Better to be lucky than good. The cat had seen that many times. A sound snapped in her head like a thunderclap and she was far up the tree overhanging camp before she understood it was one of the humans stepping on a dry twig. Better to be safe than sorry. The humans would kill anyone, and then not only eat their kill but tear off its fur and tear out its teeth and wear them afterward, macabre trophies that were part of what made humans so awful, along with their smell, and their ability to kill at a distance by throwing rocks and sticks. None of the other animals could do that. The cat disliked all the other animals, including her own kind. Cats at least liked to stay away from each other, they had that basic courtesy. All except for the lions. Lions acted like they were wolves, it was sickening. The biggest of every kind of animal were gregarious, which the cat found mysterious. All the littler wolves were solitaries: fox, coyote, mink, weasel. So were all the littler cats. But the biggest of both kinds, wolves and lions, roamed in groups. There’s safety in numbers. So they clumped and safe they were. And their prey, the big herd animals, clumped together too. The lions should have known better.
Bears left their little sisters alone, wolves likewise, but big cats would eat little cats. Anyone would eat a little cat if they could catch one. Thus her jumpiness. To see the biggest cats ganging up in packs was a little disgusting, a little embarrassing, also terrifying. They looked like cats in every other way, then there they were, hanging around like wolves. How could they do it?
All the animals had been the same in the beginning, then things happened and they became sun and moon, northern lights and thunderstorms, and all the various animals, still the same inside and sharing an outlook on things. But some killed and some got killed, and many did both, like cat. Best be careful. Hiss at the storms and they might go elsewhere.
Another thunder crack of a twig snap and cat’s fur stood, her tail grew fat with unease. Another pair of humans were now under the tree. These were the two dominant males in the herb woman’s pack, deadly men with rock or stick. Cat peeked over the side of the branch to observe, and saw that the two humans were talking to another pair of them, from the pack that cut off their little fingers and gave them to the cats. Naturally cat liked these humans better, but they did not have an herb woman like cat’s, so she stayed mostly around the woman. It was a pack with a lot of camp mice, and the oddments left out by the old woman were interesting. The old woman teased cat with weird gifts.
Now the men were arguing, pointing up- and downcanyon. It was territorial, and they were chest to chest and swelled up. In such a state they would never notice cat, and she poked her head out to see better. Possibly they would drop something in a fight, or something would remain after to be scavenged, anything from drops of blood to dead bodies.
But the finger cutters were backing down. They did not want a fight. Their territory was off under the sunset, they indicated that with their gestures. The herb woman’s pack leaders accepted this and the finger cutters left, heading upcanyon.
Then the two men remaining argued with each other. Something about the meeting had left them at odds. Cat followed them as they went toward their fire, hopping nervously from branch to branch. Best be careful. Curiosity killed the cat. Despite which she was curious enough to watch from afar as the men entered camp and went to the dominant male’s wife. This big woman listened to them with a scowl that did not spare either of them. When they were done she cursed them and they slunk away abashed.
Once when they were boys Loon and Hawk and Moss had gone out on a hunt and come upon a pack of lions in a meadow, eating a big horse they had killed. As the boys had watched from the shelter of a rocky ridge above, a flock of ravens had swirled in on the wind from the west and begun swooping and shitting on the lions, and even more so on the open dismembered body of the horse, as became obvious when the snarling lions backed away to get out of the spew. The ravens kept shitting and peeing on the dead horse until it was little more than an uneven mound under the curdled white of their shit. The lions padded sullenly off. After that the ravens descended to beak through their mess and eat the body of the horse themselves.
The boys had crowed themselves at such a great opportunity, and when the lions were gone they charged down and drove the ravens off, and then threw rocks at the black birds when they dove back in their counterattacks. The boys were more dangerous to the ravens than the lions had been, and after a brief skirmish, filled with curses in both languages, the ravens had flown off heavy-winged, hoarse with unhappiness.
The three boys had been very pleased with themselves, and had quickly hacked chunks of the horse free, and carried the two rear legs and the head down to the river to wash them off. They had washed them and rubbed them with sand in the cold flow of the upper Ordech for more than a fist of the afternoon, then carried them home and on Hawk’s urging told the people at camp that they had killed the horse woman themselves and brought back this meat. Thorn had taken up one of the rear legs and sniffed it and nibbled it like Heather’s cat, and then whacked Hawk with it as if swinging a branch, knocking Hawk to the ground. Hawk cried out and everyone gathered and Thorn picked up the leg and gave it to Heather. Heather bit into it and scowled.—When ravens shit on a kill the meat changes, she told the boys.—You can’t just wash it off.
—Oh, Hawk said.
The three boys must have looked pretty foolish, because all of a sudden Thorn started laughing at them, and then everyone was laughing. Although then the boys had been slapped around a bit too.
Today you mix paint, Thorn croaked one morning.
—I always mix paint.
—Then clean up my spot.
—No! Loon said, frowning.
Thorn grinned in a way that revealed he had wanted to get a rise out of Loon.—So mix paint. I’ll teach you how to make it so it won’t run in the rain.
