We only have to break through the sky
And take a bag with us,
And kidnap summer and bring it back.
So they decided to do that.
To break a hole in the sky
They put a leech to it, to bite that first hole.
Then next wolverine clawed through that little hole,
And while he was at it
He pulled through a seal skin to use as a bag.
Once on the summer side, wolverine found
All the people were away from home,
And he started to stuff summer into the seal bag
To take it back to the animal side.
But there was an old man there tending the fire,
An old man not as stupid as some I know,
And he said to wolverine, Don’t take all of it
Or it will be winter all the time here,
And all the people here will freeze.
Just take part of it with you, then it will go back and forth.
So wolverine brought back part of summer to the animal side,
And broke the bag open and all the summer things came out.
Pretty soon the snow melted and they had a summer too.
So now when the animals have summer,
The people have winter. But when people have summer,
The animals have their winter again.
So it goes, back and forth, winter on one side,
Summer on the other. Every time the animals bust the bag,
All the summer comes out.
— Fine for them, Thorn remarked. But tonight we’re just going to be cold.
— You still have to tell the story, Heather said.-What kind of a shaman are you?
Thorn did not reply.
As they took a day’s rest to wait out the storm, Loon saw Sage talking to Hawk again, and he could see the interest there in both of them. After that, when they continued north and west down the Lir valley’s east ridge, he thought about it, and what Heather had said about jealousy and envy, and when they came to the next river crossing, he helped Ducky across. She was the best-looking of their women after Sage, indeed many called her the beauty, because of her rounded figure, which was indeed a little ducklike, even now that she had grown up. Sage would not care about this, he judged; but it would be possible also to ask Ducky to take Moss’s spear thrower back to him, now that Loon was finished carving a horse’s head into it. Moss always camped next to Hawk, and when Ducky took him his spear thrower, Hawk would see her, and they would talk for a while. And indeed it happened just that way. This pleased Loon. He thought something might come of it.
The ridges got lower, and the ridge trails passed now between valley bogs that were often covered with moss. The women plucked a lot of it and took it with them.
Then it got stormy again, a warmer storm, wet and windy. Weather really mattered when they were on their trek. They didn’t want to lay by any more days, so they put their capes over their sacks, and over the kids being carried, and hiked on underneath ever-taller black-bottomed thunderheads, enduring the wind and the occasional pummeling of hail. When thunder rumbled to the west they made camp fast and hunkered down in it. Getting the fire going was hard, keeping their beds dry was hard. In so many ways, rain was worse than snow.
Thorn, perhaps stung by Heather’s words, held his hands out to the fire when it got going and intoned,
The shadow of the night spreads gloom,
It blows from the north.
The ground is wet and cold.
Hail, coldest of seeds,
Falls upon the earth
And makes life miserable for poor puny people.
The next day, walking north and west, they came to where a knob on the ridge they were walking gave them a view to the great salt sea. Always so vast, with a sunbeaten blue unlike the sky or anything else. An awesome sight.
The ridge trail turned right and headed straight north, running along the hills edging a flat coastal plain that stretched to the great salt sea. The hill route was easy walking, with occasional knolls providing high points to camp on and keep a good lookout. The biggest problem was crossing the rivers that here and there cut between the hills, flowing west toward the great salt sea. But over the years a number of rafts had been built, used, and then pulled up on these rivers’ banks at the best crossing points. So they could usually paddle across on these.
This year when they came to the first big river, they found that their crossing point had been dammed by a log jam, a truly enormous log jam consisting of many scores of logs, most of them giant tree trunks, and all wedged together like the branches of a beaver dam, but much bigger.
— Big Beaver must have done this, Thorn said.
There were many stories about Big Mother Muskrat, the mother of all the muskrats, who lived in her lake on the way to the ice caps; and the log jam did look like the work of a beaver twenty times normal size, so they laughed at Thorn’s joke. However this log jam had gotten started, now it was snagging every floating tree swept downstream, so that it was always growing on its upstream side. It was hard to see what would ever move it, except the rotting of the trees, and since new ones were arriving so much faster than the old ones could rot, it seemed like it might last forever, like the Stone Bison over their river.
Carefully they walked over this new dam, stepping from one stripped battered log to the next: up, down, over, holding the little ones by the hand, hefting them over branches that blocked the way. They followed Schist’s lead, which he marked with ties of red yarn, and the route was solid; not a single log moved under them. They might as well have been walking on fallen logs on the forest floor, even though through the many holes underfoot they could see the river bubbling west. It was strange and beautiful, and they talked about it all that night by their fire.
Still farther north, out on the coastal plain itself, the kind of landscape features they used around their home camp to locate themselves were no longer to be found, so they spoke of their route in ways that at home they would only use to talk about the wind: they headed north, on low land to the east of the great salt sea.
Overhead, shifting lines of geese spear-tipped the way for them, also heading north. It was the twelfth day of the seventh month now, and every living thing on earth was moving, it seemed, including them. There was a thrill in that you could feel in your spine. SUMMER. They woke at dawn and ate by the fire, packed up, went downstream to shit and pee, gathered the little ones up one way or another, and headed north. The morning moment of taking off was as effortful and squawky as the geese when they flapped and ran over a lake to get off water into the air. There were many sharp words from Schist as he got them on their way, but also encouragements, and direct help to those who were lagging. Something about him made his encouragements more encouraging than other people’s. He was good at making you want to do what you hadn’t wanted to do.
The rest of the day was a matter of walking north, with some young men tapped to bring up the rear. Loon was happy to do that. His bad leg was not so bad when going at the pace of the pack, across a coastal steppe. Clumps of grass and stretches of bog covered the flat land, with shallow ravines full of low bushes and gnarled little trees. There was a lot of old snow still on the ground, so soft and suncupped in the afternoons that it was hard to walk on it. The trail stayed slightly higher than the bogs, sometimes on low bluffs overlooking the great salt sea, other times inland at the first real rise, running from ford to ford over the rivers. It had been a snowy year, and some of these fords were running too high to walk across, and they had to find the old rafts if they could. This year the rivers here seemed to have swept them all away, so they had to make new ones. While some of them made these rafts out of driftwood, a few of the young men would run upstream to see if they could find something to eat; this was so seldom successful that they came to understand how much they relied on traps and snares at home. So they set snares every night, but snares worked better when they had more time. During the day hunts, they tried to come back with some eggs or mushrooms at least. The truth was, they were all still hungry. The ducks, delicious though they were, were not enough.