Shaman
Most of the ice surface they walked over was pitted, and about as white as old snow. It was too bright to look at, and indeed Loon had to squint hard to look at anything. As they walked farther north, the ice under them grew cleaner and less nobbled. Here and there boulders and pebbles were heaped up in long curving lines. These grew fewer as they proceeded north, but some still snaked over the ice, about waist high and very strange to see, because they looked like low walls that people had piled up, but were too big and long to be that. Looking back they could see south a great way, but as they walked on, eventually all they saw was ice; even the great salt sea was only a sunbeaten verge to the southwest. It looked like a world covered entirely by ice, a sight to put a pinch in one’s throat. But the northers hiked on.
Late that day they hiked on creamy blue ice that was almost too smooth to walk on. Up on a low rounded hill of this blue ice, they could see a long way in every direction. There was only ice as far as they could see. Up here the northers stopped and made a small fire on a hearth rock they had brought with them, and cooked little strips of fish and seal and caribou to black fragments like charcoal. They broke up and dumped the black bits on the ice, while chanting a chant in which the words for ice and cold were frequently repeated. Eeeeesh! Kalt!
After that they smoked a pipe they passed among themselves, and when they were done, Loon was allowed a puff too. It was a harsh bitter smoke, Loon found. The jende coughed as they expelled it, and Loon decided he wouldn’t, but he did anyway.
One of the jende men, named Orn, made apologies to the great windy ice. Then he pointed north. There on the horizon was a low black prominence. That was their destination. The nuna, they named it. A rock island in a sea of ice. The pupil of the eye, they called it, pointing at their squinting eyes. It was the reverse of the ice caps on the hills to the west of the Wolf pack’s camp.
The jende took off toward the nuna. Loon followed them head down, eyes nearly closed to reduce the glare of beaten sunlight off the ice and the sky. He would have closed his eyes entirely, but he needed to see the ice under his feet to set them properly against the nobbling.
When they came closer to the island of rock, they found that the ice had reared up over its edges, like a wave that was about to crash on a shore, frozen at the last moment. It was not possible to cross the blue trough between the frozen wave and the scraped rock under it; they had to walk around the island to the west, until they came to a break in the ice wave which allowed them access to the rock’s edge. Here, however, the rock, which was reddish black, and as smooth as chert, was a short cliff with no obvious way up. The jende led the way left, down what became a flat floor of blue ice separating the rock cliff and a growing ice wave. They descended this little rounded slot, which grew deeper as they hiked, walking on blue ice covered with reddish rubble scattered on it, each bit of rock half-buried in the ice. It was strange to walk down this rubble-floored gorge, with a wall of rock to their right and an overhanging wall of blue ice to their left. It seemed as if the wave of ice would fall on them at any moment, though it never moved, nor groaned, nor scarcely even breathed. Nevertheless the jende walked in silence, and Loon nervously followed their lead, letting his sled down ahead of him. After a fist or so of this uneasy trek, they came around a curve of the island and the rock wall shrank in height until the ice and rock were the same height, and they could simply step from the one to the other.
They walked on flat blocks of dark red stone. The sled’s bone runners scraped, but the rock was so smooth that Loon could still pull it behind him. The blocks rose in distinct steps, and the jende helped him lift the sled up each of these knee- or waist-high walls. By the time they reached the center of the nuna, they were two or three trees’ height above the ice. The tops of all the red blocks were smoothed to a polish, with straight lines scoring the polish north and south. There were also crescent breaks, the shape of day three or four of the moon, cut into the rock. Small shallow gaps between the red blocks were filled with scree and sand that was dotted with black lichen, the only living thing on the island.
They reached the high point of the rock. From there they could see out over the great windy ice for a great distance in all directions. A turn of the head gave Loon the ring of the whole earth, its western edge blazing with sunblink. The ice below them was a creamy blue marked by patches of white, lined with gray lines of broken stone. That they had walked in a single day onto this new world was astonishing. The stories at home all spoke of three worlds, one inside the earth, one in the sky, one on the surface between them. Loon had had glimpses of all three. But here the northers had simply walked north onto a fourth world, bulking over the earth. A higher realm, a frozen sky.
The northers were looking around attentively. It was not their way to speak much when they were out by day; later, in the evenings around the fire, they would talk at length about the day’s happenings, but in the moment itself they did not like to talk.
At the northernmost end of the big block at the top of the island, there was a ring of waist-high stone shards, standing on their ends. The northers walked to this circle of stones, and before they got there, indicated to Loon that he should stay behind.
The highest block had been cleared of any of the small stones that lay scattered on much of the rest of the island: only the ring of standing stones was left on it. These stones were all roughly rectangular, and had been balanced on their ends so that they seemed to stand like short men. There were about a score of them. Gathering them must have been a considerable task, accomplished by a big group of men; the stones were big enough to be very awkward to move.
