Kim Robinson - Shaman

—You want mostly that, Thorn said, pointing at the finer powder from the scabs.—The sandy part makes the paint too grainy. You can have a little, but not too much. It has to be just the right thickness for wall work, like a thick soup, or a very thin paste. It has to be thin enough to spread, of course, but not so thin that it runs.

—So you add water to the powder.

—Of course, don’t be such an insolent youth. You also add something to bind the water and the powder together, and that’s what you don’t know. It has to bind it without clumping it. There’s a number of binders will do it, some for body paint, some for wall paint. Today we need a little spit and some deer marrow fat, which I brought along for the occasion.

He pulled a gooseskin bag from his belt pouch and untied it carefully, then poured a little of the semi-liquid fat into a wooden bowl.

Loon stared at the bag; he had not known there were binders.

—It’s better if your powder is even finer than this you have here. You haven’t done a very good job, but let’s use it so you’ll see.

He picked up Loon’s metate and tipped the powdered earthblood on it into the bowl.—Swirl that around, then wait twenty beats, and in that time all the biggest grains of sand will sink to the bottom of the bowl. Then pour the paint into another bowl, but stop in time to leave the dregs in the first one. Like this.

He poured.—See, the coarsest red stays in the first bowl. Now we’ll let a finer powder settle to the bottom of the second bowl. That will take a while. Most of the red will just float forever. So, when it’s ready, pour off that water carefully. Later when these dregs in the bowls dry, they will be two cakes of earthblood powder, one coarse, one fine. You can cut the dried cakes into sticks and draw with them, like you draw with a stick of charcoal, only red. Or you can put a dried cake back in some water and break it up while adding more marrow fat, or spit, or pee, or hide glue, or spurtmilk. Then you’ll have it back to paint again. Or you can crumble a cake and mix it into beeswax, and that’s how you make the crayons you see some people using.

Loon nodded.—Heather makes a good glue. He had often watched her cook down the last remains of butchered animals into a white goo in a bucket, combining cartilage, fat, sinews and ligaments, and little bits of bone and muscle, along with some dried and crushed plants known only to her.

Thorn nodded.—She must put something special in her glue, it dries so hard. I add a few drops of it to my cliff paint. Won’t run in the rain later. Here, stir this fat in, then grind some more rock.

Grind the chunk of earthblood with the burin. Scrape scrape scrape. Warm morning air. He liked this part: the redness of the rock, its friability. Hold the block to his nose: it even smelled like blood. Sun hot on his neck.

The morning passed while he ground the rock. So pleasant to sit in the sun, soaking in its heat. He made sure Crouch and Spit were in the sun, it made them happier. It got so nice he fell asleep and sat there scraping earthblood in his dream just as he would have been if he had been awake, so that he could hardly tell which world he was in, and it wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t. Oh give thanks for the warmth of the sun!

All the time as he worked, Thorn moved around muttering to himself. He and Heather were a matched pair in that regard. In so many ways it was a contest between them. They were like a bad marriage, indeed some people said they had been a bad marriage, had split back before anyone else in the pack had even been born. True or not, Loon saw their ongoing fight up close. Indeed he worked them against each other, to crack a space for himself.

Neither of them ever stopped talking. If Thorn stopped it was almost always because he had fallen asleep. This morning he was retelling the story of the long winter, one of his favorites. All the awfulest stories were his favorites, but only told in their right time. Loon listened as he scraped, or rather let it wash over him, like the sound of the squirrels chittering in the trees.

Thorn’s croaky low voice was much like a raven’s hoarse cawing:

The grimness of Thorn’s croak as he intoned these phrases was something to hear. This part he always said the same, standing upright and facing the sun.

Then he moved around again as he continued, listing with morbid gusto all the ways those poor summerless people had starved, the suffering and hurt, and all the strange things they had been forced to eat to survive. Thorn loved lists at all times, their threes of threes of threes, all the names he mouthed as if spitting out stones, tasting each name with evident satisfaction. So he spoke the lists in the hunger stories, naming foods of every kind, and of course right in the month when they themselves were down to their last bags of nuts and fat, and out every day checking empty traps and hunting snowshoe hares and ptarmigans, and eyeing the sky to the south hoping to see the ducks return. When the ducks came back the hunger months would be over, but that was usually late in the fifth month, sometimes the sixth. Until then they would be doling out their food by the mouthful, and feeling a little pinch in the gut all the time.

—You like to hurt us, Loon observed.

—Yes! That’s what a shaman does! You tell the hunger stories when they’re hungry. That’s when you really have them seized in your grip. It’s never easier to make them weep than when they’re on the brink already. I’ve seen that many times. Now, tell me the list of what they had to eat during the ten-year winter.

Loon could never remember the poems except in the very moment he heard Thorn saying them, when he recognized them, even though he could not find them in himself. So now he sighed heavily to indicate his protest and said,

Thorn nodded, his mind somewhere else already, which was good, as Loon’s list was so woefully short compared to any of Thorn’s. Loon scraped the earthblood to powder and stretched in the sun, feeling the sunlight penetrate his leg, where it began to make Crouch happier.

He saw that this was his life he was scraping, his fate. The world would scrape him down just like he scraped this chunk of rock. It would go on until Thorn died, and then the pile of granules that was Loon would replace him, and do all things Thorn had done, including scraping down some apprentice of his own; then he would die, and the apprentice would go on and do it to his apprentice, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on it would go, the earthblood and their own blood ground up together under the sun.

The thought of that, when held up against the memory of his wander, was like Crouch moving up into his chest and flexing there. Oh the pain suddenly squeezing his chest! How could it be? In the fourteen days of his wander, entire months and even years of life had sometimes crushed into every beat of his heart! Surely that was how one should always live, surely it would be better to make every fortnight a wander, and thereby live for scores and scores and scores of years.