Shaman

  Perhaps not a good idea to play these crazy shaman tricks on himself.

  I am the third wind

  I come to you

  He lay there for a while, feeling his body pulse with his heart’s knocking. Crouch yelped in his ankle, Spit was silent. His throat and mouth burned with stomach spit. This was what happened to Thorn too when he ate the mix. Shamans poisoned themselves to launch their spirits out of their bodies, that was what it came down to, and Loon could feel his head throbbing as his spirit tried to burst out of the top of his skull. For a moment he could see himself from above, lying down there on the edge of the plateau puking his guts out. And yet his feet were still numb with cold. He tried to shift the heat around in him. Miserably he chanted one of the hot songs, aching all over, pulsing like the bag of blood he was. There was more blood in him than there was really room for, that was true of every creature; when you hit certain veins blood spurted out like spurts of spurtmilk, released from a confinement that had squeezed it hard. That was why he so often felt like he was bursting. Now he could feel all that blood inside him, pulsing to get out. It was strange really that Spit had ever stopped spitting, that any cut ever stopped bleeding, given that squeeze of the body. Sometimes you saw speared animals spurt blood from the eyes, mouth, asshole; he felt how that could happen, had to close his eyes and rub them hard to keep them from bursting out of his head. That set off a wild shower of sparking red dots and squiggles. Ah yes—he had seen these red stars and squiggles painted in the cave. Dots red and yellow and black, oh yes. Zigzag lines, squiggling right and left all over his sight. He traced them in the dirt under him, as the shamans had on the wet insides of the cave. He remembered the first time he had gone in a cave, right after his parents had died, and Thorn had shown him the wet wall and put his hand against it, leaving its impression there, then led him through his first squiggles, each finger a narrow trough, between them parallel little ridges, the clay of the walls firm but pliable. A hard press made a trough to the depth of a fingertip, and the mark remained.

  Not so this dirt under him now, so friable and full of roots and dead leaves. Suddenly he felt hungry, not as a pinch in the gut but as a general weakness, and he wondered if there was any sustenance in this dirt or these dead leaves. Surely the leaves would give him something. Normally it was not thought to be so, but they did eat certain succulent leaves, and all manner of roots and tubers and shoots and flowers and fruits, so surely these dead leaves had something good in them, or anyway would fill his belly. Although when he tried to eat them, he found his belly did not seem to want filling. No, there was nothing to eat here. He needed to shift his burning skin heat down into his feet without food to help him. Best now to stand and chant the hot song, and think about Sage and her big new tits, down by the riverside swinging together as she leaned over washing, like a ewe’s udder magically doubled. Big dark udders hanging down, sloshing side to side, banging together as Sage washed clothes, her ribs as big as any man’s, her back hard and muscled in a way that made her hanging tits more than ever like bags of milk a-swing under her. Oh yes; he was warming up at the thought of her, the heat moving around in him, rising even into his chilled spurt, which warmed as it antlered. He clasped it and squeezed till it felt like a flesh stick, hard as a stick, almost, oh but his hands were so cold, it was only the sight of Sage’s naked body there moving in his eye that could keep him hard, and thus help him overcome the cold. Dance a sex song, mix the hot song he had been chanting with a sex song, seeing how she would look if they were joined in sex, or so it seemed; Loon had never done it with her, or any girl. Both Thorn and Heather made it clear to him, as did all the women in the pack, that it was better to mate with girls from other packs. So the summer festivals were good for that. Your pack was too close, the girls in it like sisters. Except they weren’t, especially if they were from other clans. Loon had been his parents’ only child, and he was a raven, like his mother had been. The girls in the pack included eagles and salmon, and had been only girls to him, and he only a boy to them. Now they were young women and he a young man. They bled and were painted red at their moon time, they had perfect tits and asses and legs and furry soft kolbies, everything really: they were perfect and beautiful. Actually only Sage was perfect in all possible ways, something that everyone saw and remarked on, but in the end they all looked good, and Loon loved them. And Sage was an eagle. To be a shaman was to have a distance from women, but also a closeness; he would be involved with the life of their bodies in ways he wouldn’t as a normal man of the pack, a hunter married to one woman. But not to have a wife! Well, that remained to be seen. Loon danced holding his hard spurt, thinking of Sage naked, and decided then and there that he would not be that kind of shaman. He collapsed to his knees and fucked the dirt, spurted calling out at the sensation of coming, the bolts of pure pleasure streaming out of him onto the ground, and when he was done, still holding himself and pulsing, he scooped up the spurtmilk with some leaves and ate all of it. He would feed himself. It was like a mushroom soup, congealed although still warm with his warmth.

