One morning Loon woke from a dream in which he had been sleeping with his deer in her lay-by. His chest and belly had been against her back, and his hard spurt was pressed against her fur; he had had his arm across her belly. Very slowly and delicately he had slipped his thumb up into her slightly damp and slippery kolby, moving very carefully, so that she still slept. He could have stayed like that forever, the two of them together, but with his spurt pronging so hard against the top of her rump, he had finally tried to thrust down and up into her; but in removing his thumb from her to make room for his spurt, he had woken her up, and she had looked over her shoulder and then leaped out of the lay-by with a single convulsion of her body. Looking back down at him with her giant wide-set brown eyes full of alarm and disbelief, she said to him, — You want too much, and then deered off through the forest, white rump flashing.
Awake, remembering the dream, the feel of her body, he felt bad. He wondered if he had managed to succeed in mating with her, if she would have gotten pregnant and given birth to a stag-headed person. Thorn had shown him a painting of one of those on a shaman cliff on the other side of the ice caps. Maybe that was what had happened out there to the west. He ached with love for the deer he had killed.
The light in the hour before sunrise. He woke to see the sky had gone gray, the eastern horizon a dull red topped by a band of yellow, and knowing day was coming he promptly fell back asleep, warmed by the thought. It was in those dawn sleeps that he dreamed most of the dreams he remembered. All through the night he dreamed, as he knew because whenever he happened to wake up it was from some busy effort in the dream world, which could range from lovely sexual encounters with girls or cats or horses or deer, to convoluted efforts to escape being eaten by cats or girls, sometimes even horses or deer.
If Thorn woke him in the morning, it was usually with the quiet question:-What are you dreaming? And as Loon pulled himself up into the waking world, he would look back into the dream world and tell Thorn what had been happening there. These were his best moments with the old man, who was more relaxed in the early morning, and would sit there nodding as he watched Loon’s face, prodding him with questions, clearly interested, no matter how trivial or strange Loon’s dreams got.
— The dream world is different, Thorn would remark when Loon finished.-It’s writhing with our wishes and our fears, but we lack good judgment in that world, and that’s why so many odd things happen. If you can, try to dream your dreams without any desires. Just watch. Except if you see a chance to fly in a dream, then fly. That’s the first thing you should want. There’s no point in wanting sex in a dream, because the people in dreams never really touch you. You might come but usually you won’t, and if you do it’s because you’re fucking the ground. You can do that anytime. In dreams you should focus on flying, because you can’t fly in this world, but you can in the dream world. And when you fly in the dream world, that gives you practice for when you fly in the spirit world. The spirit world and the dream world aren’t the same, but they come together in the sky. The dream world is inside this world, the spirit world is outside it, but you can fly in both. And they meet, too, out beyond the sky. So you can fly back and forth. The spirit world is where all the worlds meet, that’s why shamans go there. So when you’re there you can be in all of them at once.
Loon would nod as if he followed this, still caught up in the dreams he had been dreaming, or simply falling back asleep. But with Thorn’s questions he got better at remembering his dreams, and when he woke in the night, he could often look back into them without confusion, and even fall back asleep intending to resume where he had left off, and it would happen. And when he flew he knew it was good, and so tried to fly more, tried to enjoy it, even if in the dream he was flying for his life somehow, as it so often seemed to be.
Afternoons after painting they wandered back to camp gathering armfuls of firewood from the slope below the painted cliff. Heather had saved some midday nuts for Loon, and their winterover taste reminded him that summer was almost on them. He was running out of time for his leg to heal.
He limped around the riverbank to the beach under the Stone Bison, following Moss and Sage. They fanned through the shallows plucking new sedges for baskets. The tender white sedge bases in the mud broke off with a snap. Female stems were required by the basket weavers; male stems would be thrown back at you.
Sitting under the great stone span over the river, they processed the leaves so there would be less to carry home. Remove the outer leaves, peel off the inner ones, split the inner ones lengthwise in half by running a thumbnail down the midrib. Pieces not split right down the middle had to be discarded. Squeeze the half leaves between the fingers until they were flat and flexible. Be careful not to cut one’s fingers on the sharp edges. Tie the processed leaves in bundles of a few score, then take them back to the weavers in camp, who would spread them to dry, dye, and ply. Their women made very fine baskets, very highly regarded at the eight eight festival. Heather had a lot to do with that, being good with dyes.
Heather’s spirit animal was not actually the spider but the wolverine, and this was so right for her. Wolverines were very solitary, and demonstrated an intelligence and rancor second to no other animal. Same with Heather. She did have her good moods, and it was probable that wolverines did too, but in both cases it was a private feeling, because company itself dispelled it.
Although Heather was not completely predictable in that regard. Sometimes she would breathe in some of Thorn’s pipe smoke and slump down by the fire baking herself like a cat, chatting with whoever was next to her. Sometimes when it was raining, in that heavy gray way that said nothing different was going to happen the rest of that day, it was she who would begin to sing some happy song, in a bright tone completely inappropriate to the moment; thus obviously sarcastic, sung to make fun of them; but as they all sat under the abri watching the rain piss down, eventually it could make you laugh.
Loon’s spirit animal was the loon, of course. Apparently he had gotten so excited when he was a little baby, hearing a loon singing one night out on the river and waving his little arms, going red-faced as he tried to sing their weird songs with them, that they had given him his name that very night. And all his life since, at night when the loons talked to each other in their unearthly language, which outdid even the wolves’ for liquid strangeness, Loon still felt a sizzle down his spine, and tears would start hotly in his eyes, and he would get up out of bed and stand at the edge of camp and cry back, ooping and looping in the hopes that the big gorgeous black-and-white birds with the red eyes would hear him, and understand that even though he didn’t know their language, he loved them. And in fact sometimes they did hear him and reply to him, which Thorn said was one of the greatest honors a man could be given, as a loon’s cry was the greatest voice a human could hear. How lucky to have your spirit animal sing back to you in the night, and fling your spirit up into the stars!
Crouch kept complaining, so it was best to stick around camp and pray to the sun for faster healing. Flex it in the sun bath over and over, ask Heather for one more rubbing. Rest it, she would say. Massage it, and feel exactly where it hurts, and how. Press starting from where it feels good, and very slowly press into the hurt. And keep it in the sun as much as you can.
So he went down to the riverside, where the sun blazed down and bounced off the water too. The sand was warm under him, and it felt like the sun was kissing him.
So when Sage showed up on the bank by herself, and sat by him, he tried kissing her too. He leaned toward her, and saw she saw what he was up to, and then saw the eager look come into her eye, and seeing that he fell in love with her. Again. So many times it had happened, ever since they were little children, and this time his spurt was hard, and she rubbed it as they kissed until he spurted, and in the moments of kissing, when he could remember to do it, he rubbed her little vixen until she too spasmed, scrunched over her pulsing belly and squeaking into his neck.