Kim Robinson - Shaman

To get what you want, get what you need. When the fire is hot enough, there is no smoke. No fear when in your place. Do not allow anger to poison you. Each person is his own judge. It is not good for anyone to be alone. Everyone who does well must have dreamed something. The one who tells the stories rules the world. Burnt child, fire dread. A starving man will eat the wolf. A wily mouse should breed in the cat’s ear. Naught venture naught gain. A friend is never known until a man have need.

Wait, I see something: two red eyes. A frightened old man.

Well, there were so many old sayings, and many of them cut against each other, like blades on the opposite sides of a tree. Eventually the tree falls one way or the other. But in the meantime you still don’t know what to do.

After a while Loon found what he thought might be a way forward. He gathered himself to attempt it, and wandered over to the low hilltop where the shamans always met.

The mass of ash in their bonfire was nearly out, mere pink gleams poking out from strange clinkers, remnants of the weird things that shamans threw into their fire. There were about a dozen of the old men there now, looking even more shattered than everyone else at the festival. They had more endurance for excess, having practiced it more, but as they mashed hard at the eight eight, and dosed themselves with smoke and mushrooms and dancing and flagellation and sleeplessness, they eventually overwhelmed even their own great endurance. Now they were lying around still wearing their animal heads, canted over their faces to cover them from the sun, so that they looked more than ever clowns and fools, frazzled, drunk, splayed out like lions after a kill. Thorn was among them, as flattened as the rest under his bison head. He stared at Loon stone-faced from beneath it.

He and his fellow sorcerers had so painted their bodies with red dots and crescents and wavy ribbons and basketry patterns that they were hard to look at. Their spirit voyages the night before would have cast them out into unions with Wood Frog, Birch Woman, Raven, the Northern Lights, and so on; they had all left their bodies and flown far above or below, become mixes of themselves and their animal spirits. Now it looked like they had not yet completely returned.

Some of them were croaking out an insult contest while still lying flat as moss.

—He’s worth just as much as a hole in the snow.

—He’s so full of shit, if you pinched him your fingers would get brown.

—He’s so lazy he married a pregnant woman.

In the scattered laughter at that last, Loon sat down among them. He stirred their fire, put on a few dung patties and a branch or two.

—Welcome, youth, one of the shamans growled.

Loon nodded his thanks.—This is the story of the swan wife, he said, and stood up and began immediately with the first lines of the old story, which was one of the first Thorn had ever taught him, and thus the one he remembered best. Those first twenty lines seemed to have filled his entire capacity for remembering stories. But his flute was carved with images from the rest of the story, and they would help him remember. He could stop to blow a few notes, and see right where he was.

Loon went on to describe the three helpers the old man then sent the husband to find, to help him get the things that he needed to rescue his wife. Loon particularly emphasized the encounter with Mouse Woman, enjoying how the little creature scuttling around the fallen leaves on the floor of the forest was actually a big headwoman when you got inside her house, a power bigger than the old man, or indeed anyone else in the story. He knew quite a few of the shamans there would recognize Heather in this description of Mouse Woman, Thorn foremost among them: all the little things she knew that made her bigger, like knowledge of poisons, or what roots you could eat. In so many ways it was Heather who kept them all alive, and not these raven-shitted sorcerers sweating in the light of day.

Loon made sure that point was made clear in all the trials the husband successfully overcame, with Mouse Woman crucial to each, until finally the husband was reunited with his wife, in the loon village on the lake above the sky, in the next world over. The various parts of the story came to Loon well, he hardly had to look at his flute; all the threes of threes pulsed through him in a chant, until he came to a good end:

And then he stopped and nodded to them, clapping lightly to thank them for listening.

—Ha, Thorn, one of the other old men croaked, raising his head from the ground.—Your apprentice is well taught, he sounds just like you! Always the heavy moral, always the cliffhanger ending!

The others laughed. Thorn mimed a glower, but he was pleased too, Loon could see.—The highest trees catch the most wind, he reminded his needlers with scorn, and all the shamans groaned appreciatively. It looked like none of them wanted to take on Thorn in a put-down contest, as his tongue could be truly blistering. And his apprentice had just made an adequate entry into their misbegotten little clan, so no one would badger him much on that day.

Loon kept his eyes on the ground. Possibly it was going to work out. His bleary-eyed audience was now grinning their horrible pleasure.

Then full moon was past and the festival too, and people packed their travois until the poles bowed under the weight, and set out every way the wind blows. The Wolves went south and east, toward the ice caps and home beyond.

Elga was quiet on their trek, and spent more time with Heather and the women than with Loon. Often Loon saw her talking to Heather. She woke as early as anyone, and made fires and washed and cooked and cleaned and carried the babies whenever she could get a turn; she worked like a beaver woman. She seldom met the eyes of the pack’s men, but answered and smiled when spoken to. She took her turn in the harnesses of the travois and hauled longer than anyone else, and not in any suffering way, or as if to prove a point, but just because she didn’t seem to notice the travois dragging behind her. Strong. She was bigger than most of them, and although fatless in the way of midsummer, still solid. She’s like an elg, they said, they must have named her after her animal, it really fits. Hearing that made Loon happy: they saw her as he saw her, at least to that extent. But only he knew what she was like at night under the stars. So: Thorn was not happy; Sage was not happy; but Loon was happy.