bone of it, and the way the bones moved or didn’t would tell them things about the year to come.
Thunder was as mean as a pike or a leopard. Cats were the fastest of the hunters, they struck faster than you could see the strike. When a red fox is heard barking near camp, a death will come soon.
Elga didn’t like Thunder or Bluejay, and she saw that none of the women did, but only endured the two of them, and worked around them as they could. Elga was used to this kind of situation; she hadn’t liked the Jende pack either, and their women had been horrible to her. Thunder and Bluejay were better than that, but they had under them a cowed and unhappy group of women. So Elga kept to herself and worked very hard for them. It would take many months to become a silent counterweight to the headwomen, if she did it right. It would happen one question at a time, one sympathetic glance at a time, after someone got yelled at.
So she worked and she asked questions. When others asked her questions, she asked what the questioner thought of the matter. This always worked to turn the talk around. She could see that Thunder and Bluejay considered her pliant, even a little slow. It was only later they would see which way the wind was blowing. By then it would be too late.
Never fall asleep when your meat is on the fire.
Loon saw that Elga appeared to be on good terms with Sage, which made him a little uneasy. Once he approached Sage alone by the river, even tried giving her a kiss, as he would have before, and with a quick scowl she smacked him on the ear and knocked him back a few steps.—No!
—I just wanted to.
—You want too much!
Hearing that, he remembered the dream in which the deer had said that very thing to him. Shocked by the echo, he stared at Sage.—You were the deer! he said aloud, and then left her alone, feeling a pang of loss.
But all that was a kind of spillover of his feelings for Elga, and left him when he was with her. In her presence he had a hard time taking his eyes off her, and during the day, if he spotted her down below in camp, he would watch her and prong at just the sight of her walking, so long-legged and slow. His wife. It was the oddness in her proportions that drew his eye, as with all the women he watched so lustfully, their particular oddities exactly what caught him and drew him to them. A woman was never bad-looking, as far as he could tell. If they were round, like Ducky, roundness was good. If they were mannish, like Thunder, then their mannishness was exactly what made them a more attractive woman. And so on. He was hopeless in that regard.
By day Elga only occasionally glanced his way, with a little hello in her eye before she returned to her affairs. From a distance Loon saw her talking with one person at a time, us
ually the girls, but also Thorn and Hawk and Schist. He didn’t like her talking to Hawk, but there was no sign that anything was going on there. And the pack was the pack, after all. You had to be able to talk to everyone, or there would be trouble. And enough trouble could split things up, and that would really be trouble. Like when the Fox pack split and many of their younger people moved west of the ice caps.
At night Loon and Elga met at their bed, behind Heather’s place against the backing cliff, and got under their furs and took off each other’s clothes, first one stripping the other naked, then the naked one stripping the one still clothed; either way was great, a time filled with kisses and caresses; and then he would slide into her and off they would go.
One day in the twelfth month, warmer than most, he found her down by the river alone. The last birds around were singing in the low midday sun, giving the news that there were no cats or bears in the area. Elga saw him approaching and simply pulled her cloak off, untied her skirt and let it fall. Her dark skin gleamed like flint in the sun. She stepped back into the stream and immersed herself in the water and stood again, and the water beaded and fell from her sparking with sunlight, all her fall curves there for him to see as he hurried to her untying his jacket. He took her in his arms, embraced her and lifted her, made her laugh with his eagerness. She tore his pants down his legs and squeezed his spurt with both hands, and then fell into the sandy shallows tucked in the outer bank of the river behind a snag. Ah blessed union. He kissed her all over, intent to kiss every surface and crevice of her body. He licked at her like a stag licking a deer, licked her until she gasped and helplessly rocked her hips, the sign she was about to come. What he liked then was to have his tongue as far up her as possible. The squeeze of her clenching on his tongue was the best feeling of all, better even than his own spurt, because while spurting he was gone from himself, whereas when her kolby was squeezing his tongue he was still there to feel it. Nothing else in the world made him feel as alive as that. His own spurt, which she so easily drew out of him afterward, was a kind of excess of happiness. After that his body glowed, and he wanted to nuzzle her dark skin, feel her heat, smell her on his muzzle. Crawl over to the creek and plunge his face in the stream and suck down swallows of clean cold water that still tasted like her when he licked his lips. This winter would not be so bad with Elga to warm him.