A squarish boulder lay flat at the center of this circle of standing stones, and on it the northers prepared a fire with branches and twigs they had brought from Loon’s sled. They dripped fat from a bag onto them, and soon had a fire sparked to life. On the fire they burned the wing of an eagle and the wing of a raven, while singing in their harsh voices. When the fire was at its biggest, though still nearly invisible in the glare of the sun and the sky and the ice, Orn took a red swath of cloth from his backsack and unwrapped it to reveal a human skull, missing its jaw but otherwise clean and fresh. He held it up to look at the sun one last time, and all of them likewise looked right at the sun, eyes closed, singing together. Then Orn put the skull in the fire, and they watched as it blackened and, when they had poured some fat on it, burned as well, not like wood, but like the tip of a giant lamp wick. As with a wick, it took a long time to burn away. White flame danced in its eye sockets and out of its gaping mouth as if it were comfortable living in fire, but eventually it broke and fell in on itself, and joined the embers under it. As the fire burned itself out, the skull became no more than black chunks, like the other bits of char there in the ash.
When the fire went out, the men stirred the ashes gently, waited again. In the frigid chill of the breeze out of the north, the heat quickly left the ashes, and as soon as they were cool enough to handle, the northers all scooped up double handfuls and carried them outstretched to the ring of stones, where they walked around the outside of the circle and stopped to sing at each of the cardinal points; after which they surrounded one of their company and tossed their ashes into the air, such that the wind caught the ashes and blew them over this man. He held his arms out and his face up, and took the rain of ash on him as if he wanted it.
This was as close to shaman stuff as Loon had ever seen in the northers, and he watched with a pang in his chest as he thought of Thorn, and wondered what Thorn would have made of this, and whether he would ever see Thorn again and thus have a chance to describe the northers’ ceremony, their ring of stones, this immense fourth world of ice that they had walked right up onto. He still did not see how getting back to Thorn could happen, and the pain of that made his body weak. His stomach shrank, his knees buckled, he had to collect himself to be able to walk. With all the standing around their feet had gone cold, and they had to proceed carefully as the jende walked west and north, to
an edge of the rock island where they had not yet been.
Here the rock stood high over the ice. At their feet a steep cliff of cracked stone dropped away to the creamy blue. All the narrow ledges of this cliff were green with moss, so they saw it as mostly green; then the cliff steepened as it dropped, such that much of it could not be seen from above. The ice beyond the green moss looked a long way down.
The jende had gone quiet on the approach to the cliff’s edge, and by signs required that Loon do the same. They stood back from the edge and looked around them. The great windy ice covered everything they could see, extended to the distant sun-singed horizon.
Suddenly the jende rushed to the cliff’s edge as if to cast themselves off, and stopped and screamed as they threw handfuls of small rocks down the cliff, bouncing from ledge to ledge.
Up and out into the air screeched a great flock of birds, flapping across each other in wild disarray, some even colliding and tumbling down before catching the air and flying again. They were crow-sized black-and-white birds, with big curved orange beaks, twentytwentytwenties of them crisscrossing the air overhead until they were everywhere over the men.
When they were past their panic and high enough, the birds flocked and began circling in groups, and either returned to the cliff below, ignoring the northers who had disturbed them, or flew off. Black backs, white undersides, ducky feet that were the same orange as their beaks. Their faces were two big white circles holding little black eyes. They flew so close together it seemed like they should be colliding, but now that they were over their fright, they never did. Birds were good at that.
The jende watched the birds’ crisscrossing very intently, hands on foreheads shading their eyes. When the birds were either gone or had returned to the cliff, with only a few still circling overhead, they talked it over for a while, in a way they usually wouldn’t. Loon could see they were interpreting what they had seen in the birds’ splash into the sky, because they sometimes scratched curves on the rock with their hand blades, or made swooping motions with their hands. The way the birds had flown off in their panic meant something to them. It was going to be a good year, they were telling each other.
After that they headed back. Down the many blocks of scraped rock, back onto the breathing blue ice, once again sliding along carefully, the sun now blazing off the ice to the west at an angle that hurt. They had to squint until their eyes were slits nearly closed shut, and here the jende’s eyelids gave them quite an advantage, it seemed. For Loon the ice was so bright it went black, as if burning at its edges. It was a light like the fire in the skull on the block. Blindly they walked down the slope of the ice plateau with the wind at their back. Badleg throbbed badly at the growing length of the trek. They were walking back down into the world. Soon the sun would set and they would have to finish their descent in darkness. For now, the world blazed.
Some of their late winter storms lasted a fortnight or longer. They passed these in the big house, eating, sleeping, and sleeping some more. On the upper platforms the jende sat around or lay on their sides. In the dim light coming down through the roof tube, they made things and talked, and their elders told stories, long stories in short rhythmic bursts of speech, the winged words following one on the next in a way that lulled Loon into something between sleep and waking, something that was not exactly dreaming, but like it. When the jende elders finished their stories they were just like Pippilouette, and would say something to effect of, Look, the icicles seem to be melting already, to remind their audience how much time they had eaten up with their story. The more the better, on days like these.
