But the farther north they walked, the less the land held. The rivers had to provide, if anything was going to; but these rivers were not yet full of their salmon and sea trout, coming back home to die. One of the fords worked as a fish weir, and there were signs on both banks that it was often frequented; but they saw no one this time.
When the seventh full moon came, they were at the river called Deer Ford. This was the moon when the caribou were going to arrive nearby, at the western end of their annual trek. In effect these caribou and the people of Wolf pack made treks from different winter homes and converged here.
This year the caribou were nowhere to be seen, however. Thorn warned the pack that it might take longer in such a snowy year, and they would just have to be patient and spend the time making a good chute to run their caribou through. That was all very well, and they set to the task with spirit, but they were again getting down to the last of their food. It was just as well when it came to the nuts, as they were beginning to go beyond the satisfying oddness of their winter fermentation, to something truly rancid; and the pungent liquid fat they had in their sealskin bags was taking on the taste of the bags. They needed fresh meat, like the ducks but more of it. Hopefully it would be coming soon.
One night while they huddled around in the smoke of the smudge fire of birch fungus, which was the only thing that would hold off the mosquitoes, Thorn went into one of his vision trances, first eating his mushroom and artemisia preparation, then vomiting like Heather’s cat, then lying back in the beginning of his trance, snorting and muttering. No one bothered him as he lay there spirit traveling.
He came back to them the next morning, and said the caribou appeared to be less than a week away, but it was hard to judge when looking down from so high in the sky. In any case they only had to get through a few more days.
Then wolves began to appear on the ridgelines of the low hills upstream.-See, Thorn said.-They’re here to tell us the caribou have almost arrived.
— They’re here in hope, Heather said.-They’re saying to themselves, the humans are here, so the caribou must be coming.
— Well of course, Thorn said.-That’s only right.
Wolves and humans were cousins, just like bears and porcupines, or beavers and muskrats. Wolves had taught people to hunt and to talk. They were still the better singers by far, and hunters too for that matter. What people had taught wolves in return was a matter of dispute, and depended on what stories were told. How to be friends? How to double-cross and backstab? The stories were divided on this.
Then one evening at the end of the twilight, with the ribbon of the river next to them the lightest thing on the dark land, a great horned owl flew over hooting its hoo, hoo, which means yes.
Thorn stood and shouted, — They’re here! The owl saw them, and I can feel their hooves in the ground!
No one else felt anything, and the land remained dark and empty, the light band of the river pouring through it. The moony band on the river surface was the only movement, the river’s chuckling the only sound. Thorn sat back down grumbling.-You’ll see, you’ll see. The owl always knows.
And in the morning they came. The first ones ran up and crashed into the river and swam to the other side, then some stopped in the big meadow inside the swing of the river to nuzzle into old grass and new, both revealed by the melting snow. Caribou ate better in winter than summer, and so now were fat, and still wearing their long winter coats.
While on their summer trek, the caribou were always in a terrible hurry. They followed each other in loose lines, speeding up in sudden little panics, and hesitating impatiently if another line cut in front of them, or just surging into them, impelled to keep moving. There were many scores of them, filling the meadow and the low hills around it, hurrying and hurrying, as if they had lost all restraint and could do nothing else. When they finally did stop to forage and look around, they seemed surprised and uneasy to find themselves not in a hurry. But here was their summer home. They migrated west and east, unlike the birds who migrated north and south. And when they arrived at their summer destination, there to meet them every summer were mosquitoes, deer flies, wolves, and humans, each of these packs dangerous and full of pain for the caribou, and therefore to be flicked away, or avoided, or faced up to, in lines of broad-chested bulls with lowered heads and sharp antlers. Why they came nobody was sure, but it was said that their summer food grew first here and they came for that.
The Wolf pack’s method for trapping and killing caribou almost always happened in the same area and the same way. Thorn sometimes said this was the way it had been done since the old time, but on other occasions claimed it had been his own idea, which had come to him as a child, watching the men running around the steppe chasing down the beasts one by one.
In this region the steppe was flat as always, but with low lines of hills running north, and boulders scattered all over. Many were too big to move, but there were lines of smaller stones, and these lines sometimes came in twos. The Wolves chose one of these paired rubble lines, as they always did, and cleaned up the ground between the two knee-high walls until they had made an inviting passageway.
The caribou as they arrived in their scores crossed the land somewhat like flocks of geese, in loose ribbons of twenty or so. They joined other ribbons or separated as the land shoved them this way or that. They were all rushing to get somewhere, and none of them knew where. Considering the distance they had come, which was many days to the north and east, so far that no one knew for sure where they wintered, it looked to the humans like they were hoofing along as fast as they possibly could, maybe even faster than could be sustained. They were strong and fast creatures, fore-weighted like a rhinoceros or hyena or bison, with heavy shoulders and a long heavy neck and head, and big antlers on the males. They seemed to hurry at least in part to catch up with their heads before they tipped and fell forward.
In that hasty careless state, so unlike their usual wariness, indeed as if they were possessed by some spirit not theirs, it was relatively easy to spook a ribbon of them into the chute the pack had made with its paired walls. And at the western end of the chute, under a small drop which the caribou normally would have jumped down without any problem, and so would not be afraid of, the pack had placed some poles across rocks, then also some antlers, until they had built a trap line that was certain to trip some of the beasts when they tried to pass over it.
When the trap was ready, the men went out with wolf skins on their heads in groups of three, and began running around trying to spook a line of running caribou into the eastern end of the chute. This took some crouched running and frenzied leaping on the part of these men, wolf heads flopping on their foreheads to give the caribou that first alarming profile on which they made their snap judgments, like every other animal. Meanwhile the people not out there hid behind the low rock walls, listening for the thump of hooves on the sod that would announce the beasts’ arrival. Loon stayed with this second group, as his bad leg was hurting a little, and the runners often had to get crazy to spook the beasts. So he sat there with the rest of the pack in ambush, salivating heavily as he listened for the signal whistles or the thumping in the sod.
Then the thumping sound came, and the hoarse breathing that one always forgot year to year, and the unhappy neighing of the first beasts as they tried to stop rather than risk a jump down onto the poles, and their squeals as they were pushed over from behind by other beasts; then Loon stood with the rest who were in ambush, his javelin end cupped onto his spear thrower and his arm raised.