Shaman

  It turned out Elga and Loon’s child had been born in a bad spring. The freeze-no-more moth never showed up, and not long after the child was born they ran out of their winter stores, all the nuts and skin bags of fat, the frozen ducks and smoked fish, the edible roots and dried caribou meat, everything in the final weeks measured out in pinches or one by one. Schist again took on this task, and Hawk and Moss did not presume to interfere or criticize. The shortage was damaging enough to Schist, they did not have to refer to it or add to it, and indeed they could not have done any better themselves: a bad spring was a bad spring.

  It meant the men needed to be out hunting more than ever, hoping their snares and traps would catch someone to eat. But this winter the land was bare. In some winters there were enough snow hares to feed an entire pack, all the snow-white little people getting fatter as the rising snowpack lifted them to higher and higher forage on the willow bushes. Snow hares actually got fat in winter, and they were easy to trap. Wait, I see something: two eyes in a bush, caught in a trap.

  But this year there were no snow hares to be found. Some years were that way, Heather said. They would be better off looking for ptarmigan and grouse. Wait, I see something: black sticks moving. Walk around in the early morning with a net in hand, ready to cast it as the white birds burst out of their snow beds. You had to be fast, but if you were ready there was just enough time. But this year, no ptarmigan or grouse.

  Loon went out with his friends on the hunt, and he went out on his own or with others to check traps, ranging as far as he could. After the stag he found with Moss, no one else seemed to be around. Sometimes he found broken traps, and once a vixen, once a muskrat. Without the snow hares all the little hunter people were just as hungry as the big hunters, and easier to catch. Anything at all was worth bringing back to camp; once he found a dead mouse and brought it back, and no one laughed. But there were two score and four people in the pack, and finding enough food for all of them every day was becoming the only thing anyone thought about. It was the only thing one felt, a sucking of the stomach up and in, until it pressed hard against the backbone, and deep into one’s thoughts.

  But it stayed cold. The hunters began to lack the strength to range as far as before, they had to conserve their efforts and save them for what really mattered. The other men considered Loon lucky because Elga could breastfeed him from time to time, to give him a little help keeping going. And it was true that it was a huge comfort to suck her thin sweet warm milk from her, while their baby sucked from the other breast. Once the babe reached out with his eyes closed and patted Loon on the head, as if to bless his participation.—I guess that’s why I have two, Elga said with a little smile.

  But Badleg impeded him, and he was no more successful than any of the rest of the hunters. Once he came on a muskrat dead in one of their tree traps, but it looked empty somehow, and it was: the muskrat’s head had been touching the ground, and ground shrews had eaten up through the face and devoured all of its meat and intestines, leaving it a fur bag filled with nothing but bones. Loon brought this remnant back to camp anyway; they would eat the marrow out of the bones, and use the fur.

  Another time he went out on a trap circle and came on a wolverine biting through the sinews of a snare in order to release a marten who had been caught. As Loon ran toward the scene, the wolverine cut its little cousin free and they both scampered off on the snow, the marten like an elongated squirrel, the wolverine in its big hops, all four feet landing together under him. Quickly they both disappeared among the trees. Loon had heard of this happening, but had never seen it himself. Wolverines and martens were family. Bear and beaver were similarly family. The bigger ones always left their little cousins alone.

  Today, it was really too bad. Nothing to be done about it but repair the snare and set it again, and hope for a better result next time. You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. No cure for disappointment but to try again. Obviously it would be best to visit every trap every day, but that made for a lot of walking. The days were getting longer, but the trap circle seemed to be getting longer too. It was a relief to lie down with Elga and the babe and suckle a little from the breast not taken by the boy. Of course most of the milk had to be saved for their child. But the rich flavor went right to his stomach and quelled his pangs for a while, and made it possible for him to ignore Badleg’s throbbing.

  They got so hungry that two of the pack fell sick at the same time, Ducky and Windy. Thorn and Heather laid them in beds at opposite ends of the camps, and went back and forth tending them. Thorn told Loon to come along, and there was in his eyes such a stony look that Loon gulped and decided his insubordinations could be resumed some other time.

  Their diseases were very different, as Ducky had a fever and boils, while Windy was simply exhausted all the time, to the point where she could barely move. It could have been just that she was so old. So when they were at Ducky’s bed under the west end of the abri, Loon shivered in fear and watched agog as Thorn put on his bison head, so absurdly big compared to Thorn’s real head; it looked like a black snake was eating a bison’s head from below, like the shrews had eaten the muskrat. To see and talk under this bison head, Thorn had to cant it back so the bison appeared to be examining the sky. Nevertheless, as Thorn staggered about Ducky, and peered down her throat and fingered her in the armpit, then played his flute over her body, he was in such a deliberate flow, like an eddy in a slow river, that Ducky seemed entranced, and Loon felt the pull too. He wanted to help, but kept his distance. He was afraid.

