Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  Hamr charged out of the canebrake in time to see the boar turn sharply before the jabbing spears and bolt for a gap that the clustered men had left at their flank. He kicked Blind Side to a dash, and the sightless horse lurched forward a few quick strides, enough to reach spear-range. Hamr threw his spear underhand, and it struck the boar's back but lacked the force to pierce vitally.

  Hurt and infuriated, the boar turned, tried to shake the spear loose, then heaved itself toward the horse that had dared to hurt it. Hamr stiffened with alarm, and Blind Side, feeling his fear and hearing the enraged squealing, skittered nervously. By scent and sound, he measured the boar's lunging attack and reared as its tusks thrust for his front legs.

  Hamr, unprepared for the boar's assault, lost his grip on Blind Side and went flying. The sedge grass softened his fall, and he sat up in time to see the boar bearing down on him, head lowered, tusks glowing with dawnlight. His provision sack had fallen beside him, and he clutched it desperately, a useless gesture yet unable to stop himself. Above the grass, he sighted the heads of the hunters and their spears, too far away to help. Grunting with fury—the impaled spear waving from its back—the boar flashed toward him. The wisp of a scream squeaked in Hamr's throat.

  Blind Side trotted into view, reared up, thrashing the air with his front legs, and came down on the angry noise in the grass, striking the boar's skull with his hooves. The beast collapsed with a squeal, and lay unmoving. Blind Side backed away and ambled off as the hunters rushed toward him. Their spears stabbed at the boar, though it was already dead.

  Breath gushed into Hamr's lungs, and he got to his feet. He waved the hunters off, looking down at the still boar and the socket of blood above its eye, where Blind Side's hoof had crushed its skull. Its legs stuck straight out from its thick black bulk. Its dark lips revealed sharp teeth set in a permanent snarl, and its tusks gleamed. Its rage still rang in Hamr's ears.

  He thumped it hard, and it lay still. The men had begun to apologize for not killing the creature as it came out of the cane-brake. Hamr silenced them with a hard stare. "Truss it," he told them, and pulled his spear from its back.

  Blind Side had drifted to the firmer land above the sedge. Hamr called to him, and he reluctantly stepped back onto the softer ground and came, head waving side to side, smelling for more danger. Hamr rewarded him with several sweet-roots from his sack and whispered his gratitude in the horse's ear.

  A soft rain fell as Hamr dragged the trussed boar through the tall grass and over the hummocks toward the Blue Shell's summer camp above the sea cliffs. Hamr had tied the rope about his waist.

  The dead weight of the beast pulled hard behind him as he clung to Blind Side. In this dead weight, he recognized his own death. He had died back there in the sedge. His soul had squeaked in his throat on its way out. But the Beastmaker had forced his soul back into him and had saved him from the boar by the power of the Horse.

  The other hunters had seen it. He heard them muttering among themselves as they walked behind. Blind Side of Life embodied Hamr's soul-animal. They existed as one life in two forms. The Beastmaker had joined their souls, fused them together in the space where Hamr would have died, and made them one.

  At the Blue Shell camp, the hunters spoke excitedly to the others about what they had seen. The whole tribe gathered to view the boar. Even the fisherfolk climbed up the cliff-trails from their summer beach camp to behold the fierce creature Hamr had killed with his horse. Such a huge boar would provide meat for each of the families.

  The tusks, of course, belonged to Hamr. He promptly gave them to his wife. That caused a stir among the Panther men who had expected him to honor their cult with the trophy. Hamr preferred to secure his marriage than his rightful place in the Panther cult. During their moon together in the fern holt, he and Aradia had often quarreled. The time he had spent with his horse had continually annoyed her.

  He had tried to explain that Blind Side of Life had never been separated from him since the fateful day that he had ridden the wildness out of the animal. He wanted her to think of him and the animal as one—a thought that repelled Aradia. She sharply informed him that she had married Hamr and not his horse.

  Time and again she made her displeasure apparent by refusing to ride with him. When he had gone ahead and ridden without her, she wandered off alone, and once he spent the better part of a day looking for her, only to find her in a tree near their bower, weeping disconsolately. On their return from the fern holt, Aradia had walked and, not wanting to enrage her, Hamr had walked too, leading Blind Side with a rope around his neck.

