Kim Robinson - Shaman

Stinging nettles for net twine. Lily bulbs. Birch bark. Cedar roots. Pine pitch. Spruce gum, spruce inner bark. Mistletoe berries. All these had to be gathered in the fall.

Often while out gathering, Loon and the others would bring the kids along. To keep the kids amused when they weren’t gathering, Loon would bend and weave a hoop, and roll it along for them to throw sticks through, or set up targets for throwing rocks. He carved knots into toys, and hid them for the kids to try to find. He had to think like a squirrel or a jay to recall where he had hidden these things, because often the kids would not find them. There was no point to making something and then hiding it where no one could see. Don’t hide your gift in the forest, they said, don’t tell your story to the forest. Though he often did just that, even if he never spoke.

Full moon of the eleventh month was the time for the pack to make its annual visit into the cave in the hill above them, after which it would be abandoned to the bears for their winter sleep. It was one of the smaller ceremonies of the year, but as it came at the end of the fall, an important one: a time to say thanks to Mother Earth for the year’s bounty, and weave themselves together for the long winter to come.

This time, when the ceremony in the big room was done and the other members of the pack had left, Loon was supposed to stay in the cave with Thorn, and for the first time penetrate farther inside, down the shaman’s passages to the secret rooms that only shamans entered. All fall Loon had wondered if Thorn would do it, he seemed so disgusted with him for marrying. As the eleventh moon approached, Thorn had said nothing about it. Loon was tempted to ask him but did not want to show that he was concerned, so he didn’t.

On the morning of the eleventh full moon, Thorn said,—Do you have the paints and brushes ready, and your lamps?

—Yes.

—Remember you’re not going to be painting anything in there this time, and for many years to come.

—I know.

He would only help Thorn. Possibly Thorn would let him etch some old painted lines. It didn’t matter. He had Elga, and he was going down into the shaman’s part of the cave. All was well and more than well.

In the twilight of the eleventh full moon the pack made its way up from Loop Meadow to the clay ramp that was incised into the cliff as if by a giant burin. The paintings on the back wall of this abri ramp welcomed them, the animals leading visitors up to the cave entrance. The entrance was a wide gap in the cliff, about a man’s height above the bench, and fringed by a brush overhang. The animal paintings on both sides of the entry showed the animals returning to the underworld that had birthed them. They were mostly red to the left and black to the right, with some red and black mixed in every animal, in a way that the colors were not mixed inside.

Though night was falling, the remaining twilight and the rising full moon illuminated the cave for a good distance in, and the first big chamber’s walls were still clear to their sight. This chamber was left unpainted; it was not yet considered to be in the cave, but rather the last part of the outside. In Mother Earth’s body, it was not the sabelean but the baginaren.

When they were all in the big dim room sitting on the floor, Thorn spoke to them in an almost conversational tone, unlike his more usual shaman’s voice.

Thorn paused, looking around at the cave walls surrounding them.

—And here we are again, he finished abruptly.—Let me show you.

They lit the pine torches they had brought along, and by their big wavery light walked deeper into the cave. In the next chamber it was dark, and they saw only by the yellow of the torches, a light which caught the red of the animals on the walls of this first painted room. Here the animals were dominated by red lions, and so this room was called either the lion room or the red room, or sometimes simply the first painted room. Thorn said every pack who visited this cave had its own names for the chambers, and the shamans involved couldn’t corroborate them.

When they were all in the first room, they gathered in a circle around Thorn, and he passed around his lit pipe for everyone to breathe in on. Through the smoking and coughing some of the men shook rattles and huffed into big gourds. The women sang the thanksgiving for the year which they always sang during this visit, and then Thorn set the torches together in the middle of the floor, so that as they danced around them their shadows were cast out onto the walls, black figures moving over the red animals, who after a while themselves began to move. So they danced with the animals in there, slowly so as not to spook the beasts’ spirits, then approached the walls and touched the animals’ flanks and their own shadows’ hands, connecting thereby with their cave spirits.

Then they all sat down near the torches and watched the walls pulse around them in silence, holding hands. It got so quiet that they could hear each other breathing, hear their own heartbeats tocking at the back of their open mouths. All the oh-so-busy year came to a still moment of silent thanks. It went on for a long time; watching the animals pulsing redly around them, looking as if they were in their women’s initiation, it felt like the longest moment of the year, something like the spindle the stars turn around.

Then Thorn set a tone, by humming it loudly, and they all hummed it with him; and humming their good-byes, the rest of the pack stood up and filed out of the chamber, back up to the day room and the cave opening, through the baginaren of the world to be reborn yet again into Loop Meadow. They left their shamans Thorn and Loon inside to speak further for them.

Thorn used their torches to light oil lamps, and when the little wick flames were burning, he ground the torches out in the wet clay underfoot. For a while it was shockingly dark, and then Loon could see again, although never as clearly as he had when the torches were lit.

They continued down into the cave, Loon following Thorn’s black back. Their lamps flickered in their hands with every step, so that their shadows danced on the flickering walls, and the whole cave seemed to tremble.