He was full of food from the night before, he was well rested, and unashamedly satiated in almost every respect. His talk atop the cliff with Tonton Annajaka the night before nagged at him, though. Of the different peoples on earth at that moment, what gave the Black Mountain peoples any less of a right to a future? Chance? The hand of some indifferent god? The random path of a rogue meteor? Perhaps it was that same god who had sent Gordon back to correct an earlier mistake.
What, then, was at risk if these clans escaped the coming devastation? Television? Nasal decongestants? Pizza? Bach? Thousands of years of religious wars? He sighed and rubbed his eyes, pushing all of it from his head as he heard something. After a moment he glanced to his right, then his left, wondering where Pela was and what had awakened him. She wasn’t in the main room and she wasn’t in the attached smaller room in which she made her furs. It sounded like a man’s voice, though. It was Ghaf yodeling from the Men’s Ledge.
Throwing the fur covers aside, Gordon got to his feet, pulled on his new fur pants and boots, his Coyote shirt, bearskin poncho, and hat. Moving aside the heavy fur curtain that covered the opening to Pela’s house, he stepped beyond the thick sod walls, out into the cold morning air and listened to the hunter’s call to the village. The night in men’s company had been passed, Jatka had slain his bear with a magical potion of his invention that eases soreness in aching muscles, which really works, said the hunter in an aside. Prayers had been made, and Jatka was now a man.
Gordon looked around at the village houses. He seemed to be the only one listening to the hunter’s news. The men and women of Red Cliff were down by the river standing on the north shore silently watching a tree. Gordon squinted and saw that someone—his bride—was high in the branches, singing out her own news. He could just make it out: the wedding night described blow-by-blow. Gordon felt his face grow hot, took a few steps forward, listened, then laughed and moved a few steps more.
He reached a large house with walls of wattle and daub and saw Mahu standing in the doorway listening intently to Pela. “God’n my gift from Tana,” she yodeled and again she went on to describe, touch by poke, the consummation. “Thirty and eight!” she shouted like a crowing rooster. “Thirty and eight!” She made the signs with her hands and the yoni’s companion no longer drooped. As she went on, elaborating on her theme, Gordon glanced back and saw Mahu and the Clan Father’s first wife Keila looking back, wide-eyed, mouths open. Behind him he heard running and turned to see, fresh from his recent appearance atop the Men’s Ledge, Hunter Ghaf running toward him, a most intent expression on his face.
“Oh, hell,” said Gordon. “Now everyone’ll want to know how I did it.” He made tracks for Pela’s place.
“God’n? God’n?” called Pela from outside the door.
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. Pulling the door curtain aside, he saw piled before Pela’s door what he expected: game, beads, dried fruit, jerked meat, yams, presents of leather and wood and shaped flint, each one carrying a mark. In a semi-circle beyond their gifts stood Gifted Ones, men and women, waiting for their miracles. Pela looked around at the wealth and said, “God’n, they want—”
“I know what they want,” he said. He held out his palms facing the gifts. “Take them back, I beg you. Take them back. There is nothing I can do.”
Mahu pushed through the supplicants, all his wives in his wake. “God’n,” he said, “you make me strong.” Mahu placed a brace of fine hunting spears in a prominent place among the gifts. Behind the Clan Father his three wives nodded eagerly.
Gordon held his hands out, “And if I can do nothing, Mahu?”
The father of the Black Mountain Clan faced Gordon. “Ask Wuja. Ask your Coyote. Try.”
After a deep breath and heartfelt sigh, Gordon nodded. “I will try,” he said to the Clan Father. “No promise, Mahu.” To Mahu’s wives and the others assembled in front of Pela’s door he said, “No promises.”
Gordon was inside Pela’s house shaking his head in despair when Jatka pushed the curtain aside and leaned through the door. “Father, did you hear Ghaf’s call? I am raised to manhood.”
Gordon went to the door, placed a hand on Jatka’s shoulder, and said, “I am proud of you, Jatka. Come.”
Jatka entered and gestured with his head toward the door. “Why all the gifts, Father? What do they want?”
“My son, the medicine man,” said Gordon, “what can be done to make the men strong again?” He wiggled a droopy finger at Jatka.
“Nothing,” he answered apologetically. “Nothing that I know. Tonton has no answer.” He pointed with his thumb toward the door. “Is that what they all want?”
“Yes.”
“Why ... did you and Pela—last night, did you?” and Jatka formed the familiar hand configuration representing successful copulation.
“Yes.”
Jatka’s eyebrows arched as he held his hands out to his sides. “How?”
“That is the question,” answered Gordon.
Over the next few days, as Gordon pondered the things that determine male potency, he learned the news of Pela’s wedding night had raced across the snows by foot, fire, and horse to all of the clanhouses in the lands surrounding Black Mountain. In a few days more, Gifted Ones from Big Tree and Cleft Mountain came into camp. Representatives of Many Horses and Yellow Claw clans made their bids for the return of youth, as well. Black Shoulders and Big Snake emissaries arrived days later, offering prayers to Wuja that Gordon had not run out of whatever magic potion it was.
Pela’s house became surrounded by desperate men and women in their thirties and forties demanding that Gordon reveal a secret that, apparently, was a secret even to him. Still, he could find nothing that explained why men so young became so thoroughly impotent. They ate the same and did the same as the younger men. Jatka wondered if it was the plan of Wuja. Once a man has fathered enough children, the plan has been fulfilled and there is no longer any need for virility. Everyone knew Wuja’s plan and had, up until now, accepted it. Gordon, however, appeared to have found a loophole.
Finally, when even younger men began showing up, their arms filled with gifts, hoping for some way to escape fate, Gordon put some nuts and jerked meat into his pack, declared to all a need to commune with Coyote, and then climbed the cliff trail to find a place where he could think. It was a huge cliff with many trails, many ledges, and many niches cut by ancient winds and waters. As he explored the high cliff, he took care not to be observed from the village or from anywhere else. The object was solitude.
The place he eventually found he almost missed. Its entrance was hidden from below by scrubby cedars and by brush and snow choking the narrow opening. Two places he could see where the brush had been tied into bundles. Two more places he saw where the snow had been pushed up into the opening by hands. The snow had been swept to remove such finger marks, but inexpertly. He could see light through the brush, so the space beyond was not a cave. Standing back against one of the thin cedars, he looked up at the cliff wall. In a moment he found sufficient handholds to scale the four-meter high wall to the next ledge, the cedars hiding him from below.
Once on the ledge, he noted an overhang that sheltered both the ledge and the space beyond the brush-filled opening. The surface of the ledge where he stood had also been swept, removing foot impressions, but also the snow. He studied the place. It was a good perch for a sniper, he thought. There was one escape route through a cleft in the side of the overhang and another deep in back of the overhang. It was a natural chimney. When he checked it out he found it led up through the rock to a spot on the south face just below Tonton’s special place on the cliff’s top. Back behind the cedars, he looked over the village and the southern hills. He had a clear field of fire covering both sides of the river. With the proper weapon he could wipe out a sizable portion of the village. He nodded to himself. What he couldn’t do was restore male virility.