  At Windy’s bed, up in the morning nook, he was just sad. Windy’s lassitude was so unlike her manner when Loon had been a child. She had been always rushing around camp tending to little particulars. In his sadness he would think of how later that night he would be with Elga and be so happy. It was strange to feel both these feelings, he felt like he might break from being too full. Windy had been that same frisky woman she had always been, up until this winter. So Loon sat at the foot of her bed with his head on his knees, and thought about Elga, or the black horse, or the herd of bison filing down Lower’s Upper, all of them as big-headed as Thorn, their bodies lean with the work of carrying all that head around. Lions were the same, and he saw in his mind suddenly how they were brothers, lion and bison, the same form made into hunter and hunted, either fast or big. He saw on his eyelids the sweet curves of an ibex horn and an ibex rump, different kinds of curve entirely, both very fine. He wanted to carve.

  Heather all this time sat by the sick women, sniffed their breath, put her ear to their chests to hear their hearts, tasted their pee and came back from the shitting grounds with them, shaking her head and thinking things over. She brewed many cups of tea for both women; she dripped it into Windy’s mouth from a hollow reed. Mostly it was artemisia tea, bitter and brown. To Windy’s tea she added mistletoe pollen, and a pinch of wolf lichen. This bright green moss stained Heather’s fingers and made the tea greener than it seemed it should have; the browns it mixed with went entirely away. Wolf lichen was poisonous to wolves, but Heather often fed her people noxious things in small quantities.

  With Ducky, on the other hand, she covered the boils with a balm made of bear grease mixed with alder bark powder, and other grits and dried flowers she had in her collection of little colored bags. She fed both women a mash made of honey, berries, and herbs, slighty rotted like the festival mashes. These tasted bad, but seemed to give the sufferers some relief.

  One night Thorn put on the bison head and danced around Ducky singing. All of a sudden he shouted and leaped on her and held her by the throat as if strangling her, reached down her throat and pulled out a white mass that he threw down toward the river. Ducky stared at him amazed.

  With Windy he only sat by her side and played his flute. One morning when they were walking up to do this, he dismissed Loon with a slap to the shoulder.—Go hunt, he said.—There’s nothing more you can do here.

  And there never had been, Loon refrained from poi
nting out, happy to get away. Windy died the next night. But Ducky lived.

  They carried Windy’s wrapped body out to the raven platform, put up the ladders and carried her up, and laid her body out to be eaten. The ravens were as hungry as anyone else, and Windy’s flesh would soon be gone. When her bones were clean they would collect them for their burial in the river, that summer before going on their trek.

  Before they left Windy the whole pack sat around her body and cried while Thorn played his flute. They were too hungry for this, their feelings were flayed raw, and everyone had loved Windy and been mothered by her. It was a painful disappearance of one of them from the pack. They were all part of Mother Earth, Thorn said between his flute pieces. Birth, sex, death, they were all petals on the same flower. The goddess eventually pulled all these petals off: birthed them, mated them, took them back in death.

  Loon heard inside him the sound like a loon crying in the night. This was his heart’s song, this was the song no one else heard.

  So a few lucky ravens had a little respite, but the rest of the people of the river gorge got hungrier. Finally a freeze-no-more moth flew out of one of the brakes near the river, and the sixth month came. At the dark of the sixth moon, Thorn stayed up all night chanting, asking the summer spirit to come, and just as he sang what Loon thought was his most haunting song, the one about the voyage between worlds, the night colors appeared up there among the stars, lighting up the black sky with shimmering waves of green and blue, so beautiful that Thorn woke everyone to see it, and announced that this was a sign that the summer spirit was returning, coming back from the other side of the sky. They all watched for as long as the lights spilled through the stars and poured through the black sky like waves made of dragonfly wings. When the lights went away they fell back asleep.

  —Summer had better come, Heather muttered as she stumped back to her bed.—You can’t eat ptarmigan droppings when there are no ptarmigan.

  Passing by Loon, she said,—Don’t you drink too much of your wife’s milk. Your boy needs it to grow.

  —I know, Loon said.—But if I can bring something back.

  Heather nodded.—But do it soon.

  They got so hungry that finally Schist and Thorn went upstream to the south side of the biggest ice cap to visit the Raven pack and ask if they had any food they could share. Neither man wanted to talk about it when they returned, but their sacks were heavy with bags of nuts and fat, and they dragged between them a bag of frozen ducks.

  —They’re tight there too, Schist said somberly.—This was a good thing they did for us. We owe them now. We’ll have to give them something good at the eight eight, or in the fall.

  Then the ducks showed up overhead, quacking their news: summer! summer! summer! The Wolves waited a day and then quickly netted a twenty or two of them. As they did that the geese too appeared overhead, in waves of long ragged Vs, feathers creaking, complainers honking, clonking, ooking, acking, eeking.

  The pack’s hungry times were over. Both men and women went out with nets and javelins to hunt geese. Never take the first of anything, of course, but when twentytwenties of a creature arrived at once, you weren’t going to be taking the first. Summer was here. Many of them went out on the hunt weeping with relief. They had been scraped raw by that hunger spring.

  UNDER THE ICE

  It was on the second night of that summer’s eight eight festival, during the dancing just after the bonfire flares, when Loon noticed that Elga was not among the women dancers anywhere around the main bonfire. He danced widdershins to be sure, and then wandered back to their camp to find her. Heather was there, the babe and several other of the youngsters with her, but not Elga. He went to ask Heather about it.

