Kim Robinson - Shaman

—That is my story for tonight’s fire, Pippiloette said.—I have chewed off a bit of this long fall night for you.

After that they talked some more, and it seemed to Loon that Pippiloette had a way of not looking at Sage that seemed to indicate that the two of them had an understanding. Late in the night, when the fire had died down and everyone was asleep, Loon wondered if those two did not find each other. Also, if it might not be that Pippiloette had a similar arrangement with women in each of the packs he regularly visited. Heather had suggested as much one time with a remark under the breath.

When he thought what that must be like, Loon wanted to be a traveler too. Sage was the best-looking woman in their pack, the most desirable, with her big autumn tits ploshing together at her every move. It was not chance Pippiloette had made his arrangement with her. What would it be like to lie with a woman like that in every pack, each one different?

But these were just the spillovers of his feelings for Elga, which were so filled with spurting that the feeling extended from him in every direction. He loved all the women of the pack, and all the women of other packs as well. They were all people he wanted, and so were the female animals. He wanted the deer and the vixen and the ibex and the bear women, and the horse women of course. It was simply a world of desirable females. Sometimes the feeling flooded him, like the break-up of the river in spring. So when the nights came and he pulled all these feelings back together and poured them into the body of his wife, there in their bed and the whole world nothing but Elga, he felt like he had fallen into a dream where love was all in all.

And one night after they had fused and melted into each other in their nightly way, she nuzzled his ear and said,—I’m going to have a baby. Heather says it’s true.

Loon sat up and stared down at her.—You are?

—Yes.

—So. We did it.

—Yes. She grinned at him and he suddenly felt his face was already doing that. They kissed.

—We have to take care of it, she said.

—Does Heather know if it’s a boy or a girl?

—Not yet. She said she will in a few months.

—When will it come?

—Six months from now. So, the end of the fifth month. Right in the spring, the best time. Unless it’s a bad spring.

Loon tried to understand it, but couldn’t. It felt as if clouds were filling his chest. Or as if he had plunged over a waterfall he had not seen, into a deep pool. This Elga was his. The night when she had shown up at the eight eight bonfire, everything had changed—not just at once, although that too, but also more and more over the months since, with everything else that had happened, each step along the way finally leading to this entirely new place.

As Elga grew bigger with child that winter, she gained in influence among the women, like the moon over the stars. Sage didn’t like it, Thunder neither, but Elga had a way, even with them, of calming people. They felt her power in a reassuring way. Her silence could have been a withholding, but it wasn’t; it was more like an assent to the other person and her story. Often they told her things while she was helping them with their work, because she asked questions, and remembered the answers too. It was hard to resent such a person.

And now she was bringing a new child into the pack, which was a big thing. Normally the grandparents would be celebrating such an arrival, so there would be two or even four strong advocates of the new pack member, and there would be a discussion lasting through the whole winter as to which clan the new babe would become part of. In this case there were no grandparents, but as Heather and Thorn between them had taken Loon in when he was orphaned, it was their role to be like grandparents to this child.

Heather, however, was not interested in such things, and Thorn didn’t like Loon’s marriage to begin with. So it was a matter of Elga’s ability to put the other women under a telling, and she did this without looking like she was trying; it was just her being herself. And so in her last few months the other women helped her in the way she helped them. And a pregnant woman in the end of her time was the focus of all their efforts.

The short days, the cold; the storms rolling in from the west, low and snowy. Ice on the river and the creeks, snow over that. The white world. The midday sun just peeking over the southern gorge wall. All the birds gone except for the snow birds; all the animals sleeping or hiding under the snow, or caught in the people’s traps, quietly enduring. White fur. The pack in its house, sleeping away. They were used to snow, they liked snow. They had their stored food and the daily tasks, the long nights sleeping like bears. The long stories told around the fire.

Heather would be the midwife for the birth, as always. She grumbled about this in the way she did about every task she performed for the pack, but in this case she seemed to really mean it. She didn’t like being the midwife.

—It will be fine, she told Elga gruffly.—You’re a big girl, there won’t be any problems. I’ll give you the right teas and infusions and we’ll have that kid out of you before you know it. There’s some work you have to do to push it out, of course, but we’ll help you. Mostly the work does you. You just have to ride it out.

And so the end of the winter passed with something for them to think about, and to watch happening. Tucked in their house or under the abri, they ate their food and watched the sky, went out on clear windless days to check the traps. The strike of the sun’s warmth on a body cut through all but the coldest days. But even the sunniest days were short, and in the afternoons they scurried back to their big house like muskrats or mice.

One morning Loon went out with Moss to look at some of their traps downriver, set in the ravines off the canyon one loop downstream.