Kim Robinson - Shaman

Once Click woke him with a very light tap from the base of his spear, and when Thorn sat up, gestured at him to stay still, then slumped forward and mimed a stalking cat to perfection. Thorn picked up his own spear and spear thrower and readied to throw, then rose to his feet, listening all the while. He never heard or saw the beast, and after a while Click wiped his pale face with his pale hand and gave Thorn a look that was perhaps meant to express relief, although his great brow with its perpetual frown was not well suited to doing that. They sat back down to pack their things and drink from their bags of water, and press on.

Out on the broad open land of the steppe it was possible to lope along and really cross ground. They both used their spears to push themselves along at a pace just short of a run, and so they made much faster time than the whole Wolf pack could ever have achieved. The important thing was to stay on the great rock plates of the plain, which in places lay one after another, only slightly broken by flat-bottomed muskeg channels. In the mornings it was easy, because they could walk over even these channels, the snow in them was so hard; after midday it softened, and step-throughs became more frequent. Click was so heavy he plunged thigh deep where Thorn would scarcely sink to his ankles. Under some snow patches it was possible there were hidden melt ponds, so in the afternoons it was best to stay on the rock slabs. Click called these slabs burren, it seemed, humming the word as they hurried over it:—Burren, burren, burren, burren.

North, then, at speed, and with the sun at their backs. They were a fast team. On the fifth day they came to the festival grounds, looking very strange under the snow, but it was definitely the place, all shrouded in suncupped white. By now all their journey’s habits were set, and they seldom bothered to try to speak to each other, as there was no need.

Thorn had occasionally consulted a piece of birch bark he had brought with him, on which he had drawn a version of Pippiloette’s bird’s eye view. Now they were moving into what for Thorn was new land, and the bark drawing thus became their only guide.

The river Pippiloette had indicated as the way to head north beyond the festival grounds was still frozen hard, and they could hurry down its discolored snow surface, poking ahead of them with their spears as they walked. This far north it was still cold even at midday, and the ice on the river still thick and strong. What few leads they passed they welcomed as chances to drink, for in such a land of snow and ice, water itself was scarce. And they were still far south of their destination.

The best response to the growing cold of the days was to hike hard, and they did that, and then huddled around little fires if they could find the wood, or over Thorn’s fat lamp if they couldn’t. Twice they passed tributaries of their river that were almost as big as it was.

On the third day north of the festival grounds, there came a moment of choice for Thorn. Almost any north-trending valley they now came to might be the one Pippiloette had indicated they should take, as far as Thorn could tell by his birch bark sketch. So with nothing to distinguish them, he took the first big one they came to.

This valley resembled the land surrounding the ice caps west of the Urdecha. There were fewer trees, and they were stunted and gnarled. People had used them; they had few dead branches, and many had been chopped down waist high, and had regrown above the cuts. Thorn and Click had to burn fat and dung on more and more nights, unable to find enough wood for their fires.

After two days up the bare valley, they crossed a pass and found another valley that led downhill in the same northerly direction, and two days farther along, this valley debouched onto a broad plain tilted east to west, just as Pippi’s map said there would be. The plain was covered with muskeg and head-high forest, mostly larch and alder swamps, and cedar brakes. It was not easy country to cross, and inevitably they found themselves following animal trails, marked on the land by all the animals who had crossed the plain looking for the easiest way.

—When the way is hard the trail comes clear, Thorn announced to the world every time he ran into one of these animal trails. The trails came and went with baffling frequency. Often they found one only after thrashing through brush for a fist or longer, so they were very welcome, even if they were only deer trails, sure to disappear soon. Each time, Thorn would repeat the old saying, which Pika had repeated often.

—Way har, trail clar, Click said once when he was leading and came on a trail.

—Yes, very good, Thorn said.—Thank you.

—Tank oo.

On the second afternoon crossing the plain they came to its river, now a flat white walkway. Thorn had never seen a river so wide, and was grateful they could walk across it. If the people of this pays managed to rope a raft between riverbanks as far apart as these were, it would be a real accomplishment.

They walked on, north from the frozen river. Thorn often consulted his birch bark map, though it was of little use; in the part indicating this region it was almost bare of features, and he could not recall Pippiloette talking about how many days’ walk it took to get from the big river to the ice people’s hills.

They found out by walking: three days. At the end of the third day, low hills rose over the northern horizon of the snow-blanketed steppe. The next day the foot of the hills hove over the horizon. Then the tops of the hills separated into two lines, the lower one dark and bumpy, the higher one straight and white. Those hills were overtopped by ice from the north, just as Pippiloette had described. They were getting close.

Thorn turned to the northeast then, and in an alder brake made a little shelter for them to hide in. He started a fire and made it as small as possible, fanned what little smoke was rising from it to disperse it. After they had eaten he let the fire die down, and they lay through the night by the cooling bed of embers. In the morning, when the snow was hard, they walked fast north, right into the hills.

The little ravines between these hills were all filled with boot tracks and footprints, and even wide trails beaten into the old snow. And the little trees in the ravines, and on their walls, were often chopped off. They were near someone’s camp, no doubt about it.

Thorn said to Click,—These are the people who have taken Loon and Elga. We have to come on them without letting them see us. I want to watch them for a while to see how they live. Then we will raid them and take Loon and Elga back.

—Roop, Click said.

The hunger months passed without hunger. Loon feasted on the jende’s scraps and watched them eat luxuriously as they cheered on summer, which they clearly wanted, though they did not need it like the Wolf pack did, backwards though that seemed. Maybe that was why they lived here. Freeze for ten months of the year, and in the other two months drown in mud and mosquitoes; but always enough to eat, and more than enough. This might also explain all their food prohibitions, so many more than Wolf pack’s: they had enough food to be picky about it. Their women were not to eat many things, some only when pregnant, others all the time: otter, lion, mammoth, musk ox; in short, the women said with certain looks, all the best meats. Young people were not to eat the parts of animals that looked like humans in their old age, such as sagging elg jowls or rhino lips. Never eat marmot meat, never hunt the unspeakable one. Don’t drink too much water or it will make you slow. On and on it went, far beyond Loon’s understanding. Eating only the least-favored foods dulled him to the distinctions they were making on the higher platforms of the shelter, up there in the warmth. They kept the captives cold to keep them stupid, he realized one dismal night when Badleg was throbbing more than usual.