Kim Robinson - Shaman

In other words: be afraid! Everyone in the forest knows more than you do! Elga knew from her first pack that it wasn’t right. All these Wolf women were too much like their leaders Thunder and Bluejay. The fish rots from the head.

If you really want to know someone, find out what animal they are cousin to. The strong spirits are bear, wolverine, lynx, wolf, and otter. Don’t drink too much water, it makes you heavy-footed.

This was true. Elga nodded and listened, nodded and listened some more. She asked questions even when she knew the answers. She asked all the women one thing or another, even Thunder who usually spoke before there was time to ask her a question. How do you make that sauce? What is the moon?

The sun is a young woman, the moon her brother who slept with her and turned to stone. If the northern lights are strong in the fall, there will be many caribou the following spring. Dreaming of a bear means a storm is coming. But don’t call them bears, women call them black places.

—Do you ever hunt boars?

—Don’t ever say the names of bad things! What, are you crazy?

And so they called poisonleaf the evil shrub, bitterroot the one not used, shit-soon the ugly one, boar the unspeakable, lynx black tail, or something-going-around; otter was the black thing, hyena the one-beneath-notice.

Beneath notice because they acted too much like people, Elga thought when she heard this one.

—Never eat fish with porcupine! Thunder yelled at her. The fish will be offended!

—Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.

Glacier milk will give you the runs. When the fuzz from willow catkins floats in the air, the salmon are coming. You catch the first salmon and brush it with willow, while asking for more salmon in the days to come.

They had twentytwenty recipes for preserving salmon, all delicious. Different kinds of salmon were better with different sauces applied. When they went to the salmon rivers to wait for the salmon to arrive, she was told, the Wolf women would sing them up from the ocean, naming all the rivers and streams the fish would have to swim to get to their rendezvous with Wolf pack. The oldest women would eat the first salmon caught, while doing their best not to move a single bone of it, and the way the bones moved or didn’t would tell them things about the year to come.

Thunder was as mean as a pike or a leopard. Cats were the fastest of the hunters, they struck faster than you could see the strike. When a red fox is heard barking near camp, a death will come soon.

Elga didn’t like Thunder or Bluejay, and she saw that none of the women did, but only endured the two of them, and worked around them as they could. Elga was used to this kind of situation; she hadn’t liked the Jende pack either, and their women had been horrible to her. Thunder and Bluejay were better than that, but they had under them a cowed and unhappy group of women. So Elga kept to herself and worked very hard for them. It would take many months to become a silent counterweight to the headwomen, if she did it right. It would happen one question at a time, one sympathetic glance at a time, after someone got yelled at.

So she worked and she asked questions. When others asked her questions, she asked what the questioner thought of the matter. This always worked to turn the talk around. She could see that Thunder and Bluejay considered her pliant, even a little slow. It was only later they would see which way the wind was blowing. By then it would be too late.

Never fall asleep when your meat is on the fire.

Loon saw that Elga appeared to be on good terms with Sage, which made him a little uneasy. Once he approached Sage alone by the river, even tried giving her a kiss, as he would have before, and with a quick scowl she smacked him on the ear and knocked him back a few steps.—No!

—I just wanted to.

—You want too much!

Hearing that, he remembered the dream in which the deer had said that very thing to him. Shocked by the echo, he stared at Sage.—You were the deer! he said aloud, and then left her alone, feeling a pang of loss.

But all that was a kind of spillover of his feelings for Elga, and left him when he was with her. In her presence he had a hard time taking his eyes off her, and during the day, if he spotted her down below in camp, he would watch her and prong at just the sight of her walking, so long-legged and slow. His wife. It was the oddness in her proportions that drew his eye, as with all the women he watched so lustfully, their particular oddities exactly what caught him and drew him to them. A woman was never bad-looking, as far as he could tell. If they were round, like Ducky, roundness was good. If they were mannish, like Thunder, then their mannishness was exactly what made them a more attractive woman. And so on. He was hopeless in that regard.

By day Elga only occasionally glanced his way, with a little hello in her eye before she returned to her affairs. From a distance Loon saw her talking with one person at a time, usually the girls, but also Thorn and Hawk and Schist. He didn’t like her talking to Hawk, but there was no sign that anything was going on there. And the pack was the pack, after all. You had to be able to talk to everyone, or there would be trouble. And enough trouble could split things up, and that would really be trouble. Like when the Fox pack split and many of their younger people moved west of the ice caps.

At night Loon and Elga met at their bed, behind Heather’s place against the backing cliff, and got under their furs and took off each other’s clothes, first one stripping the other naked, then the naked one stripping the one still clothed; either way was great, a time filled with kisses and caresses; and then he would slide into her and off they would go.

One day in the twelfth month, warmer than most, he found her down by the river alone. The last birds around were singing in the low midday sun, giving the news that there were no cats or bears in the area. Elga saw him approaching and simply pulled her cloak off, untied her skirt and let it fall. Her dark skin gleamed like flint in the sun. She stepped back into the stream and immersed herself in the water and stood again, and the water beaded and fell from her sparking with sunlight, all her fall curves there for him to see as he hurried to her untying his jacket. He took her in his arms, embraced her and lifted her, made her laugh with his eagerness. She tore his pants down his legs and squeezed his spurt with both hands, and then fell into the sandy shallows tucked in the outer bank of the river behind a snag. Ah blessed union. He kissed her all over, intent to kiss every surface and crevice of her body. He licked at her like a stag licking a deer, licked her until she gasped and helplessly rocked her hips, the sign she was about to come. What he liked then was to have his tongue as far up her as possible. The squeeze of her clenching on his tongue was the best feeling of all, better even than his own spurt, because while spurting he was gone from himself, whereas when her kolby was squeezing his tongue he was still there to feel it. Nothing else in the world made him feel as alive as that. His own spurt, which she so easily drew out of him afterward, was a kind of excess of happiness. After that his body glowed, and he wanted to nuzzle her dark skin, feel her heat, smell her on his muzzle. Crawl over to the creek and plunge his face in the stream and suck down swallows of clean cold water that still tasted like her when he licked his lips. This winter would not be so bad with Elga to warm him.

—It’s so good with you.

—Because you love me. She said this with a fond look at him.—You love me and I love you.

—Yes. I didn’t know it could be like this.