Contents
Title Page
Map
Epigraph
CHAPTER 1: The Darkness
CHAPTER 2: A Dream Snatched
CHAPTER 3: The Light of the Dark, Dark of the Light
CHAPTER 4: Big Dog
CHAPTER 5: A Horse Named Pego
CHAPTER 6: “Hold On! That Is Your Name!”
CHAPTER 7: Finished with Away
CHAPTER 8: Yazz
CHAPTER 9: One Bloody Night
CHAPTER 10: “What Am I Really?”
CHAPTER 11: “He Shall Call You Pegasus”
CHAPTER 12: Time Weavers
CHAPTER 13: Festering Dreams
CHAPTER 14: The Hunt
CHAPTER 15: A Weather Shelter
CHAPTER 16: Bella!
CHAPTER 17: Soundless Words
CHAPTER 18: The Ravine
CHAPTER 19: First Angry
CHAPTER 20: The Blanket Stories
CHAPTER 21: The Broken Thread
CHAPTER 22: When a Thread Breaks
CHAPTER 23: An Unnerving Scent
CHAPTER 24: The Boy Older Than Time
About the Author
Copyright
“Ga’ was that most elusive of all owl qualities. It literally meant “great spirit”; a spirit that somehow did not contain only all that is noble but all that is humble, as well.”
— From the eleventh book of the Hoolian legends, To Be a King
The boy watched the old woman’s narrow chest. The intervals between her breaths had lengthened, stretching out until they were fewer than the fingers on his hand. She was going Otang — taking the last walk to eternity. That was what the word meant. But was it really walking? Not precisely. It was more that the others walked away from the elderly one. Haru had declared her intentions when the people were loading their sledges with their few belongings — hides, baskets, pots, stone implements — to move on to better country.
“I go now on the road to the spirit camps,” Haru had announced. “I thank you for the privilege of living with you.” The people murmured and commented on her dignity. She shot Tijo a harsh glance. The meaning was clear: Don’t follow me! However, she knew it was futile. The boy would follow her to the place she had chosen to die.
When their band left, the boy made a show of leaving as well. But soon, Haru picked up the curious beat of his footsteps; the syncopated rhythm of his lame walk always betrayed him.
When he found her, she was sitting cross-legged with her pipe clamped between her remaining teeth. She began making gestures with her hands, signing but not speaking. Her palsied hands shook, making the signs blurry, but Tijo understood them.
These are the rules: You do not speak. You do not bring me food. No water. You do not make me warm by lying next to me, or bringing me your star blanket. I wove that blanket for you. Not me. If the mountain lion comes, you run and let him eat me. Her hands stopped midair and trembled. And you never say my name or I shall fall off the spirit trail and never reach the spirit camps.
Tijo nodded solemnly, filled with an odd mixture of feelings. He was sad that she was leaving, but he was grateful that he could be here with her. Haru would not die alone.
He had almost died alone shortly after his birth eleven years before. His crooked leg had condemned him. His mother had died in childbirth, three weeks after his father was killed by a mountain lion. Normally, malformed babies were abandoned, but Haru had saved him. She was powerful within her band. She had been an excellent tracker in her day and knew the stars.
Not only could Haru read the tracks of animals and follow the transit of the stars, she was also known as a smeller of weather. She could smell clouds even before they appeared on the horizon. She was as important in the band as the healer, and many thought her remedies were better than his. Perhaps that was why he’d decided to kill her.
