Kim Robinson - Shaman

Loon and Elga nodded. Click saw them and nodded too, humming and then saying,—Skai, skai, skai.

Thorn got out a bag of nuts from his pack and gave them each five.—We’ll eat on the run. Let’s go.

They took off out of their dip, running on the snowshoes toward the flat snow of the first riverbed. No cries came from behind them, but the way Thorn moved made it clear that he thought they would be seen by their pursuers. Instead of crossing the river’s ice he headed upstream on it, then picked a line and took off across the river, headed for the first rise of a ridge that ran south.

They had to show their hunters that it was not possible to catch them, neither in a rush nor over the long haul. With a woman among them it would be hard to do this, but Elga was strong. She had no problem keeping up with the men. It was harder to tell about Click, because of the way he huffed and puffed as he walked, making a song of his breathing. But the old ones were reputed to be made of harder stuff than most people, and Click certainly gave no indication of slowing down or being tired. As for Thorn, it was hard to say whether he would be able to hold this pace. For sure he was setting it now. Some old men had been cured to a kind of leathery toughness that youth could not match, and Loon would not be at all surprised to learn that Thorn was one of them.

So it could be that Loon was the slowest of their little band. It was a galling thought, and yet as they hurried along for fist after fist, it began to seem like it might be true. Badleg was never going to like a full day’s running, no matter the aid of the alder walking stick, which Loon had already named Thirdleg, hoping that the feeble joke would prong him along a little. Thirdleg would have to do its part, that was certain.

All that day they ran. At open leads of water they could safely reach, Thorn paused so they could put their faces to the water and drink, and in those moments he passed out some nuts and dried meat and honey seedcake, to eat as they started walking again. They never stopped for long, but Thorn always found something that caused them to pause briefly every fist or two. Their pace was as fast as Loon could keep to; he didn’t know if it was the same for the others or not, and he didn’t want to ask.

In the afternoon the snow softened, and they stopped to put on their snowshoes again. After that they would certainly be leaving tracks easy for their pursuers to follow. But the jende would be on broken snowshoes, which would slow them down.

Their pursuers were very seldom visible. Once they heard a distant howl, human or lupine, as if their track had been picked up after being lost. Thorn wanted to see them from time to time, to know where they were, so as they crossed the steppe he veered for low hills crowned by trees, or went to the highest parts of the drunken forests they skirted, to find places where trees had crossed in ways that gave them a blind where they could see without being seen. Three times Thorn spotted the jende party, and the third time he said,—They’re sending out a pair with the wolves to rush us.

This was the way wolves sometimes chased caribou, tiring them out with a charge until the weakest one fell behind. Their defense now had to be the same as the caribous’: stick together and stay ahead. Sometimes, Loon recalled, the lead males in the caribou herd might try to strike fear into the pursuers by turning on them. And Thorn was looking thoughtful as they hustled south through that long afternoon. At each stream crossing he took the most dangerous route, passing over exposed bare ice as near open leads as he dared, as if in hope that their pursuers might be heavier and fall through. Loon followed him over one thin brittle stretch of transparent ice, observing this, and then hustled forward to tell Thorn he was wrong if he thought he could trick the jende into making any mistakes on ice, because the jende were better on ice than anyone. Thorn growled at this, but did not try the trick again. His brow stayed deeply furrowed.

The sun finally sank into the west, and as the stars popped out they crawled into an alder brake, crawling under the weave of branches to do so. Here was where they would be vulnerable to the captive wolves, whom it seemed must have been kept on ropes, or they would have caught up.

When they were wrapped in their furs, Thorn said to Loon,—Stay here with Elga, and took Click by the arm, and the two of them headed back north with their spears.

When they reappeared, a couple of fists later, they were in a hurry to leave.

—Another all-nighter, Thorn said.—We killed one of their lead pair. The other one got away, but he doesn’t know how many of us were there. So they’ll be careful tonight. Let’s make this the night we get away.

—They can always track us, Loon said.

—Let’s see about that.

The waxing moon was one night farther east, one night fatter; by its light they walked through the increasing chill of a very cold night. In the haze of moonlight the stars were dim. The hard sparkly snow squeaked under their feet. They had reached the muskeg flats of the big valley’s drainage, and the tipping trees and icy black flat spots speckling the swamps convinced them to put their snowshoes on, to spread their weight out a little more on what looked like thin ice, maybe night ice only. If they had had ropes they would have roped together to cross land like this, but all they could do now was hope for the best. Click went after Thorn, and was substantially heavier than the rest of them, so presumably if he passed over a spot, it would hold Elga and Loon. On the other hand it was possible he would crush a spot that could only hold two crossings, and the third person then plunge through. So Loon and Elga stayed close enough to lunge to each other if they had to.

Happily the black flats proved to be frozen as solid as the white ice, and it was actually their slipperiness that made them worth avoiding. Thorn threaded between them when he could. If he crossed one, they got to feel how much better their footing was with their snowshoes on. One could even skate a little on them. Better however to stay on white snow, even if it was hard as the ice, and in some places almost as flat. The whiteness itself seemed to hold the foot.

They followed stream courses when they tended south, and skated along at a good speed. On land they were not as fast. Thorn cut a good line up the land southward. Moonlight was really the best illumination for seeing the shape of the land. Every muscle of the hills lay there under its blanket of suncupped snow, seeming to glow faintly under the luminous black sky. Through this white flesh the black rock outcroppings thrust like erect spurts, and frozen waterfalls slid down clefts like spills of spurtmilk. Male marks on female curves, the land in intercourse with itself, there in the moonlight and shadow. Always like that, from the beginning in the old time: mother and father first whole and one, split by a fight about how things should be, a fight never resolved. As they scurried under the moon, Loon remembered what he could of Thorn’s story about how the world had begun. Once in nothingness there was an egg filled by a person, and this person had all the parts and qualities of the world, and pecked out of its eggshell and poured out and became all things. The sky is the biggest piece of eggshell left behind, the sun what was left of the yolk, the earth and everything on it parts of the white of the egg. Raven pecked the white until everything was itself.

Loon knew he was forgetting most of the story. He wondered if he would ever be able to remember the stories the way Thorn could. It didn’t seem like he would. For a long time that truth had been a burden in his chest, a weight like a rock, and now he had to let it go so he could walk better. It was a problem for another time. Now whatever he could remember was enough. Now their walking was the whole story.