Now the men were arguing, pointing up- and downcanyon. It was territorial, and they were chest to chest and swelled up. In such a state they would never notice cat, and she poked her head out to see better. Possibly they would drop something in a fight, or something would remain after to be scavenged, anything from drops of blood to dead bodies.
But the finger cutters were backing down. They did not want a fight. Their territory was off under the sunset, they indicated that with their gestures. The herb woman’s pack leaders accepted this and the finger cutters left, heading upcanyon.
Then the two men remaining argued with each other. Something about the meeting had left them at odds. Cat followed them as they went toward their fire, hopping nervously from branch to branch. Best be careful. Curiosity killed the cat. Despite which she was curious enough to watch from afar as the men entered camp and went to the dominant male’s wife. This big woman listened to them with a scowl that did not spare either of them. When they were done she cursed them and they slunk away abashed.
Once when they were boys Loon and Hawk and Moss had gone out on a hunt and come upon a pack of lions in a meadow, eating a big horse they had killed. As the boys had watched from the shelter of a rocky ridge above, a flock of ravens had swirled in on the wind from the west and begun swooping and shitting on the lions, and even more so on the open dismembered body of the horse, as became obvious when the snarling lions backed away to get out of the spew. The ravens kept shitting and peeing on the dead horse until it was little more than an uneven mound under the curdled white of their shit. The lions padded sullenly off. After that the ravens descended to beak through their mess and eat the body of the horse themselves.
The boys had crowed themselves at such a great opportunity, and when the lions were gone they charged down and drove the ravens off, and then threw rocks at the black birds when they dove back in their counterattacks. The boys were more dangerous to the ravens than the lions had been, and after a brief skirmish, filled with curses in both languages, the ravens had flown off heavy-winged, hoarse with unhappiness.
The three boys had been very pleased with themselves, and had quickly hacked chunks of the horse free, and carried the two rear legs and the head down to the river to wash them off. They had washed them and rubbed them with sand in the cold flow of the upper Ordech for more than a fist of the afternoon, then carried them home and on Hawk’s urging told the people at camp that they had killed the horse woman themselves and brought back this meat. Thorn had taken up one of the rear legs and sniffed it and nibbled it like Heather’s cat, and then whacked Hawk with it as if swinging a branch, knocking Hawk to the ground. Hawk cried out and everyone gathered and Thorn picked up the leg and gave it to Heather. Heather bit into it and scowled.-When ravens shit on a kill the meat changes, she told the boys.-You can’t just wash it off.
— Oh, Hawk said.
The three boys must have looked pretty foolish, because all of a sudden Thorn started laughing at them, and then everyone was laughing. Although then the boys had been slapped around a bit too.
Today you mix paint, Thorn croaked one morning.
— I always mix paint.
— Then clean up my spot.
— No! Loon said, frowning.
Thorn grinned in a way that revealed he had wanted to get a rise out of Loon.-So mix paint. I’ll teach you how to make it so it won’t run in the rain.
This was just what Loon wanted to know, so he stared at Thorn suspiciously, and Thorn laughed at him.
Heather watched the two of them unsmiling.
— How is your leg? she asked.
Loon shrugged.-All right.
Although he worried about that. Next month they would head north to the caribou, and by then he would have to have his legs.
Now he limped after the old man to his nest, picked up his leather sack of earthblood and charcoal, and followed the shaman to the painted part of their cliff.
Thorn stood in the morning sun squinting at a wall of the cliff that had been drawn over many times. He ignored the many erect spurts and open kolbies, including a pretty great series depicting a man whose spurt was so long that he had to bend it back down to his mouth to be able to suck himself off. Instead Thorn regarded a grouping of ten russet cave bears. He liked these bears: they were clumped in a pack, in a way they never gathered on the land, with some of them standing, some shambling, some sniffing the air with their incredible noses. Each bear revealed its mood or purpose by a deft turn of eye or ear, or furrows on their sloped foreheads. A few of the bears were three-liners, but most had been painted fully, with charcoal stumped and smudged over underlying red paint, making precisely the russet shade one saw when the bears wore their late summer coats. And they were all fat. So in the painting it was autumn; and by the looks on their faces, it seemed something down by the river had caught their attention. Bumps and hollows in the stone of the wall were incorporated into several of their shoulders and rumps and foreheads. It was as if the painters, whoever they had been, had seen these bears emerging from the cliff and then drawn them on the surface. The paintings were beginning to chip away, and Thorn had talked about recoloring them. Now he pointed at the rearmost bear.
— Fixing that one was your first day of painting! Loon preempted him.
Thorn tossed a pebble at him.-Be quiet. I’m still your master. I’ll beat you and you’ll have to take it. Even though you’re strong enough now to beat me. You’ll hate that but you’ll have to take it to stay in the pack. So shut up and let me show you something you don’t know.
— For once, Loon said, and dodged another pebble.
As Thorn pulled out a few chunks of earthblood, and a selection of chopflints and burins, Loon settled down and stopped the needling. He had hungered for this, and now the old man was willing to feed his hunger.
Earthblood was friable, like sand soaked in something’s blood, which then had dried and turned into a rock. You could scrape a little of its surface off under the curve of your claw, but underneath that first scrape it got much harder. You needed to scrape that part with a flint burin, using the pointed edge of the burin to scrape off chips and granules until you had a pile of them, then grind the pile under a flint pestle, in a granite grinding cup or on a slate metate. So: scrape away with one of the biggest burins, its sharp flint point and edge turned as needed. Push where the red stone was weakest, which was where the darkest earthblood clumped like scabs within the sandier parts of the rock, which were also red, but mixed with blacks and browns. The rock broke best where scabby and sandy met. Once broken away, the scabs were softer than the sandy parts, like a very hard mud.
— You want mostly that, Thorn said, pointing at the finer powder from the scabs.-The sandy part makes the paint too grainy. You can have a little, but not too much. It has to be just the right thickness for wall work, like a thick soup, or a very thin paste. It has to be thin enough to spread, of course, but not so thin that it runs.
— So you add water to the powder.
— Of course, don’t be such an insolent youth. You also add something to bind the water and the powder together, and that’s what you don’t know. It has to bind it without clumping it. There’s a number of binders will do it, some for body paint, some for wall paint. Today we need a little spit and some deer marrow fat, which I brought along for the occasion.
He pulled a gooseskin bag from his belt pouch and untied it carefully, then poured a little of the semi-liquid fat into a wooden bowl.
Loon stared at the bag; he had not known there were binders.
— It’s better if your powder is even finer than this you have here. You haven’t done a very good job, but let’s use it so you’ll see.