Now as she teetered on the brink between life and death, Haru felt relieved that she had made Tijo promise not to interfere with her passage, a passage that she was sure had been hastened by the healer, for she had felt a numbness in her fingers in the days after the corn silk ceremony. The silk from the corn was put into a fermented brew, and she sensed that her cup had been tainted. Most likely the healer had rubbed her cup with the powder of liverbleed leaves, an almost untraceable poison. The healer was cunning, cunning as a coyote. He could not risk poisoning the brew, for then everyone would die. Though he would hardly have mourned if Tijo had drunk from that pot. Tijo was lame but he was intelligent, and if there was anything the healer feared, it was intelligence. But she would not curse the healer. She would not die with a curse on her lips. If she did, she would be doomed to be a spirit walker and never find the way to the camps of Otang. Nor would she be able to find a spirit lodge on earth, a shelter in the body of a living creature — except of course for the crows, or the vultures. The carrion eaters. She would rather take lodge in a coyote than a carrion eater.
She could feel the boy next to her. She thought she could almost hear his tears rolling down his cheeks. Don’t cry, she wanted to say. I am off to a good place.
Haru had not abandoned him to die alone and Tijo would not abandon her. He dared not even think her name, lest he cause her to fall off the spirit trail.
He looked over at Haru. Would she feel lonely if he were not here? Though he knew it was not so much her loneliness he was concerned about but the immutable solitude that death would leave for him, the vacant space that had been Haru in this world.
What would happen to him? He had never been accepted by the members of Haru’s clan, the Burnt River People. His twisted leg had forced Haru to hide him for the first month of his life. By the end of one month, a baby was deemed too old to be cast out. But even after the Burnt River People had discovered Haru’s secret, Tijo and Haru had lived mostly apart from the clan. He was still shunned, but the people were too dependent on Haru for her knowledge of medicine to totally ignore them.
They looked at him, but never directly into his eyes. If Tijo returned, there would be no one to share a cooking fire with, no one whose breath he would hear through the night as he slept. No one to speak with, no one to learn from, no one to sing with as they scraped the hides for their clothing and blankets.
Tijo would follow the rules, but he would not leave her. Haru would not fall off the spirit trail, and if she did, he would be there to catch her. He might be lame, his one leg crooked and shorter than the other, but he was strong. How heavy could she be? Not much more than the weight of a newborn lamb. He looked over at Haru. Her chest had not risen in a long time. He crept closer. He could not remember when she had taken her last breath, but suddenly she took another. The sound of the air passing through her windpipe was jagged. Her nose twitched. Does she smell a storm coming? Tijo wondered.
The smell … the smell … so different. Goodness, this spirit trail is interesting, Haru thought. There was an animal odor unlike any she had ever known. Not fur but hair. Not human but definitely animal. Heavy of bone, large, very large. Larger than a dog. She felt a flutter of excitement. So many things on the trail to eternity … so many interesting things. A slight shiver passed through her, as if she were shedding her own pelt. It was a lovely feeling. She was so light. She looked back and saw her body, but it was no more important to her than a discarded blanket, or an animal’s pelt she had scraped to make a pair of buckskin trousers for Tijo. She wouldn’t need it anymore. She saw Tijo bending over her, weeping. She wanted to reach out and touch that thatch of shiny black hair. Don’t cry. Don’t worry. She wanted to return and soothe him. But there was no going back on the trail of Otang.
If Haru had turned back, she might have been tempted to keep going, for in the immensity of this star-powdered night, Tijo seemed like the tiniest speck of
matter in the universe. He looked smaller, more vulnerable than when she had first found him abandoned on the trail side. But she did not turn back. She kept walking toward a pale and inviting light while the shadows of the night gathered in the darkening forest. A vast silence enveloped the small hunched figure as he drew the blanket closer, the blanket that Haru had woven for him in the first month of his life. But there was no Haru, no warmth, only nothingness and the nagging question in Tijo’s mind: What will happen to me?
A fine rain scratched the night. It had been strange for Hold On since the fire. The stallion could feel. He could smell. He could hear. But he could not see. He lived in a shadow world of confusing shades of blacks and grays. The stars above were invisible no matter what the weather. However, his remaining senses were becoming sharper, and he smelled the rain before it came.
