Kim Robinson - Shaman

Suddenly the jende rushed to the cliff’s edge as if to cast themselves off, and stopped and screamed as they threw handfuls of small rocks down the cliff, bouncing from ledge to ledge.

Up and out into the air screeched a great flock of birds, flapping across each other in wild disarray, some even colliding and tumbling down before catching the air and flying again. They were crow-sized black-and-white birds, with big curved orange beaks, twentytwentytwenties of them crisscrossing the air overhead until they were everywhere over the men.

When they were past their panic and high enough, the birds flocked and began circling in groups, and either returned to the cliff below, ignoring the northers who had disturbed them, or flew off. Black backs, white undersides, ducky feet that were the same orange as their beaks. Their faces were two big white circles holding little black eyes. They flew so close together it seemed like they should be colliding, but now that they were over their fright, they never did. Birds were good at that.

The jende watched the birds’ crisscrossing very intently, hands on foreheads shading their eyes. When the birds were either gone or had returned to the cliff, with only a few still circling overhead, they talked it over for a while, in a way they usually wouldn’t. Loon could see they were interpreting what they had seen in the birds’ splash into the sky, because they sometimes scratched curves on the rock with their hand blades, or made swooping motions with their hands. The way the birds had flown off in their panic meant something to them. It was going to be a good year, they were telling each other.

After that they headed back. Down the many blocks of scraped rock, back onto the breathing blue ice, once again sliding along carefully, the sun now blazing off the ice to the west at an angle that hurt. They had to squint until their eyes were slits nearly closed shut, and here the jende’s eyelids gave them quite an advantage, it seemed. For Loon the ice was so bright it went black, as if burning at its edges. It was a light like the fire in the skull on the block. Blindly they walked down the slope of the ice plateau with the wind at their back. Badleg throbbed badly at the growing length of the trek. They were walking back down into the world. Soon the sun would set and they would have to finish their descent in darkness. For now, the world blazed.

Some of their late winter storms lasted a fortnight or longer. They passed these in the big house, eating, sleeping, and sleeping some more. On the upper platforms the jende sat around or lay on their sides. In the dim light coming down through the roof tube, they made things and talked, and their elders told stories, long stories in short rhythmic bursts of speech, the winged words following one on the next in a way that lulled Loon into something between sleep and waking, something that was not exactly dreaming, but like it. When the jende elders finished their stories they were just like Pippilouette, and would say something to effect of, Look, the icicles seem to be melting already, to remind their audience how much time they had eaten up with their story. The more the better, on days like these.

Sometimes Loon made things too. He carved spear throwers from shoulder bones in their food, using not blades, which the captives weren’t allowed to have, but broken pebbles. Sometimes after they broke bones for their marrow, there were splinters left over that were easily sharpened into trap stickers; but these could be blades as well, obviously dangerous, and there was no place to hide them, so he usually broke them up when he was done making them. One however he slipped between two hides on the wall where they overlapped, near the floor. No one noticed.

But he couldn’t see a way out.

As they waited out the spring storms, they spent more time in their house than in any month of the winter. At dawn one or two of them would dress and look out the entryway, and then report on what the winds told them they could do that day. If it wasn’t storming, out they ventured into the cold, and did what could be done. They fed their captive wolves, visited their shitting field, got more frozen fish from the food platform. At sunset they convened in their big beaver den of a house and talked the day over while they ate in the heated air. They sweated freely through the evenings, resting on their highest levels in their highest heat. They slept on the lower levels where it was cooler, just above Loon and the other captives, as they seemed to like to sleep snuggled into their furs. The air flowing in the low entryway’s cold trap was the same coldness as the outside air, of course, and if you put your hand down from the captives’ level into the tunnel of the entryway, you could feel just how cold it was, very much colder than on the ground floor of the house, so quickly did the air warm as it rose. It always amazed Loon how quickly that happened, but he could feel it with his hand, and also reach up and feel the greater warmth just above him. In the distance from the cold trap to the jende’s first level, the air went from freezing cold to mildly cool, indeed almost warm, or in that in-between that was neither warm nor cool. It was like the way air warmed from one’s nose to one’s lungs, or when the sun hit you in the morning: strangely quick changes in the heat or coldness of air.

In their big house, the warmth had to do mostly with the fire kept burning on the platform level, and the way in which every wall of the house had been covered in leather, making the place windproof and holding in its warmth as if in a bag. The jende’s bodies glowed like lamps in the gloom, their plump skin flush with blood and gleaming with sweat. They looked like the rocks they put in their fire, then lifted with stout branches into buckets of water they cooked in: these stones too glowed in the dimness and sizzled the air. On storm days the hollow branch at the top of the house was kept almost completely plugged by a patch of fur, and that held in even more heat. When they retired to their beds in the evening, they pulled out the fur patch and opened the top hole entirely, which let the whole house cool down a little. After that they would curl into their furs and the near darkness of the lowest fire, really just a lamp fire, with three wicks burning through the night.

Before going to bed, they had a final meal. They often ate fishes while they were still frozen, chewing on them with relish. But sometimes they boiled the fish in wooden buckets, using the hot rocks to heat the water. When they did that, they ate the fish and then drank the soup they had been cooked in. The jende women would snatch out the fish, dry them with their fingers, hand them out to every jende in the house, with particular attention to who got what. After the fish were eaten, they passed around ladles of the soup. Then they went to bed. Sometimes they woke at night and peed into their pee buckets. Mostly they slept, with only Loon to ponder sometimes through the long fists of the night, feeling Badleg throb with the cold.

The days began to last longer. They would soon be in the hunger months of spring, and yet the jende were not even close to running out of food. They could have made it through yet another winter with the food frozen on their platforms, Loon judged, and maybe another after that. And yet every day that the winds allowed, the men went out hunting and fishing and trapping. Loon didn’t know what to make of that. Probably they just liked to be doing things. They did have more kids in their pack than most packs in the south had. And sometimes they stole wives from other packs, as he very well knew. Maybe having so much food made them want for other things to do. Maybe they wanted a lot of kids, wanted to increase their number. One time he caught a glimpse of Elga in the entry to the women’s tent, and she looked well fed, and he wondered if she would get pregnant. Loon sucked air through his teeth at the thought. But he didn’t know what to do about it. At night he could only lie wrapped in his hide on the cold floor, eating his cold meat; and if the impulse came to him in the darkness, fucking the cold earth. But the impulse rarely came. His feet were always cold, and a cold lump inside him too. Nothing he could see was going to free them from this place.