People of the Raven(22)

In a weary exhalation, he added, “Blessed Song Maker, I should have known he’d do this. Dzoo is our strength, and Cimmis knows it. Of course he’d take the opportunity to snatch her when she’s outside Sandy Point Village’s protection.”

Dogrib gave him a searching look. “I just pray she has foreseen their coming.”





Late Morning

“Oh, I have seen many things in my time. But most of them, I admit, I did not wish to see,” I whisper.

The old Soul Keeper rises to his feet, and I hear him walk a few paces away. His voice is dimmer, muted by the rushing wind through the cottonwoods and the riot of birdsong that fills the day. “Seeing is good, Chief. Most humans sleep from the womb to death. They never fully open their eyes. Oh, a few are startled now and then and forced to really look at the world, but they quickly choose to return to sleep. Not seeing is so much easier.”

“I, too, have spent a good deal of time sleeping, Soul Keeper. I blame them not.”

He pauses as though not sure what to say to my admission. He thinks everyone should wake up. That there is no place for sleeping in a world such as ours.

“Did not seeing comfort you, Chief? Weren’t you afraid that there were others stirring around you who were awake and watching you?”

I laugh softly. “People who are truly awake are engaged in great suffering. They didn’t have time for me.”

He turns, and his long robe flaps in a gust of wind. “Are you awake now?” he softly asks.

“More awake than I have ever been.”

He walks back and sits beside me. The scents of wood smoke and wet leather cling to him. For a long time I just lie still, trying to memorize the fragrances. I have smelled these things every day of my life, yet they smell new, fresh, and pleasant. I want to keep them.

“Do you mean you are suffering physically, or in your soul?”

“Both.”

“Great suffering,” he says with a sigh, “is not usually physical. Abandonment, isolation, loss of hope—those are the real torments. So many people these days have outlived their beloved spouses and companions. Their children are absorbed in their own lives. They cannot bear to stare into the eyes of someone who is truly awake.” He reaches out and takes my hand. His fingers have a knobby, skeletal feel, like knotted ropes. “Are you lonely?”

“I wish my wife were here. I yearn to look into her eyes.”

“She would not look back. You have become the entire universe. The naked unbearable universe. All that there is.”

Is that what Death is? Looking into the naked unbearable eyes of the universe?

It takes a great effort, but I manage to slit my eyes, and I find him gazing down at me with infinite kindness through a blaze of white-hot light.

How strange.

If occurs to me for the first time that he is wrong. Looking upon great suffering is not the most frightening thing in life. It is not what is naked and unbearable.

Great kindness is.

Perhaps because it is harder to accept.

I close my eyes and work very hard to keep them closed.





Eight

The man known as Coyote prowled the starlit forest trail that wound around Antler Spoon’s village. He carefully stepped over snow-covered ferns that might rustle beneath his fur-trimmed moccasins. He could not afford to misstep or be heard. Not tonight when old dreams were about to become real.

He lifted his nose to sniff the chill air, and his long hair blew around the magnificent coyote mask he wore. Human scents rode Wind Woman’s breath: cooked food, moldering hides, the fever-sweaty bodies of the ill, and the tangy odors of boiling Spirit plants.

Beyond the dark spruce to his left, smoke clung like a blue veil to the towering gray cliff. There the villagers had taken refuge in the lava caves that riddled the rock like wormholes. They’d come here six moons ago. Three tens of refugees from famine-struck villages in the north. The children had been filthy and starving. Many of the elderly had barely been able to walk. For a time, this narrow mountain valley must have seemed like one of the Above Worlds to them, beautiful and free, impervious to the raids that savaged the villages along the shore and on the islands out in the sound.

When his duties allowed, he had come here to watch them. They were people with no local kin, no one to call upon for aid. Isolated and vulnerable. From that the plan had been born. One night he had crept among them and sowed the deadly fever. He had trickled scrapings of a red-brown fungus into their stews, sifted it into sacks of dried food. Within days, people started to lose weight and complain of chest pains. Some died before Chief Antler Spoon asked for help.

As he had hoped, she had come.

Now, as the frost of his breath silvered the muzzle of his Coyote mask, he watched from beneath a spruce tree’s dark skirt. A shadow moved across the firelit roof of the largest cave. Coyote let his tall body melt into the dark trunk.