But it was true that Elga was thankful to Thorn too, as she made clear often, bringing the old sorcerer things by the fire, or down by the river, or at his bed: ladles of soup, needles, birdskins, buckets of water, morsels from the kill. Loon did the same when it occurred to him, and he saw how much Thorn liked Elga’s thanks, much more than Loon’s, which he accepted as only what was due. Loon ignored that, which seemed proper to him anyway. Thorn had come and rescued them, and now Loon was going to be the pack’s next shaman, it looked like, so he needed Thorn to teach him things. It was exactly the reverse of how he had felt after his wander, which again made him feel like he had fallen into a different world. As for Thorn with Elga, no doubt it felt good to Thorn when she was nice to him, considering the treatment he always got from Heather, her constant needling. Very different to have a woman be sweet and kind, and a young strong woman at that, fat with child.
Also: Elga never thought about what had happened to Click. She did not see Click’s ghost, or if she saw it, pretended to perfection that she didn’t. She refused even to see how the haunting had affected Thorn, or Loon too for that matter. She never mentioned the past at all. Thorn liked that in her.
Because for Thorn the past was still alive. Loon could see it. There was a dream world Thorn could stumble into, even while fully awake. Although it was true that since they had buried Click’s bones in the lake, Click’s spirit had stopped hanging around at the edges of the firelight. He was not inside Badleg either, as Loon could tell because he walked around painlessly, and without the sound of humming bees from inside him. The lack of pain there remained new enough to Loon that he remembered to know it was a miracle. It seemed to him a clear sign that the burial had been good, and Click’s spirit content. And it looked like Thorn was seeing signs of this too, although he was still wary at the end of most nights; he kept his gaze on the fire itself, and did not look sideways or out into the night. And so there were no more moments when his fireside face would turn to a wooden mask as he looked out at the flickering trees at the edge of the light.
But then one day Hawk brought back an antler fragment he found in Quick Pass, and gave it to Loon while Thorn was there. The moment he saw it Loon snatched it up and tried to keep Thorn from seeing it; unfortunately the snatching motion drew Thorn’s eye, and before Loon had it hidden in his fist Thorn too had seen: it looked just like Click’s body after they had eaten the legs, the same truncated thighs at one end and long head at the other, all rough but obvious. And Thorn recognized it. His mouth tightened hard at the corners. Click’s spirit had said hello to him.
Loon took the antler fragment away, and refused to see the little incisions that one could have made to clarify the neck and crotch, which would have made it a toy in just the shape of Click’s body. Instead he cut away with his burin until the fragment was splittable, and then split it and turned the lengths into needles for Elga and Heather and Sage. So much for that.
Although it could also be said that now Click’s spirit was always there among them, and getting all sewn up in the seams of their clothes, and occasionally even sticking them in the thumbs. Loon realized he should have just lost the fragment in the forest, or cast it with the appropriate song into the pond with Click’s bones. He still didn’t have enough practice dealing with ghosts to understand how subtle they could be.
Thorn did, having spent many years in concourse with them; and the look on his face as Loon had hurried away with the antler piece had said that there was no way to avoid a spirit, if they wanted to visit you. One could do one’s best to assuage it, but in the end the spirit did what it wanted.
So Thorn kept his head down, and was as peaceable as he had ever been. He tended the sick with a particular regard, formal and distant, but intent and meticulous. Scared of Fire started vomiting, and Thorn listened to his breathing, then conferred with Heather before devising his healing ceremony; and when consulting her, he treated Heather with the same regard he gave to Scared. All of his ceremonies he performed with particular care. He did the monthly counts with perfect etchings on his yearstick. He made his old jokes. He ran the kids through their songs and riddles in the mornings.
All this unthorny behavior, as if with Elga there about to give birth, and Lucky underfoot, he could be content despite all his thinking. And yet one night when the fire had died down and he was approaching his bed, he stifled a cry and stepped back. Loon saw this from his own bed and exclaimed,—What? before he could stop himself.
Thorn didn’t answer. He was standing back, hands out, staring at his empty bed. Loon tried to look sidelong, not wanting to see. Thorn’s bed appeared empty to him. But not to Thorn. Loon flexed Badleg a little, felt nothing there. Click was not in him.
Loon didn’t know what to do. He had never heard any stories about such a situation, and it wasn’t clear to him what Thorn might want him to do. Well, Thorn would want him to stay out of it. Possibly there was something Thorn could say now to Click, something he could do…
And yet he seemed at a loss. His lips were flopping like a fish out of water, mouthing words soundlessly, just like fish did. Loon had never seen him so taken aback.
Finally Thorn pulled himself together, drew himself up, sighed heavily. He flicked the back of his hand, the way he would at kids who had gotten in his way.—What? he complained in a low voice.—What am I supposed to do? Just tell me and I’ll do it.
Then he stood there for a long time. Finally he went back down to the fire. Loon fell asleep before he returned, having never seen Click or felt a twinge.
