Kim Robinson - Shaman

When he woke he found a knot in his hand, a twist of hard wood that looked like it had spent quite a bit of time free of its tree. A knob at one end gave it the look of a lion’s head; he could see the indentations between the shoulders and the clean bulk of the neck; it was a male lion, there was the little bump of its spurt lying against its underside, but it was standing upright like a man. It would only take a little carving to bring all that out. This was his father’s gift from out of the dream. Lions were fearless. From his deerskin belt flap he took the flake of flint he had broken off when he made his choprock. It would be better to set the flake in the end of a shaft, but for now he could scrape away at the knot, make the first cuts. There was just enough dawn light, and just enough warmth in his fingertips, to make it possible to do the work, lying on his side with the knot and flake right in front of his nose. The ragged tip of the flake was almost like a little burin. He scraped away, looking deep into the bloodless white flesh of his fingertips, which would take impressions from the flake and hold them until he rubbed them away. Crouch was humming sleepily, Spit was pulsing with his heart, but only right at the broken skin itself, almost outside of him, not in him. These people were not his friends, and needed to be ignored. What hurts you has to be forgotten. The lion man was emerging from its knot quite nicely.

When the sun was three fists high, he crawled out from under the boulder and hiked west over the moor, on its hard snow, to a low ridge where he could look up to the land farther west. His people were to the south, down at the mouth of Upper Valley, where the Stone Bison arched over the Urdecha. He was due back in camp in three nights. He could subsist on dead berries until then, and he had his deerskin vest and skirt and cape, and some of his cedar bark underclothing. So he needed to attend to his wander, finish it in style. He recited to himself the story as he would tell it: the night out in the storm, his failure to make a fire; next morning a fire started from nothing, while still in the storm; the glories of the fire; the fish and onions, cooked to a turn; the sighting of the deer killed by bears, their fight over the meal; the lions that chased him; the dream appearances of his dead parents; the disastrous encounter with the old ones, the arrival of Crouch and Spit, his escape; the interval in the tree nest; the time on the moor, under a rock.

Now he needed to add the story’s spurt: the vision. And up here in the hollows of the moor were little sprigs of ground artemisia, and certain old piles of bison dung, not too fresh and not too dry, in which grew the little gray mushrooms called witch’s nightcaps. He wandered around, gathering some of these sprigs and nightcaps and putting them in his belt flap. He would eat them together on the morning of the day before he was to return. Thorn would be impressed despite himself. They would taste bitter, and were best washed down in a big slug of water. After that one needed to chew a sprig of anise, and be prepared to vomit a fist or so later. Loon touched a nightcap to his tongue, and just the touch put a quiver of dread down his throat, right through him to his pizzle and asshole. It shook him. This wander had already been hard enough: should he do this? Would he be making it too hard? He didn’t even want to be a shaman, that was Thorn’s idea. It was his father who was supposed to have been Thorn’s apprentice. Heather didn’t like Loon doing it. If his parents hadn’t died, Thorn would never have taken him on. He had always been away from camp as a boy, out in the canyons absorbed in the animals, looking for Heather’s herbs. After his parents’ deaths he had almost become a wolf child, brought up by the woods themselves, as if stolen by a woodsman. He followed horses whenever he saw them, they were his animal, he was entranced by their beauty. Heather had had to tempt him back in to camp like she did her camp cat. Thorn had never noticed him by the fire, and Loon never remembered any verses to Thorn’s songs. None of this would have happened if his father hadn’t died.

But it had happened. Thorn and Heather had raised him and taught him, and his wood carvings and slate paintings had all come to him by way of Thorn. These Loon loved. Of course the endless verses also came from Thorn, and Loon hated those. But they were all part of what a shaman did. But Loon did not want to be a shaman. It was too intense, too lonely, too scary, too hard. Thorn’s shaman had been a bad shaman because all shamans were bad.

On the other hand, Loon had left on his wander accepting the challenge. To renounce it during the wander would be a shameful thing, an act of fear. If he had wanted out he should have said so before he left. That would have taken cold blood indeed. But he hadn’t done it. Embarrassing not to have acted on his desires, done something he didn’t want to do and then gotten stuck with it. But there he was.

So on the morning of his last full day out, he sat facing the sun and ate the combination of nightcaps and artemisia sprigs. The aftertaste was as bitter as always, so much so that it made his skin crawl. His stomach began to grumble and burn. Something in the mix rebelled inside him more even than usual, and before too long his body rejected it, he had to vomit. He didn’t want to so soon, it felt like his body was taking over and reversing his decision, but he had no choice; he fell to his hands and knees, arched over, and vomited like a cat spitting up grass, his whole body clenching to eject the offensive stuff, a mass of burning spit littered with chunks of mushroom and little leaves, as bitter coming up as going down; the taste itself made him retch some more, made him run at the mouth and nose and eyes, coughing until he was empty and his belly sore.

Perhaps not a good idea to play these crazy shaman tricks on himself.

He lay there for a while, feeling his body pulse with his heart’s knocking. Crouch yelped in his ankle, Spit was silent. His throat and mouth burned with stomach spit. This was what happened to Thorn too when he ate the mix. Shamans poisoned themselves to launch their spirits out of their bodies, that was what it came down to, and Loon could feel his head throbbing as his spirit tried to burst out of the top of his skull. For a moment he could see himself from above, lying down there on the edge of the plateau puking his guts out. And yet his feet were still numb with cold. He tried to shift the heat around in him. Miserably he chanted one of the hot songs, aching all over, pulsing like the bag of blood he was. There was more blood in him than there was really room for, that was true of every creature; when you hit certain veins blood spurted out like spurts of spurtmilk, released from a confinement that had squeezed it hard. That was why he so often felt like he was bursting. Now he could feel all that blood inside him, pulsing to get out. It was strange really that Spit had ever stopped spitting, that any cut ever stopped bleeding, given that squeeze of the body. Sometimes you saw speared animals spurt blood from the eyes, mouth, asshole; he felt how that could happen, had to close his eyes and rub them hard to keep them from bursting out of his head. That set off a wild shower of sparking red dots and squiggles. Ah yes—he had seen these red stars and squiggles painted in the cave. Dots red and yellow and black, oh yes. Zigzag lines, squiggling right and left all over his sight. He traced them in the dirt under him, as the shamans had on the wet insides of the cave. He remembered the first time he had gone in a cave, right after his parents had died, and Thorn had shown him the wet wall and put his hand against it, leaving its impression there, then led him through his first squiggles, each finger a narrow trough, between them parallel little ridges, the clay of the walls firm but pliable. A hard press made a trough to the depth of a fingertip, and the mark remained.