by B. Muze
The mountains out of the valley were steep and difficult to climb. They pulled and pushed the wagons and, through several passages, those of the weak who could walk for short periods did so. Others were carried on stretched mats while the wagons were lifted and turned onto the wheels on their slim sides. These passages took much time, and at the end of a full day’s journey, they still had not left the valley behind.
At first, the people sang while they walked and joked in good humor. It lightened the sadness and fear of leaving their homes. They made great plans of what they would do on their return and looked forward to a good Trintoa, which would earn them a better year next year. Their talk grew quiet, however, as they left their valley. Where they were unfamiliar, it felt as if enemies might be everywhere.
The shaman walked ahead, only hours behind the scouts, his servant at his side. He focused more on the healing skills, teaching her of the body, how it worked, the many ways it could be hurt, the few ways it could be mended. They gathered herbs, sometimes leaves or buds, sometimes roots. He told her their histories and their powers. He showed her how to take them — this one in the full moon only with a cut like so and this chant…this one in the daylight of a waxing moon…this one never in fall or winter or even summer, but only in spring when it flowered if there was no frost…There were so many things to know! It seemed impossible that anyone, even a man as great and aged as Yaku Shaman, could possibly learn it all. The little girl slowly began to realize what he had meant when he had told her that the study would take many years.
As they crossed the mountains to the other side, her master stopped her and held her still to look out over the endless world that stretched before them. It was bigger than she had ever imagined. The last time they had gone this way she had traveled mostly on her mother’s back as her baby brother traveled now. It seemed to her that there was space enough for everything that ever wanted to live.
“Listen deeply,” he ordered.
She listened as deeply as she could but did not hear anything that she could understand.
“What do you hear?” he asked her.
“Water,” she answered instantly. But she hadn’t heard it. She didn’t know why she had said it.
Yaku Shaman nodded. Her answer had pleased him.
“It is deep at this place,” he pointed to the ground “but it will rise to the surface soon. It flows far out there, over all that land, to a giant lake, wider than all this land before us, that catches it and keeps it.”
“Have you seen this giant lake?” asked the little girl in awe.
“No. Our people do not go so far.”
“Then how do you know of it?”
He frowned at her.
“I hear it.”
They traveled several weeks south, over plains and rivers, around lakes and canyons to forested lands still rich with game. The winters here were warmer, wet but not frozen. Many of the animals who slept through the winter around their village had kin who did not sleep down here, and there were many good plants for eating that were not common in their valley. Game birds, too, were plentiful.
All their people had survived their trip, and only a few of the livestock had fallen to animals. Wolves and large cats followed the caravan, but had, so far, kept their distance. A Gicok camp had been found, long deserted.
They settled in their first lowlands camp. They would have many as they followed the game.
The shorter days did not shorten the shaman’s lessons. There was much to learn by the moon and the darkness of night. They walked in the woods long after the rest of the people had retired to their tents. When she listened, the little girl could hear their slumbering and sometimes imagined she could hear their dreams.
As they walked back toward the camp, late one night, a giant, black wolf mounted a rise in the road and blocked their way. At the height of his shoulders, he was as tall as a man. His teeth gleamed white as they reflected no earthly light and his eyes watched them with sharp and evil intelligence.
At first, they did not see him, so like the shadows he was, but the shaman knew he was there, and knew he had not approached like a normal wolf or dog.
“It is a spirit,” he spoke softly to his servant, “a very, very bad one. You must stay back and stay quiet. Do nothing to attract its attention.”
She obediently drew back, off the path, and hid behind a tree.
Her master went forward, chanting softly, a strange light collecting around him. As he approached, the wolf growled menacingly. The shaman’s chant grew louder, but not one step failed to bring him closer. He showed no fear. The light around him grew brighter and reflected in the evil one’s red eyes.
The wolf sprang. He did not crouch like an animal first but simply flew through the air and landed on the shaman. Yaku Shaman fell back, under the weight of the beast. His chant fell silent, but the light around him exploded and from where he had fallen a huge brown bear, taller and mightier than any bear could be, rose to battle.
The bear and the wolf fought furiously over the shaman’s still body. They dealt each other blows that would have instantly killed normal animals. Gashes opened in their hides and closed with no blood but only a kind of steam escaping.
The bear fell, with the wolf’s teeth at his throat, and rolled over to crush the crying dog under him, claws flying at the evil one’s eyes. The wolf scrambled away and ran, with the bear at his heels. For a while, there were only growls and snarls, snaps and yelps in the distance.
The little girl listened, afraid to move, afraid to go to her master’s body, which lay as if dead, or to run to her people’s camp for help. The sounds of the fight grew closer, then more distant, then suddenly stopped altogether, and all she could hear was an animal panting, and a low growl behind her.
