—I do think snow comes after the sun shows its ears, Loon said.
—Or the moon, Moss agreed.—It’s the snow in the air getting lit up. The light bounces off the snow in the air just like off any other snow.
The light was definitely bouncing off the snow on the ground. They pulled down their caps to their eyebrows and tilted their heads down and to the side to hike up the ridge into the low winter sun. Loon’s cap was edged with marten fur, Moss’s with wolf.
When the snow warmed up in the sunlight enough to soften a little, they stopped and tied their snowshoes to their shoes and continued on to the first traps, set in the ravine mouth where Steep Creek ran into the main creek of Next Loop Down. There was a giant rock called the Robin’s Nest standing in the little meadow at the confluence of these two creeks, sticking out of the blanket of snow so tall that its top was still over their heads as they passed it. The creeks under the dips in the snow were frozen, the land silent. No birds, no animals; snow everywhere, except on the rock faces too steep to hold snow. These ragged gray walls breaking the snow blanket here and there were just begging to be painted, Loon felt, and two or three they passed were: the sight of the sacred animals in red or black, vivid in all the white and blue of snow and sky, caught his breath in his throat. The air was cold, and Moss was singing a little hunter’s ditty to himself. In places the snow was so feathery they sank knee deep even with their snowshoes on. Big lumps of soft snow balanced on every bunch of pine needles in the trees around them.—You should bring some of this feathery snow back for Elga, Moss said.
Drinking water melted from such snow would make her child light-footed. Loon laughed and said,—Good idea.
They came to the first trap, which was a pit Moss and Nevermind had dug the summer before, down into the soft dirt of the meadow. At the bottom of the pit they had put sharpened sticks and blades of knapped rock, and then covered the hole with light poles and leaves. It was only under a blanket of snow that this kind of trap was likely to catch an animal, and now as they snowshoed into the meadow, they could see that something had crashed through the roof of the pit, leaving an odd hole in the land. They rushed to the edge of the hole and looked down. A big red stag had fallen through and broken a foreleg at the bottom of the pit, and after that frozen to death. Now its dead eyes looked up at the sky as if the beast’s spirit were nearby, and using its old eyes to get its bearings.
—What is he doing here! Loon exclaimed.
—Helping us out. Thanks old man! But couldn’t you have jumped out of this pit and died up here?
Moss clapped Loon on the arm. It was an excellent bit of luck, though it meant a hard afternoon for them, first getting down safely into the pit, and then hauling the stiff body onto a frame made of trap poles that held it barely chest high, from which position they could get under it and shove it up together, out of the pit. They were just strong enough to push it up, and in their first try the stag’s body crashed back down into the pit and they had to skip away through the stone shards like squirrels to get out of its way. It stared up at them with its fixed cloudy gaze. The second time they were more careful and it went better. All the while the beast kept looking at them.
—What do you think he was thinking at the end? Loon asked.
Moss shook his head and frowned. Loon only said things like this when he was alone with Moss; the others would just joke at such questions. But Moss regarded the stag’s big weird eyes, which somehow conveyed so clearly its mute endurance, and pushed his mobile face through any number of expressions to show he was thinking, before venturing,—Maybe he was just thinking he should have been walking one leg at a time to test the snow. That’s probably what I would be thinking.
—But not only that.
—No. No, he was probably sad. Maybe thinking of his wives. It’s strange how deer have rectangular pupils, isn’t it? They look like they’re from somewhere else.
—Thorn says animals’ eyes show they don’t have human souls. There’s no flutter or movement, they’re always just stuck there in one position looking.
—So our soul is in the whites of our eyes? I don’t believe it. This deer looked at you just like you looked at him. There’s no difference except the square pupils, but even so you can see just what he’s thinking, I mean look at him! Hey, we’re sorry about this, brother, he said to the frozen deer,—but we need to eat. So thanks for helping us out!
And with that he plunged his spear between two neckbones and began to slice between them. After that they took turns in the low sun skinning the body and cutting it up with their spears. Under the spear tips the frozen meat had its usual hardness, crystalline yet flexible; they thrust between joints, bent them apart with twists from the end of the spear, cut back and forth at the meat. The blood still frozen in the beast’s veins was going to be much prized by their women back at camp. It took hard work for most of that short day to get the body into pieces they could carry in their sacks and haul behind them through the snow, using its own halved skin as a rough rope to drag them along.
By the time they were ready and on their way, the sun was low in the west, casting long black shadows over the snow, which was hardening quickly back to a surface they could walk on without snowshoes. They were a long way from home, and when the sun went down behind the hills to the west, the air quickly got much colder. But there’s always heat in hurry, as the saying had it, and without discussing it they picked up their pace and cronched over the snow side by side. It was only when it was this cold that they could hike this hard without overheating. It came on them again; they were made to run in cold like this.
Behind them the moon rose. It was the first night after full, and the fat moon turned the sky a thick twilight blue, which then infused the white snow under their feet. A world of blues: when they came to the broad ridge between loops, and could see far up and down the gorge of the Urdecha, and over the hills on both sides of it, the sky and the land were still so lit by the blue moonlight that they felt they could see everything. It was Mother Earth at her most beautiful, her every curve and declivity glowing distinctly; though blanketed by snow, it was in these moony nights that she looked most naked, the bare blue flesh of her hillsides smooth and curvaceous.
