People of the Wolf (34 page)

To the south, the ice rose, white, sullen, to mix with the grayish clouds. His heart pounded in his breast. At the edges of his exhausted mind, a whispering of desire called, taunting, drawing. A high-pitched wail came faintly to his ears, drifting down over the southern ice. Ghosts? He strained to listen, but the blood rushing in his veins, the rasping breath in his windpipe, blotted the sound.

Below him, an undulating plain of snow-topped moraines and eskers mounded and rolled—tumbled waves of rock left by the retreating ice.

The stiffness out of his legs, he settled on a snow-encrusted rock, studying the gash cut by the Big River. Even now, when the Long Dark closed its freezing grip on the land, water roared and pitched, an incessant outpouring.

"So much."

The words died in his throat as something black and twisted rolled out, swirling in an eddy, catching on the rapids-washed rock. Curious, Wolf Dreamer worked his way down the polished top of the ridge, carefully moving along the piled boulders. Father Sun had dipped below the ragged mountain wall to the west by the time he picked his way through the treacherous rocks, some larger than a bull mammoth.

The dark spot swirled, battered, one horn broken
off
even with the skull. A leg had been violently ripped from the body-The reality remained.

"Buffalo! Did you come through underneath?" A giddy rush swept him as hopes taunted. "Somewhere, on the other side, there's a place where buffalo live." He swallowed hard, feeling tendrils of Wolf's promise twine through him.

Balancing, he leapt from rock to rock until he made it to the snagged buffalo. Grasping a torn hoof, he dragged the animal back, slipping and splashing in the frigid water.

"Maybe you didn't come underneath," he lamented, struggling to be realistic. "You could've been frozen here for hundreds of Long Darks."

While the cold water lapped his feet, he dragged the animal as far as he could toward shore, as far as the beast's dead weight could float. He wedged it against the current, snagging the gouged hide on a spike of wave-lapped rock.

Twilight glimmered brassy from the white crests of water rushing around his feet.

Heart beating, light failing, Wolf Dreamer used a chert flake from his pouch to cut open the gut cavity. Entraps bulged out in blue-gray ropes. He sliced open the paunch, green matter spilling into the water. A tapeworm twisted and wiggled before it disappeared in the sandy wash of icy water.

He dove for the worm, missing. "How long does a tapeworm live when it's frozen?" Fishing around in the paunch, he found a second, carefully catching it up. "Think," he gasped to himself, turning in the darkness. "Think how to find out."

He laid the parasite on the fresh dusting of snow, turning, dismembering the huge buffalo while his feet went numb in the cold water. Satisfied, he poked and prodded, finding nope of the deep joints frozen. They numbed his fingers, but still weren't as cold as they should have been had they been

trapped in the water under the ice. The gut, he thought, carried a slight trace of heat.

In the blackness, he turned back to the tapeworm. It had stuck to the snow, breaking in two as he lifted it. With some of the thin hide from the buffalo's groin, he bound up the parasite and turned his tracks for Heron's.

In his own mind, no doubt remained. In all their talks, Heron had never mentioned long-horned buffalo in the valley. No, this beast came from somewhere else . . .
beyond the ice.

Sitting beside a crackling fire in Heron's shelter, Wolf Dreamer stared at the tapeworm he'd thawed. He prodded it. Dead. His eyes raised to stare absently at one of the drawings on the rock. Beneath the soot stains and dust, he could make out the effigy. A web drawn in a spiral. A fist knotted in his gut, a curious shimmering hazing the edges of his vision,

Why did Heron draw that in red all those years ago? What does it mean? Why a web?
He shook his head vigorously, snapping his concentration back to the dead tapeworm.

Heron stretched out on her side across the fire, head propped on one hand, dark eyes watching him. Her long hair fell across her tan dress in silver and black strands that shimmered in the firelight. "What are you thinking?"

"That tapeworms don't live after they've been frozen."

"Then?"

"Then there's no way the buffalo could have been frozen."

"What else did you notice? "

He frowned at her, meeting and holding her probing eyes. Was this another test? "His paunch was full of green stuff, grass, plants, a couple of late-blooming flowers. His summer coat was just beginning to thicken. . . . and the tapeworms were alive."

"What do you think that means?"

"There's a place on the other side of the ice where buffalo live."

"You say he felt warm?"

. "Maybe. My fingers were cold. I couldn't really tell, but the gut seemed to feel warmer. How long would a buffalo take to go cold? He had to have been under there for a while;

the body was all ripped up—like it had been caught and pulled loose a dozen times."

"Caught under there?" She tapped her fingers, looking up at the gray-mottled rock walls over their heads. "So he came through a ..."

"...
hole,"
he breathed. In the firelight, the muscles of his smooth jaw quivered.

Poised on the balls of his feet, One Who Cries waited. The big cow spun, wheeling, trunk high to scent Wind Woman, little eyes hot and black in her shaggy head.

He could feel the tremors of her tramping feet through the very rock he crouched behind. Like he always did when he hunted mammoth, he wished he could let the runniness in his bowels and bladder loose. The cow turned away again and One Who Cries raised on his feet. Like lightning, his arm rolled back, then snapped forward, his atlatl sending the long dart arching to strike near the cow's anus where the skin was thin, sensitive.

Once more, it worked. The dart Singing Wolf had so carefully crafted struck home, the shaft itself separating, the main part falling back to earth, the lethal point and foreshaft deeply embedded in the beast, continuing to slice tissue as the animal moved. The shaft clattered as it fell to earth.

The cow bellowed, whirling on her feet, trunk whipping back and forth. Hot breath rasped from her mouth as she sniffed for her tormentor.

One Who Cries scuttled through the rock, bent low.