That winter people began to say that Thorn had lost his luck. They didn’t know about Click, they didn’t see Click around the camp, but still they saw something in Thorn, and said what they said. Not when he could hear them, of course, although sometimes he heard it anyway. If he did he only turned his head away, sometimes nodding to himself. The hunters often talked about losing their luck, that was the only way one could deal with it; you had to face up to Narsook, and if it happened to you, let your friends know about it, and let them take the lead for a while to help you, and then something might happen and your luck would come back to you.
But for shamans it was different. They ventured into realms far beyond luck, into dreams, into the sky, into animals and Mother Earth. They entered spirits, and spirits entered them. Clearly they needed their luck to do that, or something like luck; and if their luck was gone, not only would their shaman’s work get harder, but the whole pack might suffer. So no one liked to see it, and after a while, anyone who talked about it was told to shut up.
On a cold winter’s night, a new person was born into Wolf pack. A woman, salmon clan. The men sat around the fire smoking from Thorn’s pipe. Thorn sang a long version of the swan wife story, laughing cheerfully at his own jokes, and cuffing Loon more affectionately than ever before.
Loon spent a lot of time with Elga and Lucky and the new babe, and in helping Thorn do things. When he wasn’t busy, he carved figures out of antlers and little sticks of mammoth ivory they had gotten at the festival. Some were toys for their new baby. Elga was happy to see them, but she was tired with the new baby, and distracted with the things going on among the women.
—Is everything all right? Loon would ask when he saw her face.
—No, she would say.—But it’s the women’s affair, nothing you can do anything about. Thunder and Bluejay are beginning to notice that no one likes them anymore. Actually no one ever liked them, but they think it’s changed to that, and that the change is my fault. Which it is, too. So, it’s too late for them now, but they’re just realizing that and are mad about it, and making things worse to make them better. Which never works. But we have to get through that one way or another. Don’t you worry about it. Someday you and your friends may have to get involved in a solution. But right now you just take care of Thorn.
—I will.
Before giving the little carved figures to the baby to play with, he took them to Thorn and asked for his comments on
them. Same with his cliff paintings in Upper Valley, and his charcoal boulders on the river, which he asked Thorn to visit and look at. Thorn would join him in a walk to the river, then when they were there Loon would walk over the river’s ice and go to work. Curve after curve, animal after animal.
Thorn would sit by a little fire he would light, interested in Loon’s work. When they returned to camp after these days, he often took out a big smooth slate and a stick of earthblood mixed with beeswax, and gave them to Loon and then called out animals and postures for Loon to three-line:
—Hyena looking over its shoulder at you.
—Ibex horns, seen from behind.
—Ibex horns seen from straight on.
—Bull elg, wasted after the rut.
—Baby rhino stuck in the mud.
—Female lion on the hunt. Oh, that’s very nice. That’s the exact look in her eye there, with just a dot and a tear line.
—Stallion throwing his head up to threaten a rival near his wives. Ah, well done. You are getting very good at horses.
Loon didn’t know what to make of these unthorny comments, but just wiped the slate clean and waited for the next prompt.—Horses are beautiful, he said.
—Yes.
Both of them only looked on when Hawk and Moss went at it with Schist and Ibex. This could be regarded as an aspect of Thorn losing his luck, in that if they had a shaman feared by all, then they might have behaved better in front of him. But probably it would have happened no matter what, because Schist kept making decisions about food that no women but Thunder and Bluejay and Chamois liked, from the winter stores to that night’s meal. And also because Hawk and his friends were now bringing home most of the winter meat. And really because the two of them had never liked each other, not since when Schist had been Hawk’s babysitter, Heather said.
So they knapped away at each other, bang, bang, bang, and sparks would fly. Schist would be sitting by the fire sniffing his mash, and Hawk would come into camp all bloody with a saiga rear over his neck and the hooves hanging down his chest before him. The mass over his shoulders gave him a bison look, and as he passed between Schist and the fire he dipped his head toward Schist, as if to a female being told to submit. Schist saw it and surged to his feet, which meant he almost got a hoof in the eye, and he swept the hoof aside, but this brought the other hoof into the side of his face, even though Hawk was stepping back as it happened, and could pretend it was an accident and laugh. Schist fumed while Hawk hefted the rump and legs off his head and held them out as if to protect himself. Schist cursed him, red-faced, and Hawk waggled the saiga hooves at him, another bull command to bison women.—Out of my way, old man. I was just trying to get by the fire to the cutting stone, don’t know why you jumped up at me like that!
To which Schist could only scowl and stomp off to the wood pile.
Endless number of incidents like that. It got tedious. Their jokes were too pointed. There were two score nine of them in the pack now, and three of the married women were pregnant. In a lot of ways things were good. They had not starved last spring very much, and it was looking like they were going to be all right for the coming spring. Seemed like that could last for year after year; so why the tension? Was it just something about the men who took charge, the ones who wanted to be headman? The young one going after the old one, the old one fighting back? They saw that a lot out in the herds. But did the pack really need a headman? A lot of packs seemed to work fine without them; the men did what needed doing, the women made the family and clan decisions without fuss in a continuous flow of talk, and things went fine. It would be good to be in a pack like that. Loon had cause to wonder whether Hawk would like it too. But he thought Moss would. And Hawk disposed, but Moss proposed. This was something Loon knew without Heather’s help, that he had seen his whole life, since they were all little boys together.