  Now that the entire tribe had acknowledged the soul-bond of Hamr and his steed, Aradia could no longer object to the attention her husband lavished on his horse. The tusks mollified her somewhat, for with them came a great deal of prestige within the tribe, especially among the Mothers.

  The tusks, shaped like the crescents of the New and Old Moons, honored the Mothers, who proudly installed them behind the Throne of the Elder. The blessings of the Great Mother redounded to Aradia. Surely, now her childbearing would be easier and she would birth great souls.

  After that, Aradia acted more tolerant of Hamr's doting care of Blind Side of Life. She even took time to help prepare the horse's daily feed, sifting through the sheaves of wild barley and oats for strands of milkweed and thorn-grass. When Hamr went riding, she contented herself to see him go, and she attended to her duties as a Young Mother, for the first signs of pregnancy had already appeared in her.

  Her younger sister, Duru, eager to learn the Mother mysteries, shadowed her everywhere. Except when her new brother, Hamr, let her ride with him. Unlike Aradia, she enjoyed riding, feeling the muscular strength under her, smelling the good animal heat. She was always the first to greet Hamr each day when he returned from his time with the men, and he always pleased her by taking her on a slow circuit about the camp.

  Timov watched with feigned indifference from behind the hut, where he and the slave Biklo gathered kindling for the night-fire. Timov, amazed that Hamr had not died hunting the boar, began to believe that the hunt consisted of more than common sense. He began resenting the time that Hamr spent with Duru. A girl, she belonged with the Mothers.

  Timov, however, needed a sponsor to initiate him among the Panther men. Hamr could not vouch for him until he himself had been initiated, which would not happen until Hamr had crafted the pelt of the boar he had killed into a ceremony-vest. And the more time he spent amusing Duru, the less time for him to work on the vest, which he alone could do.

  Hamr understood Timov’s eagerness to leave the women and join the men, yet his time with Duru was important for him. Soon after his father had drowned, his mother had chosen another man among the Tortoise men. He had insisted young Hamr leave his mother's clan and join the men in the dugouts.

  Hamr had never liked working together closely to spear and net fish, gossiping and joking the whole time and no one at all interested in his dreams. He had much preferred solitude, lifting rocks for hours on end, trying to pack their strength into his muscles, running all day between dunes and sea, fitting the wind itself to his breath.

  If he had to work, he waded through tidepools and shallows collecting mussels and seaweed with the women. Their songs left him to ponder the thoughts Spretnak had taught him. He contemplated how he would become a great man.

  His time with Duru reminded him of those earlier days, when the women had given him the chance to think about the Beastmaker and the ways of power. When he rode with her, he felt free of the Panther men's judgments and Timov's expectations.

  Every night, no matter how fatigued from accompanying the men on the hunt, Hamr worked on the boar hide. He chewed the margins, where the bristles had been plucked, gnawing the boar-skin to leather. He pierced the softened hide with a bone-awl to stitch feathers and shells to the edge with plant fiber.

  Timov helped him in the only way he could, by talking to help pass the time. He recounted how many birds-of-prey he had
killed at winter's end and boastfully displayed the feathers. And he observed how, without the birds to eat them, mice and hares abounded, offering many kills for his slingshot. He had achieved skill with the sling, and he shared the meat and related the tales of his rabbit hunts with his friends.

  Hamr smiled to himself as he chewed the leather and stitched the white owl's feathers to the boar-skin's edge. Last season, Timov had despised him for a pompous fool. The whole tribe had thought him intimidating. And now he had turned all that around. He crafted his ceremony-vest, his wife proudly growing her first child for him—and Gobniu, the chief, thanked the ancestors that Hamr had married out of the clan. The boys who had feared him and mocked him behind his back now avidly pranced for his attention. Everything had changed for the better in his life. Just as Spretnak had promised, the wheel had turned.

  Most gratifying of all, he had turned the wheel of his life himself, by his own dream and his own bravery.