  Ah, the slow pulsing of afterglow. He staggered around in a bliss. Vomiting, spurting, they were all part of it. To feel so good in his body; he should have been spurting in Mother Earth as often as he could manage it. Well, maybe he had been; maybe this was the first time in the whole fortnight he had had the time and warmth and strength and spirit. Of course; or else he would have. Afterglow buzzing down his legs from his spurt, up his belly from his spurt, then out his arms to his fingers. A subtle but distinct flow of goodness, there to do battle with all the nicks and scrapes, with Spit and Crouch, and all the days of throbbing cold feet. Well, down at the very ends of his legs it was hard to penetrate with the goodness. Too cold down there. Best to hop again, dance and chant again, say good-bye to Sage for a while and focus his attention on the moment. The sun was high, it was midmorning and the air was warming up. Time to be out and about.

  He rolled up his cape and tied it around his waist, retied his belt and skirt, and headed down the plateau’s edge toward the top of his home valley. Upper Valley dropped to the river, past Cave Hill onto Loop Meadow, the filled dry river course that ran around Loop Hill and the Stone Bison, which straddled the river. He was not a great distance away from home, it would be only a day’s walk on the ridge trail between Upper and Lower Valleys. Going down the valley cleft itself it would take much longer, but it would be good to avoid the ridge trail, he judged, to reduce the chances of running into anyone. As he walked he found he had decided to stay just under the ridge trail, on the Upper Valley side.

  He limped down the easiest traverse as it presented itself. There were faint trails traversing the slope where animals had chosen, like he had, to make their way without risking a ridge trail encounter, also without descending into the alder thickets filling the valley floor. Up here he could often see over the west ridge of Upper Valley to the distant horizon, a white haze obscuring the ice caps, which were sometimes visible. Many of the hilltops around Upper Valley were white knobs and protuberances, so that the land looked like an immense boneyard. Now it was breathing a little under him, undulating like the back of a living thing. He had to slow down to keep his balance, using Prong more than ever.

  He began to feel exhilarated. His afterglow had turned into a benign tingling all through him. It emanated from his stomach and gut. He found he could walk without actually putting his weight down, which caused Crouch to sigh contentedly. Anywhere he looked sprang right to him and resolved as if he were close to it, which was part of what was making him sway as he walked; it was hard to keep his balance when things kept jumping at him. The blue of the sky throbbed with different blues, each more blue than the next. The clouds in the blue were scalloped and articulated like driftwood, and crawled around in themselves like otters at play. He could see everything at once. His spirit kept tugging at the top of his head, lifting him so that he had to concentrate to keep his balance. The problem made him laugh. The world wa
s so great, so beautiful. Something like a lion: it would kill you if it could, but in the meantime it was so very, very beautiful. He would have cried at how beautiful it was, but he was laughing too much, he was too happy at being there walking in it. All right, this was what he had not known: Thorn poisoned himself to get to this feeling. Once you got to it, you saw the puking was worth it, oh yes no doubt about it: well worth it. You would die for this feeling. He reeled a little, trying to turn and take it all in at once, but then Crouch complained, and he went back to traipsing along, as in a slow dance, winding along the narrow ledges that allowed him to walk just a few body lengths below the ridge trail.