It wasn't much of an outcrop to hide in. Just an angular upthrust of black shale that created a sort of hogsback. Nevertheless, the mammoth couldn't traverse it. She could only circle, and try to avoid the narrow-walled gully that erosion had cut along the lower border of the rock. If she fell there,

the six-foot drop would kill her much quicker than One Who Cries' stone-tipped darts.

One Who Cries bent low, scurrying through a gap in the rock, panting and puffing, zigzagging between the walls of shale that thrust up around him. Seeing his chance, he scrambled for the long dart shaft, grabbing it up, sprinting for the safety of the rocks.

The cow caught a glimpse of him, screaming rage. She charged forward, accelerating her huge body in an amazing burst of speed. She stopped on the verge of bad footing, questing with her trunk. She'd almost caught him the first time he'd retrieved his dart shaft using the same tactic.

Heart pounding so hard he thought it would break his ribs, One Who Cries waited—safely out of reach. "Got to goad her, make her madder.''

Laughing and dancing, he sailed a flat, hand-sized slab of rock to pelt her in the face. A shrill trumpet of fury smashed at him as he dodged away, yipping and whistling. He jumped a tilted gray slab, adrenaline pumping, and rolled to one side, crabbing through the narrow crevice as the berserk mammoth -circled, gouging the resisting ground with her tusks, flinging ripped moss and grass to the air, broadcasting her frustration at his taunting.

The cow screamed again, brought up short by the angular black rocks. She shifted, one thick leg resting on the rock as her trunk sought him, picked up his scent, head extended forward, trunk reaching.

She staggered as the rock crumbled under her heavy foot, backing off, startled by what she'd almost done.

Heart hammering, One Who Cries waited where he'd crawled into a sheltering niche in the rock. As her trunk swung away, he scuttled farther. The cow squealed angrily, pounding around the outcrop, trying to circle his position. He fitted the last of his foreshafts into the dart body, twisting it into place, checking quickly to make sure it sat in the shaft straight. He puffed a final breath. The last shot.

"That's it!" he taunted. "Chase me! Come on! Lose all your sense! Be mad, Mother! Mad to the point of blood rage!"

He had room now. Circling his arms to keep her attention,

he shrieked and hollered. The cow stopped, tearing the frozen ground as she wheeled, snorting.

One Who Cries leapt, his last dart in hand, and lashed it forward, the atlatl providing two hundred times the power of his unaided hand.

The dart shot true, planting itself in the thinner hide behind the jaw—driving the foreshaft deep. The spent shaft separated to clatter noisily at her feet. The cow went crazy. Head up, trunk extended, she rushed forward.

One Who Cries screamed in fear, casting his atlatl to one side, running unencumbered for the edge of the rocks. The cow roared slathering wrath—the very earth shaking as she bore down on him. Not once did One Who Cries look back. His every thought centered on running, on picking his path through the uneven footing as he flew for the edge of the rock outcrop.

He made it, turning the corner, leaping nimbly along the path he'd cleared hours earlier. Legs pumping prodigiously, he bounded along the edge of the drop-off, one last jump taking him to firmer ground.

Heart thundering, he looked back, seeing the cow round the bend, seeing startled fear in her eyes as the gully appeared under her feet. She slid forward, legs locked.

Beneath her, the undercutting excavations One Who Cries and Singing Wolf had dug with such labor from the permafrost collapsed. The cow teetered, trunk whipping for balance. So much weight falls slowly at first. She had time to voice a final shriek as she toppled.

The ground slapped up at One Who Cries as her huge body slammed the earth. The sound of snapping bone seemed to stick in his ears. Then it was over. A rasping—like grinding ice—blasted from the cow's mighty lungs.

One Who Cries climbed up over the rocks, well out of harm's way, peering carefully over the drop-off. The redhaired trunk quivered, blood leaking from the mammoth's mouth. A frightened black eye stared up at him.

Wouldn't be long now. She couldn't breathe down there, the very weight of her body would smother her. She couldn't stand, her snapped limbs powerless. The top ear batted back and forth, her trunk questing, probing, determining the re-

ality of her death. The ragged wisp of tail slapped behind her.

Singing Wolf called, "Thought she had you for a second there at the beginning."

One Who Cries closed his eyes, sighing. He looked down. "Yes, Mother, you almost did get me, huh? I'll relive that moment forever."

Singing Wolf stood on the hill, downwind, some three dart throws away, waving with his hands. Green Water, Laughing Sunshine, and the rest would come now. They would all begin the butchering process, rendering the huge cow for all they could take before beginning the long trek back to Heron's valley.

Puffing out his cheeks, One Who Cries shook his head at the huge beast, now still in death. "Another handsbreadth, Mother, and you'd have stomped me into red mush. Blessed Stars, there's got to be an easier way."

He sagged on the rock, remembering.

For a long time he looked at the dead mammoth, sadness and regret welling in his heart. Somberly, he went down to kneel by the mammoth's huge head and stroke it gently. From the sacred pouch hanging around his neck, he took the special amulets, breathed on them, and began the process of singing the cow's soul to the Blessed Star People.

The new darts had worked. Never had One Who Cries driven a point so deeply into animal flesh before. As they cut each of the foreshafts from the carcass, Singing Wolf nodded, muttering under his breath as he examined the depth of the wound.

"Still got a problem with the hafting. Can you make the point thinner at the base?"

One Who Cries rubbed his mashed nose with a bloody finger, frowning. "No, it'll break too easy on impact. I tried that, remember?"

"Maybe a longer point?" Singing Wolf asked. "Not quite as wide as this one?"

"Thought you said the People didn't make different styles of points."

Singing Wolf shrugged, sheepishly.