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.
Chapter 64
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.
Chapter 65
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.
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.