People of the River

One


Lichen, daughter of the Morning Star Clan, ran along the ridge top, dodging the bristly arms of dogwood and beaver root until she found the trail that skirted the edge of the cornfield. The faded leaves of last cycle's crop snatched at her dress as she jumped a deep gully and angled down the incline, heading for the tan humps of limestone in the distance. Her friend Rycatcher's steps pounded behind her. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure that he could jump the gully. Flycatcher was a summer younger than she, barely nine, and he had the shortest legs she had ever seen on a boy. He took a flying leap and made it, but stumbled on the other side and fell to his knees. Dust plumed up around him. Flycatcher made a low sound of disgust.

Lichen laughed. "That was a deep one, wasn't it?"

"Who cares about deep?" he asked as he pulled himself to his feet, "It was as wide as the Father Water." He brushed the dirt from his bare legs and straightened the blue headband that kept his shoulder-length black hair out of his eyes. He had a round face and a small, forever-wiggling nose. Hy-catcher liked to smell things—some of them pretty putrid, Lichen thought. Once last spring he had taken her to a recently abandoned bear den to prove to her that he could distinguish the cubs' sleeping places from the sow's just by the smell of the urine. Lichen couldn't see any use to such knowledge. She could tell the difference just by the look of the feces. Who wanted to smell urine?

As Flycatcher trotted toward her, Lichen turned and sprinted on down the trail. She passed the far boundary of the cornfield and descended the slope through a garden of boulders. The irregular surface bit at her moccasined feet. The trail had been worn into the stone here and was polished smooth by thousands of feet. But Wind Mother blew enough sand and gravel into the trough to make the going miserable until the traveler climbed up the next hill, where the rains swept the trail clean. Lichen moved along as fast as she could.

When she crested the slope, the beauty of First Woman's land lay spread around her, vast, and carved into odd shapes by the Ice Giants who had once roamed this swampy river country. In the rich bottomland below, water rushed down dozens of creeks and flowed into a strewn handful of ponds and lakes. Women sat on the shores washing clothes. Men labored farther north, felling the scraggly trees that grew along the bluffs. The trees would be taken back to the mound construction sites in the great village of Cahokia. Everyone else had stopped building mounds long before Lichen had been bom. Only the Sun Chief still worked to lift Mother Earth so she could touch fingertips with Father Sun.

Across the Father Water, to the west, tan-and-gray bluffs thrust their blunt noses into the turquoise sky. Lichen had never been there, but she knew that Pretty Mounds sat on the highest bluff. She had a cousin of the Grasshopper Clan who always came from Pretty Mounds to visit during the Green Com ceremonial. To the south, the direction in which Lichen and Flycatcher ran, a bank of blue-black clouds trailed filaments of rain over gnarled limestone spires.

"How much farther?" Flycatcher panted.

"Not much." She pointed ahead. The irregular line of the bluff climbed to the tallest spire, which thrust out over the sheer cliff like a long snout. On the ledge beneath it, a thick copse of bare-branched oaks hid Wanderer's rock shelter. "Wanderer's house is in the side of the cliff, just past those oaks."

"Lichen?" There was hesitation in his voice. "Are you sure we should go see him? My mother says he's a crazy old witch."

"I have to talk to him, Flycatcher," she threw over her shoulder as she trotted on. "He's the only one who understands about my Dreams."

"But Mother says the village elders banished him from living with humans because he has the soul of a raven."

"He does," she answered blithely. "At least for the moment. He says his soul had many shapes before it became a raven. You'll like him. He tells great stories."

The pounding of Flycatcher's feet stopped. Lichen paused and looked back at him. He stood awkwardly at the bottom of the slope, the flap of his tan breechclout waving in the breeze that swept the bluff top. A morose expression contorted his face.

"What's wrong?" Lichen called.

Flycatcher gazed up speculatively from beneath his long lashes, but he didn't answer.

"Flycatcher! He's not as crazy as people say. Wanderer is just . . . different, but he's not bad. Come on, you'll see." She waved him forward, but he stood as though rooted to the tan limestone.

He wet his lips. "But what if Wanderer does something to us, like casts a spell on us?"

"A spell? What for?"

"I don't know! Maybe he'd witch us to make us lose our human souls so he can put raven souls in our bodies."