He took a sip of the warm, delicately flavored soup and sank back against the hide pillow. His teeth had begun to chatter so violently that he barely managed to keep his mouth on the bowl long enough to get another swallow. “Perhaps.” “You doubt me? Don’t. I tell you the truth. You must stop giving so much of yourself to people. Pretty soon there won’t be enough of you left to Dream.”
He started to respond … but he heard voices again, faint, riding the wind like lost souls, calling to him. He closed his eyes to listen better.
“Sunchaser? .. . Sunchaser? Hurry! Where are you? Can you hear me? Come and look! There are mammoths coming!”
A brilliant glow suffused the world around him, filled with the desperate cries of a baby. He floated on that tormented sound with the freedom of a curl of smoke on a still day, rising higher and higher, freed from the cage of his sick body.
The Dream lifted his soul and carried it away on wings of gold…
He found himself crouching in a condor trap high on a mountain. Rocky cliffs jutted into the sky around him. He huddled down into a ball, but cold seeped from the frozen soil, penetrating his heavily fringed hide shirt and pants. Puffs of clouds were visible through the dense weave of brush. They drifted westward, toward the sea. All day long, snow flurries had intermittently frosted the peak. Above-Old Man must have been looking out for him. The thin, white coating would help disguise his trap.
The trap was a circle of rocks placed around a pit and covered with brush. Forty hands from the trap lay a dead bighorn, its magnificent horns catching the afternoon sunlight. Sunchaser had killed the sheep at dawn, dragged it down the mountain’s rocky slope and slit its belly open so that the internal organs lay in full sight and created a range of smells, from the sweet richness of blood to the stench of torn intestines. Grandmother Condor hunted warily. But only the downy under feathers of Condor’s wings could complete Sunchaser’s ritual attire.
He spied two tiny black dots gliding against the background of clouds, and he held his breath. He could just make out the white linings of their enormous wings.
The condors descended slowly, cautiously, circling each other, cocking their red-bald heads as their sharp eyes surveyed the conifer forest for danger. A breeding pair. Sunchaser had located their nest a moon ago. It filled a rocky niche two hundred hands down the slope from his trap.
The huge female let out a glorious cry, tucked her wings and sailed as straight as a well-cast dart to the dead sheep. The male alighted beside her and together they hesitantly approached the exposed guts. The female tore into the liver, while the male pecked at the bloody lungs. Sunchaser pulled his bone dagger from his belt and readied himself. He waited patiently, twisting the fringe on his pant leg as he repeated a mental chant, a prayer of offering:
I see you. Condor. Hear my prayers. In clasping one another tight, Holding one another fast, May we finish our roads together, keeping Beauty before us always.
The condors’ eighteen-hand wing span made taking off difficult, and when condors ate, especially in cold weather, they gorged themselves. Flight would be even harder on a full stomach.
The gigantic birds ate in silence, occasionally flapping their black-and-white wings as they tugged at a stubborn gobbet of meat. After two fingers of time, both birds had slowed their consumption, stopping more often now to stare. about and strut through the gutted mess they’d created. The male lifted his head and bent his neck back, perhaps to resettle his stomach. They seemed to have eaten their fill. The female ruffled her feathers and plucked at some annoyance beneath her right wing. The male hopped up on top of the sheep and scanned the open meadow. Soon they would fly away.
Sunchaser burst from his hiding place and raced toward the birds. The male let out a cry of shock and flapped hard, trying to lift his heavy body. The female broke in the opposite direction. Sunchaser ran with all his might. Snow squealed beneath his moccasins, as he leaped for the female’s legs. He managed to latch on to the right one. The condor squawked in fear, and the frozen puffs of her breath twisted away in the wind. The talons on her left foot ripped at his arms while she attacked the top of his head with her beak. Hot blood streamed down his face and dripped from his chin.
“Please, Grandmother,” he Sang as he struck out with his dagger. “Give yourself to me so that mammoths may continue to live in our world.” He struck again and again, feeling the sharp point rip through the feathers and puncture the condor’s black breast and throat. Warm stickiness
coated his hand, and offal leaked from the bird’s punctured gut.
The condor shrieked and flogged him with huge, bloody wings. Her mate circled away on the updraft, watching and calling out in terror.