She turned and faced the wolf. He towered above her, his legs taller than her whole body. He glared down at her triumphantly, teeth dripping a fluid that hissed through the air as it fell. Then he crumpled to the ground, the brown bear on top of him.
The child darted away, without direction. She stumbled over her master’s body and fell beside it. The wolf made a desperate lunge for her or for the inert body, she could not tell, but the bear swatted at him in the air with his giant claw, and the wolf fell, rolling, missing his mark. The bear was instantly on top of him. Again, they struggled, again the bear chased him. This time they did not come back. She heard the black wolf whining in the distance, getting farther and farther away.
The little girl knelt, trembling, by her master’s body, waiting for him to return and tell her what to do. She was scared. Yaku Shaman lay on the cold, hard ground before her. He still breathed. She could hear his heart beat, but his spirit was fighting without him. She didn’t want to leave his body. She couldn’t carry it. She lifted his heavy head into her lap and waited quietly.
Chapter 8
Lost Soul
The morning came and grew into a cold, windy day. Yaku Shaman did not awaken. The little girl listened as hard as she could. She thought she heard the stirring at the distant camp. Not long after, she heard the sound of footsteps fill the area. They had found the shaman missing and were looking. She finally heard them come her way.
“Here,” she called. She blew her whistle in the call for help, but the wind whisked the sound away from the searchers.
Finally, a group of three men, including Tapeten, the Winter Leader, called to her as they mounted the rise. She waved to them eagerly as they approached.
“He’s alive,” announced Tapeten upon close examination. He ordered the men to lift the shaman and take him back to camp.
“His spirit is still away,” said the little girl. “If you take away his body from where he left it will he know where to find it again?”
The men glanced at her curiously but did not bother to answer her. They carried the shaman back to his tent and called one of the healers.
“There is nothing wrong with him,” she announced. “He seems just asleep.”
�
�But he doesn’t wake up,” insisted Tapeten Winter Leader.
“Perhaps his spirit is lost. If another shaman were here, he could call him back.”
Tapeten Leader frowned, worried. It was a very bad thing for their people to be without a shaman.
They put Yaku in his bed and covered him with blankets, then left him to sleep while his servant watched. She tried to sing for him. She sang him the chant he had taught her to call the spirits of the sick and dying back, but it didn’t work. This was different somehow.
Two days went by. He did not return. They could not get his body to eat. It did nothing but sleep deeply.
“He will die soon,” warned the healer, “if we cannot get him to eat or drink more.”
The hunting game had run short. It was time to move further south.
“But if you move him so far, Yaku Shaman won’t know where to find himself,” the little girl tried to argue. No one listened, for she was only a non-person. Yaku Shaman might never come back, and it was time to go.
She would not go without her master, she decided. It was wrong. She knew it was wrong. The shaman was lost. If she could not call him to her, then she would go looking for him.
She ran back to where he had left his body first. He was not there. She looked around for any sign showing which way to look. There were no clues. She listened, quietly, deeply. She closed her eyes and concentrated hard. It wasn’t that she heard anything, nothing that she could understand, anyway, but she turned northwest and went that way, calling for her master.
Her steps made a rhythm and her calling made a song. She called the shaman, she called the great bear. She called in the old language, and in the one he had known better, and in something that was no language at all, but just a calling. It’s time to come home now. I’ll show you the way.
An impossibly big, brown bear, awake in winter, came lumbering toward her through the woods. She stopped and waited when she heard him. He approached her like an animal, not a spirit, but he was too big to fool her, and he wore the homecoming bracelet around his thick bear’s wrist. She knew him.
“Yaku Shaman,” she called to him.
He approached her warily and sniffed her all over, batting her lightly with his paw to turn her around.
“You’re acting like a bear,” she laughed. “But you’re not.”
He snorted and shook his head and started wandering away.
“Not that way,” she called in the old language. “This way.”
He turned around and came back. She reached her hand up as high as she could, but it could not reach his head. He lowered his head and sniffed her palm.
“This way, Great Bear,” she told him in the old language. “Follow me.”
Her master gruffly obeyed.
As they walked, she told him how worried about him everyone was, how weak his body was getting without enough food or water, and the plans the people had to leave that morning. He hardly listened to her, even when she spoke in the old language, which was all he seemed to understand. He ran ahead and jumped at a bush, scaring some small animal into flight. He would gladly have hunted it down, but the little girl called him back.
“Yaku Shaman. They’ll be leaving soon without us. We have to hurry.”
He growled at her with annoyance, but stopped his chase and followed.
She paused, just outside the camp. It was almost all packed. Even the shaman’s tent was down.
“You should change back now,” she told her master.
He seemed not to hear.
“Yaku Shaman,” she said. He looked at her curiously. “You will scare everyone if you’re a bear. Don’t you think it would be better to be your human self now?”
But he did not change. She sighed. He was the master, he must know better. Together they walked into the camp.
