One moment they were in the fairy-tale wood, then they were walking across arctic tundra, the horizon stretching impossibly far on all sides with no sign anywhere of the forest they’d just quit. They moved from marshlands where they had to pick their route with care, every lifted step making a sucking sound as they pulled their feet from the wet ground, to arid badlands where the dry air seemed to pull all the moisture out of their skin and the air tasted like dust. A dip in the ground took them into a lush, sleepy valley where willows clustered along the banks of a slow-moving river and herds of grazing deer barely raised their heads at their passage, then they turned a bend to find mountains as tall as the Rockies rearing up all around them, the ground underfoot turned to shale and loose stones.
The seasons changed, too, running through spring and summer, autumn and winter, following no particular order. Sometimes the climate changed with the landscape, sometimes it abruptly shifted while the landscape remained the same. They went from carrying their winter jackets under their arms, to bundling up and wishing they had down parkas.
What was most disconcerting was that these transitions between the various landscapes and climates were subtle. There was no abrupt change like that first cross-over; you simply became aware that you were somewhere else, or that the pleasant summer’s day had suddenly acquired a wind with a winter’s bite. The seamless flow from one to another was what made the journey feel so dreamlike in particular. Where else but in a dream could one experience such a phenomenon?
“So,” Ellie said at one point. “Is it always so confusing here? How do you even know where we’re going?”
Because unless all of these pocket worlds were laid out in some set pattern, she had no idea how anyone could navigate so easily among them.
Aunt Nancy shrugged. “Manidò-akì is what we make it.”
“ We’re doing this?”
“Not just the three of us, but all people. Everyone carries a piece of the spiritworld in them, and that fragment is echoed in our hearts—we call it our abinàs-odey. One’s heart place. What we are traveling through here is an area that is thick with them, a quilt pattern that overlays the spiritworld, little pockets of many people’s abinàs-odey.”
“Can anybody just—” Ellie searched for the word. “Connect with their heart place? I mean, travel there?”
“Most people do so only in their dreams.”
“And it’s always like this?” Hunter asked. “Some lonesome place out in the wilderness?”
“Oh, no. You can find whole cities created out of the crazy-quilt pattern of several thousand abinàs-odey. Cities, towns, villages, but also more solitary places of habitation like a single farm, or a hunt camp.”
“Mine would definitely be a city place,” Hunter said. “All this wild country kind of spooks me.”
They were traveling at the moment through a landscape of rugged red hills, the predominant vegetation being scrub brush and clumps of dry, browning grasses. The sun was just starting its climb up from the horizon and the air was chill enough for them to see their breath.
“I like it,” Ellie said. “Especially places like this, where it feels like all the excess has been stripped away and you can see the real heart and bones underneath.”
“I prefer the woodlands of the Kickaha Mountains,” Aunt Nancy said. “There’s something comforting about the close press of the trees when you move through those forests. You can’t take a step without touching something and it feels to me like the land itself is welcoming me with the scrape of a twig, the brush of a leaf. Like a mother, tousling the hair of her child as she runs by.”
“I like that, too,” Ellie said. “And I like the way you put it. It’s not what…”
Her voice trailed off as she realized what she’d been about to say.
“What you expected from some old bush woman?” Aunt Nancy finished for her.
“No. Well, maybe a little bit.”
What had happened was that the simple poetry of how Aunt Nancy had described walking in the woods around her home had made Ellie reconsider the image she was carrying of the older woman. She wasn’t just this brusque, kind of scary old medicine woman.
Aunt Nancy shot her a grin, as though aware of what Ellie was thinking.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about each other,” the old woman said. “Which is why it’s always better to walk up to any new experience without any preconceptions.”
Ellie nodded. “I should know that. I’m sorry.”
But Aunt Nancy’s grin only grew wider. “Hell, girl. Don’t be sorry. I cultivate that image. I can’t tell you how much wasted time it’s saved me, not having to get all warm and cuddly with people who just want a piece of my medicine but otherwise wouldn’t give me the time of day. I figure if I make it a little tough on them, maybe they’ll take the time to think of some way they can deal with their problems on their own, instead of always looking for a quick medicine fix.”
They reached the crest of one of those tall-backed red hills. The sun was higher and the hills just seemed to go on forever. The summons for the Glas-duine grew more urgent for a moment, then faded again, as though the force of its call was being swept back and forth across the spiritworld and they were no longer directly in its range.
“Trouble is,” Aunt Nancy went on, “is you get into the habit of being who you’re pretending to be. That’s the problem with masks. The reason they’re so seductive is because they’re so easy to put on. And that’s also the reason you should always take care of who you go walking with in the spirit-world because this is a place where masks don’t fit the same as they do on the side of the borders where we normally live. The seams and cracks start to show and whoever you’re here with could come away knowing more about you than you’re comfortable having them know.” She smiled at the pair of them. “You find yourself rambling on too much, the way I’m doing right now.”
“But we’re interested in all of this,” Ellie said. “Really we are.”
Hunter nodded in agreement.
“Or you’re good at sucking up,” Aunt Nancy told them.
It’s no good, Ellie thought. We can see through you now. But rather than follow that train of thought, she wanted to know more about how things worked, here in the spiritworld.
“So all these pieces of people’s dreams,” she said. “Is that what makes up the spiritworld?”
Aunt Nancy shook her head. “Every single being, animal or human or otherwise, owns a little piece of manidò-akì. Yet if you put them all together, they make up but the smallest fraction of what can be found here. It stretches as far and wide as the imagination allows it to—not our imagination, but that which belongs to the land itself.”
“You’re saying it’s sentient?”
“I don’t know about that. It’s not like I’ve ever had a conversation with it.” She bent down and picked up a handful of the dry red dirt, letting it sift through her fingers back onto the ground. “But you just have to touch it to know there’s more going on here than dirt we’re walking on. If you listen close enough, you can hear a heartbeat. That’s what we do when we drum, you know. We’re talking to the heartbeat of manidò-akì—the spiritworld.”
The summoning call swept over them again, louder and stronger than it had been yet. Aunt Nancy straightened up. Her nostrils flared as though she was trying to catch a scent.
“We’re close now,” she said. She gave them each a considering look. “Where do you think it’s coming from?”