When the sun was three fists high, he crawled out from under the boulder and hiked west over the moor, on its hard snow, to a low ridge where he could look up to the land farther west. His people were to the south, down at the mouth of Upper Valley, where the Stone Bison arched over the Urdecha. He was due back in camp in three nights. He could subsist on dead berries until then, and he had his deerskin vest and skirt and cape, and some of his cedar bark underclothing. So he needed to attend to his wander, finish it in style. He recited to himself the story as he would tell it: the night out in the storm, his failure to make a fire; next morning a fire started from nothing, while still in the storm; the glories of the fire; the fish and onions, cooked to a turn; the sighting of the deer killed by bears, their fight over the meal; the lions that chased him; the dream appearances of his dead parents; the disastrous encounter with the old ones, the arrival of Crouch and Spit, his escape; the interval in the tree nest; the time on the moor, under a rock.
Now he needed to add the story’s spurt: the vision. And up here in the hollows of the moor were little sprigs of ground artemisia, and certain old piles of bison dung, not too fresh and not too dry, in which grew the little gray mushrooms called witch’s nightcaps. He wandered around, gathering some of these sprigs and nightcaps and putting them in his belt flap. He would eat them together on the morning of the day before he was to return. Thorn would be impressed despite himself. They would taste bitter, and were best washed down in a big slug of water. After that one needed to chew a sprig of anise, and be prepared to vomit a fist or so later. Loon touched a nightcap to his tongue, and just the touch put a quiver of dread down his throat, right through him to his pizzle and asshole. It shook him. This wander had already been hard enough: should he do this? Would he be making it too hard? He didn’t even want to be a shaman, that was Thorn’s idea. It was his father who was supposed to have been Thorn’s apprentice. Heather didn’t like Loon doing it. If his parents hadn’t died, Thorn would never have taken him on. He had always been away from camp as a boy, out in the canyons absorbed in the animals, looking for Heather’s herbs. After his parents’ deaths he had almost become a wolf child, brought up by the woods themselves, as if stolen by a woodsman. He followed horses whenever he saw them, they were his animal, he was entranced by their beauty. Heather had had to tempt him back in to camp like she did her camp cat. Thorn had never noticed him by the fire, and Loon never remembered any verses to Thorn’s songs. None of this would have happened if his father hadn’t died.
But it had happened. Thorn and Heather had raised him and taught him, and his wood carvings and slate paintings had all come to him by way of Thorn. These Loon loved. Of course the endless verses also came from Thorn, and Loon hated those. But they were all part of what a shaman did. But Loon did not want to be a shaman. It was too intense, too lonely, too scary, too hard. Thorn’s shaman had been a bad shaman because all shamans were bad.
On the other hand, Loon had left on his wander accepting the challenge. To renounce it during the wander would be a shameful thing, an act of fear. If he had wanted out he should have said so before he left. That would have taken cold blood indeed. But he hadn’t done it. Embarrassing not to have acted on his desires, done something he didn’t want to do and then gotten stuck with it. But there he was.
So on the morning of his last full day out, he sat facing the sun and ate the combination of nightcaps and artemisia sprigs. The aftertaste was as bitter as always, so much so that it made his skin crawl. His stomach began to grumble and burn. Something in the mix rebelled inside him more even than usual, and before too long his body rejected it, he had to vomit. He didn’t want to so soon, it felt like his body was taking over and reversing his decision, but he had no choice; he fell to his hands and knees, arched over, and vomited like a cat spitting up grass, his whole body clenching to eject the offensive stuff, a mass of burning spit littered with chunks of mushroom and little leaves, as bitter coming up as going down; the taste itself made him retch some more, made him run at the mouth and nose and eyes, coughing until he was empty and his belly sore.
Perhaps not a good idea to play these crazy shaman tricks on himself.
