So festival fights were almost always shouting matches. This was part of what made Thorn’s attack on Loon’s hand so shocking. It was almost as if Thorn had been trying to end his painting, to take away the part of being a shaman Loon wanted the most. It didn’t make sense to Loon, and he sucked down bowls of Heather’s spruce tea, and rubbed the finger with a salve she gave him, and thought it over.
To get what you want, get what you need. When the fire is hot enough, there is no smoke. No fear when in your place. Do not allow anger to poison you. Each person is his own judge. It is not good for anyone to be alone. Everyone who does well must have dreamed something. The one who tells the stories rules the world. Burnt child, fire dread. A starving man will eat the wolf. A wily mouse should breed in the cat’s ear. Naught venture naught gain. A friend is never known until a man have need.
Wait, I see something: two red eyes. A frightened old man.
Well, there were so many old sayings, and many of them cut against each other, like blades on the opposite sides of a tree. Eventually the tree falls one way or the other. But in the meantime you still don’t know what to do.
After a while Loon found what he thought might be a way forward. He gathered himself to attempt it, and wandered over to the low hilltop where the shamans always met.
The mass of ash in their bonfire was nearly out, mere pink gleams poking out from strange clinkers, remnants of the weird things that shamans threw into their fire. There were about a dozen of the old men there now, looking even more shattered than everyone else at the festival. They had more endurance for excess, having practiced it more, but as they mashed hard at the eight eight, and dosed themselves with smoke and mushrooms and dancing and flagellation and sleeplessness, they eventually overwhelmed even their own great endurance. Now they were lying around still wearing their animal heads, canted over their faces to cover them from the sun, so that they looked more than ever clowns and fools, frazzled, drunk, splayed out like lions after a kill. Thorn was among them, as flattened as the rest under his bison head. He stared at Loon stone-faced from beneath it.
He and his fellow sorcerers had so painted their bodies with red dots and crescents and wavy ribbons and basketry patterns that they were hard to look at. Their spirit voyages the night before would have cast them out into unions with Wood Frog, Birch Woman, Raven, the Northern Lights, and so on; they had all left their bodies and flown far above or below, become mixes of themselves and their animal spirits. Now it looked like they had not yet completely returned.
Some of them were croaking out an insult contest while still lying flat as moss.
— He’s worth just as much as a hole in the snow.
— He’s so full of shit, if you pinched him your fingers would get brown.
— He’s so lazy he married a pregnant woman.
In the scattered laughter at that last, Loon sat down among them. He stirred their fire, put on a few dung patties and a branch or two.
— Welcome, youth, one of the shamans growled.
Loon nodded his thanks.-This is the story of the swan wife, he said, and stood up and began immediately with the first lines of the old story, which was one of the first Thorn had ever taught him, and thus the one he remembered best. Those first twenty lines seemed to have filled his entire capacity for remembering stories. But his flute was carved with images from the rest of the story, and they would help him remember. He could stop to blow a few notes, and see right where he was.
A man was son of the chief no one knew
And he had no marten skins to wear.
He went out from his village one day
Following a loon that called to him,
And over the ridge he came on a lake
And there on the bank lay a loon’s feathers
And in the water a girl was bathing.
He sat on the loonfleck of black and white
And said he would not give the girl her clothes
Unless she agreed to marry him, which she did.
And he took her back to the village
Where no one knew his father was chief
And introduced his new wife to them all.
And she was welcomed but would eat nothing,
Bear lips, deer marrow, none would do for her
Until an old grandmother steamed some marsh grass
And the girl happily gulped it all down.
The villagers were hungry too, and seeing that,
The girl promised them food, but every day
She brought them piles of marsh grass
Wet from the lake bottom, and she was wet too.
And people said, She thinks very highly of goose food
And instantly she decided to leave.
She put on the loon skin and flew away,
Looning the cry loons cry when they’re sad.
Hearing it her husband was desolated.
He wandered the village crying all the time,
And asked the old man who lived out of camp,
What can I do to get my wife back?
That old man told him, You have married
A woman whose mother and father
Are not of this world, as you should have known.
Loon went on to describe the three helpers the old man then sent the husband to find, to help him get the things that he needed to rescue his wife. Loon particularly emphasized the encounter with Mouse Woman, enjoying how the little creature scuttling around the fallen leaves on the floor of the forest was actually a big headwoman when you got inside her house, a power bigger than the old man, or indeed anyone else in the story. He knew quite a few of the shamans there would recognize Heather in this description of Mouse Woman, Thorn foremost among them: all the little things she knew that made her bigger, like knowledge of poisons, or what roots you could eat. In so many ways it was Heather who kept them all alive, and not these raven-shitted sorcerers sweating in the light of day.
Loon made sure that point was made clear in all the trials the husband successfully overcame, with Mouse Woman crucial to each, until finally the husband was reunited with his wife, in the loon village on the lake above the sky, in the next world over. The various parts of the story came to Loon well, he hardly had to look at his flute; all the threes of threes pulsed through him in a chant, until he came to a good end:
She was happy to see him,
And after that they did everything together.
And as to whether they stayed that way,
Or whether the husband tired of the sky
And fell back to earth,
Dropped by a raven who didn’t care where he landed,
That is a story for the next eight eight
Or some other eight eight in the time to come.
And then he stopped and nodded to them, clapping lightly to thank them for listening.
— Ha, Thorn, one of the other old men croaked, raising his head from the ground.-Your apprentice is well taught, he sounds just like you! Always the heavy moral, always the cliffhanger ending!