  Then he heard a noise on the ridge, and he dropped under a fallen log and froze before he had time to think a single thing. Musky smoke smell: the old ones.

  Terror ripped through him, and he snuggled farther under the log, trying to shrink to the size of a mushroom cap. They would stick their mammoth spears through him and he would die in a squeal of horrible agony, like a rabbit. His feet went ice cold again at the idea, and the leaf mat under the log disintegrated into whorls of blotchy color, like pebbles seen at the bottom of a swift stream, everything breaking up and bouncing in his eyes.

  The sounds above him moved downridge, in the direction he had been going. He heard the old ones croaking to each other in their raven voices. Over any distance they whistled to talk. These two were moving down the ridge trail pretty quickly. If he tracked them he would know where they were, and then when night came he could move away from where they were. As long as there weren’t any others, he would then be safe. It seemed like a good plan.

  He floated down through the trees and rocks under the ridge, on the hunt and never more so, not ever in his whole life. He caught sight of them below him from time to time, by putting just one eye around trees to have a look; each sight of them made him tingle. The little trees on this broad ridge rustled and clicked in their own birdlike language, waving their branches to snag his attention. Clouds were swirling out of nowhere into existence overhead. One had to hope it would not rain. Although it felt like rain would only hiss and steam off him. He found he wanted to kill the old ones; that would make him safer, and he could see what they owned. But this was not a good idea, in fact he was surprised it had come to him. One didn’t kill old ones; they were people in their way, almost-people, and never dangerous to humans properly in a pack. Although as he was alone, ordinary conduct did not obtain. But it was still a bad idea.

  There was a shallow rill running off the ridge down into Upper Valley; the old ones dropped into the ravine holding this rivulet. Loon wondered what they would do when they came to his pack’s camp, whether they would stop and visit his people or not. In camp people seldom saw old ones, or had any trouble with them if they did drop by. They sometimes showed up at the edges of the eight eight festival, whistling and chirping and clicking curiously, talking to shamans who knew their speech, staying clumped together a little defensively. No, his pack would be all right, no matter what these two did. So he could stay on the ridge above them, come down on the ridge to the gorge overlook, at one of the points on the cliff’s edge where a chute of scree ran down to the river. There he could see if anything approached him, and ride out his spirit wander in peace. Then if his spirit left his body, as it was still trying to do, banging against the top of his skull to get out, then he could deposit his body in a safe tuck, and take flight above the sky. That would be much better than killing some passing old ones. Even if they were the ones who had tried to kill him. Although he didn’t think they were. There had been three of them. A jolt of fear flooded him at that thought, and he regarded the ridge above carefully, listened and sniffed and watched. No one around.

  So he stayed on the ridge and sneaked down its trail, peering down the slope into Upper Valley, where the old ones were still descending, clearly in view. There was a lot of open rocky and snowy land here, only broken by the creek’s line of trees, and some isolated groves on the slopes dotting the rest of the valley, with some tilted meadows and scrub here and there.

  The other side of the ridge had a short cliff right near the top, then the long forested slope into Lower Valley. As he was feeling exposed on the ridge, spooked by a presence he couldn’t see, he changed his plan again; he decided to take the first chute through the cliff that would allow him to drop into Lower Valley, and then go downvalley to the river, meeting it one big loop downstream from the Stone Bison, then work his way back to camp on the river path. Tonight was not the full moon anyway, but the last night before it, unless he was mistaken. So he needed to find one more good tuck, and he knew of a small cave over the river. He could spend the night there. The old ones were in Upper Valley, he would be in Lower. That was good.

  Clouds puffed into existence as the sun went down, inspiraling like fern tips, their whites turning pink in the pulsing blue of the sky. As the sun winked away the moon was big in the east, and slightly red. It was a little less bright on its left side than its right, or so it seemed to Loon. He worried about it: there had been boys who came in from their hunter’s wander a night too early, which made them look eager to return, so that people had laughed at them. On the other hand Moss had come in a night too late, which had made him look tentative. The problem was that full moons were not all alike; they grew a little bigger and smaller, and their glow also shifted a little, so that the perfect ring of bright light sometimes did not surround a full moon until midnight, rather than right after sunset. Worse, the perfect ring of glow sometimes happened a bit before the moon rose in the east. So mistakes were possible, even when examining it most carefully.

