—Even when you sleep?
—It depends where you sleep, right? Don’t you think so?
—I was out on my wander back in the spring. It seemed hard to find a safe place to sleep, especially with a fire. Sometimes I slept in trees. Other times I made a huge fire. I would even sleep by day and stay awake all night.
—I’ve done all that, Pippiloette agreed.—You have to take care.
—What about woodsmen, or old ones?
—You have to take care. It depends what you think is worse, the animals or the woodsmen. In different areas it’s different. Woodsmen are skittish, they’re almost all up on the plateau, or in the ravines of the highlands, up where no one else will live. The lunkheads aren’t like that. They have their own regular camps, usually at the top of kolby canyons, or else on islands in rivers. They’re not very dangerous, compared to lions or hyenas. They’re not real happy around people, but they are polite. Woodsmen are usually crazy, and most want to keep their distance. They’re out there because they killed someone, or ate a dead person when they were hungry or something. Lots of times when I’ve run into one, it’s seemed like they forgot how to talk. A couple of them talked all the time, but never to me. They had invisible friends. They spoke languages I’ve never heard.
He shook his head.—It wouldn’t be good to be alone all the time. I like it when I’m out on a trip, but I like it because I know I’ll be talking to someone soon. If it were to go on forever, I wouldn’t like it. I don’t think the woodsmen are any different in that way, or not much. It’s true that a few I’ve met seemed really happy. Although it’s the happy ones you’re most likely to run into. The other kind, you hope you don’t.
He came with them to their camp and joined the evening by the fire. They cut up the stag and the women stuck some herbs into the brisket, and marinated the ribs and haunches and coated them with spiced fats. Everyone ate well that night.
As they sat watching the fire bank down, Pippiloette gave out some gifts from his sack, shells and carved sticks of antler and tusk and black wood. Those in the pack who had handcrafts to trade at the eight eight gave him some of their littler things as something to pass along to other packs. In this way people knew what to look for at the festivals. So they gave him things that would fit in his sack, like baskets, spoons, waterproof bags, fur liners, or hats.
Loon gave him an antler carved to have a man’s body and a lion’s head, much like the knot he had carved in his wander, and Pippiloette laughed out loud as he inspected it and shook Loon’s hand, saying—I’ll keep this myself, I tell you, but I’ll show it to everyone and tell them you made it.
—Thank you, Loon said.
Several of the girls clustered around Pippiloette, and because of that a number of the women did as well, some keeping the girls in hand, others just joining the general pleasure, because the traveler was a good-looking man, and his stories often brought news. Even Heather was relaxed around him, which was a good sign, because usually she regarded such men and muttered,—A face is just a face, what do you do in your place?
But Pippiloette seemed to do quite a lot in his place. And also he was good at being friendly without actually coming on to the women; he was charming but a little distant, and intent to speak also to the men he had hunted with. If there was ever an awkwardness, he took his flute from his sack and played them his tunes, which were the same every time he visited, and ones they only heard from him. He had a haunting way with the flute, different than Thorn’s. He sang their songs with them in a high nasal voice, buzzy and penetrating, but perfectly pitched. A really musical person. A spirit took him up when he sang or played, just as one saw in certain morning birds. He even stood up when these moments came.
Tonight he agreed to tell them a story, and they settled in around the fire happily. He stood by the fire, and looked at them as he spoke.
I am a traveler as you know,
I walk the surface of Mother Earth
And so do my fellow travelers,
Each of us on his own path.
And some of us repeat our paths
As long as we can find them,
And nothing makes us take a different way.
I am one of those myself,
Having a wife with my brother,
And he goes out when I’m at home,
And he doesn’t like it when I’m overly late
Although both of us have been delayed
Once or twice through the years.
What this means for me is I go out east
To the gate between worlds
And then turn north and walk for a fortnight,
Right up to the edge of the great ice cap,
And come back just under that great white wall
Or sometimes up on the ice itself
If the summer melt has made the land next to the ice
Impassable. West I return and south
Across the steppes to home, using paths
Of my own that no one knows, the best ways of all.
That’s the way it is for me, but in my travels
I meet other men out walking the world,
And some of them have neither circuit nor home
But wander always a new way. These men
Are curious people, odd in their ways and speech,
But interesting for that, and we talk.