People turned to look at them. They were alternately astonished, frightened, and confused. When they’d see the little girl out of the corner of their eyes, it looked as if an impossibly large, brown bear was following her, but when they looked again, there was nothing there. Many quickly made a sign to ward off evil and hurried away.
“Where have they taken Yaku Shaman’s body?” asked his servant of the nearest person she could stop. The pinch-faced woman nodded curtly toward the last wagon and bustled on about her business.
She found his sleeping body lying on bed mats, between an injured man and a sickly old woman.
“You’re in here,” she told the bear. He flopped himself into a sitting position as if to say, “so what?”
“You need to go and get back into your body.”
She was speaking the old language, but he didn’t seem to understand.
“The healer says you’ll die soon if you don’t,” she tried to argue.
The bear only yawned.
“Yaku Shaman,” she pleaded, grabbing him by the fur around his neck and trying to pull him onto the wagon, “please get on this wagon and get into your body.”
He raised himself slowly and heaved himself onto the wagon. It lurched with his sudden weight. The people on it looked around, confused. The little girl who had just climbed on could not possibly be that heavy. She walked to the shaman’s sleeping body and pointed, saying something in a strange and lovely language that only the shaman ever spoke.
“That is you,” she said. “You are Yaku Shaman’s spirit, and you must get back in your body now.”
The bear approached the sleeping man. He sniffed him curiously, licked his face with his tongue and gently nudged him with his paw.
“This is Yaku Shaman,” she explained, “and you are Yaku Shaman. You need to get inside him, Great Bear.”
Slowly the bear dissolved through the shape of a man crouching like an animal over the shaman’s body, then into nothing. Yaku Shaman sighed deeply in his sleep, stretched his arms and slowly opened his eyes.
“Are you hungry master?” she asked him in their daily language.
He stared at her, as the bear had, with strange eyes, not comprehending.
“Food?” she asked again in the old language.
He nodded slowly, but he looked around him as a dazed man, not knowing where he was or what he was seeing.
His servant hurried to the healer who came running with food and water.
Yaku Shaman sniffed at the bowl of vegetable broth and snarled like an animal.
“Perhaps some meat?” suggested his servant.
“Too heavy,” said the healer. “He has not eaten properly in days.”
They poured him a cup of water. He held it awkwardly, between his two palms, and tried to lap it with his tongue. The healer watched him closely.
“He’s acting like an animal,” she said.
“He was wandering as a bear,” the little girl told her. The healer looked up at her.
“What do you know of this?”
The child told her the story of the black wolf and the brown bear.
“That is very bad,” said the healer, nervously, when she had finished.
“Will he be a man again?” asked the child.
The healer shrugged.
“If it were possible I would say ask the shaman. The best we can do is get him to eat and wait to see.”
The shaman’s servant faithfully served her master. She walked by the wagon and talked to him all day long in the old language, telling him the old stories, although she did it more like her father than like a shaman. When the stories that she knew ran out, she made up new ones. The shaman didn’t seem to notice. He listened, but it was to the sound of her voice more than her words.
At first the shaman did not like to ride the wagon. He tried to walk beside his servant, but his body was weak. It frustrated and angered him, for his spirit was strong. When his servant asked him to please ride, he reluctantly obeyed her like a tamed animal.
She and the healer, with the help of his hunger, managed to get him to drink some meat broth.
“It will make you strong again,” his servant told him in t
he old language. He seemed to understand.
Massern Summer Leader, himself, helped raise the shaman’s tent in the new camp.
“We are glad you’re back with us,” he told Yaku cheerfully. The shaman looked at him blankly.
He slept the night curled like a bear, but woke the next morning able to speak the old language, although he had little to say except to ask for meat instead of broth. They brought him some dried fish and water. He growled but ate hungrily. He slept a good deal throughout the day, and every time he woke he was a little more like a man. The healer was very pleased.
“He will be all right,” she said. “He just needs time.”
The third night in their new camp, the little girl was shoved awake by her master crouching over her, on all fours.
“I’m confused,” he said in the old language. “Help me.”
She forced herself awake and revived the dying fire, making it brighter so that they could see each other.
“You are Yaku Shaman,” she explained, once again. “A great, holy man for our people. We love and honor you very much.”
She sat down beside him and told him the story about the black wolf and the brown bear. He listened. He stopped her several times with questions and made her repeat many parts. Slowly, he started to understand.
“And you,” he asked. “Who are you?”
“I am your servant,” she answered.
“You are not a shaman?”
“I am not even a person yet. You will name me at the next Trintoa.”
“Trintoa,” he repeated softly. He seemed to find the word familiar in an unfamiliar way.
“Why is it that you are the only one who can speak?” he asked.
“This is the old language, the spirit’s tongue. Everyone else speaks the normal language. You do too, only you’ve forgotten.”