Before the last drop to Loop Meadow they stopped and looked around wordlessly at it for a while. Nothing moved, no wind, no sound. It was like a spirit world, a world beyond the sky, where the stillness quivered with a mystery. The few stars were fat and blurry, and they swam about as Loon blinked and blinked in the cold. They stood inside a black starry bag, on a white body, and everything was much bigger than could be grasped. So many times they had gone out at night during full moons to see things look like this, all the way back to when they were little boys, slipping out of the big house when most of the women were in the women’s house and there was no one to catch them. Loon and Moss were the two who liked it most.
Now they glanced at each other, smiled and nodded: time to go. The cold air was chilling them quickly. They dropped toward camp almost at a run, skidding down the hard snow where it was steepest. As they came into Loop Meadow, Loon smelled the fire, and realized he was returning to Elga, who was pregnant with their child, and they were bringing in some unexpected meat, so that most of them would stay up late, eating some meat while the women worked on the rest of it. The cold air expanded in his chest, and he let it out of him in little loon cries that Moss laughed to hear.
Late that winter Elga got huge, and her time came one morning and the women took her off to their birthing hut, which was a shelter they had built next to their monthly house. They all gathered there and shooed the men away, and Thorn gathered the men around the fire and started a round of smoking his pipe, even though it was not yet noon.—New kid in the pack, he explained with his snaky grin,—our duty to welcome it.
He did not congratulate Loon as the father, but he didn’t glower at him either. Loon took up a blade and stick and carved it with nervous precision, making a little birthday to
y for the newborn, in this case an ibex, which used a couple of knobs at one end of the stick for its horns. From time to time they heard the women singing, and then for a while they heard some yelps, which were hard to believe came from Elga; Loon’s scrotum tightened and he felt a flash of pain in his gut, as if his body were feeling what Elga felt.
—Getting the head out, Thorn said.—It’ll be over soon.
—So, what clan? Hawk asked.
Thorn stood.—The new one should be from the eagle clan. That will give us an eagle in a few years, and we need one. And Elga is an eagle. So eagle it is.
—Don’t the women have to agree? Hawk asked.
—No, Thorn said, glaring at him.—I’m the one who sees the clans in this pack. I had a vision the other night that showed me which one this one was.
—I’m an eagle too, Moss offered.
—That’s right, but you and Schist are the only adult eagle men in the pack. We need younger ones. You and Schist will have to get together to choose the newborn’s clan name, if it’s a boy.
Moss laughed and came over to give Loon an embrace.—Now I’m your kid’s clan uncle. Did Heather ever say whether it will be a boy or a girl?
—She wasn’t sure, but she said probably a boy, Loon replied.
—Either way, we’re brothers more than ever now.
Loon nodded, his stomach still tight.—That’s good.
He finished the birth stick, which as it turned out was only the ibex’s head, to take advantage of a whorl that could be made into its eye.
It was Sage who came down to give them the news, with a sly smile.—Elga’s child is born. It’s a boy.
The men cheered.
Later Heather said to Loon,—It was harder on her than I expected, because your child has a big head. I had to scare her into pushing him out. There’s a point that sometimes comes, where if the babe doesn’t come out, there’s going to be trouble. The mom’s getting tired, losing heart, and the babe’s neither in nor out, which is a bad place to be caught. So before I have to do anything worse, I try to scare the mom into pushing harder than she has up to that point. I tell her what will happen to her and to the babe if I have to get drastic, and how wrong that could go, and usually by the time I’m done telling them that, they’re so scared that they are really pushing hard. That’s what happened with Elga.
Every once in a while when out on a hunt, they would run into hunters from the packs that lived nearby. The Lions were downstream where the Urdecha ran into the big river, and the Lynxes were up under the ice caps, the Foxes and Ravens south and west of that. Meeting any of them was cause for a quick little party. They would share some food and a pipe of smoke, and sit by a stream and drink and talk for a while before heading on their way. If they were both trailing the same animals they would sometimes join forces to finish the hunt, but that seldom happened. The Lynxes were very easygoing and even a little sleepy, more like cheetahs than Lynxes, and they liked to travel with little sacks of mash to tipple from, so some said it was because of that.
Once Loon was out gathering plants with Heather when they encountered two Ravens, who had been walking along hand in hand on the plateau’s edge trail. After they had gone on their way, Loon said,—I’ve seen those two before.
—They’re always together, Heather said.
—What do you mean? Loon said.
—They’re a pair, like swans.
Loon looked through the forest after them.—Really?
—It’s just their way, Heather said. She gave him a look.—Like Hawk and Moss, right?
—What?
—Or Thunder and Bluejay.
—What?
She stared at him. Finally she said,—You and Elga are lucky, right?
—Yes.
—A lot of people feel that way.
—But…
She dismissed his puzzled frown with a wave.—We’re deeper than we can see. There are other people down inside us doing things. We get carried along by what they do. That’s what it looks like to me.