Always when travelers get together over a fire
We talk. You can see that right now, I know.
And travelers together talk about traveling. Where have you been?
What have you seen? What are people like?
What’s out there in this world we live on?
These are the questions we ask and the stories we tell,
And some travelers travel to find the answers
And tell new stories to those they meet.
One such I met this summer, at the farthest east
Of all the places I go. This man looked like
The northers and I could barely understand him,
But I could, and it got easier as we talked
Because he had only one thing to talk about,
Which was this world we live on, its shape and size.
All travelers agree, for we’ve seen it ourselves:
There is ice to the north, wherever you go,
And to the west is the great salt sea,
And to the south, again the salt sea,
Although warmer and more calm,
More in and out, and dotted with islands.
We all agree on this, we travelers,
As between us we have seen it all,
And some travelers claim to have seen it all
Themselves alone. Good. Maybe they are even
Telling the truth. I can’t say. But here’s the thing:
What about east? This norther man
Was like a lot of us, he had that question,
And more than that: he wanted to know the answer.
And no one had it.
So he took off walking east, he said.
He walked for days, he walked for months,
He walked for years. He walked east from the time
This question had come to him, in his youth,
And kept on walking until he was a man in the middle of life.
Seventeen years, he said, he walked east.
I asked him what he had seen on this life walk.
He told me of steppes that went on forever.
There were mountains like those to the west of here,
And some lakes bigger than any I’ve seen,
Little salt seas even, their water was salt, he said,
But mostly it was steppes.
You know what that’s like. The walking is good
If it isn’t too wet, and there are always animals to eat.
So there really was no impediment to him.
Yet there he sat, across a fire from me,
As far to the east as I had ever been,
But it was only the gate
of worlds, a nice broad pass
Between low mountains to north and south.
It had taken him twelve years to walk back
To where we were. This he told me.
Finally I had to ask him: why did you come back?
Having gone so far, why turn around?
Why not keep going for the rest of your life?
He stared into the fire for a long, long time
Before he met my eye and answered me.
When I was as far east as I got, he said,
I came to a hill and went up it to look.
I was feeling poorly and my feet hurt,
And no person I had met for several years
Spoke any word I understood. All my dealings
Were done by sign, and you can do that
And still get by, but after a while you want a word
With the people you see. I Pippi could only agree to that!
And so, he said, he stood on that hill, and all to the east
Was just the same. There was no sign at all it would ever change.
I realized, he said, that this world is just too big.
You can’t have it all, no matter how much you want it.
It’s bigger than any man can walk in one life.
Possibly it just keeps going on forever.
Possibly our Mother Earth is round, he said then, like a pregnant woman
Or the moon, and if you walked long enough
You would come around to where you started,
Assuming the great salt sea did not stop you,
But really there is no way to know for sure.
And so I turned back, he said, because the world is too big,
And most of all, I wanted to talk to somebody again
Before I died. Having said that, having told his tale,
We stood and hugged, and he cried so hard
I thought he would choke. I had to hold him up.
Whether he had succeeded or failed
He did not know, and I didn’t either.
After that he calmed down, and we looked at the fire
Until long in the night, telling other stories we knew.
Before bed I asked him, So what’s for you now?
What will you do, now that you’re back?
Well, he said, to tell the truth,
I’m thinking I may take off east again.
—That is my story for tonight’s fire, Pippiloette said.—I have chewed off a bit of this long fall night for you.
After that they talked some more, and it seemed to Loon that Pippiloette had a way of not looking at Sage that seemed to indicate that the two of them had an understanding. Late in the night, when the fire had died down and everyone was asleep, Loon wondered if those two did not find each other. Also, if it might not be that Pippiloette had a similar arrangement with women in each of the packs he regularly visited. Heather had suggested as much one time with a remark under the breath.
When he thought what that must be like, Loon wanted to be a traveler too. Sage was the best-looking woman in their pack, the most desirable, with her big autumn tits ploshing together at her every move. It was not chance Pippiloette had made his arrangement with her. What would it be like to lie with a woman like that in every pack, each one different?
