Kim Robinson - Shaman

The cave moaned again. It chuckled at his capture. How did the cave bears guide themselves in here? How could they see in this?

They didn’t. They smelled their way. And the chamber that contained their hibernation nests was much closer to the cave mouth. They just bumbled blindly in and smelled their way to the place where they always slept, and slept again, and woke and sniffed their way out.

For a moment he lost his line of thought, and a panic of sheer terror washed through him in a flood that left him hot and gasping.—No, he groaned, and heard a little ringing that might have been an echo or a response.

He stepped around carefully, trying to keep his face toward the wall, to keep a sense of where he was. Facing the wall, the way out was to his left. He got down on his knees and crawled, sweeping with his hand ahead of him to feel for the extinguished lamps, for his sack—for anything that might be his, and thus help him.

But when his hand hit one of the lamps, it was no good; the wick was cold, the lamp’s little depression was out of fat oil. Possibly he had gotten so caught up in the four horses’ heads that all the lamps had burned their fat and gone out together. Maybe there had been no gust of wind at all, no laugh from the thing under the floor. Although it was laughing now. Anyway it didn’t matter. He had to find his sack.

Finally a sweep of his hand ran into it. Knowing its location allowed him to find his second lamp, and then the third. They were all out of fat, or so close that their wicks had gone out. He brought them back to his sack, missing it for a while and briefly panicking; but there it was at last, so that the terror of the dark subsided in him.

He sat on his fur patch and dug into his sack, feeling for the bag of fat grease. He found it, and that was good. In that bag was light and sight. Then he reached in the fold of his belt, and found the burl with the ember inside it, and when he felt the burl he took it up with desperate care, untied the cedar cap with trembling hands, and poked in gently with his finger, hoping to be burned: but it wasn’t even warm. Just ashes. He had stayed too long.

He sat back and whimpered with fear. There in his sack were his bags of food, and the rest of his painting things. The bag of earthblood powder, it felt like, ready to mix with his water to make red paint. But he was almost out of water. And nowhere in his sack did he feel the firestarter flints, or the little bag of duff and dried wood chips he needed to start a new fire.

He didn’t know what could have happened to them. Terror struck him again, swept through him and took him off. He needed to ice over that torrent of fear and stand on it. Needed to be ice cold, and yet he was burning with fear.

After a time the terror let him go, it flung him to the floor crying. It occurred to him that he might have taken the firestarter kit out of the pack when he lit the third lamp. Although he had lit that lamp from the ones already lit, of course, using a splinter, so there would have been no reason to take out the flints and duff. But it could have happened. That had been nearby; he wasn’t sure exactly where, because in the blackness he had carried all the lamps to this spot by the sack.

He crawled in the direction he thought the third lamp had been, felt the floor of the cave. Nothing. Then he lost the sack for a while, trying to return. When he relocated the sack he cried again, and after that he took the sack with him as he crawled around. He found some rocks on the floor, and some charcoal sticks tucked against one wall in a little hole. A jaw with teeth, giant in the dark, bigger than his head: a cave bear skull, it had to be, long and toothy, with the bump and rise in the forehead that marked it as a cave bear, although its sheer size was enough to tell.

Nothing. He had lamps, wicks, and oil, but no flints or duff. No way to make fire. He banged the rocks he had found against each other, and some brief sparks flew red across the blackness, like shooting stars, but nothing like what it would take to start duff burning; and besides, there was no duff.

He was stuck in the black of the cave. There was no way out, except to try to walk or crawl in the right direction.

By now he had no idea what direction was the right direction. He needed to find his wall again to get oriented, but standing up and walking around, hands stretched before him, he came to one wall, then another wall; he reached up and felt for scratches, smelled his fingers to see if they were perhaps smearing charcoal; but everywhere felt the same in the pure blackness, and his fingers always smelled like charcoal now, no matter what he touched.

Cold, tired, hungry, thirsty. Filled with fear, and then, as more time passed, with a rending grief. Oh that it should come to this! Thorn would be so mad at him if he turned up in the spirit realm so soon, having gotten lost in their own cave! It was almost funny to think of the look that would be on the old snake’s face. But it wouldn’t be funny if it happened. And what about Elga? She would be angry too, but so sad.

He crawled around on hands and knees until he felt something like a footprint. There were many bear prints in the hardened old mud of the floor, as they were deep enough to last through many a spring flood. They pointed in all directions. And he could feel by putting his own feet in them that they were far too large to be a person’s footprint. When he found another one, he fitted his foot into it, and knew it was a person’s footprint. Encouraging. But people had walked around. It didn’t mean he had a clear direction.

If he went toward the end chamber, there would be a series of drops. While on the other hand, if he had to step up, and if he was lucky enough to encounter the stepping stone placed at the bottom of that one big step, he would know he was headed in the right direction, at least for as long as he could keep any particular direction steady.

So he filled his sack with his things and put it on his back, and tried to go uphill. If he ran into a wall, he tried to determine which way the floor was tilted, and continued as upward as he could.

He crawled on and on, using his hands to feel the floor ahead of him. He felt like he was holding a straight line as he went, but he wasn’t sure. Thorn had once remarked that no one without light would ever be able to find his way out of a cave this big.

He lost his sense of time. He got colder. The cave’s air seemed colder now, and down below the floor, something was laughing at him louder than ever.

At some point, it felt like many fists later, he stopped to eat the last of his food, and without wanting to, he drank the last of his water. Some parts of the cave’s walls and floor were wet; he could lick the walls for moisture, perhaps. In him a despair was growing, a realization that dying in here was quite possible. He refused to accept that, even to think about it. It was impossible to come to grips with anyway. But the laughter from under the floor of the cave sounded like the thing that had chased him into the crack in the gorge cliff, on the last night of his wander. Quartz or not, that thing had known it almost had him. It had laughed at that knowledge then. And now it knew it was right.

He lay there and cried. The blackness itself was getting to be enough to suffocate him, to strangle him right there on the cold mud floor. Thorn was going to be so angry! Elga was going to be so sad!

He fell into sleep, or something like sleep.

Later, shivering with cold, he woke and pushed up onto his hands and knees and crawled forward. As he crawled Thorn said scornfully in his ear, Every time you run into a wall, turn to the left. Then, even if you have to circle the inside of the entire cave, you will eventually find the kolby and be born out of the earth. Isn’t it obvious?