Loon’s clothes were well made and clean. Loon had stitched them, but for the most part Heather had cut the parts, and she had her own style. Loon liked the way his clothes felt and looked, and when compared to the makeshift equipment of his wander, he felt superbly comfortable and well dressed.
He wore a woven reed cap that had a good sun brim, and a strap to tie it under his chin in a wind. He had made it himself and would wear it until his abuse wrecked it, after which he would weave another one.
On his back, outside everything else, he wore a woven reed cape, which took such a beating from water and sun that he needed a new one every summer. He folded and stuffed it in his sack when he did not need it, and that too was hard on it.
Under that he wore a parka made of caribou hide, with ruffs of marten and marmot fur around the hood and bottom and sleeve ends.
His middle was covered by a skirt of deer hide turned inward, with a crotchpiece of rabbit fur cradling his pizzle when it was cold.
He had chaps of caribou hide, but kept them in his pack except during the bitterest cold or the thorniest brakes; he liked his legs free as much as possible.
He often went barefoot, but his shoes, worn on rough ground or during long walks, were some of Heather’s best, with bearskin bottoms and deerskin uppers, big enough to take a layer of fine straw stuffed in their tops when he wanted that warmth.
Over his arms were the hide straps of his backsack, and in his sack were his fire kit, some duff and punk and fungus tinder, an ember bole, and some bearskin butt pads. In the fold of his waist belt were flint and antler points and needles, a burin, some blades, a tassel of leather strings looped in a bone ring, a blade retoucher, and some assorted lucky pebbles and teeth, including his deer’s teeth.
These things were really all one needed, along with a javelin and spear thrower. One could become a traveler with just them. They took all that away from a boy going out on his wander, supposedly to make him prove he could get by on his own; but now it occurred to Loon that if the boys were allowed to leave with their things, a lot of them might never come back again.
Loon made up a riddle of his own:
Wait, I see something:
My head is covered by reeds.
Marten and marmot make my fur.
Reindeer and saiga cover my legs.
I walk on a bear’s back with deer on my feet.
I can break stone cut wood start fire,
Etch bone paint cliffs glue cuts,
Kill any animal except one,
Sing like a bird drum like thunder.
What am I?
I am Loon the wanderer.
ELGA
On the seventh day of the seventh month they began their summer trek, walking up Upper Valley and over its head onto the moor to the north, then over three low divides into the valley of the Lir. Everyone carried a sack on their back; some of these were lashed to wooden frames strapped over their shoulders, to take on heavier loads and the new kids too small to have a name.
River valleys and their feeder canyons were often thick with brush or blocked by boulder fields, so they walked almost entirely on ridge trails. These had obviously been used forever, they were so well marked. Always in the land they crossed, when you succeeded in finding the best way you would find a trail there already, in some places trod ankle deep. When the trail ran over rocks it would be a matter of cairns marking the way, cairns ranging from two or three stacked stones to rockpiles taller than a person, and including many carefully stacked stone figures of one sort or another. One also saw bits of colored yarn tied to branches, in places where there were trees.
On the last pass before the head of the Lir, they came to a spring that poured out of a broad spot in the pass itself. In most of the summers they visited it, its water ran down into the valleys on both sides. Around this double outlet spring the meadow was trampled by hoofprints and paw prints. They drank there, and then dropped into the Lir valley, for the spring was considered dangerous to camp at.
So in the waning of the day, near the end of the long summer evening, they came to their traditional first night’s camp. It was the same every year, unless something untoward happened to slow them down. This first camp had an open prospect to the north and west, and the late sun slanted off the nearest ice cap, which from here loomed well over the ridge to the west. This was the northernmost of the four ice caps that rested on the highest parts of the highland to the west of the Urdecha. Even in summer these ice caps stood there, smooth snowy white hills, with parts of them the creamy blue of bare ice. The two smallest ones farther south they called the Ice Tits, the larger ones to the west and north, the Big Ice Caps. Whenever the people of Wolf pack saw these big ones, they knew they were on the way to the salmon and caribou, so the sight always filled them with the sudden thrill of distance, of knowing they were in that moment of the year and on their trek over the great big world, like all the other animals in summer, journeying from one place to another in search of their livelihoods.
On the third day of their journey, low dark clouds poured over the western horizon on a cold wind. The ridge trails were headed mostly downhill now, and mainly northward. Once they got to the north end of these ridges they would be on the open land of the steppe, but now they were still in the hills, on an exposed ridge trail, and this summer storm was coming in on a raw wet wind. So they stopped early that afternoon and dropped into a protected high canyon to the east, and chopped up branches and made a shelter in a grove of oak and hemlock and white spruce and yew. It was a big storm for summertime, but these things happened.
When they were all tucked out of the wind, under a woven spruce branch shelter, they rekindled their fire from embers they had carried from the previous night’s fire, and huddled and ate some of the last of their nuts and the newly caught ducks of this summer, delicious straight from the fire. Schist and Ibex and several other men went out setting snares and looking in likely dens. Thorn and Heather took over the fire, and, given the look of the night to come, laid it long and hot, to build up a bed of embers to sleep by. The clouds rolled in thicker and thicker, until it looked like evening all afternoon. When night finally fell, little chips of snow flew sideways on the wind, sailing over the branches of their grove and the smoke of the fire. It was going to be a stormy night.
— The unspeakable one should tell the story of how the animals got summer, Heather said to Thorn.-That’s one he always tells on this walk.
— You tell it, Thorn said unhappily. His bones hurt him in any unexpected cold.
— In the beginning the sky came right down to water, Heather said in her clipped harsh tones, as if she were recounting a story she didn’t approve of.
It was winter all the time.
Squirrel mama came out of the tree crying.
Went down to the forest floor to collect her frozen babies.
That kept on happening to her.
Winter is too cold, she said to the other animals.
Every once in a while all my babies just freeze.
Raven said, we should steal summer from the summer people.
Summer is on the other side of the sky.