But these were just the spillovers of his feelings for Elga, which were so filled with spurting that the feeling extended from him in every direction. He loved all the women of the pack, and all the women of other packs as well. They were all people he wanted, and so were the female animals. He wanted the deer and the vixen and the ibex and the bear women, and the horse women of course. It was simply a world of desirable females. Sometimes the feeling flooded him, like the break-up of the river in spring. So when the nights came and he pulled all these feelings back together and poured them into the body of his wife, there in their bed and the whole world nothing but Elga, he felt like he had fallen into a dream where love was all in all.
And one night after they had fused and melted into each other in their nightly way, she nuzzled his ear and said,—I’m going to have a baby. Heather says it’s true.
Loon sat up and stared down at her.—You are?
—Yes.
—So. We did it.
—Yes. She grinned at him and he suddenly felt his face was already doing that. They kissed.
—We have to take care of it, she said.
—Does Heather know if it’s a boy or a girl?
—Not yet. She said she will in a few months.
—When will it come?
—Six months from now. So, the end of the fifth month. Right in the spring, the best time. Unless it’s a bad spring.
Loon tried to understand it, but couldn’t. It felt as if clouds were filling his chest. Or as if he had plunged over a waterfall he had not seen, into a deep pool. This Elga was his. The night when she had shown up at the eight eight bonfire, everything had changed—not just at once, although that too, but also more and more over the months since, with everything else that had happened, each step along the way finally leading to this entirely new place.
As Elga grew bigger with child that winter, she gained in influence among the women, like the moon over the stars. Sage didn’t like it, Thunder neither, but Elga had a way, even with them, of calming people. They felt her power in a reassuring way. Her silence could have been a withholding, but it wasn’t; it was more like an assent to the other person and her story. Often they told her things while she was helping them with their work, because she asked questions, and remembered the answers too. It was hard to resent such a person.
And now she was bringing a new child into the pack, which was a big thing. Normally the grandparents would be celebrating such an arrival, so there would be two or even four strong advocates of the new pack member, and there would be a discussion lasting through the whole winter as to which clan the new babe would become part of. In this case there were no grandparents, but as Heather and Thorn between them had taken Loon in when he was orphaned, it was their role to be like grandparents to this child.
Heather, however, was not interested in such things, and Thorn didn’t like Loon’s marriage to begin with. So it was a matter of Elga’s ability to put the other women under a telling, and she did this without looking like she was trying; it was just her being herself. And so in her last few months the other women helped her in the way she helped them. And a pregnant woman in the end of her time was the focus of all their efforts.
The short days, the cold; the storms rolling in from the west, low and snowy. Ice on the river and the creeks, snow over that. The white world. The midday sun just peeking over the southern gorge wall. All the birds gone except for the snow birds; all the animals sleeping or hiding under the snow, or caught in the people’s traps, quietly enduring. White fur. The pack in its house, sleeping away. They were used to snow, they liked snow. They had their stored food and the daily tasks, the long nights sleeping like bears. The long stories told around the fire.
Heather would be the midwife for the birth, as always. She grumbled about this in the way she did about every task she performed for the pack, but in this case she seemed to really mean it. She didn’t like being the midwife.
—It will be fine, she told Elga gruffly.—You’re a big girl, there won’t be any problems. I’ll give you the right teas and infusions and we’ll have that kid out of you before you know it. There’s some work you have to do to push it out, of course, but we’ll help you. Mostly the work does you. You just have to ride it out.
And so the end of the winter passed with something for them to think about, and to watch happening. Tucked in their house or under the abri, they ate their food and watched the sky, went out on clear windless days to check the traps. The strike of the sun’s warmth on a body cut through all but the coldest days. But even the sunniest days were short, and in the afternoons they scurried back to their big house like muskrats or mice.
One morning Loon went out with Moss to look at
some of their traps downriver, set in the ravines off the canyon one loop downstream.
They made good time on the trail climbing the ridge between the two loops, and were on the ridge by sunrise. All the sky to the east was orange, and they agreed this meant it would probably snow two mornings later. Then Moss laughed and said,—Does it ever happen that way?
Loon laughed too. Moss’s laugh was particularly infectious. He was slighter than Hawk, with a narrow handsome face under a thick tangle of black curls. His face was very flexible and expressive, one moment as sharp as if knapped, the next slack-lipped and foolish.