Loon stepped back and stared. He had drawn the mane of the second horse without thinking, and now he was appalled to see that it was too high. Thinking about Thorn had distracted him, and he had painted without looking. A huge mistake!
And no way to fix it. If he continued with this new head in this position, the four heads would be too close together: but the space wasn’t big enough for five heads.
Startled still, sick with frustration, he stepped back again, careful this time not to go near the lamps. He sat down next to his sack and looked at the wall and thought it over. He recalled Thorn’s bison in the farther chamber; one of them had seven legs to show it was running. He saw again against his eyelids the black horse on the ridge, rearing and throwing his head toward the sun. The way the light had caught on his stiff short black mane. The way black horses seemed to jump out of a landscape into the eye.
He stood again and went and touched the wall under the mane. He could leave that mane detached and on its own, and place the second head a bit farther down. It might look like there was an extra horse in between the two, as often happened when one looked across a herd. Or it might suggest the horse’s rearing, like the seven legs of Thorn’s bison. The world seen by lightning flash, as Loon often saw it, storm or not. Moments of being one after the next, snapping in the eye once and then forever.
The wall was cold under his fingertips. His feet were cold, and he flexed up and down on his toes and heels, trying to warm them. The wall pulsed out toward him, then sucked back away from him, trying to pull him off balance, cause him to fall into it and be captured. There were smaller horses in the valleys to the west, their women had no manes. He saw he could make a little joke; the four heads of the rearing horse would also be from four different horses. And the detached mane could also be smudged in a way that made it look like the top horse’s cheek, while remaining the mane of the horse under it. Then a maneless horse, with little ears on top: a colt, or almost. So in a single toss of the head the horse would age through its whole life, or rather become all the black horses Loon had ever seen. Well, the story it told was not his problem. He just needed to draw them, and after that they would tell their own story. He wouldn’t be sure what he would get until he drew it.
The curves of the wall under his fingers showed him that the second head was looking less into the wall than the top one had been. Part of the toss of the head. Rearing away, defiant. The back line of the blackest bull, to the left of the horses, was a faint line between the two horses’ faces, making a triangle. He took up the burin and scraped that triangle a little whiter, working as carefully as he could in the corners where the lines met. The rock-on-rock scrape rasped into the black shadows of the cave. A big black nostril. The sound of the stick against the wall was so much woodier than the burin.
Loon stood back to see how the second head looked. It seemed to be sniffing the drawing of a little old rhino, standing on end. His third horse would be sniffing this same rhino’s rear. That would not make the horse happy, it would keep its mouth and nostrils shut to avoid the smell of that rhino’s rear. Horses and rhinos definitely did not like each other. Really no animal was happy to be around a rhino. Only mammoths would even come near one. Mammoths did not care who they approached, although they did take care around rhinos. It was a standoff between them when they both wanted the same water. Once Loon had seen a rhino and mammoth stand watching each other across a creek for an entire fist of the day without moving, each not quite looking at the other, both seeing who would wait the longest. Loon had left before they decided it.
He made the third head a woman horse, with a very short mane, neat and demure. Coloration a lighter black, achieved by a close mottle of wall and charcoal, requiring a very light touch with the end of the branch, and some finger smudging, very light. The wall here was slightly chipped, which made it perfect for this effect; black on the high points, dimples white. Each horse was going to be a slightly different black.
The fourth head, at the bottom, he decided would be the blackest black of all, something to really draw the eye, to start the viewer at the beginning of the tossing of the head. One would look first at this bossy mass of black, then the eye would move up with the motion of the rearing. The heads would move and lie still both at once. The Thorn touch, yes, of course; Thorn would have liked this painting. So, one of the smaller kinds of horse to start things. A young stallion, black as the cave when the lamps went out, and whinnying. This noisy black creature would be the start of it all: a horse startled, his eye round, scraped white around it, a white tear streak under the eye, also scraped. Mouth open as it whinnied in protest at being seen, then reared and wheeled away, as it had done on the ridge, in that moment when some part of Loon had been born, his wander’s great moment, when he had realized the world was stuffed with a meaning he couldn’t express. Right here he would express what could not be expressed, for all to see.
He filled in the black. He scraped with the charcoal stick, fingered the soot into the rock. His fingers were pure black now too, and as he rubbed the charcoal in, there were times when he felt and saw his fingers go right into the rock, right into the horse’s body. Bristles of the mane as stiff as lion whiskers, bunched and upright. Black the whole head, all except a little stretch where neck met chest, just to round the figure, give it the curve that the wall itself gave the horse, a little curve of a bump so that the horse’s left leg stood out from the wall. This would be a great touch when he brought the pack in to see it, and moved the lamp to make shadows on the wall dance. He couldn’t both move the lamp next to the wall and see its effect from the center of the cave, but he could tell it would be good, a real movement. And above it the horse would toss its head.
Now his hands plunged deep into the stone of the wall. He had to move them around slowly, as if in thick mud, to keep from breaking off his fingers. The wall was cold, his fingers were cold.
When he was done with that blacking, the blackest blacking he had ever done, it took him a while to pull his hands out of the wall. When he did, he stepped back to his sack to look at the wall.
