— It’s so good with you.
— Because you love me. She said this with a fond look at him.-You love me and I love you.
— Yes. I didn’t know it could be like this.
— Neither did I.
It made him so happy that he could barely stand to be with Thorn, all his stinky dishevelment, his reproaches and remonstrations and orders, his picky and convoluted lessons. Learn how to calculate the relation of the months to the year, so many scores of days, all the ugly little slash marks on the yearsticks and the tally sticks. Recite one of the five great poems or one of the ten lesser poems, and always the one he was weakest at. Ducking away to avoid the swift middle finger snapping off the thumb onto his poor ears. Ending long fists of nonstop effort with his ears buzzing nevertheless.
— Quit it! he would complain.
— You quit it. Start thinking, start remembering.
— I am already. Just leave me alone!
But he seldom ran off, because then the night by the fire would be bad, and the next day as well, until he apologized and got back to it. Painfully he had learned that his least bad option was to sit there and try to get through his lessons.
— Wait, I see something. Thorn was not impressed by his unhappiness.-A face looking left and down turns his head until he’s looking up and right.
— The man in the moon, Loon said, — looking around every month.
— Yes. And full moon is when the moon’s face is looking right at us. How many days in a month?
— Twenty-nine and a half days, new moon to new moon.
— Yes. So what do we do about that?
— We alternate the months and call them either hollow or full, meaning either twenty-nine days or thirty days. Twelve of those in alternation leaves us short of the winter solstice by eleven or twelve days, so the shamans at the corroboration add a thirteenth month every two or three years.
— Yes. And it still doesn’t work, Thorn added with a gloomy frown.-The error builds up fast. Vole thinks he has a splitter that makes it better, two score and nineteen over two, but even that loses a day every three years or so, and besides, what kind of a split is that? It has no shape, no one can see it. It’s cat vomit.
— Maybe Heather should taste it.
Thorn laughed.-I wish she would. I would be interested to hear what she thought of all that, but she doesn’t care about matching the sky to the seasons. Month to month is fine for her. People think just like they fuck, women inward and men outward. And women are naturally very monthly because of their bleeding.
— Everyone is monthly, Loon pointed out, thinking of their nights under the full moon, that world of light so clear and pale, a different world, almost like the world of dreams, but one they were awake in.
Thorn shook his head.-Everyone is yearly. Monthly is a matter of more or less.
— But the way you can see on full moon nights! It’s so bright you can even see the colors still, a little bit.
— There you are, thinking outward. You don’t think inward when it comes to the moon, but women do. So it’s different. I should have thought that as a married man you would have figured that out by now.
Jays while bathing grew ever more disheveled as they managed to get their feathers wetter and wetter. Never did you see a bird’s feathers in such disarray, except in their bath. It was as if they took their jacket off by briefly disassembling the weave of it. The blue of a jay will go away. Soon all the jays would be gone for the winter. There were only a few left now.
Sitting with Heather, splitting cedar roots for basket making. Being with Heather was far more relaxing than being with Thorn. She went out for a walk every day, to seek out her own plants in their little tucks. She joined the nut-gathering groups and helped them, then took Loon as a lookout and helper, on rambles even farther away. He often came back laden with small fragrant twigs or entire plants, and she crushed the leaves under his nose so he would learn the scents. Indeed a smell was a very distinct thing, seemingly right there inside his head, so that it almost always called up a name from him.
— When you need to memorize something, she said to him, — sniff this rosemary. It will help you remember, you’ll see.
Loon took from her the fragrant brittle twig with its short pale green needles. It had a very particular scent, part of the smell of the south-facing slopes.-Thanks, I’ll try it.
— Bears have by far the best sense of smell, she told him.
— Is it true you should never eat a bear’s small stomach?
— Who says that?
— Hawk and Moss. They say that if you eat it, you’ll end up slipping and sliding around in your shoes when you walk in forests. They say they tried it and Nevermind and Spearthrower didn’t, and they started slipping and falling when the others didn’t have any problem.
Heather shook her head.-I don’t know. It’s possible something about that small stomach might make you a little sick, hurt your balance somehow.
— So it’s true?
— It could be, I guess.
Loon made a fire with his firestarter, and they heated water in cedar cups held in the forks of branches and brewed spruce tea. Taste of spruce filling his throat and making his insides bigger. Watery eyes. Spruce had a big spirit, it helped them in all sorts of ways. Thorn wore a spruce top in his hair when he went into the caves, to bring a little luck in there with him.
Different firestarter kits used different woods: red cedar, bitter rose, elderberry tree, alder root.
— Find out which kind works best, Heather instructed him, gesturing at several kits she had assembled.
— How?
— Try them all and see which one goes fastest! She stared at him as if he were feeble-minded.
He nodded.-All right then, I will. When did you think of this?
— Last winter.
— And how long were you alive before you thought of this?
— Go. Do it.
He took the kits out into the low sun and put them each to the test, using the same starter in every case, made from a dried duff and moss mix commonly used by the pack. Thorn could drill up a fire almost as fast as you could sit down and get comfortable. Loon was not that fast, but he was good at it, as indeed most people were. It was that which made his failure on the first night of his wander still rankle. What a night that first night had been.
All Heather’s kits worked about the same speed, it seemed to him. The alder root was almost black, its firestick much lighter. The elderberry stick was made of a dried tip of new growth. The hearths had to be hard and with a tight stubborn grain to their wood, so the cup for the firestick tip would hold. The firesticks had to be hard enough to hold their tips as they were spun, but soft enough to make them hot. Putting a little sand in the cup would make them hotter too, but for the sake of the test Heather didn’t want him to do that.
— They’re close to the same, he told her when he was done trying them.
She frowned.-Do it again, I’ll sing the time. So as he lit fires, his arms beginning to burn with the effort, she turned away from him and sang the reed-splitting song, which was very short and repetitive, sticking out her fingers every time she did it five times, and marking the results on a tally stick with a blade. When they were done, she looked at her tally stick and nodded.-The cedar is fastest. We can tell people at the next festival.