Kim Robinson - Shaman

He floated down through the trees and rocks under the ridge, on the hunt and never more so, not ever in his whole life. He caught sight of them below him from time to time, by putting just one eye around trees to have a look; each sight of them made him tingle. The little trees on this broad ridge rustled and clicked in their own birdlike language, waving their branches to snag his attention. Clouds were swirling out of nowhere into existence overhead. One had to hope it would not rain. Although it felt like rain would only hiss and steam off him. He found he wanted to kill the old ones; that would make him safer, and he could see what they owned. But this was not a good idea, in fact he was surprised it had come to him. One didn’t kill old ones; they were people in their way, almost-people, and never dangerous to humans properly in a pack. Although as he was alone, ordinary conduct did not obtain. But it was still a bad idea.

There was a shallow rill running off the ridge down into Upper Valley; the old ones dropped into the ravine holding this rivulet. Loon wondered what they would do when they came to his pack’s camp, whether they would stop and visit his people or not. In camp people seldom saw old ones, or had any trouble with them if they did drop by. They sometimes showed up at the edges of the eight eight festival, whistling and chirping and clicking curiously, talking to shamans who knew their speech, staying clumped together a little defensively. No, his pack would be all right, no matter what these two did. So he could stay on the ridge above them, come down on the ridge to the gorge overlook, at one of the points on the cliff’s edge where a chute of scree ran down to the river. There he could see if anything approached him, and ride out his spirit wander in peace. Then if his spirit left his body, as it was still trying to do, banging against the top of his skull to get out, then he could deposit his body in a safe tuck, and take flight above the sky. That would be much better than killing some passing old ones. Even if they were the ones who had tried to kill him. Although he didn’t think they were. There had been three of them. A jolt of fear flooded him at that thought, and he regarded the ridge above carefully, listened and sniffed and watched. No one around.

So he stayed on the ridge and sneaked down its trail, peering down the slope into Upper Valley, where the old ones were still descending, clearly in view. There was a lot of open rocky and snowy land here, only broken by the creek’s line of trees, and some isolated groves on the slopes dotting the rest of the valley, with some tilted meadows and scrub here and there.

The other side of the ridge had a short cliff right near the top, then the long forested slope into Lower Valley. As he was feeling exposed on the ridge, spooked by a presence he couldn’t see, he changed his plan again; he decided to take the first chute through the cliff that would allow him to drop into Lower Valley, and then go downvalley to the river, meeting it one big loop downstream from the Stone Bison, then work his way back to camp on the river path. Tonight was not the full moon anyway, but the last night before it, unless he was mistaken. So he needed to find one more good tuck, and he knew of a small cave over the river. He could spend the night there. The old ones were in Upper Valley, he would be in Lower. That was good.

Clouds puffed into existence as the sun went down, inspiraling like fern tips, their whites turning pink in the pulsing blue of the sky. As the sun winked away the moon was big in the east, and slightly red. It was a little less bright on its left side than its right, or so it seemed to Loon. He worried about it: there had been boys who came in from their hunter’s wander a night too early, which made them look eager to return, so that people had laughed at them. On the other hand Moss had come in a night too late, which had made him look tentative. The problem was that full moons were not all alike; they grew a little bigger and smaller, and their glow also shifted a little, so that the perfect ring of bright light sometimes did not surround a full moon until midnight, rather than right after sunset. Worse, the perfect ring of glow sometimes happened a bit before the moon rose in the east. So mistakes were possible, even when examining it most carefully.

On this night the fat bright moon was growing and shrinking with his every heartbeat, jumping in every blink of the eye, but at all times brilliantly huge. By its light he could see down Lower Valley into the gorge in perfect detail, though everything was in shades of gray frosted with moony white. Otherwise it all lay below him like a ghost version of the daytime world, Mother Earth in all her loveliness, and he floated along looking into the gorge, watching moonlight glitter on the open black riffles in the part of the icy river he could see. The gorge walls seemed to glow from within, and yet the shadows were charcoal black, giving the land a decisively hewn look, as if the gorge had been hacked into the hilly landscape by a great sharp blade. Ah moonlight!

The ridge came to a point that gave him a view of the big loop in the river one loop downstream from their camp. It was just the shape of the loop their camp was in, but filled with water instead of meadow. He saw that when the river wore the upstream turn of this loop’s bank away and broke through, there would be another stone bison standing over the flow, and this loop would dry out and become another meadow. Curve of the water around its icy bend, pouring out of shadow into the moonlight. It made little wet noises, audible even up here. The river was singing to itself, as it always did, even now when it was still mostly iced over. Black leads were like long narrow ponds in the gleaming white flat surface, sometimes seeming higher than the ice, other times black holes in white ermine.

In the shadows under the alders at the curve of the bank, something moved and caught his eye. It looked like a person, but when it walked into the white moonlight and stood on the snowy riverbank, Loon could see it had an animal’s head, dark and rounded: huge owl eyes over a feline muzzle, antlers curved like ibex horns… Loon had never seen anything like it, and he reeled a little at the sight. Its eyes were surely owl eyes, they were so big and round; everything would be visible to it. Loon froze against the tree behind him, hoped that he would become part of its blackness. But the thing stared right up at him, and kept its gaze fixed on him as it walked upstream on the riverbank. It raised its right arm, and he saw its hand was a paw, a cat’s paw; and it had a lion’s head, he now saw, but owl-eyed, and with horns that curved above cat ears; the ears turned up at him, listening to his heart pounding loudly at the back of his throat. Then the creature disappeared into the shadow of the gorge wall.

Loon found himself walking backwards without knowing it, up the ridge. Terror had stuck him like a spear through the throat; he could scarcely breathe, and was hot all over. He could feel he was about to shit, like a steppe beast preparing to flee. He had to clench his butt muscles, clench his gut.

Then he turned with a whimper and ran without a thought in his head, without seeing where he was going, without feeling his legs. It was extremely dangerous to flee through the night like that, but I could not help him; in that moment of terror there was nowhere in him for me to enter.

By accident he found himself on the ridge trail again. He stopped because he had to, he was panting so hard. He looked around, afraid of what he might see. And he was right to fear: there was the owl-eyed lion man again, but now above him on the ridge trail, as if he had flown to get there ahead of Loon. With a bleat Loon turned and limped down the ridge, still terrified but back within himself, feeling the pain in his left leg, sobbing as he ran.