I am the third wind
I come to you
He lay there for a while, feeling his body pulse with his heart’s knocking. Crouch yelped in his ankle, Spit was silent. His throat and mouth burned with stomach spit. This was what happened to Thorn too when he ate the mix. Shamans poisoned themselves to launch their spirits out of their bodies, that was what it came down to, and Loon could feel his head throbbing as his spirit tried to burst out of the top of his skull. For a moment he could see himself from above, lying down there on the edge of the plateau puking his guts out. And yet his feet were still numb with cold. He tried to shift the heat around in him. Miserably he chanted one of the hot songs, aching all over, pulsing like the bag of blood he was. There was more blood in him than there was really room for, that was true of every creature; when you hit certain veins blood spurted out like spurts of spurtmilk, released from a confinement that had squeezed it hard. That was why he so often felt like he was bursting. Now he could feel all that blood inside him, pulsing to get out. It was strange really that Spit had ever stopped spitting, that any cut ever stopped bleeding, given that squeeze of the body. Sometimes you saw speared animals spurt blood from the eyes, mouth, asshole; he felt how that could happen, had to close his eyes and rub them hard to keep them from bursting out of his head. That set off a wild shower of sparking red dots and squiggles. Ah yes-he had seen these red stars and squiggles painted in the cave. Dots red and yellow and black, oh yes. Zigzag lines, squiggling right and left all over his sight. He traced them in the dirt under him, as the shamans had on the wet insides of the cave. He remembered the first time he had gone in a cave, right after his parents had died, and Thorn had shown him the wet wall and put his hand against it, leaving its impression there, then led him through his first squiggles, each finger a narrow trough, between them parallel little ridges, the clay of the walls firm but pliable. A hard press made a trough to the depth of a fingertip, and the mark remained.
Not so this dirt under him now, so friable and full of roots and dead leaves. Suddenly he felt hungry, not as a pinch in the gut but as a general weakness, and he wondered if there was any sustenance in this dirt or these dead leaves. Surely the leaves would give him something. Normally it was not thought to be so, but they did eat certain succulent leaves, and all manner of roots and tubers and shoots and flowers and fruits, so surely these dead leaves had something good in them, or anyway would fill his belly. Although when he tried to eat them, he found his belly did not seem to want filling. No, there was nothing to eat here. He needed to shift his burning skin heat down into his feet without food to help him. Best now to stand and chant the hot song, and think about Sage and her big new tits, down by the riverside swinging together as she leaned over washing, like a ewe’s udder magically doubled. Big dark udders hanging down, sloshing side to side, banging together as Sage washed clothes, her ribs as big as any man’s, her back hard and muscled in a way that made her hanging tits more than ever like bags of milk a-swing under her. Oh yes; he was warming up at the thought of her, the heat moving around in him, rising even into his chilled spurt, which warmed as it antlered. He clasped it and squeezed till it felt like a flesh stick, hard as a stick, almost, oh but his hands were so cold, it was only the sight of Sage’s naked body there moving in his eye that could keep him hard, and thus help him overcome the cold. Dance a sex song, mix the hot song he had been chanting with a sex song, seeing how she would look if they were joined in sex, or so it seemed; Loon had never done it with her, or any girl. Both Thorn and Heather made it clear to him, as did all the women in the pack, that it was better to mate with girls from other packs. So the summer festivals were good for that. Your pack was too close, the girls in it like sisters. Except they weren’t, especially if they were from other clans. Loon had been his parents’ only child, and he was a raven, like his mother had been. The girls in the pack included eagles and salmon, and had been only girls to him, and he only a boy to them. Now they were young women and he a young man. They bled and were painted red at their moon time, they had perfect tits and asses and legs and furry soft kolbies, everything really: they were perfect and beautiful. Actually only Sage was perfect in all possible ways, something that everyone saw and remarked on, but in the end they all looked good, and Loon loved them. And Sage was an eagle. To be a shaman was to have a distance from women, but also a closeness; he would be involved with the life of their bodies in ways he wouldn’t as a normal man of the pack, a hunter married to one woman. But not to have a wife! Well, that remained to be seen. Loon danced holding his hard spurt, thinking of Sage naked, and decided then and there that he would not be that kind of shaman. He collapsed to his knees and fucked the dirt, spurted calling out at the sensation of coming, the bolts of pure pleasure streaming out of him onto the ground, and when he was done, still holding himself and pulsing, he scooped up the spurtmilk with some leaves and ate all of it. He would feed himself. It was like a mushroom soup, congealed although still warm with his warmth.