At the far end of the second ledge he came to the entry of a little cave, a vertical notch in the white stone. Yes, this was a spot he knew. His father had first showed it to him. The notch incised the cliff to a certain depth, where there was a short drop to a little platform. Beyond that the cave was unfortunately bottomless, a hole dropping into blackness. In a crack at the back, beyond the hole, a little water trickled down.
His father had showed him this cave to warn him about it; the hole inside it went right down to the river. His father had found this out, he said, by dropping a walnut etched with a sign down into the blackness, and then finding the walnut later down in the river, turning in an eddy.
Now Loon sat on the platform, in the dark, behind a rock. He could still look out the cave opening, which gave him a view across to the south wall of the gorge, its moony white all mottled with lichen streaks and ledges of its own. Black sky over it pricked with stars, faint in the milky moonlight. The night was young.
From behind and above him, on the first ledge, there came a clatter. Loon, shivering now, feeling like he did after getting stung by a bee, crawled to the hole at the edge of the platform and reached down into it. The wall of the hole was damp, but broken. There was a knob sticking out he could step on. No way to tell what else might be down there. But now there was a snuffling from the second ledge, outside the cave, so Loon slithered feet first into the hole and stepped with both feet on the knob he had felt. He toed into the rocks below the knob, really felt them. At this point Spit was his best scout, being sensitive even when cold. More snuffling from above caused him to grope around faster. He found another knob he could grab, squeezed it as hard as he could, lowered himself farther into the hole. He would have to remember where all these knobs were, and with his eyes closed he painted the two knobs he knew of in their positions. With his right foot he toed down, hunting for another knob. There was one, though it was a bit too far down; by the time he had the arch of his foot on it, his left leg was so bent his knee was above his hip. This wasn’t good, the ankle hurt more than it had in a while, but he ignored that and searched for a lower handhold. If he could find another good one, he could take the left foot off and seek something lower for it. There was a crack, discovered blindly by hand, a good crack; he could make a fist in it and the fist would not come out no matter how hard he pulled. That was a hold he could swell or shrink as he wanted, so he let his left foot slip off and probe around next to the one already down there. In the end he discovered that both feet fit well on the same knob, which now felt more like a shelf.
Now he was well down in the hole. He would not be visible even from the little platform, unless the thing hunting him could see in the dark. Or if it smelled him. A lion’s head on a man’s body, with owl eyes, with antlers: no way to guess how well it could smell. A thrill of terror bee-stinged through him again, as he remembered what it had looked like looking up at him. Well, but even if it smelled him, even if it saw him in the pure black, would it climb down into this hole? Without fingers, with paws on its forelegs, would it be able to descend? Maybe not. This was all he could hope for. He could see on his eyelids his way back up, left right, left right. He didn’t want to descend farther. Maybe he would if the thing snuffled at the top of the hole. But in fact he heard nothing but his breathing, and the tock of his heart at the back of his throat. No way to know what the antlered owl-eyed lion man was doing. If it didn’t have a bear’s nose too, possibly it would have lost him. Lions hunted mostly by eye, owls too.
He hung there. It got cold, and his legs grew stiff. He couldn’t feel his feet, except for a little burn from Spit. He let go with his right hand and carefully untied his deerhide cape and arranged it over his head and around his shoulders. He eased his body up and down, up and down, and shifted which hand he had in the fist crack, and hung from each as long as he could. Inside himself he called on the third wind to help him. But that one always came late, if at all. He rubbed himself against the dark rough rock. He was down in a cave. Small though it was, it was still an earth womb, a passage to the spirit world. In their painted caves, one pressed one’s hands through the walls into the underworld, and saw the animals’ spirits dance. So he tried to believe now, but really it was just a cold hole at the back of a little whitestone cave, a hole his father had warned him to stay out of. It was too cold to be a womb, too cold to birth him through to the other side. He could only hang there and endure.
In the blackness before him, the rectangular grids of red dots turned slowly into squiggles, into blobs, into side views of bison and mammoth and horse and ibex, all there hanging before him just as clearly as if they had been snatched off a ridge in the sun. His brothers and sisters. Maybe he had passed through the wall of this hole. Only the three points of it that he touched still seemed real to him. It was as if he held three cold hands, clasping him as he hung in the starless skies of the animal spirits. They pulsed as they floated before him.
He grew weak. I held him to the wall of that hole for a while.
I am the third wind
I come to you
When you have nothing left
Some twentytwentytwenty breaths later, it seemed lighter above. It was as if the blackness now had one drop of white diffused in it, like blood dripped into a river. More drips of gray followed, and then there was a tint, a gray somewhat like the blood in his eyelids when he squeezed his eyes shut hard. He seemed to see the trickle of water that had been dripping down the wall behind him, when he turned his head to look.
Ah yes: he could remember the way up. First the knob he had had to raise his knee above his hip to get his left foot onto; then the other handhold; and the higher foothold; and then he could grasp a knob at the very edge of the hole, and reach over and curl his fingers like hooks of cedar root, into cracks on the cave floor. And pull himself up, up into the fist before dawn. Crawl out to the ledge, look down into the gray gorge. It was empty except for the iced river, which snaked through it like the big live thing it was. On this quiet morning it was slipping along under its blanket of ice and old snow. Black leads flowing flatly. Nothing else moving. A squirrel, talking to itself: nothing big and terrible could be prowling around this morning. The sky had lost its stars, and was that gray that could be either clouds or clear sky, in that brief time before you could tell which.
Down the gorge a touch of pink indicated the sun was coming soon. Suddenly it could be seen that it was a clear sky, a cloudless sky. Loon clenched the right fist, the one that had held him the most, and felt its flesh groan. He stretched the hand open, wiggled the fingers, twisted one hand with the other. That right hand had gotten him through the night. And as the day grew brighter, the lion man with the owl eyes seemed less and less likely to be out and about; or even to be real. Although in the night it had most definitely been real.
Now that he could see, the ledges he had used to get to his hole were scarily narrow. Stiff as he was, he crawled over them like a lizard, a red water lizard, every limb plopped deliberately in its place. Then up the bushy cleft to the gorge edge. Now he could walk back to the ridge trail, and down into Upper Valley. He needed to take the whole day to get to camp, so he could come in after dark, at full moon. There was lots of time. He knew right where he was.
Daylight chased off the night’s fears. The air was cool and clear. He felt a buzzing in all his skin, all his flesh and bones. Trees were leafing right before his eyes, and the colors of the day flooded him as they grew brighter. A breeze bounced everything up and down in the air, and something inside him opened. He knew he would survive to be a man, a man on Mother Earth, so big and beautiful. There was terror out there too, oh yes, but this day was huge, bigger than terror. Clouds in his chest swelled like thunderheads. Squirrels celebrated the day with their chitters and chirps, and Upper Valley’s creek clattered and splooshed down its icy defile, sunlit moss greening its banks with bright spring greens, vivid against the old snow.