He found himself thinking longingly of the comforts he had disdained for so long — the comforts of the stall where hay and water were brought each day, where grooms might curry his coat, rub his joints and his sore tendons so tenderly. Yet it was foolish to think of the old ways now. He might be blind, but he was wild. They had escaped and left the Old World of men behind. They were in the New World now. Hold On shook his head as if to rid himself of these torturous thoughts, as though a swarm of flies were buzzing through his mind. He had been a captive then, a tool for humans. He refused to become a traitor to freedom, to wildness.
In his mind’s eye, there was the dim flicker of the young filly Estrella.
It was Estrella who had led Hold On and the other horses away from that terrible world of men. Her dam, Perlina, had died, torn apart by a shark when they were cast overboard by the Ibers. But the other horses had survived, and despite having never set hoof to earth until that beach, Estrella had really been born wild. Hold On, however, had been born in the old country, shod by the blacksmith when he was a few months old.
How odd it was that it had been Estrella who first showed him how to forget the ways of men, forget the gaits he had been taught, the bridle and bit that had been shoved in his mouth. How to unlearn all that and discover what it meant to run free. Had she died in the canyon fire? Would he ever see her again? A wave of despair rose within him.
Hold On and the first herd had been led into that canyon by the treacherous stallion Pego, when a fire had broken out. The flames had singed Hold On’s mane and burned his tail until it was just a charred stub. It was the fire that had blinded him. He had no idea if Estrella and the rest of the first herd had perished. Somehow he had escaped. He had been blinded, his lungs seared, but he was alive.
He squinted and looked for that last pale layer of the night, the skin of the night before the pink flesh of the new day. It was still dark, too dark, but was there a smudge in the sky? Was it the moon? Could he borrow just a bit of moonlight to find a place to sleep? He wanted to capture it behind his eyelids, save it, cosset it, polish it, and in that way he might once again find his old friends.
He would need all his senses to find them, but especially his eyes. He knew the tracks of each horse. Angela and Corazón touched down lightly, as if a ghost of their old gaits hovered just beneath their hoofprints in the earth. Grullo, the heaviest, had a deep track, whereas Estrella’s hooves seemed to barely touch the earth when she galloped. For Estrella had never been shod, never worn a saddle, never been broken. There was a remarkable purity that surrounded her like the starry dust of an ancient night.
He wanted to find them all. He was lonely in this dark and empty new world.
Not half a league away in the softly drizzling rain, the boy began to dig a grave. The earth was soft, so the digging went quickly. He wrapped the frail body of Haru in the thin antelope skin he had brought for this purpose, and gently laid her down on her back with a stone propped under her head. That way, she could watch the stars even when the dirt was piled on, for the eyes of the dead could see through earth into the next world, the world of Otang. In addition to the antelope hide, he had brought a shiny black piece of obsidian and placed it in her mouth. The stone would turn to honey and nourish her as she traveled the trail. It was all the food she would need.
It did not take him long to finish burying her. He took the pipe and stuffed in the shredded cedar bark he had brought. Relighting the pipe took time because the bark was damp and he couldn’t let his mouth touch it, for it was Haru’s pipe, and to properly send her off, there must be the mark of her lips only on the pipe stem. So he blew into the bowl of the pipe long enough to rekindle the ashes. Then he lifted the pipe into the air, turning to the north, and began to recite the first verses of the mourning song:
Shadow of the wind,
Flash of the firefly,
Vapor of breath when the night is cold,
Such is your life on earth.
But comes the everlasting
In the lap of mother sky,
Go you on the way to Otang.
He recited this song four times: first to the north, then to the east, then to the south, and finally to the west. The wind shifted suddenly, blowing the smoke and the words back into his face, but he continued singing until all the cedar in the pipe had burned.
Hold On had finally fallen into a dreamless sleep, a dark void with no flames, no singed manes, when the scent of smoke jolted him awake. Fire! He began to tremble so hard, he thought his legs might buckle. The blackness was still thick. He took a step forward and bumped into the trunk of the piñon tree. He backed away and began to walk slowly in circles. He heard a dry rapid clatter. Snake! he thought, the bad snake whose bite was poisonous. He reared slightly and jumped aside only to knock his hindquarters against another tree. But now there was something worse than the clatter snake. Another scent. That of a human. He froze and opened his eyes wide and stared into the emptiness.
