— Some bad things happened in that pack, she said once, looking away and frowning.-I don’t want to talk about that. There’s no need. I plan on forgetting it. My life begins with you. With a sleepy little smile she would pull him back into her.
Loon’s story was a bit more complicated, at least to him.
— My father Tulik was Thorn’s real apprentice, he told her.-He was the one who was supposed to be the next shaman, not me. If he had lived, Thorn might already have given it over to him, and gone off to be a woodsman or something. But my dad was killed by a skelg kick during a hunt, and my mother died that following spring, some say because she was too sad to get fat enough for winter. But Heather says it was a fever. Anyway, with both of them gone, Heather and Thorn took care of me more than anyone else. So eventually Thorn started treating me like his apprentice, although I never asked him, and I don’t like it. But everyone just seems to assume that’s what I am. They know I don’t like it. Moss would be better at it. But now I’m stuck with it. But now I have you, so it doesn’t matter. I’ll be a lot better at it with you, I hope.
Elga smiled her little smile and kissed him.-That’s right, she said.
In the eleventh month they hurried around every day as if forestalling a doom. Which was true, as the swiftly shortening days made clear. It was getting colder, leaves swirled east on winds that filled the gorge at night with their fateful chorus. How big the world grows in a wind!
Stinging nettles for net twine. Lily bulbs. Birch bark. Cedar roots. Pine pitch. Spruce gum, spruce inner bark. Mistletoe berries. All these had to be gathered in the fall.
Often while out gathering, Loon and the others would bring the kids along. To keep the kids amused when they weren’t gathering, Loon would bend and weave a hoop, and roll it along for them to throw sticks through, or set up targets for throwing rocks. He carved knots into toys, and hid them for the kids to try to find. He had to think like a squirrel or a jay to recall where he had hidden these things, because often the kids would not find them. There was no point to making something and then hiding it where no one could see. Don’t hide your gift in the forest, they said, don’t tell your story to the forest. Though he often did just that, even if he never spoke.
Full moon of the eleventh month was the time for the pack to make its annual visit into the cave in the hill above them, after which it would be abandoned to the bears for their winter sleep. It was one of the smaller ceremonies of the year, but as it came at the end of the fall, an important one: a time to say thanks to Mother Earth for the year’s bounty, and weave themselves together for the long winter to come.
This time, when the ceremony in the big room was done and the other members of the pack had left, Loon was supposed to stay in the cave with Thorn, and for the first time penetrate farther inside, down the shaman’s passages to the secret rooms that only shamans entered. All fall Loon had wondered if Thorn would do it, he seemed so disgusted with him for marrying. As the eleventh moon approached, Thorn had said nothing about it. Loon was tempted to ask him but did not want to show that he was concerned, so he didn’t.
On the morning of the eleventh full moon, Thorn said, — Do you have the paints and brushes ready, and your lamps?
— Yes.
— Remember you’re not going to be painting anything in there this time, and for many years to come.
— I know.
He would only help Thorn. Possibly Thorn would let him etch some old painted lines. It didn’t matter. He had Elga, and he was going down into the shaman’s part of the cave. All was well and more than well.
In the twilight of the eleventh full moon the pack made its way up from Loop Meadow to the clay ramp that was incised into the cliff as if by a giant burin. The paintings on the back wall of this abri ramp welcomed them, the animals leading visitors up to the cave entrance. The entrance was a wide gap in the cliff, about a man’s height above the bench, and fringed by a brush overhang. The animal paintings on both sides of the entry showed the animals returning to the underworld that had birthed them. They were mostly red to the left and black to the right, with some red and black mixed in every animal, in a way that the colors were not mixed inside.
Though night was falling, the remaining twilight and the rising full moon illuminated the cave for a good distance in, and the first big chamber’s walls were still clear to their sight. This chamber was left unpainted; it was not yet considered to be in the cave, but rather the last part of the outside. In Mother Earth’s body, it was not the sabelean but the baginaren.
When they were all in the big dim room sitting on the floor, Thorn spoke to them in an almost conversational tone, unlike his more usual shaman’s voice.
We had a bad shaman, he pinched us
And beat us with sticks till we bled,
He stuck bone pins through our ears
And pulled them out sideways to make us remember.
You see what I have on the sides of my head,
Nothing but holes straight into my brain.
It wasn’t right but I’ll admit this:
I do remember things very well.
One thing I remember is how he led us
Into this cave for the first time
To paint the sacred animals.
It was one of his sorcerer things.
He had us all painting the cliffs
Under the abri at Ordech-Meets-Urdecha,
Using charcoal and bloodstone
To paint just like he did,
Not just lame tries like kids on a lark,
But true three-liners and colored paintings,
And all the tricks you see in here now,
To make the brothers and sisters look real,
And move in the light like they’ll jump in your face.
I remember he took me and his other boys
And made us eat his sorcerer’s dust,
A ghastly mix so bitter we puked
And afterward walked knee high off the ground,
Which is very hard to do without falling.
And he hauled us into the depths of the cave
Singing a spirit song announcing our presence
To the great mother goddess whose body we stand on,
Whom he said we were mating by walking inside her.
We were the spurtmilk that night, he said.
A full moon it was, and Pika the shaman took an oil lamp
And led the way into the kolby of Mother Earth,
Warm and damp just as you might expect,
All opened to us, and pulsing not so much pink as orange.
Thorn paused, looking around at the cave walls surrounding them.
— And here we are again, he finished abruptly.-Let me show you.
They lit the pine torches they had brought along, and by their big wavery light walked deeper into the cave. In the next chamber it was dark, and they saw only by the yellow of the torches, a light which caught the red of the animals on the walls of this first painted room. Here the animals were dominated by red lions, and so this room was called either the lion room or the red room, or sometimes simply the first painted room. Thorn said every pack who visited this cave had its own names for the chambers, and the shamans involved couldn’t corroborate them.
When they were all in the first room, they gathered in a circle around Thorn, and he passed around his lit pipe for everyone to breathe in on. Through the smoking and coughing some of the men shook rattles and huffed into big gourds. The women sang the thanksgiving for the year which they always sang during this visit, and then Thorn set the torches together in the middle of the floor, so that as they danced around them their shadows were cast out onto the walls, black figures moving over the red animals, who after a while themselves began to move. So they danced with the animals in there, slowly so as not to spook the beasts’ spirits, then approached the walls and touched the animals’ flanks and their own shadows’ hands, connecting thereby with their cave spirits.