The others laughed. Thorn mimed a glower, but he was pleased too, Loon could see.-The highest trees catch the most wind, he reminded his needlers with scorn, and all the shamans groaned appreciatively. It looked like none of them wanted to take on Thorn in a put-down contest, as his tongue could be truly blistering. And his apprentice had just made an adequate entry into their misbegotten little clan, so no one would badger him much on that day.
Loon kept his eyes on the ground. Possibly it was going to work out. His bleary-eyed audience was now grinning their horrible pleasure.
Then full moon was past and the festival too, and people packed their travois until the poles bowed under the weight, and set out every way the wind blows. The Wolves went south and east, toward the ice caps and home beyond.
Elga was quiet on their trek, and spent more time with Heather and the women than with Loon. Often Loon saw her talking to Heather. She woke as early as anyone, and made fires and washed and cooked and cleaned and carried the babies whenever she could get a turn; she worked like a beaver woman. She seldom met the eyes of the pack’s men, but answered and smiled when spoken to. She took her turn in the harnesses of the travois and hauled longer than anyone else, and not in any suffering way, or as if to prove a point, but just because she didn’t seem to notice the travois dragging behind her. Strong. She was bigger than most of them, and although fatless in the way of midsummer, still solid. She’s like an elg, they said, they must have named her after her animal, it really fits. Hearing that made Loon happy: they saw her as he saw her, at least to that extent. But only he knew what she was like at night under the stars. So: Thorn was not happy; Sage was not happy; but Loon was happy.
On the trip home they stopped at the ford over the Joins-Lir river, and found the red salmon had already arrived.-Let your food come to you, the women sang as they wove and tied together some pole frameworks, and dug out the leather nets they kept buried under rocks near that ford, and the following day they netted twenties of salmon, a big catch. While they were drying their meat they killed three bears, including a stayawayfromit, as a warning to the other bears in the area to keep their distance. Loon helped Ibex and Hawk and a few others to break up the bears, while most of the rest of the pack chopped and dried the fish. The men who had killed the bears gave Loon a bear penis to eat, laughing at him and saying it was clear he needed it.-You’re looking pretty haggard man, she’s sucking you dry, you need to save some for the trail. The penis was chewy and tasted like kidneys.
Hawk was happy for him, and happy too, Loon supposed, at the removal of a rival for Sage. When they left the Joins-Lir, their travois heavier than ever, they trudged south and upstream on the trails running along the Lir. The travois were as heavy as could be pulled, and everyone over five years old pulled one. But that was the right way to come back from the summer trek, down off the moor into Loop Camp again, where they howled and got the houses back up and began settling back in.
THE HUNGER SPRING
Now they could occupy their fall days in eating, in finishing the smoking and drying of the caribou and salmon meat, in gathering and leaching nuts, plucking seeds and berries and leaves, and getting all the food properly stored. Also, while they sat around the fire, they made new clothes and tools, and new toys for the kids. Also went out trapping and hunting, especially for the ducks before they left. And did the fall initiations.
Once again Schist took on his most intent air. Pine nuts were spread on old deerskins in the sun for three days before being bagged for storage in cedar boxes, and every nut had to be inspected to see if there were any little breaks or insect holes marring their smooth surfaces. Dried meat and bags of oil were stored in pits floored with pine needles and covered with bark, dirt, and then stones. Thorn helped Schist and Thunder pack these supplies away, marking a stick like a yearstick with his counts, and calculating what they had against their needs for the coming winter. Schist would not be satisfied unless they had stored up an amount that would feed them all to the end of next spring. Almost certainly they would be able to trap some winter animals, indeed in some years the snowshoe hares were so common that they could almost have lived on them alone. But other years it wasn’t so. They had been through some hard springs, as Schist often reminded them. Thorn and Heather and all the older people of the pack were in agreement: better safe than sorry. Store is no sore. If they happened to waste some nuts by having too many, and could not eat them before they went bad, then they would have something to give if other packs came asking, or they could give them to the ravens at the end of the spring, with thanks for another year passed without hunger. Besides, it was more likely that they were going to end up counting nuts next spring, just as they had in this last one. Two score and three people ate a lot of food.
The women declared full moon of the tenth month to be Loon and Elga’s wedding day, and on that morning when the sun came over the hills they were all down by the river on the sand bank, Elga dressed in something from each of the other women in the tribe, with her hair braided around her head, so that she looked immensely taller than Loon, and more elgish than ever. Thunder and Bluejay and Heather and Sage presided, running the two through their oaths to each other and the pack in a quick singsong that nevertheless included the pack women’s promise to the groom that they would stab him to death if he ever mistreated his wife; and this was spoken by Sage, standing right in front of Loon and looking him in the eye with something like the wolves’ long stare. Loon shook that off, and also noted with relief that while Thorn had not said anything at all about this marriage, and wore a black look throughout the ceremony, he still put on his bison head and played his flute at the end, and through the day of dancing.
That night Loon and Elga took their bearskins to the edge of camp beyond Heather’s bed and mated through the night, pausing to nap or to talk.
After that Loon was completely lost in the night world of Elga and their mating. It was all that mattered to him. He ignored Thorn during the days, and went out on short hunts or to check traps, but often Elga came with him, and they interrupted whatever they were doing to lie down and kiss and get their clothes off and mate. Loon fell directly into a dream at certain things Elga did or said, things like her murmured, — I’m hungry for you. They got better and better at pleasuring each other, and he learned to feel the differences between his spurts through the course of the night, the way the first was so prongy and tingly, the third so deep and profound, a kind of soul-slinging into her. He could scarcely believe the seizure of love that came on them when they came together, the spurt and clench pulling them together so tightly, something that happened in their eyes looking at each other, in the way they clutched each other, the way they felt they were meant for each other, had found each other among all of Mother Earth’s many creatures, and would be happy in each other for as long as they lived, and were only sorry they would not live longer in such bliss, and each hoped to die first so as not to live beyond the other.
After moments like those, they lay next to each other intertwined, and sometimes talked. Loon felt a need to tell her everything that had ever happened to him that mattered, and he wanted to learn the same from her; and although she was still a quiet person, she sometimes pleased him by falling under a similar compulsion to tell her stories. She had been born into a pack that lived far to the east, she didn’t know how far, but had on the appearance of her monthlies been married out to a pack farther west, still well to the north and east of the Urdecha.