Sometimes Loon made things too. He carved spear throwers from shoulder bones in their food, using not blades, which the captives weren’t allowed to have, but broken pebbles. Sometimes after they broke bones for their marrow, there were splinters left over that were easily sharpened into trap stickers; but these could be blades as well, obviously dangerous, and there was no place to hide them, so he usually broke them up when he was done making them. One however he slipped between two hides on the wall where they overlapped, near the floor. No one noticed.
But he couldn’t see a way out.
As they waited out the spring storms, they spent more time in their house than in any month of the winter. At dawn one or two of them would dress and look out the entryway, and then report on what the winds told them they could do that day. If it wasn’t storming, out they ventured into the cold, and did what could be done. They fed their captive wolves, visited their shitting field, got more frozen fish from the food platform. At sunset they convened in their big beaver den of a house and talked the day over while they ate in the heated air. They sweated freely through the evenings, resting on their highest levels in their highest heat. They slept on the lower levels where it was cooler, just above Loon and the other captives, as they seemed to like to sleep snuggled into their furs. The air flowing in the low entryway’s cold trap was the same coldness as the outside air, of course, and if you put your hand down from the captives’ level into the tunnel of the entryway, you could feel just how cold it was, very much colder than on the ground floor of the house, so quickly did the air warm as it rose. It always amazed Loon how quickly that happened, but he could feel it with his hand, and also reach up and feel the greater warmth just above him. In the distance from the cold trap to the jende’s first level, the air went from freezing cold to mildly cool, indeed almost warm, or in that in-between that was neither warm nor cool. It was like the way air warmed from one’s nose to one’s lungs, or when the sun hit you in the morning: strangely quick changes in the heat or coldness of air.
In their big house, the warmth had to do mostly with the fire kept burning on the platform level, and the way in which every wall of the house had been covered in leather, making the place windproof and holding in its warmth as if in a bag. The jende’s bodies glowed like lamps in the gloom, their plump skin flush with blood and gleaming with sweat. They looked like the rocks they put in their fire, then lifted with stout branches into buckets of water they cooked in: these stones too glowed in the dimness and sizzled the air. On storm days the hollow branch at the top of the house was kept almost completely plugged by a patch of fur, and that held in even more heat. When they retired to their beds in the evening, they pulled out the fur patch and opened the top hole entirely, which let the whole house cool down a little. After that they would curl into their furs and the near darkness of the lowest fire, really just a lamp fire, with three wicks burning through the night.
Before going to bed, they had a final meal. They often ate fishes while they were still frozen, chewing on them with relish. But sometimes they boiled the fish in wooden buckets, using the hot rocks to heat the water. When they did that, they ate the fish and then drank the soup they had been cooked in. The jende women would snatch out the fish, dry them with their fingers, hand them out to every jende in the house, with particular attention to who got what. After the fish were eaten, they passed around ladles of the soup. Then they went to bed. Sometimes they woke at night and peed into their pee buckets. Mostly they slept, with only Loon to ponder sometimes through the long fists of the night, feeling Badleg throb with the cold.
The days began to last longer. They would soon be in the hunger months of spring, and yet the jende were not even close to running out of food. They could have made it through yet another winter with the food frozen on their platforms, Loon judged, and maybe another after that. And yet every day that the winds allowed, the men went out hunting and fishing and trapping. Loon didn’t know what to make of that. Probably they just liked to be doing things. They did have more kids in their pack than most packs in the south had. And sometimes they stole wives from other packs, as he very well knew. Maybe having so much food made them want for other things to do. Maybe they wanted a lot of kids, wanted to increase their number. One time he caught a glimpse of Elga in the entry to the women’s tent, and she looked well fed, and he wondered if she would get pregnant. Loon suc
ked air through his teeth at the thought. But he didn’t know what to do about it. At night he could only lie wrapped in his hide on the cold floor, eating his cold meat; and if the impulse came to him in the darkness, fucking the cold earth. But the impulse rarely came. His feet were always cold, and a cold lump inside him too. Nothing he could see was going to free them from this place.
Still. He had that bone sticker hidden in the hides on the wall. And whenever he was sent out for firewood, or frozen fish from the food platform, or sealskin bags of fat, he tried to steal things and hide them, first in the hides on the wall, or in snowdrifts around camp, and then, when he went out foraging for firewood, under a boulder in the valley nearest camp, one boulder in a clump of boulders at the bottom of a rockslide. The hole under this boulder was like a marmot house, and of course marmots could get into it, so he did not leave food. But over time he hid stolen bags and backsacks, and later two jackets with hoods, and sticks that could be walking poles or spears. Anything he could steal that was not food, that he thought might be useful for the walk home, he took and put there.
But he still couldn’t think of how to get away.
Thorn was crossing Quick Pass when a figure appeared in the meadow at the head of Lower’s Upper. Thorn went still and watched for a while. He couldn’t see like he used to. Then the figure waved at him. It was Pippiloette. Thorn waved back, and the traveler ascended the headwall under the pass at speed. Thorn tugged at the remnant of his left ear, a stub that he seldom touched. When the traveler appeared in the pass, Thorn went to him and they embraced, then regarded each other holding hands.
—Do you know where Loon is? Thorn said.