Kim Robinson - Shaman

As it went on, slowing down each time, the rattle becoming briefer, less violent, Loon began to feel calmer. Thorn was almost done now. His suffering was over. These last breaths seemed no longer sheer stubbornness and refusal to die, but a kind of farewell. So it seemed to Loon. Little Thorn jokes. Playing dead; then a little insuck, an attempt at the rattle. Ha, fooled you again. Then the long moment of nothingness.

—It’s like he’s fooling us, Loon complained.

—I know.

It went on. It kept happening.

After one of these little attempts at breath, Heather said to Thorn,—It’s all right. We’re here.

Then they waited. There came another little rasp. Then Thorn lay there still. They waited and waited for his next breath. There did not seem to be any hurry at that moment; they could wait him out. No rush to declare it over, and be proved wrong yet again. No rush to be right about it. They could sit with him in this in-between zone, on the pass between their valley and his.

Loon would never be able to say how long they waited like that. Thorn’s eyes were half open, glazed and unseeing. Now he was clearly the dead body of a dead animal. As always, death was unmistakable. So much went away.

Heather stirred at last. She reached out and closed Thorn’s eyelids, then put her ear to his chest and listened. She lay against him like that for a long time.

Finally she sat up and looked at Loon.—He’s gone.

They held his hands for a while longer. There was no hurry now.

Everyone in the pack took something of Thorn’s to remember him by, but all the things that had come to him from Pika were given to Loon, meaning his flute and pipe, and fire kit, and painting kit, and the bison-headed cloak.

Loon played the flute when they put Thorn’s body on the raven platform on top of Loop Hill. It seemed to him that the flute made the music, he only had to breathe through it and listen with the rest to whatever came out. That was quite a discovery. While he played he saw everyone’s faces, and he was surprised to see how distraught the other members of the pack were. He had not realized what Thorn had meant to them; he had been too close to see. He himself felt nothing.

When they were done laying his body out on the platform, Loon stopped playing the flute and said,

That night by the fire, Loon stood before all the rest of them wearing Thorn’s bison head, and told them the story of the swan wife. Young man marries swan woman, goes to live with the swans, it doesn’t work out, he ends up a seagull. One of Thorn’s favorites, and all of them had heard him tell it many times. And then Loon and Elga and Thorn had lived it.

In the same way as the flute’s tunes, the words just spilled out of him. Suddenly he knew to stop knowing it. It would come breath by breath, in an even in and out, and he only had to breathe out the part of the story that fit that breath. He added a couple of skipbacks to pick up dropped points that occurred to him, he foretold a few parts; that was just part of the game. Although this time he was telling the story as simply as he could.

All that day Heather stood at the edges of the group, facing away from the rest of them, not saying a word. When he was done with the story Loon helped her back to her bed, and she seemed light to him, and ancient.

She sat on her bed. Loon looked down at her and saw her desolation, which from his curious new distance, his bird’s eye view of everything, which was maybe the shaman’s view, surprised him a little. She and Thorn had always fought so.—I’m sorry, he said.

She did not look at him.—I don’t know who I’ll talk with now, she said.

He could not fall asleep that night, and under the waning moon he realized that he wanted to go in the cave by himself, to paint something new. In the autumn it would have been Thorn’s turn to go in, and Loon knew Thorn had had big plans, though as usual he had not said much about them. But Loon didn’t want to wait that long. He wanted to go in now.

Next day he said to Moss,—If I work fast, Thorn’s spirit will still be around to help me paint. So I have to do it before the ravens are done with him.

Moss nodded.—Heather will help gather your supplies, and we’ll hold things together out here while you’re inside.

—Good man. He held Moss with his gaze.—It’s our turn now.

—I know, Moss said.

They helped Heather pack a backsack with the painting gear and several bags of fat for the oil lamps, also some food and a water bag. Hawk and Moss walked with him up to the cliff and its narrow ramp to the cave entry. Pika’s Cave, the biggest and most beautiful of them all, right over Loop Valley. The shaman’s entry to Mother Earth, the kolby of the world.

At the entry they stopped and hefted the full sack onto his back. Moss took an ember from his belt and puffed up a flame at the end of a wick, then got it arranged in a fat lamp, then lit the wick in another lamp. In the light of the afternoon it was difficult to see the lamp flames, hard to imagine they would be enough in the world below.

He sat and smoked Thorn’s pipe with Hawk and Moss, both of whom sucked down their burns eagerly. They continued to smoke while Loon ate some of Thorn’s dried mushrooms and artemisia, then sang the cave hello.

Hawk and Moss were looking worried; they had only been in the cave’s deepest depths twice, when they were kids trying to break the rules, and the second time they had almost gotten lost. They didn’t think it was safe to be going in alone like this, and though they were forced by circumstances to do dangerous things all the time, maybe that made them even less inclined to take on any unnecessary dangerous things, and in cold blood.

But that was what shamans did. So they sat to each side of him and pressed into him shoulder to shoulder as he sang the cave hello, and they sang too when they knew the words. There was quite a bit of wonder on their faces as he hugged them good-bye and took off, into the big dark kolbos of the passage at the back of the day chamber of the cave, down into the dark.

As he walked into the passage it was broad at first and lit by daylight. Then came the turn into the dark, followed by a narrow passage. As he shuffled past that turn the shadows got blacker, and his lamps shed more and more light, until they were all he was seeing by, the two flames brilliant in his hands. As he walked the lit walls and black shadows shifted with him, flickering with the same flicker as the lamp flames, so that it was clear they all made one thing.

He stopped for a while to let his eyes adjust, as Thorn had taught him, and then continued forward with the short steps that were best in the cave, to be sure the floor had no unseen blocks or drops. It would be very bad to fall and knock out his lamps. Thorn had tried to teach him to spark a fire in the dark, using the sparks themselves to see the duff well enough to light it, and touch the wick to the burning duff, and breathe the wick back to flame; but it had proved to be very hard. Now Loon carried a live ember inside a burl in his belt, which would make it much easier to relight the lamps if he needed to. But it would be so much better not to need to. Better to treat the lamps as little sparks of his own spirit, so precious that he could be said to be carrying his life in his hands.