Elga waited for him, and they fell behind the other two. Sun slanted through the pines and birches into their faces; it was a real relief whenever they were in their shade. The smells of the trees cut into Loon’s head, so familiar they almost made him cry. The old snow under the trees was mottled with pine needles and tree dust, and in the shadows it was icing up again. It seemed unfair of the snow to go from too soft to too hard with no good time in between. In some canyons like this, or in this one in another season, the walking would have been straightforward, but on this afternoon the canyon floor was becoming a matter of little ice slides dropping between trees. Loon began to sit on his bottom and slide down the steep sections, getting himself wet and cold in the process. If only the canyon had been flat, if only it had been free of icy snow… But really there was no kind of terrain that would have been easy for him on that day.
So he struggled on as the sunlight slanted through the trees. The others stopped and waited for him in whatever lanes of sunlight they could find, stomping their snowshoes to warm themselves. Of course in the snow they were still leaving tracks, slight though they might be. Presumably when this canyon dropped into the valley running south, Thorn would have them run for a while, then look for a snow-free slope they could climb over into another valley. Loon welcomed the idea of climbing again, as a way to keep Badleg from any more downward shocks. Although every up leads to a down. And it would be more work to go uphill, and he wasn’t sure he had that in him. It would take the coming of his third wind, that was certain.
Go and rest, go and rest. In the forest dusk the others waited for him, chilling in shadows. When he reached them he stood leaning his chest and elbows over his poles. He huffed and puffed as they rested and talked it over.
—We’ve got to keep going, Thorn said. His voice had the flinty sound it took on whenever he was thirsty, or angry, or making a shaman’s command.—We’re passing snow-free routes up to the ridges, so if they come down here at all, they won’t know whether we’ve stayed in this canyon or not. If we use tonight to get over into another canyon, we’ll lose them.
A wind gusted through the trees around them, and Thorn looked up. The tallest pines were swaying. All their tops pointed permanently east, and indeed this was another west wind, pushing at them yet again.
—Could be a storm, Thorn said, sounding surprised.—That would be good. We could use something good right now. And he tilted back his head and barked a muffled little fox bark.
They hiked on as the light leaked out of the land. They made Loon go first, so he could set the pace and they wouldn’t lose him.
He put his mind to seeing the best way downcanyon. He could do this as well as any of them. In all canyons there was a ramp of easiest travel, inlaid into the jumble of rocks and trees in ways that could be hard to find. The best way might zigzag from sidewall to sidewall, or run as straight as a crack. Sometimes it was overgrown by trees or brush, especially if it was an alder canyon; still it would reveal itself to the eye if one took the trouble to look for it. So Loon took the trouble, and the way came clear. He stumped along, his weight on his sticks as much as possible.
Finally the day’s light was gone. It was dark in the shadows of the trees. The lopsided moon was gazing down, however, so as Loon’s eyes adjusted to its light, he was able to proceed almost as before. Peering down; shuffling over bushes emerging from melting snow; getting to another turn; finding the ramp of fewest drops; feeling, under the pain Badleg was throwing up with every step, the pleasure of finding the right way.
But then the snow under his left snowshoe gave under him, a bad step-through that jarred him when he bottomed on a rock, and he cried out at the pain of it. The others rushed forward and helped him out of the hole, Elga reaching down and flexing his snowshoe sideways to get it up through the snowshoe-shaped gap in the surface crust. As it came through this hole, Badleg twisted in a way that sent a jolt of hot agony up through Loon’s nuts and asshole and guts. He cried out before he knew he was going to, then thrust his face into a snowbank and groaned again.
—Shit, Thorn said, arm around his shoulders.—Stand steady there, boy. Put your arm over my shoulder here. Let the bad leg hang free there for a second. There, there. Just let it hang. Now, wiggle the snowshoe. Just a little. Can you do it?
Fearfully Loon tried it. He could indeed move his left foot, although the rocking tweaked the bad point faintly as he did so.—I can move it.
—So maybe you can walk on it.
Loon tried, but he had to keep his weight entirely on his poles.
Thorn hissed to see it. He turned to Click, gestured at Loon.—Click, can you carry him?
He mimed what he meant. Click got it, and his bushy eyebrows lifted his forehead into four distinct furrows. In the shadows of the moonlight, his beaky nose and big brow and wrinkled forehead and bristly little chin resembled one of the wooden masks the western packs carved, expressing one feeling or another; in this case, surprise. He looked Loon up and down as if weighing him. Everyone had had to carry something big from time to time, a deer, a child, a mammoth head, a hurt friend, a log for the fire; so everyone knew it wasn’t an easy thing. Couldn’t be done for long. And it was night. And they had been going for three days and nights without pause.
Then Click’s mask of a face shifted, as if wood were shifting, the mask settling into a new expression: resolve. It was a more than human look, like Thorn on a spirit voyage.—Es, he said.
He shuffled over to Loon. Elga and Thorn got the snowshoes off Loon’s feet as gently as they could, and Elga tied them to the back of Thorn’s sack. When his feet were clear, Loon reached his arms around Click’s neck and clasped his own wrists well down on the old one’s massive chest. Click reached back and put his hands under Loon’s knees, and between the two of them they lifted Loon onto his back. Click took a step forward and stopped. He shifted Loon back and forth, up and down, took a few short slow steps.