It was good. The free-standing mane between the top two heads was still strange, but there was nothing he could do about it. It worked as the cheek of the top horse, or the top of a horse seen between the upper two, or the mane of the second horse, rising before its head did, leading the head. All of those, sure. Part of the movement. And the black of it was good. Loon loved the black of the lowest horse, whose whinny seemed to echo in the dark reaches of the cave, the black spaces that the lamps did not light.
He went back to the wall with the burin, and began to scrape the area around the lowest head, to make its outline that much sharper. The mouth inside the whinny had to be as white as the woman’s kolby, there under the bison man looking across the chamber at him. Scrape it clean. Get it just right. The stone had such a texture here, granular but smooth; he could scrape it very clean, get a smooth white surface to delineate the black mass of the horse. Ah, watch out, a scrape too far down—pick up the charcoal stick, wet the finger, cover the scrape mark. The lower line of the jaw had just the jowl of that horse on the ridge, two little indentations marking it.
There was a burbling moan from below, and then a gust of wind, and all his lamps went out at once, leaving him in pure blackness, a black as black as if the lowest horse head had spilled out and poured over him and filled the whole cave.
This was bad. The blackness was absolute. He could make colors appear in his eyes by squeezing them shut, but there was no point to that. He had no sight. The world was black.
The cave moaned again. It chuckled at his capture. How did the cave bears guide themselves in here? How could they see in this?
They didn’t. They smelled their way. And the chamber that contained their hibernation nests was much closer to the cave mouth. They just bumbled blindly in and smelled their way to the place where they always slept, and slept again, and woke and sniffed their way out.
For a mome
nt he lost his line of thought, and a panic of sheer terror washed through him in a flood that left him hot and gasping.—No, he groaned, and heard a little ringing that might have been an echo or a response.
He stepped around carefully, trying to keep his face toward the wall, to keep a sense of where he was. Facing the wall, the way out was to his left. He got down on his knees and crawled, sweeping with his hand ahead of him to feel for the extinguished lamps, for his sack—for anything that might be his, and thus help him.
But when his hand hit one of the lamps, it was no good; the wick was cold, the lamp’s little depression was out of fat oil. Possibly he had gotten so caught up in the four horses’ heads that all the lamps had burned their fat and gone out together. Maybe there had been no gust of wind at all, no laugh from the thing under the floor. Although it was laughing now. Anyway it didn’t matter. He had to find his sack.
Finally a sweep of his hand ran into it. Knowing its location allowed him to find his second lamp, and then the third. They were all out of fat, or so close that their wicks had gone out. He brought them back to his sack, missing it for a while and briefly panicking; but there it was at last, so that the terror of the dark subsided in him.
He sat on his fur patch and dug into his sack, feeling for the bag of fat grease. He found it, and that was good. In that bag was light and sight. Then he reached in the fold of his belt, and found the burl with the ember inside it, and when he felt the burl he took it up with desperate care, untied the cedar cap with trembling hands, and poked in gently with his finger, hoping to be burned: but it wasn’t even warm. Just ashes. He had stayed too long.
He sat back and whimpered with fear. There in his sack were his bags of food, and the rest of his painting things. The bag of earthblood powder, it felt like, ready to mix with his water to make red paint. But he was almost out of water. And nowhere in his sack did he feel the firestarter flints, or the little bag of duff and dried wood chips he needed to start a new fire.
He didn’t know what could have happened to them. Terror struck him again, swept through him and took him off. He needed to ice over that torrent of fear and stand on it. Needed to be ice cold, and yet he was burning with fear.
After a time the terror let him go, it flung him to the floor crying. It occurred to him that he might have taken the firestarter kit out of the pack when he lit the third lamp. Although he had lit that lamp from the ones already lit, of course, using a splinter, so there would have been no reason to take out the flints and duff. But it could have happened. That had been nearby; he wasn’t sure exactly where, because in the blackness he had carried all the lamps to this spot by the sack.
He crawled in the direction he thought the third lamp had been, felt the floor of the cave. Nothing. Then he lost the sack for a while, trying to return. When he relocated the sack he cried again, and after that he took the sack with him as he crawled around. He found some rocks on the floor, and some charcoal sticks tucked against one wall in a little hole. A jaw with teeth, giant in the dark, bigger than his head: a cave bear skull, it had to be, long and toothy, with the bump and rise in the forehead that marked it as a cave bear, although its sheer size was enough to tell.
Nothing. He had lamps, wicks, and oil, but no flints or duff. No way to make fire. He banged the rocks he had found against each other, and some brief sparks flew red across the blackness, like shooting stars, but nothing like what it would take to start duff burning; and besides, there was no duff.
He was stuck in the black of the cave. There was no way out, except to try to walk or crawl in the right direction.
By now he had no idea what direction was the right direction. He needed to find his wall again to get oriented, but standing up and walking around, hands stretched before him, he came to one wall, then another wall; he reached up and felt for scratches, smelled his fingers to see if they were perhaps smearing charcoal; but everywhere felt the same in the pure blackness, and his fingers always smelled like charcoal now, no matter what he touched.
