The boy gave a brief nod and tried to swallow the anxiety that started in his stomach but kept trying to squeeze up his throat. Old Carp smiled at him reassuringly, his pride and belief lighting his seamed old face. His teeth were yellow, separated by black and empty gaps. Kerlew thought his eyes must have been brown once. Now they were skimmed with gray film that reminded him of the green slime that clouded the surface of summer ponds. Kerlew knew that if one stirred the slime with a stick, the depths and wonders of the pond beneath it were revealed. Sometimes when he stared at Carp’s clouded eyes, he thought he glimpsed the depths and wonders beyond the gray that misted them. Gray as the smoke that drifted and wandered through the tent. When he breathed it in, it was like breathing cobwebs. It clung to the inside of his nose and lined his throat with dryness.
Carp’s withered lips were moving, and Kerlew focused on them with difficulty. He was supposed to be listening, he remembered belatedly. The smoke was supposed to make this easier. Instead it was making it harder.
‘Just breathe deeply and listen to the drum. Let the drum guide you. Listen now.’
The drum. Kerlew shifted his eyes to Carp’s hands. A little drum with a yellow-leather drumhead was gripped between the old man’s knees. In one of Carp’s hands was a tiny hammer, made from a bear’s molar mounted on a stem of birch. Kerlew watched the molar lift and fall, lift and fall, lift and fall. Each time it struck the taut leather it made a sound. Listen to it. He was supposed to listen to it. The old shaman’s fingers were the same color as leather that had been used a lot and hung up inside a smoky tent. Like this smoky tent. His eyes drifted away from the drum and fingers, rose to follow the gray smoke as it swirled silently through the tent.
Carp was still talking to him. His words drifted through the tent with the smoke. ‘Listen to the drum and let go of this world. Breathe in in this world, breathe out in the spirit world. Let go and go down, into the spirit world to seek out your spirit beast. Go down, follow a mouse, follow a beetle, go down into the spirit world, followatrickleofwatergodown-deepintotheearth…’
The words mingled with the smoke and swirled through the tent and up. Up and around, past the patch sewn on the tent wall, past his leggings hung to dry on one of the tent supports, past the old shaman’s head. Kerlew lay still on his pallet of hides and watched them. His tongue was gummed to the roof of his mouth and he could not let out his breath. He could take in air, and he felt his chest swell tighter with every breath. But he couldn’t let the air out. For a slow moment he noticed this and it troubled him. Then his attention was caught once more by the swirling smoke. He watched it glide, so gray and soft and free. He let out a long sigh and followed the smoke.
Once he had fallen into a river, and before his mother could snatch him out, he had been washed downstream on the buffeting flood. This was like that time, except the smoke was warm and soft and there were no great stones to batter him. It carried him up and around, toward the peak of the tent and the smoke hole. He brushed past the old shaman’s bent head, heard a few lingering notes from the skin drum. For that instant he remembered that he was supposed to be going down, into the earth to seek the depths of the spirit world. Then he swirled past Carp and was carried aloft on the smoke. The old shaman’s instructions no longer seemed important. He floated up and out of the smoke hole.
The night was black, studded with stars. Winter was but a breath away, yet Kerlew did not feel the cold. He hunted across the sky, the smoke soft beneath him, his every stride a stag’s leap. Then, as he felt the smoke grow thinner and fade, he began to step from star to star just as one could step from stone to stone in a stream crossing, or from hummock to hummock in a bog. Gone was his usual clumsiness and halting stride. Here he walked as a hunter and a man. The night wind touched his hair.
Higher and higher into the sky he climbed, until far ahead of him he saw the pale hides of the moon’s caribou. Far above the stars behind the moon, the herd was scattered out across the black sky. Kerlew stood on the highest stars and lusted after them. Their coats shone like lake ice and their antlers swept white and gleaming over their backs. Their heads were down and they grazed across the night sky. He knew that the smoke of their breath formed the clouds, and the clash of their antlers presaged thunder and lightning. Their power and majesty made his heart ache. He knew that if he touched one between the eyes and claimed it as his spirit brother, he would be a powerful shaman indeed.
But between him and the herd the stars were few and widely scattered. He stood teetering atop two stars, yearning after the sky caribou, and wondering what he should do. Briefly he recalled that Carp had told him to go down into the earth, not up into the sky. With a sinking heart, he knew he had disobeyed his master; he would fail in his hunt. He would return from this journey, no shaman, but only the healer’s strange boy. At the thought, sickness washed through his belly and throat and tears nearly blinded him. He forced a shuddering breath into his lungs. Unless, perhaps, he could claim one of these creatures as his spirit brother…He centered his courage in his belly and prepared to jump to the next star.
But from behind him came the sound of panting, and he felt hot breath on the backs of his legs. Turning, he beheld Wolf racing up the stars toward him. Wolf’s coat was gray streaked with black, and his lolling tongue was red while his eyes glowed green. His great paws splayed wide with every stride he took, and Kerlew noticed every black nail. Then his eyes met Wolf’s, and in that moment he knew his brother.
He set his feet well and lifted his hand. Palm out he waited for Wolf, and when he was but a few stars away, Kerlew cried out, ‘I claim you as my spirit brother.’
Wolf didn’t pause but laughed savagely as only the wolves can. ‘Fool!’ he howled. ‘You cannot claim me here!’ With a sudden leap he sprang high over Kerlew’s head, beyond the reach of his outstretched hand. To the next star and to the next he sprang. The great white herd of sky caribou suddenly marked his coming. They threw up their antlered heads and bellowed to one another in fear. As one creature, the whole herd leaped into flight, bounding away across the night sky with Wolf panting behind them.
All this Kerlew saw in a teetering instant. The winds of Wolf’s passage swept his balance away. His arms flapped vainly as he tried to keep his precarious perch, and then he was falling, tumbling down between the stars that snagged and caught at him like brambles. The bright light of the moon faded into a mellow darkness as he fell, and to his ears came the far sound of Wolf’s hunting cry. Kerlew knew he called to his brothers, and he snatched at the words as they whispered past his ears.
‘If you would be Wolf’s brother, learn to follow the herds!’
The birthing had been long, though not as difficult as Tillu had feared. Elna’s thick hair was sweat-soaked to her skull; in the heaviest of her labors, she had thrown aside furs and skins, panting with the heat of her struggle. But soon after the child emerged, she was shivering with cold and asking that her pallet be moved closer to the fire. The young mother slept now, her fat babe nestled in the crook of her arm, soft furs tucked closely around them both. Elna had been so proud when she saw her baby, her cry of joy louder than her cries of effort had been. He was the first child for Elna, and a large one. Tillu had feared that in her inexperience the laboring woman would push too hard and tear herself. But all had gone well.
She spread one more covering of soft fox furs over mother and child and bent to gather the bloody scraps of hide the newborn had been cleansed with. Tillu straightened slowly, wishing she could just lie down and sleep. Her back ached from her hours of kneeling and crouching by Elna, and her head ached from the tension of midwifing. The need for a successful birthing had been like a knife at her spine. The other women were gone now, but during the birth, they had crowded inside the tent. Tillu had felt their eyes on her like clinging burrs. Had they believed she would do Elna some ill? She supposed so. She sighed again