Thorn put an arm around Loon’s middle, and together, with some difficulty, they pulled Loon back out of the wall, grunting and heaving. When Loon popped free he held his pale palm up to his face amazed, staring at it and trembling with relief to have it back. Thorn led him away with uncharacteristic gentleness. There on the cave wall behind them, an open hole the shape of Loon’s hand showed where he had almost been sucked in.
— Now a part of you will always be here, Thorn chanted.
Loon thought, So now I really am a shaman, and immediately he had to contain a little ember of fear burning at the center of that thought, trying to flare to a blaze in his chest.
Thorn kept holding Loon’s hand, and pulled him deeper into the cave.-Duck your head here, we’re almost to the black room.
The descending passage soon opened up again, and they walked into a large chamber, with a ceiling that was low and obvious in some places, sheer black emptiness in others. Thorn set their lamps carefully on the floor, illuminating a bare part of the cave wall curving to the left of a big crack that might have been a passage to yet deeper rooms, but was too narrow for a human to pass through. Cool air wafted out of it. There was a sound like distant voices reverberating up from chambers below them through another hole in the floor. Loon shivered hard as he set to helping Thorn unpack their gear, putting things around the paint bowl. Thorn picked up the charcoal sticks and inspected them closely; the burnt ends of these sticks were so black they did not appear to Loon’s eye in the lamplight, but were rather holes in his vision of the cave floor.
Farther down the wall, to the right of the crack, a stone in the shape of a bison’s pizzle hung from the ceiling. Drawn on the side of it was a woman’s kolby, again so black it was another hole in the rock, triangular this time, the black wedge tucked between legs that went pointy below the knee. The vertical slit of the kolbos was an intense white; it had been cut into the bottom of the triangle, etched with a burin, so that against the solid black of the vixen it was a glowing white line. The crack, the slit, the kolby, the baginaren, the way-to-bliss.
To the right, hovering over this naked woman’s legs, loomed a bison man about to mount her, his left leg hooking at her left leg, about to pull her legs apart and plunge into her. It was clear as could be.
Thorn laughed when he saw Loon goggling at it.
— That was Pika, he explained.-He would do anything.
Thorn lit a spill of dry pine needles from his lamp flame, and straightened up and used the flare to light his pipe. He breathed in his smoke deeply, then breathed it out onto a blank part of the wall. He hugged that part of the wall with his arms spread wide, and Loon feared he would merge into it and leave Loon all alone. But he came back and sat down, and they prepared the paint in a bowl, mixing some black powder Thorn carried in a sachet with water from his water bag. He was going to use black paint and charcoal sticks both, he explained. He began humming a deep resonant hum, which seemed to resound from first one part of the recess and then another.
He stood again and kissed the rock wall, then rubbed his hands over a bulge he declared to be a lion’s shoulder, feeling each little crack and declivity with his fingertips, then his lips. The wall was covered with fine cracks, but otherwise it was a very clean face.
Thorn sang his exhales:-Ahhhhhh, ahhhhhh, ahhhhh, always in a steady tone. The cave hummed back, — Ahhhhhhhhhhh. Loon felt the sound in his skin, and then his bones. He too hummed, it seemed involuntarily, as if he were a drumskin helplessly vibrating. It was like a kind of shivering, as if the chill of the cave was penetrating him and making a sound like river ice in the sun. Everything in the cave at that moment was humming that same Ahhhhh, and the vibration helped Loon to fight the cold, which flowed up from the floor into his feet like a flood of water. Ahhhhhh, ahhhhhh, ahhhhhh…
Thorn was still attending to the wall, head cocked to the side. He drew a line with his charcoal stick, stepped back and took a huge breath in, exhaled loudly.-Ha, he said.-Good. Let’s get started then. Oh now we come to you, mother, sister! A hunt I saw myself, on a midsummer day.
He chose the stick he wanted to start with, and flattened one side of it with his blade, working gingerly so that he wouldn’t break the brittle charcoal. When he was done he dipped the tip in their bowl of black paint and stood up.
When he pressed the charcoal end of the stick over the blank wall, he sang, — Ahhhh. The wall sang back, — Arrrr. Thorn’s head tilted to the left as he drew, and his whole body tensed like a cat on the hunt, then relaxed, then bunched up again as he drew some more. He moved smoothly, made each line in a single continous motion. The round bulge in the wall became the shoulder of a lion. Then a head, as in a three-liner. Ears were blacked on their insides, rounded and pointed forward: the big cat was listening. Both eyes were visible at the front of his face, gaze very intent to the left. Then another head in front and beneath that one, long and scowling, ears flattened back on the head, a foreleg reaching ahead. Then a foreleg almost horizontal ahead of that, detached and by itself; clearly the same foreleg in the next instant. The lion was making her dash for the kill.
Loon gaped as he watched Thorn work. Another head emerged before the charging lion, mouth open and eye round, pupil placed most carefully to show where the lion was looking. Then a giant head, the biggest of them all, leading the way: this one slobbered with hunger as he stared ahead. Then a three-liner of a smaller head, and another one.
When those were completed, Thorn sat on the ground behind the lamps and stared at what he had done. Then he jumped up with a newly prepared stick and began again.-Ahhhhhh.
More lions, and some smudging with both fingers and stick ends, to darken certain parts of the heads. He dipped his fingers, or a little pad of moss, into the black paint, then applied it very gently. Now the lions were flowing left in their dash, six lion heads, bigger and smaller, blacked or three-lined, with some free squiggles and detached forelegs to emphasize the flow. In the lamplight they all quivered together.
Above these Thorn added two lions who were ignoring the hunt, touching noses the way cats in a pack did. Above them then, a lion with a snout almost elongated into a cave bear shape, slobbering eyelessly. That was the hungriest lion. To its right another one appeared both in profile, as was normal, and yet also turned toward the observer, both in the same head space.
Thorn then did some scraping with a burin to get the space around the black heads even whiter. One big lion head had three rows of whisker spots dotting its muzzle, over a tight mouth. They looked just that way out in the world; when hunting they were very intent and serious people, and pursed their mouths like unhappy old men thinking something over. Now Thorn dotted whiskers on the one above also, an afterthought it appeared.
— Wait, I see something, Thorn said.
— The animals they’re hunting, Loon guessed.
— Exactly. They were hunting eight bison.
As far as Loon could tell there was not room for eight bison on the left end of the lions’ wall, where a fold tilted away into darkness. Loon watched curiously as Thorn worked, first taking a caribou shinbone and scraping the lower part of the space left, then drawing a bison with a rhino’s horn, some kind of joke or odd perspective. Above that a clutch of bison heads, all in profile except for the one to the farthest left, who looked straight out at the viewer with a suspicious round white eye. All the bisons’ nostrils were pinched shut unhappily, and they squinted, except for that one looking out at Loon from under its sweet curve of horns. Animals were seldom painted front on, but Loon enjoyed seeing the characteristic double curve of horns one saw when a bison was regarding you: out, in, out.