Kim Robinson - Shaman

—Yes, that’s right.

—Those two lions touching noses don’t make sense.

—But cats are like that, Thorn said.—You know how they are. There are always some in a pack who aren’t paying any attention to what the others are doing. Raven messed them up, they’re not very good at being pack animals. They have a hard time staying on the hunt long enough, and they don’t care what the rest of the pack thinks of them.

—That’s true, Loon said, remembering lions flopping around in their meadows ignoring each other.

—So, that helps make it look real. I did it just as it came to me. It always has to be more than just your idea of what you want. It’s not just your plan. You have to think how it would really be. Also, see how that lion and the bison just to its left are on the same bulge? They’re like a combined animal, looking like both at once. Of course if the lion catches the bison, that’s what would happen. And at the moment of attack you often see both tells at once, mixed together. Like a two-headed sheep in a herd. Or bison man over there, about to mount the woman. See how the left leg could belong to either one of them? Things overlap.

—It really moves, Loon said, growing a little fearful when he couldn’t make the lions stop moving.—I feel like I might trip and fall.

—Good. That’s what you want to feel. It’s the painter’s trap. They’ll try to move forever and they never will. People will come in here and see them move. How I wish I could see Quartz when he sees this! He’s always wearing his lion head cloak. This will blow the top of his head off. He will shit in his pants, he will run away blubbering, maybe knock his head on that bull pizzle over there, slam his head right into that girl’s big old kolby. He wouldn’t be the first man to knock himself senseless on a woman’s pubic bone. Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m hungry.

Loon in the days after that:

Mix up a batch of charcoal dust and water and go down to the river cliff to three-line some animals, working on the curves that marked each kind of beast, their proportion and flow. Spring’s high water washed the wall clean most years.

More detailed drawings he reserved for flat pieces of sandstone he collected for their surfaces—flat, rippled, crackled, each had their possibilities. He spent a lot of time knapping blades he liked enough to mount on sticks and use to etch, continually seeking a finer burin tip and edge to cut into things. There were so many ways flint could break wrong, it was a little maddening. There was no such thing as a perfectly edged burin. The angles involved were not flint’s natural angles. You could get a good point or a good edge, but not both on the same rock.

Still it was interesting to try. The trick was patience. It was like throwing spears through a hoop; you had to do it twentytwenty twenties, until you knew what would happen when you did it, if you could.

Silence is a prayer.

Sit in the morning and whack rock on rock, careful to squint and look away at the moment of the strike. A single splinter can blind you. Check the results in the light of the sun, fingering shards and chips and splinters. Sometimes the most remarkable blades would lie there in the dust after a lucky knock. Girls would give you a caress and a friendly look forever in exchange for blades perfect for what they needed. He already had needles he liked enough. So knapping was good. The better you make things, the better they are to you.

Heather would tax him with plant lore. Every little twig she put before him was bursting with its life story, its uses and dangers, twig after twig, until it began to seem to him that their variety was infinite, that no two plants in the world were the same. Of course this was not true, there were lots of samples of every type out there to be found when walking around, often bunched by type in their favorite places, like thin soils, or shady areas, or whatever might be their characteristic ways. Loon saw that better as he learned more with Heather, and it gave him some pleasure, these habits in the way living things made their living. They grew, they flourished, they died and fed their descendants, who used them as ground and food. Plants were mute people, stuck in their one spot.

It was in tasting that Heather went too far. She wanted him to accompany her to all these places and bring back samples of everything, and then she wanted him to help her eat them! He might as well be her camp robber of a cat, vomiting strange meals she set out. Added to what Thorn demanded that he learn, it was almost too much.

Although he liked it better. He was more interested in what Heather wanted him to know than in what Thorn wanted him to know, all except for the painting. He could see her things, touch them, put them cautiously to his tongue. Thorn on the other hand was always going off into the realm of numbers, stories, poems, songs, and all of it to be memorized, sometimes word for word. Words words words! That was what made it too much.

But even Heather wanted him to memorize words. She would have him recite the qualities of three different twigs as he looked at them, following her lead, and the next day ask him to do it by himself, and he would stare at them and try to remember what they were. It didn’t always come to him.

—You are not very good at this, Heather observed one time.

Another:—Why are you so bad at this?

—I don’t like it! Loon said.—You can’t make me do everything.

—Everyone does everything, haven’t you noticed?

—No they don’t. No one else does the shaman stuff. And not many people have the plant knowledge. Mostly women at that.

She stared at him.—Well, but are you a shaman or not?

He heaved a sigh.

—So, she said.—You need to know all this stuff. The plant stuff you will need if you are going to try taking care of sick people, and that’s what shamans do. Maybe our unspeakable one doesn’t like that part, but believe me, it is shaman work. What I do for sick people would go a lot better if they had a shaman teaching them what to try for. So, stick it in your head! Put it in there as a song or something! Practice! You memorize things by associating them in strings and clusters, like tunes. Pick your own method, or try more than one. See something like the riverbank, and put each thing in a different spot on the riverbank, that’s what I do. It’s a skill as well as a talent, so you can get better at it if you try.

Another big sigh.

—Go away you big baby, you’ll huff out my fire. Go cry in the river.

She would let him off, in effect. With Thorn it was never like that.

—Tell me the story of bison man, Thorn would demand.

Loon gritted his teeth and took a deep breath. Thorn was a bison man, Pika had been a bison man. They were all assholes. Making your wife mate with a bison, trapping the son that resulted in the cave, sending girls in to find him, it was all bad news, therefore one of Thorn’s favorites. If Loon told it in a way that made it sound as bad as it really was, Thorn would flick him hard on the ears. Loon was getting tired of that.

It’s forbidden!

—Oh, sorry, I didn’t know.

Twentytwenty prohibitions in Wolf pack. Elga was sick of them. The pack she had grown up in had had them also, but not so many. You can’t eat sucker fish, they’re such thieves! You can’t eat pike, they’re too mean! Although you can ward off bad spirits with a ring of pike jaws and teeth hung over the door. Hang a goose wing in a golden spruce to show respect to the birds. Never eat newly killed fish when you’re bleeding, they’re not yet all the way dead and it will make you bleed more. Never butcher an animal when you’re bleeding. If you want a baby and it won’t come, eat a bear penis, it works every time. Catching sight of a weasel or a flicker means good luck. Don’t ever touch a raven! Ravens will take away your luck.