Cold, tired, hungry, thirsty. Filled with fear, and then, as more time passed, with a rending grief. Oh that it should come to this! Thorn would be so mad at him if he turned up in the spirit realm so soon, having gotten lost in their own cave! It was almost funny to think of the look that would be on the old snake’s face. But it wouldn’t be funny if it happened. And what about Elga? She would be angry too, but so sad.
He crawled around on hands and knees until he felt something like a footprint. There were many bear prints in the hardened old mud of the floor, as they were deep enough to last through many a spring flood. They pointed in all directions. And he could feel by putting his own feet in them that they were far too large to be a person’s footprint. When he found another one, he fitted his foot into it, and knew it was a person’s footprint. Encouraging. But people had walked around. It didn’t mean he had a clear direction.
If he went toward the end chamber, there would be a series of drops. While on the other hand, if he had to step up, and if he was lucky enough to encounter the stepping stone placed at the bottom of that one big step, he would know he was headed in the right direction, at least for as long as he could keep any particular direction steady.
So he filled his sack with his things and put it on his back, and tried to go uphill. If he ran into a wall, he tried to determine which way the floor was tilted, and continued as upward as he could.
He crawled on and on, using his hands to feel the floor ahead of him. He felt like he was holding a straight line as he went, but he wasn’t sure. Thorn had once remarked that no one without light would ever be able to find his way out of a cave this big.
He lost his sense of time. He got colder. The cave’s air seemed colder now, and down below the floor, something was laughing at him louder than ever.
At some point, it felt like many fists later, he stopped to eat the last of his food, and without wanting to, he drank the last of his water. Some parts of the cave’s walls and floor were wet; he could lick the walls for moisture, perhaps. In him a despair was growing, a realization that dying in here was quite possible. He refused to accept that, even to think about it. It was impossible to come to grips with anyway. But the laughter from under the floor of the cave sounded like the thing that had chased him into the crack in the gorge cliff, on the last night of his wander. Quartz or not, that thing had known it almost had him. It had laughed at that knowledge then. And now it knew it was right.
He lay there and cried. The blackness itself was getting to be enough to suffocate him, to strangle him right there on the cold mud floor. Thorn was going to be so angry! Elga was going to be so sad!
He fell into sleep, or something like sleep.
Later, shivering with cold, he woke and pushed up onto his hands and knees and crawled forward. As he crawled Thorn said scornfully in his ear, Every time you run into a wall, turn to the left. Then, even if you have to circle the inside of the entire cave, you will eventually find the kolby and be born out of the earth. Isn’t it obvious?
Loon crawled on, feeling dully that he had a plan he could pursue till death. Onward.
Then a hoot seemed to come from somewhere:
—Loon! Loon!
He shouted as loud as he could:—I’m here! Help! HELP!
Part of the black turned gray. There grew a lightness there, and he turned to face it, to suck it into himself like a great draft of life itself. Yes, that was light, just as distinct as sunlight, even though it was merely a pale black among darker blacks. The cave walls in that direction were shadows in blackness, and the cave itself therefore loomed around him again, visible as black on black.
He shouted again. He didn’t recognize anything of what he saw, couldn’t tell whether the grayblack shapes were distant or close, a day’s walk or something he could reach out and touch; he tried touching what he saw, but nothing was touchable.
He sat there. The light seemed to dim, and in terror he cried out again,—Help! Help!
Onc
e before he had called out in this same desperate way, when as a child he had plunged into the river and could not feel the bottom, and somehow had thrashed back up to the surface and shouted out HELP to anyone who might hear. Such a cry of fear! And that time his father had pulled him out.
The sounds in the cave began to say,—Loon! Loon!
Then the light grew, and suddenly he could make out the cave roof above him, folded and ribbed like a gut. He was going to be reborn out of Mother Earth’s kolby; this was what the birth passage looked like from inside. His tongue had felt folds in Elga like what he saw now looking up.
Then he heard that one of the voices was Elga’s. A prick of light stabbed him right in the eye; he threw up his hands to block it, crying out in shock and relief and joy as he clambered slowly to his feet. He stood there swaying unsteadily, staggering as he called out,—Elga! Elga! Elga!
The blazes of light came from torches. Their flames bobbed wildly, shadows flew all around him like flocks of giant birds, ah: he saw that the spirit ravens of this cave had been gathered over him, ready to pick his bones the moment he died. Now they flew blackly away, giving him back to the light. The torch flames were so bright and yellow he could see nothing else, it was as if fire alone approached him through the black air of the cave.
Then he saw the people carrying the flames. Elga and Heather and Hawk. Elga gave Hawk her torch to hold, and ran up and embraced him.
—You’re so cold! she exclaimed.
—I’m fine, he said, and felt his face grinning as he wept. Now his teeth were chattering.
They told him Moss was back up the cave a ways, holding a torch for them. And from Moss’s location they knew the way to the red chamber, and then the day chamber. Elga was wrapped around him, almost holding him up. He had been gone too long, they said, so they had come in. It had been four days.