Kim Robinson - Shaman

Thorn did, having spent many years in concourse with them; and the look on his face as Loon had hurried away with the antler piece had said that there was no way to avoid a spirit, if they wanted to visit you. One could do one’s best to assuage it, but in the end the spirit did what it wanted.

So Thorn kept his head down, and was as peaceable as he had ever been. He tended the sick with a particular regard, formal and distant, but intent and meticulous. Scared of Fire started vomiting, and Thorn listened to his breathing, then conferred with Heather before devising his healing ceremony; and when consulting her, he treated Heather with the same regard he gave to Scared. All of his ceremonies he performed with particular care. He did the monthly counts with perfect etchings on his yearstick. He made his old jokes. He ran the kids through their songs and riddles in the mornings.

All this unthorny behavior, as if with Elga there about to give birth, and Lucky underfoot, he could be content despite all his thinking. And yet one night when the fire had died down and he was approaching his bed, he stifled a cry and stepped back. Loon saw this from his own bed and exclaimed,—What? before he could stop himself.

Thorn didn’t answer. He was standing back, hands out, staring at his empty bed. Loon tried to look sidelong, not wanting to see. Thorn’s bed appeared empty to him. But not to Thorn. Loon flexed Badleg a little, felt nothing there. Click was not in him.

Loon didn’t know what to do. He had never heard any stories about such a situation, and it wasn’t clear to him what Thorn might want him to do. Well, Thorn would want him to stay out of it. Possibly there was something Thorn could say now to Click, something he could do…

And yet he seemed at a loss. His lips were flopping like a fish out of water, mouthing words soundlessly, just like fish did. Loon had never seen him so taken aback.

Finally Thorn pulled himself together, drew himself up, sighed heavily. He flicked the back of his hand, the way he would at kids who had gotten in his way.—What? he complained in a low voice.—What am I supposed to do? Just tell me and I’ll do it.

Then he stood there for a long time. Finally he went back down to the fire. Loon fell asleep before he returned, having never seen Click or felt a twinge.

That winter people began to say that Thorn had lost his luck. They didn’t know about Click, they didn’t see Click around the camp, but still they saw something in Thorn, and said what they said. Not when he could hear them, of course, although sometimes he heard it anyway. If he did he only turned his head away, sometimes nodding to himself. The hunters often talked about losing their luck, that was the only way one could deal with it; you had to face up to Narsook, and if it happened to you, let your friends know about it, and let them take the lead for a while to help you, and then something might happen and your luck would come back to you.

But for shamans it was different. They ventured into realms far beyond luck, into dreams, into the sky, into animals and Mother Earth. They entered spirits, and spirits entered them. Clearly they needed their luck to do that, or something like luck; and if their luck was gone, not only would their shaman’s work get harder, but the whole pack might suffer. So no one liked to see it, and after a while, anyone who talked about it was told to shut up.

On a cold winter’s night, a new person was born into Wolf pack. A woman, salmon clan. The men sat around the fire smoking from Thorn’s pipe. Thorn sang a long version of the swan wife story, laughing cheerfully at his own jokes, and cuffing Loon more affectionately than ever before.

Loon spent a lot of time with Elga and Lucky and the new babe, and in helping Thorn do things. When he wasn’t busy, he carved figures out of antlers and little sticks of mammoth ivory they had gotten at the festival. Some were toys for their new baby. Elga was happy to see them, but she was tired with the new baby, and distracted with the things going on among the women.

—Is everything all right? Loon would ask when he saw her face.

—No, she would say.—But it’s the women’s affair, nothing you can do anything about. Thunder and Bluejay are beginning to notice that no one likes them anymore. Actually no one ever liked them, but they think it’s changed to that, and that the change is my fault. Which it is, too. So, it’s too late for them now, but they’re just realizing that and are mad about it, and making things worse to make them better. Which never works. But we have to get through that one way or another. Don’t you worry about it. Someday you and your friends may have to get involved in a solution. But right now you just take care of Thorn.

—I will.

Before giving the little carved figures to the baby to play with, he took them to Thorn and asked for his comments on them. Same with his cliff paintings in Upper Valley, and his charcoal boulders on the river, which he asked Thorn to visit and look at. Thorn would join him in a walk to the river, then when they were there Loon would walk over the river’s ice and go to work. Curve after curve, animal after animal.

Thorn would sit by a little fire he would light, interested in Loon’s work. When they returned to camp after these days, he often took out a big smooth slate and a stick of earthblood mixed with beeswax, and gave them to Loon and then called out animals and postures for Loon to three-line:

—Hyena looking over its shoulder at you.

—Ibex horns, seen from behind.

—Ibex horns seen from straight on.

—Bull elg, wasted after the rut.

—Baby rhino stuck in the mud.

—Female lion on the hunt. Oh, that’s very nice. That’s the exact look in her eye there, with just a dot and a tear line.

—Stallion throwing his head up to threaten a rival near his wives. Ah, well done. You are getting very good at horses.

Loon didn’t know what to make of these unthorny comments, but just wiped the slate clean and waited for the next prompt.—Horses are beautiful, he said.

—Yes.

Both of them only looked on when Hawk and Moss went at it with Schist and Ibex. This could be regarded as an aspect of Thorn losing his luck, in that if they had a shaman feared by all, then they might have behaved better in front of him. But probably it would have happened no matter what, because Schist kept making decisions about food that no women but Thunder and Bluejay and Chamois liked, from the winter stores to that night’s meal. And also because Hawk and his friends were now bringing home most of the winter meat. And really because the two of them had never liked each other, not since when Schist had been Hawk’s babysitter, Heather said.

So they knapped away at each other, bang, bang, bang, and sparks would fly. Schist would be sitting by the fire sniffing his mash, and Hawk would come into camp all bloody with a saiga rear over his neck and the hooves hanging down his chest before him. The mass over his shoulders gave him a bison look, and as he passed between Schist and the fire he dipped his head toward Schist, as if to a female being told to submit. Schist saw it and surged to his feet, which meant he almost got a hoof in the eye, and he swept the hoof aside, but this brought the other hoof into the side of his face, even though Hawk was stepping back as it happened, and could pretend it was an accident and laugh. Schist fumed while Hawk hefted the rump and legs off his head and held them out as if to protect himself. Schist cursed him, red-faced, and Hawk waggled the saiga hooves at him, another bull command to bison women.—Out of my way, old man. I was just trying to get by the fire to the cutting stone, don’t know why you jumped up at me like that!

To which Schist could only scowl and stomp off to the wood pile.