Only when he was successfully on the canyon floor did Nirgal look up again, to see that the canyon was filled by the forest he had barely seen from above. Trees stood high over a needle-strewn floor of old snow, big fir and pine, and then, upcanyon to the south, the unmistakably massive trunks of giant sequoias, big trees, trees so huge that the canyon suddenly seemed shallow, though the descent of the ravine had taken quite a while. These were the treetops that had stuck up over the canyon rim; engineered giant sequoias two hundred meters tall, towering like great silent saints, each one extending its arms in a broad circle over daughter trees, the fir and pine, the thin patchy snow and the brown needle beds.
The antelope had trotted upcanyon into this primeval forest, headed south, and with a few happy hoots the hunters followed them, darting past one huge trunk after another. The massive cylinders of riven red bark dwarfed everything else — they all looked like little animals, like mice, dashing over a snowy forest floor in the failing light. Nirgal’s skin tingled down his back and flanks, he was still adrenalated from the descent of the ravine, panting and light-headed. It was obvious that they could not catch the antelope, he didn’t understand what they were doing. Nevertheless he raced between the stupendous trees, following the lead hunters. The chase itself was all he wanted.
Then the sequoia towers became more scattered, as at the edge of a skyscraper district, until there were only a few left. And looking between the trunks of the last of the behemoths, Nirgal again hauled up short: on the other side of a narrow clearing, the canyon was blocked off by a wall of water. A sheer wall of water, filling the canyon right to the rim, hanging suspended over them in a smooth transparent mass.
Reservoir dam. Recently they had begun building them out of transparent sheets of diamond lattice, sunk in a concrete foundation; Nirgal could see this one running down both canyon walls and across the canyon floor, a thick white line.
The mass of water stood over them like the side of a great aquarium, turbid near the bottom, weeds floating in dark mud. Above them silver fish as big as the antelope flitted next to the clear wall, then receded into dark crystalline deptns.
The three antelope pronged nervously back and forth before this barrier, the doe and fawn following the quick turns of the buck. As the hunters closed on them, the buck suddenly leaped away and crashed its head against the dam with a powerful thrust of its whole body — antlers like bone knives, thwack — Nirgal froze in fear, everyone froze at this violent gesture, so ferocious as to be human; but the buck bounced away, staggered. He turned and charged at them. Bola balls spun through the air and the line wrapped around his legs just above the hocks, and he crashed forward and down. Some of the hunters swarmed on him, others brought down doe and fawn in a hail of rocks and spears. A squeal cut off abruptly. Nirgal saw the doe’s throat cut with an obsidian-bladed dagger, the blood pouring onto the sand next to the foundation of the dam. The big fish flashed by overhead, looking down at them.
The woman with the green scarf was nowhere to be seen. Another hunter, a man wearing only necklaces, tilted his head back and howled, shattering the strange silence of the work; he danced in a circle, then ran at the clear wall of the dam and threw his spear straight at it. The spear bounced away. The exultant hunter ran up and slammed his fist against the clear hard membrane.
A woman hunter with blood on her hands turned her head to give the man a contemptuous look. “Quit fooling around,” she said.
The spear thrower laughed. “You don’t have to worry. These dams are a hundred times stronger than they need to be.”
The woman shook her head, disgusted. “It’s stupid to tempt fate.”
“It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds.”
“You’re a fool,” the woman said. “Luck is as real as anything else.”
“Luck! Fate! Ka.” The spear thrower picked up his spear and ran and threw it at the dam again; it rebounded and almost hit him, and he laughed wildly. “How lucky,” he said. “Fortune favors the bold, eh?”
“Asshole. Show some respect.”
“All honor to that buck, indeed, crashing the wall like he did.” The man laughed raucously.
The others were ignoring these two, busy butchering the animals. “Many thanks, brother. Many thanks, sister.” Nir-gal’s hands shook as he watched; he could smell the blood; he was salivating. Piles of intestines steamed in the chill air. Magnesium poles were pulled from waist bags and telescoped out, and the decapitated antelope bodies were tied over them by the legs. Hunters at the ends of the poles hefted the headless carcasses into the air.
The bloody-handed woman shouted at the spear thrower, “You’d better help carry if you want to eat any of these.”
“Fuck you.” But he helped carry the front end of the buck.
“Come on,” the woman said to Nirgal, and then they were hurrying west across the canyon floor, between the great wall of water and the last of the massive sequoias. Nirgal followed, stomach growling.
The west wall of the canyon was marked with petro-glyphs: animals, lingams, yonis, handprints, comets and spaceships, geometric designs, the humpbacked flute player Kokopelli, all scarcely visible in the dusk. There was a staircase trail inlaid in the cliff, following a nearly perfect Z of ledges. The hunters hiked up it and Nirgal followed. Shift into the uphill rhythm one more time, his stomach eating him from within, his head swimming. A black antelope splayed across the rock beside him.
Above, a few giant sequoias stood isolated on the canyon rim. When they reached the rim, returning to the sunset’s last light, he saw that these trees formed a circle, nine trees in a rough woodhenge, with a big firepit at their center.
The band entered the circle and got to work starting a fire, skinning the antelope, cutting big venison steaks out of the haunches. Nirgal stood watching, legs in a sewing-machine tremble, mouth salivating like a fountain; he swallowed again and again as he sniffed the steak juices lofting in the smoke through the early stars. Firelight pushed like a bubble at the dusk’s gloom, turning the circle of trees into a flickering roofless room. The light flickering against the needles was like seeing your own capillaries. Some of the trees had wooden staircases spiraling around their trunks, up into their branches. High above them lamps were being lit, voices like skylarks among the stars.
Three or four of the hunters bunched around him, offering him flatcakes of what tasted like barley, then a fiery liquor out of clay jars. They told him they had found the sequoia henge a few years before.
“What happened to the, the leader of the hunt?” Nirgal asked, looking around. “Oh, the diana can’t sleep with us tonight.” “Besides she fucked up, she don’t want to.” “Yes she does. You know Zo, she always has a reason.” They laughed and moved nearer to the fire. A woman poked out a charred steak, waved it on its stick until it cooled. “I eat all of you, little sister.” And bit into the steak. Nirgal ate with them, lost in the wet hot taste of the meat, chewing hard but still bolting the food, his body all abuzz with trembling light-headed hunger. Food, food!
He ate his second steak more slowly, watching the others. His stomach was filling quickly. He recalled the scramble down the ravine: it was amazing what the body could do in such a situation, it had been an out-of-body experience — or rather an experience so far into the body that it was like unconsciousness — diving deep into the cerebellum, presumably, into that ancient undermind that knew how to do things. A state of grace.