When Tijo was finished, he tucked the pipe away, pulled the thick sheep hide around his shoulders, and sat down to think. Where should he go? Back to the clan? Without Haru he would become omo, not cast out like a malformed baby but turned into a living ghost. No one would speak to him. No one would share food with him. At first, they would avert their eyes or pretend not to see him, and finally they would actually look right through him as if he were transparent. He would become air and then he would finally die.
A person normally became omo as punishment for some transgression — not a serious crime like murder but after violating some code of behavior. The shunning would commence in a small way, then it was like a contagion. Other people would join in, or else it might suggest the misbehavior was acceptable, which would threaten the integrity of the band. Tijo looked down at his crooked leg. It was enough to threaten the sturdiness of the band. No parent would want their daughter to become friends with Tijo. Marriage would be forbidden.
That had always been clear. For as long as he could remember, he’d been kept separate from other children. He could not play their games or learn to hunt alongside them. Haru had been his only playmate and his only teacher. He knew practically nothing of the communal life of the band. He and Haru lived always a short distance away from them. They made their own cooking fires. Dug their own latrine. Stood apart at the ceremonies. That had been his life, and now if he returned, it would be worse.
He could not go back to the band. It would be an insult to Haru. If Haru sat in the lap of the Spirit Mother at the end of the spirit trail, did she want to look down and see the boy she had raised for eleven years treated so miserably? It would make her cry. Tears from the spirit world caused bad things to happen — drought, sickness, famine — even tears shed for a lame boy. He got up to stretch. If the people of the band wanted a ghost, they would have one.
The ground was still damp and he noticed the prints of an animal he did not recognize. He crouched down and ran his hand over the impression in the mud. The creature had no toes. The hoof, or whatever this strange shape was called, was not cloven and it was big and sank deep into the mud like that of the big-horned mountain sheep. What could it be? Ti
jo recalled how Haru’s nose had twitched just before she died. He bent down and picked up the faintest trace of a scent he had never known. Haru had smelled this creature!
The tracks were pronounced and easy to follow, but they seemed to be going in circles, as if the creature was lost.
The rain finally began to taper off. Mist rose from the thinly wooded stand of piñon and birch trees. Tijo halted abruptly and stared in disbelief. Beneath a piñon tree stood the most immense creature he had ever seen. It was shivering and at intervals its entire hide appeared to flinch. Its pointed ears were laid back. Tijo approached quietly, but the creature jerked its head around and snorted. Its odor was different from the oily one of sheep or the meaty one of mountain lions, and there was a more powerful overlying smell of charred hair or fur. His coat was a silvery gray but streaked with smoky marks. This creature had passed through a fire, one of the canyon fires that sometimes ignited at this time of year. It turned its head toward Tijo and peeled back its lips in a strange manner.
Tijo could tell that the creature was frightened. Frightened and lost. As the mist swirled about, it appeared like a specter before the dawn. And I believed I was the ghost here, Tijo thought. This animal truly looked as if it had fallen off the trail to Otang. It seemed lost between two worlds. The mist billowed around them more thickly. The light of the moon gave this place an eerie luminosity. Tijo felt as if he were standing nowhere but everywhere, a place that was suspended in a fold between air and water, cloud and earth. A strong gust suddenly rustled the trees, and a swarm of clouds stampeded across the moon as utter blackness descended. When it cleared off, the creature had vanished. I must have dreamed it, Tijo thought, and blinked. A dream snatcher must have come and ripped the cloth of his sleep. It could happen. Such a wind could tear the strongest filaments of a spider’s web. His vision of the creature could not have been real. Creatures like that appear only in dreams.
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