Thrush crept quietly up to the clearing, glancing behind her all the while to see if they woke. She had nearly reached the trail that led behind the bear house into the woods, when she heard a voice behind her:
“Wait! You’ll need these!”
She started, and turned. The old woman by the doorway held out her hand.
“Here! Take them! Hurry!”
Thrush took a few steps back. In the old woman’s hand sat four hard, greenish lumps—nuggets of pure copper. “How—” Thrush began.
“Take them, you idiot girl!”
Thrush reached for the nuggets. At that moment, Growl appeared on the other side of the clearing, crawling sleepily on all fours. Thrush quickly grabbed the nuggets and hid her hand in a fold of her skirt.
Turning away, she marched across the clearing into the forest behind the house. She found a good spot at the foot of a gigantic hemlock, amidst the litter of deer fern, fallen branches and ancient, rotting trunks. She glanced back: Growl was approaching quickly, and now Nose had appeared as well. Quickly Thrush pulled up her skirt and squatted down, hidden behind a tall clump of ferns. She dropped the nuggets between her legs.
She really did have to go, but she held it in. After a moment she stood again and rearranged her clothing, and started to cover up the nuggets. Heavy footsteps crunched in the litter behind her and she looked up to see her giant, long-armed sisters-in-law.
“Wait!” said Nose, coarsely, grabbing Thrush’s arm. “Let’s see just what does come out of your pure little asshole!”
Growl dropped onto her hands, face low to the ground, and snuffled all around where Thrush had been squatting. She soon found the little pile of copper nuggets, and nosed the sticks and needles aside, sniffed at the nuggets, licked them with a long, pink tongue.
“Well, look at this,” she said, picking them up and holding them out to her sister. “It’s real copper.”
Nose sniffed them, licked them twice, then grabbed Thrush and yanked up her skirt, forcing Thrush to bend over at the waist. She was terrifyingly strong. She sniffed at Thrush’s vagina, and, using her long-nailed hands to part the buttocks, snuffled at Thrush’s anus. She was so close Thrush could feel her hot breath on the little hairs there. Then Nose licked Thrush, a coarse, warm, wet tongue between her buttocks. Thrush jumped into the air at the loathsome touch, and then stood there, trembling, humiliated, hating the sisters, hating all the grizzlies, only the greatest effort of will between her and abject tears.
“Oh, she’s such a sweet little thing,” said Nose. “Only pure copper falls out of her asshole. But she smells like a man’s been with her.”
“Of course she smells like a man’s been with her,” said Growl. “Brother fucks her all night long.”
“What a perfect little beauty,” said Nose. “It’s too bad she doesn’t like our food.”
After that the grizzlies did not keep such a close watch on her. No one followed her the next time she slipped behind the house, and she was careful to cover everything very thoroughly. They did not, however, let her wander freely. Growl or Nose always appeared if she stayed away too long.
Her trap caught a modest number of salmon. Thrush asked Growl for a knife so she could slice the fish thin enough to dry. Growl, suspicious as always, rummaged through her animal boxes to find a knife of polished black slate. While cleaning and drying the salmon Thrush began to feel a slight hope that she might somehow get home. Then, one brilliantly clear day, she embarked on a berrying expedition up the side of the tall and glacier-clad mountain to the north of the bear house. Growl and Nose came along, though they didn’t do much berry-picking. Thrush climbed high above the timberline and gazed out westward, at range after jagged blue range. Nothing looked familiar, not even the farthest, bluest, faintest peak.
The king died in Sandspit Town in winter, three and a half years after Thrush disappeared. He had aged rapidly after his two eldest sons died searching for her.
In that time any number of search parties had gone out and, if they had not been scattered or destroyed by the Four-Legs, had returned without finding clues to Thrush’s whereabouts. The king had, of course, consulted wizards near and far. The wizards claimed the Four-Legs had abducted Thrush, and not killed her, but none could tell the king where in the east the bear house lay, in forest or meadow, beyond how many mountains. “Not even wizards can travel easily to the other world,” they would say, “The First People show themselves when they are willing, and even then, they show themselves in their various guises. Even a wizard might not always know what he saw.”
And they would say, “If a brave young man purified himself, bathed and scoured himself with hemlock branches until he had scrubbed off his human scent, perhaps he might take the Four-Legs unawares. Perhaps he might find his way to the spirit house. But these things don’t happen often.”
The king died from a sudden pain in his chest. He lay in state in Storm House for eight days, attired in his cloud robe and abalone-inlaid crown, surrounded by all the treasures of the house: carved and painted chests, painted hats, copper bracelets and plaques, feast dishes, brightly figured robes and tunics of mountain-goat wool, the masks of the First People used in the winter rites. On the eighth day they burnt his body behind the ice-covered house, with most of the town in attendance. Rumble presided. With his hair cropped short and his face painted black in mourning, he looked as grim and implacable as if he were setting off to war.
Otter should have been there, too, as the king’s only surviving son, but he had taken the wizards’ advice to heart. If indeed he still lived, he was somewhere in the eastern mountains, purifying himself, searching for power, searching for Thrush. It had fallen instead to the queen’s brothers to build the funeral pyre and deliver the speeches of praise. The brothers did not look happy; Rumble, inheriting his uncle’s place, was supposed to marry the queen, but so far he had been silent.
Winter had been feeling ill through the long days and nights of the king’s wake. As she and her mother headed back to her father’s house, a wave of dizziness overwhelmed her. She had to lean against the painted front of Frog House, panting little puffs of fog, while the line of massive, snow-laden houses along the frozen shore wavered and rippled like water. Away from the fire, the air was bitterly cold. Her head felt like a hollow cave of ice, and her heartbeat throbbed inside it, echoing. Something shoved from her gut through her lungs and into her head, until it shattered the ice that was the roof of her skull. She spun upward into vast and empty blackness. Later, her mother told her that she had crumpled as though clubbed on the head.
She lost half a month in the sickness, and when she finally came back to herself, she had a hard time staying there. After a few days of this, her mother brought a wizard to examine her. It was the old woman wizard, Diver, from Snag House. “So you have dreams?” Diver asked, squatting beside Winter’s pallet.
“They’re not dreams,” Winter whispered. Talking exhausted her, and the waking world still seemed fragmentary and insubstantial. “I travel.”
“And where do you travel?”
“I don’t know,” Winter whispered. “Here and there. Flying. I’m a petrel.”
Diver nodded. “Are you just traveling, or are you looking for something?”
“Thrush,” Winter said. “I’m looking for Thrush.”
As the days passed, the world began to seem more real to her again, but the ice had long melted and the herring had spawned before she was strong enough to go outside. The first time, she walked only as far as the seaside platform in front of her house. The bay enclosed by Sand Spit was still as a pond, perfectly mirroring the row of plank houses and the forest and the misty grey sky. Woodsmoke drifted through the trees. She could see Rumble standing by the door of Storm House, a tiny figure beneath its tall painted façade. He was speaking with one of the north-side house lords. Rumble had grown colder and harder-edged every time his uncle had forbidden him to search for Thrush, and sent him instead on a raid or a sea-hunting expedition. Now that he was king it was even worse. She sometimes felt he didn’t recognize her.