This was just what Loon wanted to know, so he stared at Thorn suspiciously, and Thorn laughed at him.
Heather watched the two of them unsmiling.
—How is your leg? she asked.
Loon shrugged.—All right.
Although he worried about that. Next month they would head north to the caribou, and by then he would have to have his legs.
Now he limped after the old man to his nest, picked up his leather sack of earthblood and charcoal, and followed the shaman to the painted part of their cliff.
Thorn stood in the morning sun squinting at a wall of the cliff that had been drawn over many times. He ignored the many erect spurts and open kolbies, including a pretty great series depicting a man whose spurt was so long that he had to bend it back down to his mouth to be able to suck himself off. Instead Thorn regarded a grouping of ten russet cave bears. He liked these bears: they were clumped in a pack, in a way they never gathered on the land, with some of them standing, some shambling, some sniffing the air with their incredible noses. Each bear revealed its mood or purpose by a deft turn of eye or ear, or furrows on their sloped foreheads. A few of the bears were three-liners, but most had been painted fully, with charcoal stumped and smudged over underlying red paint, making precisely the russet shade one saw when the bears wore their late summer coats. And they were all fat. So in the painting it was autumn; and by the looks on their faces, it seemed something down by the river had caught their attention. Bumps and hollows in the stone of the wall were incorporated into several of their shoulders and rumps and foreheads. It was as if the painters, whoever they had been, had seen these bears emerging from the cliff and then drawn them on the surface. The paintings were beginning to chip away, and Thorn had talked about recoloring them. Now he pointed at the rearmost bear.
—Fixing that one was your first day of painting! Loon preempted him.
Thorn tossed a pebble at him.—Be quiet. I’m still your master. I’ll beat you and you’ll have to take it. Even though you’re strong enough now to beat me. You’ll hate that but you’ll have to take it to stay in the pack. So shut up and let me show you something you don’t know.
/> —For once, Loon said, and dodged another pebble.
As Thorn pulled out a few chunks of earthblood, and a selection of chopflints and burins, Loon settled down and stopped the needling. He had hungered for this, and now the old man was willing to feed his hunger.
Earthblood was friable, like sand soaked in something’s blood, which then had dried and turned into a rock. You could scrape a little of its surface off under the curve of your claw, but underneath that first scrape it got much harder. You needed to scrape that part with a flint burin, using the pointed edge of the burin to scrape off chips and granules until you had a pile of them, then grind the pile under a flint pestle, in a granite grinding cup or on a slate metate. So: scrape away with one of the biggest burins, its sharp flint point and edge turned as needed. Push where the red stone was weakest, which was where the darkest earthblood clumped like scabs within the sandier parts of the rock, which were also red, but mixed with blacks and browns. The rock broke best where scabby and sandy met. Once broken away, the scabs were softer than the sandy parts, like a very hard mud.
—You want mostly that, Thorn said, pointing at the finer powder from the scabs.—The sandy part makes the paint too grainy. You can have a little, but not too much. It has to be just the right thickness for wall work, like a thick soup, or a very thin paste. It has to be thin enough to spread, of course, but not so thin that it runs.
—So you add water to the powder.
—Of course, don’t be such an insolent youth. You also add something to bind the water and the powder together, and that’s what you don’t know. It has to bind it without clumping it. There’s a number of binders will do it, some for body paint, some for wall paint. Today we need a little spit and some deer marrow fat, which I brought along for the occasion.
He pulled a gooseskin bag from his belt pouch and untied it carefully, then poured a little of the semi-liquid fat into a wooden bowl.
Loon stared at the bag; he had not known there were binders.
—It’s better if your powder is even finer than this you have here. You haven’t done a very good job, but let’s use it so you’ll see.
He picked up Loon’s metate and tipped the powdered earthblood on it into the bowl.—Swirl that around, then wait twenty beats, and in that time all the biggest grains of sand will sink to the bottom of the bowl. Then pour the paint into another bowl, but stop in time to leave the dregs in the first one. Like this.
He poured.—See, the coarsest red stays in the first bowl. Now we’ll let a finer powder settle to the bottom of the second bowl. That will take a while. Most of the red will just float forever. So, when it’s ready, pour off that water carefully. Later when these dregs in the bowls dry, they will be two cakes of earthblood powder, one coarse, one fine. You can cut the dried cakes into sticks and draw with them, like you draw with a stick of charcoal, only red. Or you can put a dried cake back in some water and break it up while adding more marrow fat, or spit, or pee, or hide glue, or spurtmilk. Then you’ll have it back to paint again. Or you can crumble a cake and mix it into beeswax, and that’s how you make the crayons you see some people using.
Loon nodded.—Heather makes a good glue. He had often watched her cook down the last remains of butchered animals into a white goo in a bucket, combining cartilage, fat, sinews and ligaments, and little bits of bone and muscle, along with some dried and crushed plants known only to her.
