Kim Robinson - Shaman

It was the twelfth day of the eighth month, and so the waxing moon hung in the eastern sky at sunset, lighting the land as the sunlight drained from it. Pippi led the way to a low ridge and hiked north on it. He was slower now, and as they came up the ridge to certain knobs he crouched behind boulders and kept off the skyline, looking up the ridge carefully, then down into the valley next to them. Loon did likewise, heart beating hard; but they never saw anything below. Most of the night passed, the moon was setting in the west; they both moved slowly in the cold air. Loon felt the long walk in his feet. But as the moon set and the night blackened accordingly, Pippi topped a knob on the ridge and sat down quickly.—Keep down.

Loon sat and rested.

—Look, Pippi said, gesturing ahead.—Their fire.

Far downvalley to the north was a tiny yellow flicker.

—Ah yes, Loon said. Hope and fear made a furious crosschop in him.—What now?

Pippi was silent for a long time. Then he said,—They will probably have a night watch. And the day is coming. I don’t think we can do it tonight without being seen. Tomorrow night, if we come on them earlier, we can study them in the moonlight, then move when the moon sets. So I think maybe we should get some sleep now, while we can, and follow them at a good distance tomorrow. Keep out of their sight while watching them.

Loon was weary enough to accede to this. They found flat spots among the rocks, looked for moss to make a quick bed. They both had fur wraps in their backsacks; Loon’s was made of muskrat pelts sewn together so the fur overlapped the sewing lines, Pippi’s was a flank of a bear. They rolled up into these wraps and were quickly asleep.

At sunrise Loon woke briefly; Pippiloette was sleeping. After a moment of welcoming the rays of the sun on his face, Loon fell asleep again.

He woke as he was being jerked to his feet. He was in the grasp of two big northers, with three more holding spears and surrounding them. Pippiloette was nowhere to be seen.

The northers held their spear tips right to him, a frightful thing, and then after he went still, they pulled them back and indicated with them that he was to walk north with them on the ridge trail, or be speared on the spot. Soon they joined a larger group.

Off they all went. The ridge dropped until it disappeared into a steppe. Here shallow streams looped across plains of grass and scree. Sometimes exposed flat rock was split in warp and weft fashion, so that the streams pooled and poured in rectangular patterns.

All that day they walked north over the flat stony plain. During their first stop they indicated that Loon was to give them everything on him except his clothes. Most of what he had was in his backsack, which they already had, but he gave them his belt with all the things in its pouch. They tied his hands behind his back with what felt like a leather braid. While they were doing that, he saw that Elga was there, standing among their women with her head and shoulders down. She turned her head and saw him, then turned her head away. He flinched and did likewise, feeling in agreement with her, that it might go better for them if their captors did not know they knew each other.

Although perhaps the northers were already aware. They spoke in a language that sounded almost right, but that Loon often lost the drift of. It resembled how the people of the steppes sounded, but Loon understood the steppe people better. These people didn’t reply to Loon when he spoke, and he thought they didn’t understand him very well either. Pippiloette would have been useful in such a situation, knowing so many tongues. What had happened to Pippi? Had the traveler betrayed him to the northers, given them a captive for something in return? That didn’t seem possible to Loon, but on the other hand, if Pippi had woken to their danger, or known of it before, why hadn’t he told Loon about it, so they could have both slipped away? Would it have been that much harder?

In the end he could only suppose that Pippi had been as surprised as he had been by the northers, but had waked just in time to slip off into the dark with his things. Certainly the traveler was quick.

In any case there was no real need for a translator, as the northers’ meaning was simple in the end: Go! Ora! And he went.

Possibly they would sacrifice him to their gods, maybe eat him; it was said such things happened in the north. A bad situation, a dreadful possibility.

But Elga was there, and she had seen him. She knew he had come after her. Whatever happened, they at least had that. So he determined to endure, to submit and be a good captive, and to ignore whatever indignities might be inflicted on Elga, if any. She spoke their language, he saw. Back at the festival they had said she was a runaway, that this was her original pack. She didn’t look anything like these men, being much taller, and so dark-skinned she was almost black against the snow. The northers were not that dark, though from a distance, against the snow, every person was dark. Not as black as a black horse, but more the color of mud, which was the point of the story of how Raven first made humans, by clawing up some mud into a ball. Thus they were mostly the brown of the winter shag of a bison. These northers were the lightest brown Loon had ever seen, and their eyes were heavily protected by folds of skin. Most of them were short and rounded, although part of the rounding was their thick clothing.

His captors were joined by some of their men carrying parts of a caribou they had killed and cut apart. That night they roasted the head first, and Loon could see that they liked the same parts that other people liked; tongue and brain, but more than that, the jowl, and the pads of fat behind the eyes. After that they roasted the brisket, then the ribs, then the pelvis.

Meanwhile Loon and the two other captives they had with them, neither of whom Loon understood, though they did not sound like the northers, were fed the lungs, the heart, and the entrails, although not the entrail fat, which was scraped off by the women, melted in long-handled antler spoons, and poured into pokes.

Loon chewed the hard muscle of the caribou heart with a dignified lack of expression, as if thinking of something else. It would not do to be among these people like an evil presence or a manifestation of bad luck. He had to accept his standing and perform it as well as he could. He saw how it was that captives helped to capture themselves, just as part of staying safe, of biding one’s time, of hoping.

They walked for day after day. The steppe first sloped down to a big river, which looped westward through a broad marsh and grassland, supporting big larch and alder thickets in the loops and along the riverbanks. At the river itself, a leather braid rope crossed the river, tied to tall spruce trees on each bank. There were log rafts floating in the shallows on each side. They got in one, looped two loops of rope over the big rope bridging the river, and pulled themselves across with their hands and arms, moving the loops forward one at a time. Their raft stretched the big rope downstream, so they had to paddle and pull hard as they approached the northern bank.

Back and forth they ferried themselves and their loads. At the end of the crossing, some of their men took both rafts across to the south side, left one, and came back together on the other.

After that they ascended the steppe on the northern side of the valley. For most of the second day of this ascent, they passed through a strange forest, composed of the usual spruce, pine, larch, birch, and alder, but all of them only half as tall as they were to the south, and many tilted this way and that, as though the ground under them had collapsed. And apparently it had, for they passed big ponds sunken deep into moss beds, the water level well below the ground. Sometimes the banks of these sunken ponds were strangely white under the water line, turning the water a sky blue. There was ice down there. The soil and pine spill that made up the floor of this forest, and all the beds of moss and patches of muskeg, even the many ponds—all of them were resting on an underlayer of ice, it seemed, which here and there you could see down to. Whenever this underlayer of ice happened to melt, the trees growing on top of it tilted like festival drunkards. It was a strange forest to walk through.