  Heather scowled in a way that caused Loon’s heart to flutter.

  —What? he demanded.

  —Find her. Heather glanced at the kids.—Find her, or send Thorn back to me right quick.

  —Why? What’s wrong?

  —Just go find her. I’ll explain later.

  Loon ran off, alarmed by her manner. He quickly circled the main fire again, and all the subsidiary fires, and then the whole circle of encampments. No Elga. He had spotted Thorn with his little pack of shaman friends at one of the smaller fires, and panting now with fear he ran back to him and pulled him aside.

  —I can’t find Elga anywhere, and Heather said I should get you.

  —What do you mean? He sounded a little drunk.

  —Elga! We left the little one with Heather at camp, and went to the dance, and she stopped to talk to somebody, and I kept going around the circle, and after that I didn’t see her for a while, but I thought she was just on the other side of the fire, in the women’s line. Then when I didn’t see her I figured she had gone back to our camp for something, so I went back but she wasn’t there either. And Heather, I don’t know, she didn’t like it.

  —Let’s go see what she wants, Thorn said, his brow furrowed.

  Heather saw them entering their camp and came right to them.—The girl came from the north, she said to Thorn.—She was a runaway from one of those packs up there. I’m afraid they’ve taken her back.

  —Oh, no, Thorn said, voice rich with disgust. He glanced darkly at Loon and said,—Which pack?

  —One of the northers. One that doesn’t come to this festival.

  —Then why were they here?

  —I don’t know, how would I know? Go find Pippiloette, and Schist, see what they say.

  Thorn took Loon by the shoulder, squeezing it hard.—Go find Schist and Ibex, and your friends. Get everyone back here. Tell them I said we’ve got a problem.

  Loon ran off toward the big fires, and in short order found Schist and Ibex and gave them the news. Within a fist they were all regathered at their camp’s little fire. Thorn came back with Pippiloette in tow, and the traveler sat next to the fire with them, warming his hands and watching the Wolf pack discuss their situation. He took a bag of water from Sage and drank from it, then splashed some of it over his face, shaking his head as if trying to clear the festival out of it. The noise of the crowd around the bonfires didn’t help any of them with that.

  It suddenly became clear to Loon that Schist and Ibex, but also Hawk and Moss and Nevermind, had no desire to go after Elga.

  —We have to save her! he exclaimed when he saw this.—We can’t let them do it!

  —Be quiet, Schist told him.—This isn’t your decision to make.

  —We do need to defend ourselves, Thorn pointed out.—Word will get around if we don’t.

  —She was a runaway. She wasn’t ours, she just came.

  —We let her in, Heather said.—You don’t get to decide that. She’s been ours all winter, and she helped us get through it, and she’s married to Loon and has his baby. So don’t talk about her that way.

  Schist took heed of Heather’s black withering look and extended a hand.—All right, but she was a runaway from another pack, you said. And we don’t know where she is now.

  —And you want to keep dancing, Heather said contemptuously.

  Schist glared at her. No doubt he wanted to silence her, but he knew that trying to silence Heather often splashed back on one. No one could lay curses like Heather, not even Thorn. This was not the moment for that kind of scene. And he had not become the leader of their pack without a quick sense of what they needed.

  So now he sat down next to Pippiloette.—Do you know who they are?

  —Maybe. I don’t know for sure who took her. But I’ve heard the stories about where she came from, and if those are the people who took her, I know who they are.

  —Are they a big pack?

  —Northern packs are usually bigger than southern ones.

  —Could you track them?

  —Maybe. Depends if they’ve gone straight home or not.

  —Why wouldn’t they?

  Pippiloette stared at him.

  Schist got to his feet and looked into the fire. He spoke without looking at Loon.

&nb
sp; —We can’t go running off to the north after a woman. We just barely made it through this spring, we’re still weak, and we need to be here finishing our caribou, and getting back to Cedar Salmon River in time for the run, and putting enough together to give the Ravens something in return for what they gave us. We don’t have the food or the strength for a chase. That’s just the way it is. We can’t do it. Maybe next year we can steal her back.

  Loon left the fire. He stood outside the light of it, on a low rise above the festival. The drumming around the big fire pounded inside him. He was numb; he couldn’t take it in. He understood what was happening, he sensed the enormity of it, but it was so big and sudden he couldn’t feel it yet. He was stunned in the way he had been once after running straight into a tree while looking behind himself as he ran. He had never done that again; he knew the truth of the saying Watch where you’re going. Now the buzzing in him suddenly resolved to a quick clutch of nausea, and he put his hands to his knees and hung his head for a while.

  I am the third wind

  I come to you

  When you have lost everything

  When you can’t go on

  Pippiloette left their camp, and Loon took off after him. He made sure to catch up to him well away from camp.

  —Pippi! I need your help!

  —What do you mean? the traveler asked carefully.

  —Can you show me where those northers live? And which way they go to get there?

  —I could show you that, Pippiloette allowed.—But look, youth. I don’t want to take on the northers. It won’t be easy to steal your woman back from them, especially on your own. And a second person is no help either.