—Roop, he said briefly.
Thorn led the way downcanyon. It was flattening out, which was good. The snow was hardening in the night’s cold, and getting slippery, Loon could tell. His front side was warm and his backside was cold. He hoped he could serve Click as a warm cloak at least, and clung to him hard and tried to stay light, to breathe himself upward, to cling to Click well and thus be an easier load, nothing for Click to worry about except for the weight itself, like a heavy sack. Thorn was carrying Click’s sack now, and as he strode through the forest’s moon shadows he looked something like the bison man in the cave, a big head standing on human legs.
Click was whistling through his teeth. He made a little triple hiss for each step he took, the air forced between his teeth; then a big breath in, then another triple hiss, all in a coordinated rhythm with his slow steps, like a thumping dance around a fire. He did not seem to be breathing particularly hard, nor was he much hunched over, nor slower than Thorn. It seemed like he could keep doing it. Loon tried to loft himself, to become a bird and wing away, to pull the old one up into the air.
Down through the forest. The snow gave way to black soil and washes of sand, also bare expanses of flat rock. Thorn always led them to these bare rock stretches. From time to time Loon fell asleep, and would wake up falling away from Click, grabbing on to him, with the strong impression that he had been asleep for some time without letting go and falling back. He dreamed in these sleeps, and in his dreams the triple hiss from Click sometimes became a birdsong, or someone playing a flute. His back was getting very cold. He wiggled his left foot in quick little tests of what it could do, and tried to confine the resulting pain to its point of origin in the ankle. Keep it trapped there, let his blood flow past it and through the rest of his leg. Let it rest and gain the strength to go on.
The moon was in the west, but still well above the horizon, when the cold penetrated his back so far that he croaked,—I can walk now, I think. Put me down, Click, and let me try it.
—Tank oo, Click said.—Roop roop.
Loo
n slid down onto Goodleg, and then onto his walking sticks, held out to him by Elga, who had been carrying them. Gingerly he put Badleg down, placed that foot on the ground, shifted his weight that way. A little stab or click of pain; but after that, as it washed up his leg muscles, it diffused to something he could stand. He could still control the leg, around or through that wash of pain. It would work.
—Good man, Thorn said, and they took off again.
Loon hobbled along behind Thorn, and Click dropped back and brought up the rear. Clouds flew under the moon and thickened on their way east, but were still thin enough to light up around the moon, which shone right through them, and lit them all over the sky. Thorn stopped often for short standing rests, and when he did, Elga came up and held Loon by the arm. She was still going strong, but her stride had shortened, as if she were limping with both legs. She stepped like a heron in a marsh. No doubt she was hurting. They were all slowing down. The moon was still a couple of fists above the horizon; the night had a long way to go. Loon wondered if they could make it to dawn. But he was happy to be able to walk. Only that little click of pain in the turn of every stride, and he could almost lift over that with his arms and his sticks. So he could walk. And the walking was warming him up, not completely, but in his middle where it counted. He could feel the skin of his back burning as the feeling came back to it. His fingers too burned with new feeling.
The wind continued to get stronger. Even down in the forest they could feel it. The chorus of trees on the slopes of the valley sang their airy roar as gusts swirled this way and that. The cloud blanket overhead poured in from the west and filled the sky, thickening and then breaking up into puffballs of moonlit white. In the breaks between clouds the black sky swam with fugitive stars, which looked like they had come loose and were sailing westward. A longer glance would steady them and reveal how fast the clouds were flying east. A storm, coming in from the great salt sea. Loon could smell the salt on the wind. Thorn raised his spear and sang his storm welcome. He was clearly happy to see it. It was true that a new blanket of snow would cover all traces of their passing, so Loon had to agree that it was probably a good thing. But it was going to be cold.
Well, cold. He was used to it. He had been cold for months now, and he could endure more of it. The world was a cold place. One breathed and shivered and danced in place to fight it, and it was possible to endure. As long as there was food. And of course a fire would be nice. In a storm no one would be able to see smoke from a fire. Getting one started would of course be a test. Loon grimaced, remembering his failure on the first night of his wander. But Thorn was a real firemaster, like all the old shamans. And he had his kit with him, the firestarter stick and block, flint knockers, bags of duff kept dry in dovekie skin. He could do it and he would. They would make a shelter, make a fire, wait out the storm if they had to. Walk through it if they could. Maybe a little of both. Thorn would decide. He would make their plan, Loon didn’t have to do that; which was good, because he was too tired to do anything as hard as thinking. He couldn’t think beyond the next click in his ankle.
When the moon set it got a lot darker. The clouds went dark too, and closed up so that no more stars could be seen. Though Loon knew dawn had to be coming, he could see no sign of it. So much black time passed that it began to seem to him that they had fallen into a cave world, that the night would go on forever.
He never did see the eastern sky lighten, but only looked up from the ground under his feet at one point to discover that the whole world had gone gray and was visible again. Neither black nor white intruded on this world of grays. The clouds had lowered in the night, and now skimmed the ridges hemming the valley. Gray snow flurries draped gray forested slopes: this was as much day as they were going to get.
