Kim Robinson - Shaman

So it was a long slow walk to the far end of the pale-walled cave, through the various big chambers and the narrow passageways connecting them. Down here it was the cave’s own air, always the same, cool but bracing, in wintertime warmer than the air outside. No sound from the cave mouth reached this far. The body of the earth lay over him completely. It was almost entirely silent, but that allowed him to hear little creaks and gurgles, always coming from the shadows outside the space jiggling in the light, and often seeming to rise from below. There was a musty smell, a cave bear smell, mixed with mud. A faint charcoal whiff. Big groups when they came back this far brought brush pine torches, and the pine’s sappy blaze made the walls dance and leap. But that was light for seeing, not for painting.

Now the two lamp lights were pale and steady. They quivered in time with his steps. He was by himself, no one else here. Thorn’s spirit did not seem to be present, nor Click’s. If anything he felt the presence of Pika, whom he had never met. The madman who had started painting in this cave, the notorious bison man.

But even Pika was now absent. Loon could feel it: he was alone in there. Just him. He could recall quite a few times in his life when simply being alone like this in the dark would have been enough to terrify him. Often when alone, at night, he had sensed something out there, something unseen, maybe even invisible, that was at that moment tracking him with senses he did not have, following him by way of signs he could not hide, like his smell. More than once that apprehension had overwhelmed him with terror and caused him to run panicked like a rabbit through the moonlight for camp. Stricken with terror, bolting with terror, and all from being alone in the dark, when a feeling came over him!

Now all that was completely gone. He was empty. Being alone meant nothing to him. This was his place. He had been here before, he remembered it perfectly. It was just as before. Slowly he shuffled past the place where the roof of the cave had fallen down and now stood on the floor, a big mass of white and orange rock, which sparkled in the lamplight as he moved. Onward, past the big cats on the wall to the left. Then a left turn and on to the stone reeds that covered the floor here, so strange and beautiful. The stone reeds on the floor stood below stone reeds hanging from the roof, dripping; a few dripped even now. They were like the sand drip towers kids made on the riverbank. How many drips, with water so clear? How many years? Since the old time, the time when all the animals were people, and they walked in a dream together. Since the world was born out of its first egg.

He followed the path always taken through the reeds, doing his best to step in the same footprints. That was how it was done in here. And it was true that the floor of the cave was often coated with a slight mud that squished between the toes, and in places gave way to about the depth of one’s foot. Stepping in old steps helped with that, although at the end of almost every spring the cave floor flooded, leaving a layer of new mud in their steps. Walking in the cave had its own sound because of this, a little squick, squick, squick that often echoed.

Go slowly. Move to the cave’s speed. It burbled, it pulsed, it breathed, but all very slowly, so slowly one could only dance in time with it, as with a slow bass thump, hitting five or nine to its one. Breathe deep the black shadows. The darkness behind him was darker than the darkness before him. Someone had fingered an owl on the far face of the fallen roof pile; it watched you with its big eyes as you passed it. Follow the trail around the corner.

There hung the pendant of rock from the roof, the stone bull’s pizzle, with its painting of the bison man about to mount the human woman, her legs and kolby drawn there under him, the biggest blackest kolby ever, like a little triangular door to another cave. Pika’s work. The whole story of the bison man and his woman, right there on a pizzle like the one that had done the deed.

This room was where Loon intended to paint. To the left of the pizzle there was a section of curving wall that extended far higher than he could reach. Inspected from arm’s length, it proved to be a somewhat uneven surface, bossed and spalled with bulges and cavities, and some small cracks; but on the whole it was a clean curve of stone, with lots of flat smooth surface.

He put down the lamps, took off his sack, unpacked it, picked out the caribou shinbone from the other things. He made one scrape with the shinbone at just above head height, revealing a lighter rock under the brown skin: the bare flesh of Mother Earth, very bright compared to the shadows in the corners around him.

This was the wall Thorn had said he was going to paint. For the first time Loon felt a little touch of Thorn behind his ear, and he heard the remembered sound of Thorn’s voice, saying just his ordinary things. Come here, boy. The particular timbre of Thorn’s voice suddenly pierced him, so buzzy and nasal compared to the clear tones he made when he played his flute. There was no other voice like it. Although it was true that no two voices were the same, so that meant nothing. But he would never hear that voice again. He would have to hold on to it.

Loon said to the cave,—Hello, Thorn. Before I start, I want to go look at your painting of the lions on the hunt. Come with me if you like.

He picked up one lamp and stepped down the twisted passage to the end chamber. Now that Thorn was dead, he would have to follow Loon around if he wanted to talk to him. So Loon was free to go where he wanted. Loon could feel that as he walked, could feel how it would irritate Thorn.

Now he stood in the farthest end of the cave, in front of the great lion chase he had watched Thorn paint so long ago. He saw again: it was by far the greatest painting in the cave, maybe the world. Maybe it would always be the greatest painting. The hungry look in the lions’ eyes, the sharp wariness of the bison peering over their shoulders at the great cats; the way the animals moved when you moved the lamp next to the wall; the massed groups, hunters and hunted, both flowing across the wall from right to left, moving even as they were still, moving as you breathed, the lions diving in, the bison bursting out. All these aspects together made this wall more alive than any painting Loon had ever seen or imagined.

He sat there and looked at it, and remembered what he could of Thorn on the night he had painted it. The old man had been very calm and relaxed, almost friendly. No, friendly. He had smoked his pipe and played his flute. He had stopped to eat or take sips of water. He had put his head to the hole in the corner of the floor that breathed and sometimes gurgled, listening for what the cave could tell him. It had taken a long time to paint that wall, but he had never hurried.

The lions moved in place, and yet stayed where they were. The cave breathed in time with Loon’s breaths. Deep below him it sounded like someone was talking. He saw that he wanted to do it like Thorn had done it. He would do what Thorn had done, every mood and move, make it happen again. That was what he would do; and that was what he would teach some boy to do. If you did it right, on it would go.

Loon put the lamp down, sat on his fur patch, took out Thorn’s pipe. Used the lamp flame to light a splinter, squinted and lit the leaf in the pipe’s bowl, breathed in some smoke, held it in his lungs. Exhaled.

The cave exhaled with him. He drank from his water bag. When he was finished looking at Thorn’s lions, he got up, taking some care to be sure of his balance. A little dance in place. He picked up the lamp, walked back to the other lamp, in the big chamber with his empty wall. He set the second lamp down, had a look around. The bison man still humped the human woman, and he approached it to have a look at how it had been drawn. The black triangle of the woman’s baginaren had been very carefully cleft at the bottom by a scratched white line. The door to the next world, clear as a cut on a finger. He had a burin in his pack to use as just such a line scraper. He had charcoal stumps, a bag of charcoal powder, a bowl for mixing, chamois leather patches, some brushes. Two bags of water. The wall scraper shinbone. He had to finish the scraping.