  And all this bounty he now enjoyed—sitting by a Panther cult fire, Panther women feeling safe to have him near, Panther men proud to share their strength and wiles with him—all this he enjoyed because his life had once had a hole in it, an emptiness, a lack of greatness into which he could fit an axle that had let him turn his life around.

  That axle, Blind Side of Life, had filled his emptiness, had made him whole.

  Later, when his jaws and fingers ached from his work on the boar-skin, when the fire dimmed and the old woman fire-watcher wakened to attend the embers through the night, he got up, as he always did, and went out to where Blind Side of Life browsed, tethered to a stake.

  Together, in the underworld of darkness beneath the floating river of stars, they comforted each other: Hamr with sweet-roots and a quiet song for the horse, and Blind Side with sleek, shouldering power that the Beastmaker had lifted up from the earth for the man.

  The Doom of the Blue Shell

  Hamr and Spretnak sat on the slipface of a dune. They gazed into the moonless night, a black snake glittering over the candescent breakers. For a long while, they said nothing and simply shared the pleasure of watching Blind Side of Life facing into the salt wind and blowing sighs from the verge of sleep.

  Presently, the old man broke the susurrant silence: "You know this will be the last time I can talk to you about the wheel. The coming moon will see the longest day. And now that you’ve finished your ceremony-vest, the Panther men will make you one of their own."

  Hamr agreed with a nod, not sure what to say.

  "Your ties to the Tortoise clan end. If they catch us talking about our mysteries, they will think you are divulging their secrets. Men get violent when they think their secrets are betrayed. We part here." Spretnak shook his head remorsefully, muttered, "Secrets. What else makes us important? We're such wretched creatures." His chest rattled with a deep laugh that constricted to a cough. "Only the animals have real secrets, eh?" He nodded toward where Blind Side had turned his back to the wind and drowsed. "How's your animal?"

  "He's fine. Caught a burr in his left hind hoof four days ago and hobbled for a day after that. The Mothers made up a nettle mudpack that healed it almost overnight. He's himself again."

  "And Aradia? Treating her as well as your horse, are you?"

  Hamr's smile flashed in the dark. "Since the boar, she considers Blind Side of Life one of the clan."

  "The Panther men are unhappy you gave the tusks to the Mothers. That's why they make you chew leather. You don't need a ceremony-vest. They've initiated boys of fifteen summers with no vest, just a two-point antler. And you've killed Boar."

  "I had to give the tusks to Aradia. Blind Side had come between us."

  "My gimp leg spared me the blessings of a wife. From younger days, I remember how cunningly they use our need to fulfill their own. Surely, the Mother is Great."

  Laughter swept the two men, and Spretnak curled up on himself in a fit of hacking coughs.

  "You're not well." Hamr steadied the old man with an arm about his shoulders.

  Spretnak answered through a gasp, "Forty-three winters." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I've lived long enough to see you become a Great Man. I'm ready to die."

  "A muscle chill. The Mothers will heal you."

  "There's no healing at my age, Hamr. Be great while you're young. There's no greatness in growing old."

  "Let's go to the fire and warm up."

  "You're a Panther man now. You can't sit by a Tortoise fire."

  "I'll take you there. You need to warm up."

  "No." He laid a firm hand on Hamr's shoulder, felt the muscled strength there and nodded to himself with pride. "There's something more of the wheel I must tell you."

  "You can tell me later. First let's warm you up."

  "There may not be another chance. If I've done well by you, then listen to me now." He paused, searching for the strength to speak, then began with the cadence of an oft-told tale, "At night, in the spring of every fifth summer, the tortoise climbs out of the sea to lay her eggs..."

  Hamr laid the old man back against the dune. The younger man took off his antelope-hide tunic and draped it over Spretnak. Then he lay down beside him and listened to the story he had heard many times before, of the wheel of life, of turning seasons and returning stars, and animals journeying endlessly around the wheel of their migrations.

  While Spretnak recounted the mysteries of the wheel, Hamr explored the old man's face. Clouds hooded the stars and the wind uncovered them again, drifting starlight and darkness across the familiar features and highlighting characteristics Hamr had never noticed in brash daylight.

