Kim Robinson - Shaman

One night while they huddled around in the smoke of the smudge fire of birch fungus, which was the only thing that would hold off the mosquitoes, Thorn went into one of his vision trances, first eating his mushroom and artemisia preparation, then vomiting like Heather’s cat, then lying back in the beginning of his trance, snorting and muttering. No one bothered him as he lay there spirit traveling.

He came back to them the next morning, and said the caribou appeared to be less than a week away, but it was hard to judge when looking down from so high in the sky. In any case they only had to get through a few more days.

Then wolves began to appear on the ridgelines of the low hills upstream.—See, Thorn said.—They’re here to tell us the caribou have almost arrived.

—They’re here in hope, Heather said.—They’re saying to themselves, the humans are here, so the caribou must be coming.

—Well of course, Thorn said.—That’s only right.

Wolves and humans were cousins, just like bears and porcupines, or beavers and muskrats. Wolves had taught people to hunt and to talk. They were still the better singers by far, and hunters too for that matter. What people had taught wolves in return was a matter of dispute, and depended on what stories were told. How to be friends? How to double-cross and backstab? The stories were divided on this.

Then one evening at the end of the twilight, with the ribbon of the river next to them the lightest thing on the dark land, a great horned owl flew over hooting its hoo, hoo, which means yes.

Thorn stood and shouted,—They’re here! The owl saw them, and I can feel their hooves in the ground!

No one else felt anything, and the land remained dark and empty, the light band of the river pouring through it. The moony band on the river surface was the only movement, the river’s chuckling the only sound. Thorn sat back down grumbling.—You’ll see, you’ll see. The owl always knows.

And in the morning they came. The first ones ran up and crashed into the river and swam to the other side, then some stopped in the big meadow inside the swing of the river to nuzzle into old grass and new, both revealed by the melting snow. Caribou ate better in winter than summer, and so now were fat, and still wearing their long winter coats.

While on their summer trek, the caribou were always in a terrible hurry. They followed each other in loose lines, speeding up in sudden little panics, and hesitating impatiently if another line cut in front of them, or just surging into them, impelled to keep moving. There were many scores of them, filling the meadow and the low hills around it, hurrying and hurrying, as if they had lost all restraint and could do nothing else. When they finally did stop to forage and look around, they seemed surprised and uneasy to find themselves not in a hurry. But here was their summer home. They migrated west and east, unlike the birds who migrated north and south. And when they arrived at their summer destination, there to meet them every summer were mosquitoes, deer flies, wolves, and humans, each of these packs dangerous and full of pain for the caribou, and therefore to be flicked away, or avoided, or faced up to, in lines of broad-chested bulls with lowered heads and sharp antlers. Why they came nobody was sure, but it was said that their summer food grew first here and they came for that.

The Wolf pack’s method for trapping and killing caribou almost always happened in the same area and the same way. Thorn sometimes said this was the way it had been done since the old time, but on other occasions claimed it had been his own idea, which had come to him as a child, watching the men running around the steppe chasing down the beasts one by one.

In this region the steppe was flat as always, but with low lines of hills running north, and boulders scattered all over. Many were too big to move, but there were lines of smaller stones, and these lines sometimes came in twos. The Wolves chose one of these paired rubble lines, as they always did, and cleaned up the ground between the two knee-high walls until they had made an inviting passageway.

The caribou as they arrived in their scores crossed the land somewhat like flocks of geese, in loose ribbons of twenty or so. They joined other ribbons or separated as the land shoved them this way or that. They were all rushing to get somewhere, and none of them knew where. Considering the distance they had come, which was many days to the north and east, so far that no one knew for sure where they wintered, it looked to the humans like they were hoofing along as fast as they possibly could, maybe even faster than could be sustained. They were strong and fast creatures, fore-weighted like a rhinoceros or hyena or bison, with heavy shoulders and a long heavy neck and head, and big antlers on the males. They seemed to hurry at least in part to catch up with their heads before they tipped and fell forward.

In that hasty careless state, so unlike their usual wariness, indeed as if they were possessed by some spirit not theirs, it was relatively easy to spook a ribbon of them into the chute the pack had made with its paired walls. And at the western end of the chute, under a small drop which the caribou normally would have jumped down without any problem, and so would not be afraid of, the pack had placed some poles across rocks, then also some antlers, until they had built a trap line that was certain to trip some of the beasts when they tried to pass over it.

When the trap was ready, the men went out with wolf skins on their heads in groups of three, and began running around trying to spook a line of running caribou into the eastern end of the chute. This took some crouched running and frenzied leaping on the part of these men, wolf heads flopping on their foreheads to give the caribou that first alarming profile on which they made their snap judgments, like every other animal. Meanwhile the people not out there hid behind the low rock walls, listening for the thump of hooves on the sod that would announce the beasts’ arrival. Loon stayed with this second group, as his bad leg was hurting a little, and the runners often had to get crazy to spook the beasts. So he sat there with the rest of the pack in ambush, salivating heavily as he listened for the signal whistles or the thumping in the sod.

Then the thumping sound came, and the hoarse breathing that one always forgot year to year, and the unhappy neighing of the first beasts as they tried to stop rather than risk a jump down onto the poles, and their squeals as they were pushed over from behind by other beasts; then Loon stood with the rest who were in ambush, his javelin end cupped onto his spear thrower and his arm raised.

Panicked caribou were being pushed from behind and pitching over onto the beasts already below. Loon chose one beast teetering on the brink and threw his spear as hard as he could. It was a very close throw, but downward, so he had to adjust accordingly, and he did: the spear slammed deep into the beast right behind its ribs, and Loon shouted to see it. Quickly all the men cast their spears into the mass of struggling beasts, and the women and children threw rocks at them, and the big beasts thrashed and bled and screamed, the air filled with the smell of their blood and shit and piss. The human screams were as loud as the caribou.

In a matter of twenty or two score heartbeats they had about twenty dead caribou lying at their feet, which was as much as they could deal with at once, or more. It was a bizarre and awful sight, shocking and exciting. Everyone was cast into a kind of blood lust; their mouths ran and their faces were red and pop-eyed. Some of the boys and girls were sent racing to the chute’s eastern end, to drive away any beasts that might run into the trap. Thorn went with them to help them construct a block.