Once Loon was down by Ordech-Meets-Urdecha, and he came on two rhinos having a fight in a snowy meadow. He stepped back behind a tree and sat to look around it and see them. The wool on the two low round creatures was thick and long, black on top, crusted with snow on their undersides. They were funny-looking animals, like the unspeakables of the forest but with their horns proud and dangerous-looking, like prongs on their nose turned into spears. These were their weapons; they seldom bit each other, but instead swung their heads sideways together in great clacking collisions that sometimes caused them to stagger back and the skin around the base of their horns to bleed. A quick sideways thrust could cut a throat or put out an eye, so it could go from a dominance fight to a deadly quarrel at any instant, and almost every bull rhino was scarred around his head.
Now these two faced off, snorting and panting. They had been at it a while and both were bloody, the snow under them splotched with red. Their little eyes bulged as they glared at each other and waited for an opening: they wouldn’t have seen Loon even if he had danced right between them.
They slapped horns together in the usual way, with a kind of dance timing that reminded Loon how much the two fighters had to be in agreement to fight. The clacks sounded like when big solid barkless branches were knocked together, but more hollow.
Then one dipped his head left, and when the other swung to meet it, ducked his horn under and jerked it straight up. The other one saw this and leaped back to avoid the upward thrust, and immediately the first one charged, slapping left and right with furious speed, battering horn against head in a rapid sequence of smacks. The retreating one turned while roaring, very agile on its hooves, and ran hard away. The winner could have followed and horned him in the rump if he had wanted to, but he stood foursquare on the bloody snow and lifted his nose, sniffing disdainfully and then opening his little mouth to emit a short low roar.
Loon went out on a winter hunt with Hawk and Moss and Nevermind and Spearthrower. Thorn came along too; now that he had recovered his strength, he could keep up with the young men in all but their fastest sprints.
Up Lower’s Upper, onto the broad moor to the north. Ah the huge pleasure of walking hard with his friends, uphill and down, pushing the pace, out on a dawn patrol. Left leg stiff, and with a little numbness inside, suggesting things Loon shouldn’t try, reminding him always to rely on Goodleg to take the load when there were any questions: but no pain. Ah the glory of the dawn hunt!
They were going to go west on the plateau, along its edge to the head of Northerly canyon, and then creep down the headwall to the meadow below the cleft between the Ice Tits, where a herd of bison appeared to be wintering. If they got to the Giants’ Knapsite before the bison passed by, they might be able to spear some from their usual blind. They had not been there since the previous fall.
It was a crisp late winter dawn, the air in the valley hazy. Firestarter was plunging into the western skyline, dimming as the sky went gray and then pale blue. The rabbit in the moon was stirring her red paint to throw at the dawn. The meadow at the head of Northerly canyon was empty except for a handful of snow hares, nearly invisible in their white coats, looking nervously around, nostrils pulsing. They were very hard to kill with a throwing spear, which did not keep the men from trying a throw from above, everyone at once, a rain of long flexing spears lancing down onto the meadow, and by chance one of them pinned a running hare right to the grass. It was dead by the time they got down to retrieve it, and it turned out to be Loon’s spear.—Thank you! Loon exclaimed to the hare with a brief kiss to its forehead. He bagged it and looped the bag over his belt at his back, and the hare joined him for the rest of the day, which would make him fast. It would also add to their scent, but they were already completely obvious to the animals with a nose anyway, so it didn’t matter. They would cook the hare if they stayed out that night.
Down the winding route they had established in Northerly’s highest part. Through a notch between rocks taller than they were, down to the Giants’ Knapsite, to wait in the blind and see which way the wind blew.
The Knapsite was a tumble of big flinty boulders
, mostly free of smaller rocks. The exposed cliff above them was spalling onto the slope below it, and the slope was at an angle that sorted the rocks by size, with the biggest falling the farthest, as usual. Some house-sized boulders had rolled far enough out to pinch a meadow that curved around them and extended both upstream and down.
There was a flat spot incised into the top of one of these boulders, as if the giants had wanted men to hide there. They hauled themselves up a number of knobs that allowed one to climb the boulder’s uphill side. The incised platform was big enough to hold all of them easily, and its lookout spot gave a view of the head of the curving meadow. The valley walls were steep, and lightly forested with brush pines. The wind was flowing downstream in typical morning style, so if any animals came downvalley they would not smell the men or the dead hare. It was warm for a winter day, though cold in the shade. The sound of the creek making its slow turn under the ice came mostly from the lead at the outlet, clucking away.
Hawk took the lookout first, and soon hissed, and the men fell completely silent as they flowed to positions beside him, hoping to see for themselves.
The bison were there. A little pack of them, hairy-headed and ragged after the winter. Nine women bison followed the chief bull, the women in better proportion than the men because they did not have such massive heads. Beautiful creatures, as always, their close tan fur only a little darker than lions’ fur, their hairy heads the brown nearest black; all moving slowly together, chewing their cuds, the sunlight diving right into their bodies, so that they glowed with their weight, floated on the snow of the meadow like visitors from a denser world. Dream creatures, walking through the waking world.