  The old man's squared-off temple bone and the mating of nose bridge to the overhang of brow looked suddenly very similar to what he had seen of his own face in rain-pools and the black reflections of volcanic glass. Soundless joy swelled in him at the thought that this man could be his father.

  He dismissed the thought with a frowning flinch and gazed up at the spectral sky. He saw only his wish. The man had been as a father to him, not only sponsoring him in the clan and transmitting the mysteries, also wanting more for him than the drudgery of the dugouts and the fishing nets.

  Spretnak had remembered the Grandfathers, who had ridden horses. They had reared them from foals captured from the herd. That was no longer possible, not since the Eyes of the Bear had settled close to the Blue Shell. The Eyes of the Bear ate horses. They believed the Blue Shell taking foals stole the food of their children. It had been Spretnak's vision to tame a grown horse.

  Hamr returned his attention to the old man and noticed he shivered as he spoke: "Men, too, turn with the wheel, just like and yet different from women, animals, and stars. Women turn from blood to blood to make their children. Animals turn from north to south to make the herds and flocks. And the stars turn through the sky to make the seasons. Men turn, too, though what turns us is invisible. Not blood, not direction or season. The invisible power that turns us is destiny. And because it is invisible, most men ignore destiny, are not even aware they turn with destiny. It turns them old—otherwise it does nothing for them."

  "You're shivering, old guy. Come on, let's go get warm." Hamr pulled Spretnak till he sat upright, then wrapped the antelope-skin full about him.

  "Listen, Hamr—destiny is never chosen. It can only be recognized, then accepted. You must see that your destiny is to serve the Beastmaker."

  "I understand, old man. Let's go."

  "Wait." Spretnak put his hands to the sides of Hamr's thick neck. "You must be equal to the silence to meet Him. We all meet Him in death. To meet Him in this life, you must be equal to the silence from which we have come and to which we go. This is the final mystery I have called you here to tell you. Whoever speaks of the Beastmaker speaks lies. Only silence carries His power. Tell no one what He reveals to you. Destiny is invisible. It can never be spoken. It can only be lived." Spretnak coughed violently, shuddered with his eyes squeezed closed. "Now take me to the fire. The damp is in my bones."

&n
bsp; Hamr lifted Spretnak to his feet. What the old man had just told him paralleled what Aradia had said the first night of their marriage, when he had tried to share his vision of the Beastmaker.

  This insistence on silence troubled Hamr.

  He wanted to talk about how the bloodnoise in his ears sometimes spoke to him, how the busy darkness behind his closed lids sometimes made scenery, lavish landscapes of red earth and fat leaves and an oily sky of swirling rainbows—and sometimes out of that mischief behind his lids, he perceived the Beastmaker with His wide antlers and moon-eyes filled with blood and His black elk shanks and hooves holding erect a manbody, a manface, packed with muscle, yet bright, carefree, a deity with a laugh in his heart.

  The edict of silence left Hamr with a weight of longing, a frustrated need to boast and to share both the wonder and the fear of his vision. At the edge of the Tortoise camp, where the dogs barked at them, they embraced, and Hamr defeated the urge to ask Spretnak to explain the vision of the Beastmaker.

  "You'll be the best of the Panther men," Spretnak said, "so long as you live what you dream."

  The old man turned, shuffled toward the wincing campfires, and left Hamr alone in the darkness.

  )|(

  Though Hamr yearned to boast, he had little time for that. His childhood days had ended when he captured Blind Side of Life. Now he labored too busily for his rightful place in the tribe to make fireside chat about his dreams. Besides hunting with the Panther men, tending his horse, and spending time with his wife and her family, a battle plan needed his attention.

  Each year, at the height of the spring mussel-harvest, the Eyes of the Bear raided the Blue Shell, marching down from the cedar forest to meet the Blue Shell men among the dunes. Atop a dune selected for its majesty, the Blue Shell chief left a cache of mussels, pelts, and shells. If the Eyes of the Bear felt satisfied with the offering, they took it and left. If not, they attacked the Blue Shell men on the beach, striving to reach the Tortoise camp where they burned the huts and stole women and children. On the way back to the cedar forest, they did the same to the Panther camp in the fields above the sea cliff.