Kim Robinson - Shaman

—Shit, Thorn said, arm around his shoulders.—Stand steady there, boy. Put your arm over my shoulder here. Let the bad leg hang free there for a second. There, there. Just let it hang. Now, wiggle the snowshoe. Just a little. Can you do it?

Fearfully Loon tried it. He could indeed move his left foot, although the rocking tweaked the bad point faintly as he did so.—I can move it.

—So maybe you can walk on it.

Loon tried, but he had to keep his weight entirely on his poles.

Thorn hissed to see it. He turned to Click, gestured at Loon.—Click, can you carry him?

He mimed what he meant. Click got it, and his bushy eyebrows lifted his forehead into four distinct furrows. In the shadows of the moonlight, his beaky nose and big brow and wrinkled forehead and bristly little chin resembled one of the wooden masks the western packs carved, expressing one feeling or another; in this case, surprise. He looked Loon up and down as if weighing him. Everyone had had to carry something big from time to time, a deer, a child, a mammoth head, a hurt friend, a log for the fire; so everyone knew it wasn’t an easy thing. Couldn’t be done for long. And it was night. And they had been going for three days and nights without pause.

Then Click’s mask of a face shifted, as if wood were shifting, the mask settling into a new expression: resolve. It was a more than human look, like Thorn on a spirit voyage.—Es, he said.

He shuffled over to Loon. Elga and Thorn got the snowshoes off Loon’s feet as gently as they could, and Elga tied them to the back of Thorn’s sack. When his feet were clear, Loon reached his arms around Click’s neck and clasped his own wrists well down on the old one’s massive chest. Click reached back and put his hands under Loon’s knees, and between the two of them they lifted Loon onto his back. Click took a step forward and stopped. He shifted Loon back and forth, up and down, took a few short slow steps.

—Roop, he said briefly.

Thorn led the way downcanyon. It was flattening out, which was good. The snow was hardening in the night’s cold, and getting slippery, Loon could tell. His front side was warm and his backside was cold. He hoped he could serve Click as a warm cloak at least, and clung to him hard and tried to stay light, to breathe himself upward, to cling to Click well and thus be an easier load, nothing for Click to worry about except for the weight itself, like a heavy sack. Thorn was carrying Click’s sack now, and as he strode through the forest’s moon shadows he looked something like the bison man in the cave, a big head standing on human legs.

Click was whistling through his teeth. He made a little triple hiss for each step he took, the air forced between his teeth; then a big breath in, then another triple hiss, all in a coordinated rhythm with his slow steps, like a thumping dance around a fire. He did not seem to be breathing particularly hard, nor was he much hunched over, nor slower than Thorn. It seemed like he could keep doing it. Loon tried to loft himself, to become a bird and wing away, to pull the old one up into the air.

Down through the forest. The snow gave way to black soil and washes of sand, also bare expanses of flat rock. Thorn always led them to these bare rock stretches. From time to time Loon fell asleep, and would wake up falling away from Click, grabbing on to him, with the strong impression that he had been asleep for some time without letting go and falling back. He dreamed in these sleeps, and in his dreams the triple hiss from Click sometimes became a birdsong, or someone playing a flute. His back was getting very cold. He wiggled his left foot in quick little tests of what it could do, and tried to confine the resulting pain to its point of origin in the ankle. Keep it trapped there, let his blood flow past it and through the rest of his leg. Let it rest and gain the strength to go on.

The moon was in the west, but still well above the horizon, when the cold penetrated his back so far that he croaked,—I can walk now, I think. Put me down, Click, and let me try it.

—Tank oo, Click said.—Roop roop.

Loon slid down onto Goodleg, and then onto his walking sticks, held out to him by Elga, who had been carrying them. Gingerly he put Badleg down, placed that foot on the ground, shifted his weight that way. A little stab or click of pain; but after that, as it washed up his leg muscles, it diffused to something he could stand. He could still control the leg, around or through that wash of pain. It would work.

—Good man, Thorn said, and they took off again.

Loon hobbled along behind Thorn, and Click dropped back and brought up the rear. Clouds flew under the moon and thickened on their way east, but were still thin enough to light up around the moon, which shone right through them, and lit them all over the sky. Thorn stopped often for short standing rests, and when he did, Elga came up and held Loon by the arm. She was still going strong, but her stride had shortened, as if she were limping with both legs. She stepped like a heron in a marsh. No doubt she was hurting. They were all slowing down. The moon was still a couple of fists above the horizon; the night had a long way to go. Loon wondered if they could make it to dawn. But he was happy to be able to walk. Only that little click of pain in the turn of every stride, and he could almost lift over that with his arms and his sticks. So he could walk. And the walking was warming him up, not completely, but in his middle where it counted. He could feel the skin of his back burning as the feeling came back to it. His fingers too burned with new feeling.

The wind continued to get stronger. Even down in the forest they could feel it. The chorus of trees on the slopes of the valley sang their airy roar as gusts swirled this way and that. The cloud blanket overhead poured in from the west and filled the sky, thickening and then breaking up into puffballs of moonlit white. In the breaks between clouds the black sky swam with fugitive stars, which looked like they had come loose and were sailing westward. A longer glance would steady them and reveal how fast the clouds were flying east. A storm, coming in from the great salt sea. Loon could smell the salt on the wind. Thorn raised his spear and sang his storm welcome. He was clearly happy to see it. It was true that a new blanket of snow would cover all traces of their passing, so Loon had to agree that it was probably a good thing. But it was going to be cold.

Well, cold. He was used to it. He had been cold for months now, and he could endure more of it. The world was a cold place. One breathed and shivered and danced in place to fight it, and it was possible to endure. As long as there was food. And of course a fire would be nice. In a storm no one would be able to see smoke from a fire. Getting one started would of course be a test. Loon grimaced, remembering his failure on the first night of his wander. But Thorn was a real firemaster, like all the old shamans. And he had his kit with him, the firestarter stick and block, flint knockers, bags of duff kept dry in dovekie skin. He could do it and he would. They would make a shelter, make a fire, wait out the storm if they had to. Walk through it if they could. Maybe a little of both. Thorn would decide. He would make their plan, Loon didn’t have to do that; which was good, because he was too tired to do anything as hard as thinking. He couldn’t think beyond the next click in his ankle.

When the moon set it got a lot darker. The clouds went dark too, and closed up so that no more stars could be seen. Though Loon knew dawn had to be coming, he could see no sign of it. So much black time passed that it began to seem to him that they had fallen into a cave world, that the night would go on forever.

He never did see the eastern sky lighten, but only looked up from the ground under his feet at one point to discover that the whole world had gone gray and was visible again. Neither black nor white intruded on this world of grays. The clouds had lowered in the night, and now skimmed the ridges hemming the valley. Gray snow flurries draped gray forested slopes: this was as much day as they were going to get.