  On this night the fat bright moon was growing and shrinking with his every heartbeat, jumping in every blink of the eye, but at all times brilliantly huge. By its light he could see down Lower Valley into the gorge in perfect detail, though everything was in shades of gray frosted with moony white. Otherwise it all lay below him like a ghost version of the daytime world, Mother Earth in all her loveliness, and he floated along looking into the gorge, watching moonlight glitter on the open black riffles in the part of the icy river he could see. The gorge walls seemed to glow from within, and yet the shadows were charcoal black, giving the land a decisively hewn look, as if the gorge had been hacked into the hilly landscape by a great sharp blade. Ah moonlight!

  The ridge came to a point that gave him a view of the big loop in the river one loop downstream from their camp. It was just the shape of the loop their camp was in, but filled with water instead of meadow. He saw that when the river wore the upstream turn of this loop’s bank away and broke through, there would be another stone bison standing over the flow, and this loop would dry out and become another meadow. Curve of the water around its icy bend, pouring out of shadow into the moonlight. It made little wet noises, audible even up here. The river was singing to itself, as it always did, even now when it was still mostly iced over. Black leads were like long narrow ponds in the gleaming white flat surface, sometimes seeming higher than the ice, other times black holes in white ermine.

  In the shadows under the alders at the curve of the bank, something moved and caught his eye. It looked like a person, but when it walked into the white moonlight and stood on the snowy riverbank, Loon could see it had an animal’s head, dark and rounded: huge owl eyes over a feline muzzle, antlers curved like ibex horns… Loon had never seen anything like it, and he reeled a little at the sight. Its eyes were surely owl eyes, they were so big and round; everything would be visible to it. Loon froze against the tree behind him, hoped that he would become part of its blackness. But the thing stared right up at him, and kept its gaze fixed on him as it walked upstream on the riverbank. It raised its right arm, and he saw its hand was a paw, a cat’s paw; and it had a lion’s head, he now saw, but owl-eyed, and with horns that curved above cat ears; the ears turned up at him, listening to his heart pounding loudly at the back of his throat. Then the creature disappeared into the shadow of the gorge wall.

&
nbsp; Loon found himself walking backwards without knowing it, up the ridge. Terror had stuck him like a spear through the throat; he could scarcely breathe, and was hot all over. He could feel he was about to shit, like a steppe beast preparing to flee. He had to clench his butt muscles, clench his gut.

  Then he turned with a whimper and ran without a thought in his head, without seeing where he was going, without feeling his legs. It was extremely dangerous to flee through the night like that, but I could not help him; in that moment of terror there was nowhere in him for me to enter.

  By accident he found himself on the ridge trail again. He stopped because he had to, he was panting so hard. He looked around, afraid of what he might see. And he was right to fear: there was the owl-eyed lion man again, but now above him on the ridge trail, as if he had flown to get there ahead of Loon. With a bleat Loon turned and limped down the ridge, still terrified but back within himself, feeling the pain in his left leg, sobbing as he ran.

  There was nothing else to do but follow the ridge trail to the gorge overlook at its lower end. This brought him to the intersection with the trail that ran along the north side of the gorge from Loop Meadow, but he didn’t want to take that trail, as it was exposed. Instead he dropped down a little cleft he knew in the gorge wall, a break furred with shrubs, which forced him to proceed on his hands and knees to get under the lowest branches. Soon he came to a ledge that hung over the gorge wall proper. He crawled onto the ledge. When the ledge narrowed and disappeared into the cliff, there was a narrow slide on which one could lower oneself to another ledge below the first one. He had been here before.