When Loon sat back down, and began to nod off over his little drum, the dancers and bonfire flames blurring together in his eyes, so that he was about to crawl off to sleep, or simply to tip over and sleep where he sat, Sage grabbed him by the arm and pulled him off into the darkness over the hill. He had been just far enough away from the fire that no one would necessarily have seen them going off. They fell onto Sage’s fur skirt spread over the cold ground and started kissing wildly, and though Sage didn’t let him inside her, which would have shocked him in any case, they rubbed each other as they kissed, and Loon whispered, — I love you, in her ear, and she squeaked, and they came at the same time, laughing a little afterward, immensely pleased with themselves. Sage gave him a last nip and a light slap to the face and pulled her skirt from under him and was off into the night. Loon proceeded to his bedding, and saw she had gone back to the dance by the fire, still full of spirit, indeed it looked not at all unlikely that she would soon drag some other boy off into the night to ravish. Loon was both pleased and displeased at that thought, a little aroused, too tired to see the harm in it. He lay down and fell asleep feeling gloriously empty and full.
It took them many days to cut up their caribou and smoke the meat. They worked hard, because the eight eight was coming soon, and by then they needed to have finished and hiked the way east to the festival grounds. So it was caribou all day and all night.
Favorite parts of roast head while they work:
Jowls, nose, ears, tongue, lips, lower jaw.
The lower lip is forbidden to all but old men
Whose lips already slack in that same way.
Brain for eating or tanning hides.
Neck meat eaten, except for the first joint,
Forbidden to all but old men
Because caribou are so slow to turn their heads.
Scapula dried and used to make the caribou call.
Shoulder meat eaten, leg muscles eaten.
The shinbones used to scrape fat from hides.
Feet boiled and the tissue eaten by old people only.
Leg joints pulverized to make a grease.
Backbone meat eaten, spinal cord eaten.
Back sinews dried and used for sewing
Wherever one had a need for strength.
Pelvis meat cooked or dried for eating,
A real delicacy; tail the same, but for the old only.
Upper hind leg excellent, lower hind legs too sinewy.
Leg marrow eaten, joints used for grease.
Rib meat the best of all, dried or cooked.
Brisket tender, prepared by boiling.
Belly meat dried or boiled a long time,
Another favorite delicacy of some.
Lungs and liver, cooked and eaten with meat.
Omasum boiled and eaten.
Lower intestine turned inside out,
Boiled with the fat inside, happily eaten.
Kidneys and heart, roasted and eaten.
The bag that holds the heart, dried and used as a bag.
Blood boiled with meat and eaten.
Milk in the udders drunk fresh on the spot.
Body fat prized, dried or cooked or rendered,
And eaten as a sauce on meat;
Saved and carried in a sealskin bag.
The fly larvae found in sores on the skins, eaten.
The antlers used for awls, needles, spoons, platters,
Handles, beads, spear throwers, buttons and tabs
And hooks and all kinds of things.
Hides tanned and used for clothing, also winter boots,
Snowshoe lashings, snares, nets, rope.
Smoking the meat was essential to preserve it, and a lot of them worked at building a long fire, creating a hot bed of embers so that green wood or wet dung would burn and their smoke rise with the heat, passing up and through strips of rib and haunch meat strung on thick hide lines, which were completely covered with meat chunks so that they would not themselves burn. They smoked as much meat as they could carry, while also eating as much as they could. It took a bit of care to keep from making oneself sick by eating too much fat at one time, and they all groaned a bit when they had to go downstream to the shitting ground, and on their return. It was hard on the gut to eat so much meat, hard on the asshole to shit so much shit. Despite that they ate with a real will. There is a hunger inside hunger, as the saying had it. This inner hunger kept them eating long past the point where their bellies were round and hard. They all wanted to get some fat on them for the hard months next spring, which right now they remembered so well. They sent the kids out to the berry brambles around their perch to gather berries to add to their meals and stew into the mash that would get them drunk at the festival.
The new moon of the eighth month came on them fast, and they were all anxious to get to the festival. The festival site was a few days’ walk away, an immense meadow on the southern edge of the caribou steppe, surrounded by a low ring of hills that became part of the encampment. As always, they now had many big strips of smoked meat, also sinews, ligaments, hides, bags of grease and of liquefied fat: they had more than they could carry. But they were going to drag it.
They found alder thickets in the steppe’s shallow river ravines, and cut many three-year-old shoots, long and straight and springy, and lashed them together to make travois, which could haul loads over the steppe much larger than what could be carried on one’s back. When the travois were lashed together and loaded, the young men and women got in the harnesses and did the hauling, while the elders dawdled behind them, joking about how easy it was to get kids to haul when the eight eight lay at the end of the path; which led to the jokes about how impossible it would be to keep up with them, if they didn’t have travois tied to them to slow them down. Same jokes every year, same everything; and that was very, very satisfying.
They came to the festival site from the west, and from a long way off could see the low hills surrounding the site, each hill topped by a cluster of big spruce trunks, stripped of branches and bark and stood top end down, so that their root balls waved at their tops like hair or antlers, with animal skulls hanging from every other root end. Thorn claimed to remember the emplacement of these tree trunks in the time of his childhood. It was stirring to see them first pop over the horizon, and then as they approached become a strange sight, the mark of their meeting, and of their existence as more than just packs out on their own. They could hear the drumming from a long way off, first the low thunk of hollowed tree trunks, a sound which seemed to come out of the ground, and then the hide drums of various sizes, battering the air and quickening the blood. FESTIVAL!