It was so windy they had to stay in the trees. The chorus of pine needles sang a constant roar. How big the world becomes in a wind. They were as ants on Mother Earth now, crawling under grass stalks, grateful for their shelter. Even down there in the trees the wind poured through and slapped them from time to time, ransacking their clothes of any heat they might have held. Even the jende would be taking shelter in a wind like this.
They could not see far in any direction. It was hard to believe their pursuers could still be out in this, and hard to believe they could have followed them into this particular canyon. They themselves didn’t know where they were.
Still Thorn hiked on, and Loon put his head down and followed, taking it step by step. Except for the clicks of agony, it seemed like the third wind was still flickering in him, fronting up to the storm. You have to face up to Narsook. He would go until Thorn told him to stop. That was simple enough; it was a thought he could hold on to. Go until Thorn says stop.
The wind roared. It was evening all day. Snow began to pelt them, even in the trees; heavy flakes at first, then icy sand thrown from the side.
Thorn stopped next to a little knot of trees and shrubs that filled a flat spot near a lead in the canyon creek, chuckling blackly as it ate the snow that fell on it. Here the wind was more heard than felt.
—Let’s make shelter, Thorn said.
—Oh good, Loon said.
Thorn set about starting a fire while the other three gathered wood, then tangled branches into a shelter wall on the windward side of the knot of trees. Loon hopped around on his poles, gathering wood from the ground, snapping off dead branches from the undersides of trees. He had to keep his weight off Badleg, but he could do that, and it was good to be able to hop around and do something useful without causing himself pain.
Thorn was crouched on the windward side of a flat rock he had prepared for the fire, piling sticks and twigs on one side of the rock and dripping on them some of the fat from his bag. He got out his firestick and spin block, set the duff from his pack around the spin hole and in the cut that ran from the hole to his little pile of fat-soaked twigs. He spun the firestick hard, the shift of his hands from the bottom of the stick back to the top so fast Loon barely saw it. Back and forth he spun the stick, his red eyes bulging out of his black snake’s face, his teeth bared in a fierce scowl, hands rubbing down then jumping up and rubbing again.
The tip of his firestick blackened, and little wisps of smoke came from the duff nearest the spin hole. While continuing to spin hard, Thorn also leaned his head around his arms and puffed lightly on the block, contorting his whole body in the effort to call forth flame. When the duff pricked yellow at its edge, and smoked some more, he stopped spinning and crouched even lower, his face right next to the flame, one hand cupping it, the other pushing the duff gently as it burned. The duff’s flame remained little more than a tiny glowing ember, and when the twig next to it caught fire, the miracle popping into existence again, he began to puff faster, blowing it up in the way he would play a quick tune on his flute. Loon helped him by getting rocks into position on the windward side of the fire, and then all around it. By the time he had made a proper fire ring, Thorn had a good blaze going in the twig pile, and was carefully balancing small branches over the flames to get them started too. Click came crashing in from time to time with armfuls of wood. Elga was still making a weave of branches between the trees on their windward side, and then around them in a complete circle except for one gap between trees on the lee side. She stuffed so many branches into her barrier that it became a woven wall of wood and leaf and needles.
When they regrouped around Thorn’s fire, now a young blaze that no single gust could blow out, they wrapped themselves in their furs and sat like four taller stones in the fire ring, jammed together in a curve around the windward side. Loon sat to the left of the rest and let Badleg lie straight before him. The warmth of the fire helped calm the hurt. Thorn stood up and went out into the storm, and came back with his dovekie bag filled with water from the creek. After they drank from it until they were full, he held it as near to the fire as he could without burning it.
The fire was even more beautiful than usual. Even Loon’s first fire during h
is wander had not comforted him as much as this one. Sometimes gusts blew its heat away for a time, then it slammed back with the full force of its radiance. Loon’s face and fingertips and ears burned and itched furiously. Finally he could give Elga a look in reply to her anxious gaze: he was all right. Beside this fire he would be able to rest, warm up, drink water, eat some of their remaining food. It was true that they were running out of food. But if the storm ended and the jende had lost track of them, then they could find food as they hiked on. They could find out where they were, if Thorn didn’t know. Loon certainly didn’t.
—Do you know where we are? he asked.
Thorn gave him a sharp look.—We’re here!
—And you know where here is?
—Close enough, Thorn said. He was looking through the bags in his sack, checking the food left to them, Loon supposed. Instead he pulled out one piece of clothing after another, to hold them up to the flames and dry them out: bits of leather, scraps of fur, mittens… After a while he stood and turned and stuck his rear toward the flames, growling at the heat burning his butt. His clothes quickly started steaming. Inspired by his example, they all stood and did the same. Click still hissed his quick triple whistle, as if dreaming he was still on the march.
When the fire had dried them and they were thoroughly warm, Thorn picked up one of the bags from his sack and took from it his sewing kit. Elga had made the entire hike so far wearing only her leggings and a bearskin robe from the women’s hut, and now Thorn offered to help her turn the robe into a proper shirt and coat, and to extend her leggings.