—I was in love with a deer once, Loon confessed, blurting it out with a sudden flush of relief, even pride.
Heather nodded.—Once I loved a bison, when I was a girl. It didn’t work out.
Loon stared at her.—Thorn?
Heather shook her head.—No, Pika.
Now Loon was even more amazed.—Old Pika? Thorn’s shaman?
Heather nodded.
—What was he like?
Heather considered it.—Well, he was kind of like Thorn. Only more so.
—Mama mia. That must have been…
—It wasn’t good. Like I said, it didn’t work out. And Thorn was there too, so it was messy. She looked at her hand, sighed a sigh.—But I was there when Pika first started painting in the cave. We went in there and mated and then he jumped up and said he was going to paint me, paint what we had done. I was supposed to be Mother Earth. But then he turned it into the bison man again. He had that bison in him. No, what Thorn says is mainly right. We had a bad shaman.
He came on a good-looking chert in the open water of the high pond’s outlet lead. The black water was slicing away from it on both sides in a way that showed it was balanced. He took it out of the creek and set it down in his camp on the ridge, between the two big boulders.
One day he ate the last of a boar’s fat from a bag he carried, and slept in the sun for a while and then picked up the creek rock and a knapping rock he had been using for many days, very fine-grained and hard, seemingly unbreakable. He held it in his right hand, and hit things held on the ground with his left hand. Tap until feeling the kind of hit that was going to be needed to make a clean break in the chert, and then: whack.
It took some whacks to find out how brittle the creek stone was. After he got a good sense of that, almost every whack did what he wanted it to.
Breathe in, breathe out, whack.
Breathe in, breathe out, whack.
Warmth in a sunny winter morning. The sheen of the river ice, the chuckle of the little open rapids in the creek, the bubbles swirling downstream. Two breaths and a whack, then three. Three against two was the cross beat of day. Four and three for the dark of night.
The whacking lines were tighter together now, and at slighter angles to what he already had done. He could see the way it was shaping up. It would be like an alder leaf, pointed at its stem and rounded with a little dip on the side farthest from the stem. The balance would be very good, if he could get the last whacks right.
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, whack.
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, whack.
The winter air was warming, strike by strike. His fur lifted a little on the river breeze, his sweaty skin cooled with the waft. The love of stone work, the bliss of it.
Two of the fast ones came by and stopped to visit with him. The old woman and her boy. They were not on the hunt and he regarded them without fear. The old woman had been good to him, and the boy was not on the hunt. They jabbered at him in their hoarse nasal voices, not like any of the other animals’ voices, various and expressive like certain birds. By now he had learned some of the old woman’s words, how are you, good, hurt, hungry, thank you, and he listened to her and tried to make out more, and told her he was good. He showed them his new stone blade and they were suitably impressed. It was almost perfectly balanced, and had as many facets as the grain of the stone could take.
The old woman hefted it and asked him a question. It seemed she was asking him what he did with the blade, or what it was for. And yet there she was hefting it. Shyly he took it back from her and held it in his fingers, turned it over, felt the edge, eyed it edge on to see the balance. He handed it back to her. That was what it was for.
—It’s just to look at, he whistled at her.—I made it just to look at. Our women like to see such things.
She shook her head, not understanding him.
—Good, he said in her tongue. She nodded, glancing at him uncertainly.
Spear tips were also good to make, but he liked these show blades most. It was true you could throw one into a herd, and if it hit an animal and caused them to stampede, smaller members of the herd might get hurt and be easy to track and kill. Boys did that before they learned to spear. But you didn’t need the facets and the balance for that. Any rock with an edge would do.
He knew the fast ones did things similar to this blade. Their clothes were painted and fringed with loops of leather, and they wore leather strings around their necks from which they hung teeth and shells. They painted their skin with bloodstone and char. They painted cliff walls. All that, and yet they did not see what he was doing with the blade. It was too bad they didn’t whistle.
All the things they did. So active around their camp, always bustling around doing things. Going out on the hunt. All kinds of different sizes of group, different directions, different kinds of hunts. They were always in a hurry. Hurry slowly, his mother had always whistled. It was an old tune mothers whistled to children. He had heard his grandmother whistle it to his mother once.
Now the old woman wanted him to accompany them down to the riverbank. He got up and followed them, taking the new blade with him.
They wanted his help in moving a boulder from the bank into the shallows. He couldn’t understand why they wanted it, but after the boy showed him the motion several times, he couldn’t see any other explanation. He got behind the boulder with the boy and together they rolled it into the stream, where it knocked up a mighty splash.
—Thank you! they said to him, and made motions as if eating from the river. Ah: the boulder might be the start of a fish trap. They were changing the river to make it easier to catch the fish. Some kind of trap.
—Thank you! he said, and whistled,—Good idea! He ate fish when he could catch them. Mostly it was the red ones who swam upstream to die. Before they died they were still good to eat. After they died they fell apart very quickly.
One day he would go back west to his people, who were at the red fish river west of the ice caps. He would bring them the best blades ever knapped, and show them things to do that he had learned from the fast people. Then his wife might take him back again. Then his father might forgive him. If they were still alive.