Thorn nodded.—She must put something special in her glue, it dries so hard. I add a few drops of it to my cliff paint. Won’t run in the rain later. Here, stir this fat in, then grind some more rock.
Grind the chunk of earthblood with the burin. Scrape scrape scrape. Warm morning air. He liked this part: the redness of the rock, its friability. Hold the block to his nose: it even smelled like blood. Sun hot on his neck.
The morning passed while he ground the rock. So pleasant to sit in the sun, soaking in its heat. He made sure Crouch and Spit were in the sun, it made them happier. It got so nice he fell asleep and sat there scraping earthblood in his dream just as he would have been if he had been awake, so that he could hardly tell which world he was in, and it wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t. Oh give thanks for the warmth of the sun!
All the time as he worked, Thorn moved around muttering to himself. He and Heather were a matched pair in that regard. In so many ways it was a contest between them. They were like a bad marriage, indeed some people said they had been a bad marriage, had split back before anyone else in the pack had even been born. True or not, Loon saw their ongoing fight up close. Indeed he worked them against each other, to crack a space for himself.
Neither of them ever stopped talking. If Thorn stopped it was almost always because he had fallen asleep. This morning he was retelling the story of the long winter, one of his favorites. All the awfulest stories were his favorites, but only told in their right time. Loon listened as he scraped, or rather let it wash over him, like the sound of the squirrels chittering in the trees.
Thorn’s croaky low voice was much like a raven’s hoarse cawing:
Back in the old time we lived like birds,
We pecked and shivered and did what we could
In every season, rain snow or shine.
But once there was a time, they say,
Once in that time when we lived so far south
That the sun stood in the north of the sky,
Came a year when summer failed to return.
Spring didn’t come nor summer after it,
It stayed bad cold though the days got long,
Cold and stormy through spring summer and fall,
Cold right through to the following winter
With never a chance to gather food.
And then it happened the next year too,
And the year after that, yes, never a summer,
No, nothing but winter, yes winter for TEN LONG YEARS.
And if it were not for the great salt sea
Everybody everywhere would have died and been dead
And no more people on this Mother Earth.
The grimness of Thorn’s croak as he intoned these phrases was something to hear. This part he always said the same, standing upright and facing the sun.
Then he moved around again as he continued, listing with morbid gusto all the ways those poor summerless people had starved, the suffering and hurt, and all the strange things they had been forced to eat to survive. Thorn loved lists at all times, their threes of threes of threes, all the names he mouthed as if spitting out stones, tasting each name with evident satisfaction. So he spoke the lists in the hunger stories, naming foods of every kind, and of course right in the month when they themselves were down to their last bags of nuts and fat, and out every day checking empty traps and hunting snowshoe hares and ptarmigans, and eyeing the sky to the south hoping to see the ducks return. When the ducks came back the hunger months would be over, but that was usually late in the fifth month, sometimes the sixth. Until then they would be doling out their food by the mouthful, and feeling a little pinch in the gut all the time.
—You like to hurt us, Loon observed.
—Yes! That’s what a shaman does! You tell the hunger stories when they’re hungry. That’s when you really have them seized in your grip. It’s never easier to make them weep than when they’re on the brink already. I’ve seen that many times. Now, tell me the list of what they had to eat during the ten-year winter.
Loon could never remember the poems except in the very moment he heard Thorn saying them, when he recognized them, even though he could not find them in himself. So now he sighed heavily to indicate his protest and said,
We ate what lived through ten years of winter,
Meaning whelks and clams and mussels and sea snails,
Meaning seaweed and sandcrabs and limpets and eels.
We ate fish when we could catch them,
We ate shit when we couldn’t.
Thorn nodded, his mind somewhere else already, which was good, as L
oon’s list was so woefully short compared to any of Thorn’s. Loon scraped the earthblood to powder and stretched in the sun, feeling the sunlight penetrate his leg, where it began to make Crouch happier.
He saw that this was his life he was scraping, his fate. The world would scrape him down just like he scraped this chunk of rock. It would go on until Thorn died, and then the pile of granules that was Loon would replace him, and do all things Thorn had done, including scraping down some apprentice of his own; then he would die, and the apprentice would go on and do it to his apprentice, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on it would go, the earthblood and their own blood ground up together under the sun.
The thought of that, when held up against the memory of his wander, was like Crouch moving up into his chest and flexing there. Oh the pain suddenly squeezing his chest! How could it be? In the fourteen days of his wander, entire months and even years of life had sometimes crushed into every beat of his heart! Surely that was how one should always live, surely it would be better to make every fortnight a wander, and thereby live for scores and scores and scores of years.
Scrape the rock to powder, sitting in the sun.
Restless nights by the fire and in his bed, remembering his wander and wanting it back. Came to him the terrified eye of the deer he had killed, in the moment of her death. Was there ever a moment they ought not live in that fear, not quiver with a desperate hope to live on? That deer, how he had loved it. Loon loved to see deer almost as much as he loved to see horses. He kept the teeth of the deer he had killed around his neck, and kept her hide among his bed furs, though it had not been properly dried.