Wren concentrated on her feet. Cougar prints marked the sand in front of her toes. Big ones, twice the size of Wren’s palm. They had been following animal trails, as Rumbler had foreseen, but the way had turned out to be much more difficult than they’d expected. Jagged piles of stones often blocked the path, forcing them to squeeze through cracks, and scramble over talus. Wren had torn out the knees of her pants scrambling on all fours across the last slope. Blood stained the blue hide, and crusted her lower legs.
As she edged closer to what appeared to be a precipice, she saw Rumbler on a ledge about fifty hands below, looking down. Half her height, from up here he appeared tiny, his arms and legs stubs protruding from his trunk. Chin-length black hair blew about his round face. She had torn off the hem of his old black shirt, washed it in water steeped with pine needles, and wrapped his hands with it. She’d slipped her wolf-hide mittens over the bandages to protect them. The mittens swallowed his arms all the way to his elbows.
“Wren? I thought this was the trail, but …” His voice faded in and out with the wind as she slid closer. “I don’t … think …”
Wren shouted, “But we followed the tracks you saw in your Dream! You told me that first we’d find the place a wolf had slept, and that if we stayed on his paw prints, he would lead us to a moose, then we would spook a deer, and her hoofprints would lead us to a cougar’s trail. We’ve done everything you said we should.”
“The cougar’s trail ends … Wren. At this ledge.” He gestured to the prints in the sand where he stood. “In my Dream, the cougar took us home.”
Jumbled boulders filled the space between Wren and Rumbler. She sank her fingers between the rocks, and lowered herself a step at a time, feeling the way with her toes.
When she had climbed down onto the ledge beside Rumbler, he flapped his arms helplessly. “I’m sorry, Wren. I may have gotten us lost.”
Spruces and oak trees splotched the hillsides. It upset her that Rumbler’s Dream might have been mistaken. She had heard of it happening to other Dreamers, when their Spirit Helpers tricked them, or deliberately made the Dream so difficult the Dreamer couldn’t possibly understand it. But Rumbler? In all the stories Jumping Badger had told, Rumbler had never once been wrong.
She said, “The cougar’s tracks were on both paths at that last fork in the trail. Remember? Maybe we should have gone to the left, not the right.”
“Maybe, but … I thought this was the way.”
“Should we go back? It won’t take long.”
He tucked the mittens gingerly beneath his arms. She had checked his fingers over breakfast, and found them healing, but the pain must be bad.
Rumbler stared at the precipice. The sheer granite wall fell seventy hands straight down. The cougar must have growled in dismay when she got here. Then what? What did she do after that? She didn’t go back the way she’d come. There were no prints headed the other direction.
Wren closed her eyes, and tried to put her souls into a cougar’s body, to imagine what she would have done, where she might have jumped or—
“Wren? The bird hasn’t come back. Why do you think he hasn’t?”
She opened her eyes. Rumbler stood facing the east, his back to her, but she could see the slump in his young shoulders.
“Yet, Rumbler. The siskin hasn’t come back yet. Siskins are very small, and it’s a long way. Give him more time.”
But she’d been worrying, too. If the bird had flown to the Up-Above-World and couldn’t find Rumbler’s mother, then it meant one of two things: Either Briar still lived, or her soul had not been able to find its way to the afterlife. The second possibility was probably eating Rumbler alive. Homeless ghosts wandered the forests crying for loved ones, miserably eating the dregs from empty village cook pots. Wren had overheard old Starflower talking about this two winters ago. She’d said that such ghosts rarely knew they were dead. They knew only that they had to find their families. Some ghosts—especially those that had died a long way from home—never found their families, and were condemned to run forever, calling the names of people who had long since traveled to the Up-Above-World. Other ghosts found their families, but the living could not hear them, and this drove the ghosts into madness. After moons of shouting into their husband’s or mother’s face, the ghost would begin causing disasters to try and gain the living’s attention. Homeless ghosts often ended up harming those they most loved.
Wren smoothed her moccasin over one of the cougar prints. “Rumbler? Are you afraid?”