But it stayed cold. The hunters began to lack the strength to range as far as before, they had to conserve their efforts and save them for what really mattered. The other men considered Loon lucky because Elga could breastfeed him from time to time, to give him a little help keeping going. And it was true that it was a huge comfort to suck her thin sweet warm milk from her, while their baby sucked from the other breast. Once the babe reached out with his eyes closed and patted Loon on the head, as if to bless his participation.-I guess that’s why I have two, Elga said with a little smile.
But Badleg impeded him, and he was no more successful than any of the rest of the hunters. Once he came on a muskrat dead in one of their tree traps, but it looked empty somehow, and it was: the muskrat’s head had been touching the ground, and ground shrews had eaten up through the face and devoured all of its meat and intestines, leaving it a fur bag filled with nothing but bones. Loon brought this remnant back to camp anyway; they would eat the marrow out of the bones, and use the fur.
Another time he went out on a trap circle and came on a wolverine biting through the sinews of a snare in order to release a marten who had been caught. As Loon ran toward the scene, the wolverine cut its little cousin free and they both scampered off on the snow, the marten like an elongated squirrel, the wolverine in its big hops, all four feet landing together under him. Quickly they both disappeared among the trees. Loon had heard of this happening, but had never seen it himself. Wolverines and martens were family. Bear and beaver were similarly family. The bigger ones always left their little cousins alone.
Today, it was really too bad. Nothing to be done about it but repair the snare and set it again, and hope for a better result next time. You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. No cure for disappointment but to try again. Obviously it would be best to visit every trap every day, but that made for a lot of walking. The days were getting longer, but the trap circle seemed to be getting longer too. It was a relief to lie down with Elga and the babe and suckle a little from the breast not taken by the boy. Of course most of the milk had to be saved for their child. But the rich flavor went right to his stomach and quelled his pangs for a while, and made it possible for him to ignore Badleg’s throbbing.
They got so hungry that two of the pack fell sick at the same time, Ducky and Windy. Thorn and Heather laid them in beds at opposite ends of the camps, and went back and forth tending them. Thorn told Loon to come along, and there was in his eyes such a stony look that Loon gulped and decided his insubordinations could be resumed some other time.
Their diseases were very different, as Ducky had a fever and boils, while Windy was simply exhausted all the time, to the point where she could barely move. It could have been just that she was so old. So when they were at Ducky’s bed under the west end of the abri, Loon shivered in fear and watched agog as Thorn put on his bison head, so absurdly big compared to Thorn’s real head; it looked like a black snake was eating a bison’s head from below, like the shrews had eaten the muskrat. To see and talk under this bison head, Thorn had to cant it back so the bison appeared to be examining the sky. Nevertheless, as Thorn staggered about Ducky, and peered down her throat and fingered her in the armpit, then played his flute over her body, he was in such a deliberate flow, like an eddy in a slow river, that Ducky seemed entranced, and Loon felt the pull too. He wanted to help, but kept his distance. He was afraid.
At Windy’s bed, up in the morning nook, he was just sad. Windy’s lassitude was so unlike her manner when Loon had been a child. She had been always rushing around camp tending to little particulars. In his sadness he would think of how later that night he would be with Elga and be so happy. It was strange to feel both these feelings, he felt like he might break from being too full. Windy had been that same frisky woman she had always been, up until this winter. So Loon sat at the foot of her bed with his head on his knees, and thought about Elga, or the black horse, or the herd of bison filing down Lower’s Upper, all of them as big-headed as Thorn, their bodies lean with the work of carrying all that head around. Lions were the same, and he saw in his mind suddenly how they were brothers, lion and bison, the same form made into hunter and hunted, either fast or big. He saw on his eyelids the sweet curves of an ibex horn and an ibex rump, different kinds of curve entirely, both very fine. He wanted to carve.
Heather all this time sat by the sick women, sniffed their breath, put her ear to their chests to hear their hearts, tasted their pee and came back from the shitting grounds with them, shaking her head and thinking things over. She brewed many cups of tea for both women; she dripped it into Windy’s mouth from a hollow reed. Mostly it was artemisia tea, bitter and brown. To Windy’s tea she added mistletoe pollen, and a pinch of wolf lichen. This bright green moss stained Heather’s fingers and made the tea greener than it seemed it should have; the browns it mixed with went entirely away. Wolf lichen was poisonous to wolves, but Heather often fed her people noxious things in small quantities.
With Ducky, on the other hand, she covered the boils with a balm made of bear grease mixed with alder bark powder, and other grits and dried flowers she had in her collection of little colored bags. She fed both women a mash made of honey, berries, and herbs, slighty rotted like the festival mashes. These tasted bad, but seemed to give the sufferers some relief.
One night Thorn put on the bison head and danced around Ducky singing. All of a sudden he shouted and leaped on her and held her by the throat as if strangling her, reached down her throat and pulled out a white mass that he threw down toward the river. Ducky stared at him amazed.
With Windy he only sat by her side and played his flute. One morning when they were walking up to do this, he dismissed Loon with a slap to the shoulder.-Go hunt, he said.-There’s nothing more you can do here.
And there never had been, Loon refrained from pointing out, happy to get away. Windy died the next night. But Ducky lived.
They carried Windy’s wrapped body out to the raven platform, put up the ladders and carried her up, and laid her body out to be eaten. The ravens were as hungry as anyone else, and Windy’s flesh would soon be gone. When her bones were clean they would collect them for their burial in the river, that summer before going on their trek.
Before they left Windy the whole pack sat around her body and cried while Thorn played his flute. They were too hungry for this, their feelings were flayed raw, and everyone had loved Windy and been mothered by her. It was a painful disappearance of one of them from the pack. They were all part of Mother Earth, Thorn said between his flute pieces. Birth, sex, death, they were all petals on the same flower. The goddess eventually pulled all these petals off: birthed them, mated them, took them back in death.
Loon heard inside him the sound like a loon crying in the night. This was his heart’s song, this was the song no one else heard.
So a few lucky ravens had a little respite, but the rest of the people of the river gorge got hungrier. Finally a freeze-no-more moth flew out of one of the brakes near the river, and the sixth month came. At the dark of the sixth moon, Thorn stayed up all night chanting, asking the summer spirit to come, and just as he sang what Loon thought was his most haunting song, the one about the voyage between worlds, the night colors appeared up there among the stars, lighting up the black sky with shimmering waves of green and blue, so beautiful that Thorn woke everyone to see it, and announced that this was a sign that the summer spirit was returning, coming back from the other side of the sky. They all watched for as long as the lights spilled through the stars and poured through the black sky like waves made of dragonfly wings. When the lights went away they fell back asleep.