“Oh, Helper …” After his own illness, Helper’s hair had started to fall out in clumps.
Sunchaser met Helper’s concerned brown gaze. “Everything is going wrong, old friend. The mammoths are dying. Sickness stalks the land.”
Helper, his tail slipping back and forth in a loose wag, licked Sunchaser’s hand.
“And I can’t even find the Power to tie your hair to your body.”
Helper whined softly, the sound punctuated by a series of snorts as he pawed the ground with his front feet.
“Do you think so?” Sunchaser asked. “I wish I had your confidence in me.”
Helper’s high-pitched whine echoed Sunchaser’s distress.
“I know.” Sunchaser gently ruffled the fur on Helper’s side. “We’ll go to the Dream Cave, where we’ll have the solitude we need to find the Way. You’ll help me, won’t you?”
Helper bounced on springy legs and tried to grab Sunchaser’s hand in his mouth.
“Yes, I knew you would. The cave isn’t more than a day’s walk from here. We’ll build a big fire. Then I’ll sweat and pray.”
Helper made a hurrumph that was half exhale and shook his head, an act that haloed his face in floating hair.
Sunchaser leaned forward, bending down to drink—and stopped short. His image stared back at him from the calm water. The interlacing branches of the fir trees overhead made a background for his face, aged now, lined where it hadn’t been lined only weeks before. But the greatest shock was something else.
Fear pumped through his muscles as he jerked out a strand of his own hair. The reflection in the pool hadn’t lied—his hair was turning snow-white!
Kestrel trotted through. the dirty froth that coated the shore of the Big Spoonwood River. Brilliant sunshine warmed her face as she ran, but it did little to ease the terror that stung her soul. Over the past five days, her desperation had been growing, until now she could barely sit still to feed Cloud Girl. Every fiber in her body screamed for her to forget trying to cross the river, to run fast and hard, to get away from here now!
But she knew the only way to really lose Lambkill lay in obliterating her trail by crossing the swollen river. Despite
the gentle rain that had pattered off and on all night long, the water level had gone down further. Rocks of gulls hunted along the shore, squawking and flapping their wings over the small creatures trapped in the stagnant pools. They screamed at Kestrel when her rapid steps frightened them away from their precious finds.
Looking out over the frothing water frightened her. Whirlpools still sucked needles, grass and small floating bits of bark down into their swirling currents. Farther out in the flow, white water shot up in jets as the relentless pounding of the river drove against the big boulders in midstream. The splintered remains of a giant cottonwood plunged and bucked like a rutting buffalo bull as it lanced the murky flow. No one can survive that! I’ll drown. I’ll die out there with my daughter.
Kestrel veered wide around an old mammoth jump site. Dozens of skeletons lay in a huge pile, their rib bones broken and interlaced like long white fingers. She could still see the top of the cliff, even the place where her ancestors had driven the herd over the edge. When the mammoths had realized their error, they must have struggled madly, trying not to fall. Chunks of protruding rock had cracked off as the animals tumbled over the precipice. She’d seen several kill sites in the past two days, but none with as many mammoth skeletons as this one had. As Kestrel trotted by, she aimlessly tried to count them. Thirty or forty animals, she guessed.. It must have happened when Winter Boy had been clutching the land to his bosom; that’s when the animals came together in enormous herds.
The gaping skulls and impact-split bones haunted her. This is a place of death—and mine will be but one more.
Cloud Girl bounced in the rabbit-fur sack on her back, quiet but awake. Kestrel had tied the sack high so that when she turned her head, she could see the baby. Two huge blue eyes stared back at her from the midst of a ring of gray fur. The mouse hide pacifier in her tiny mouth moved rhythmically. Usually Cloud Girl went to sleep after she’d
been fed, but not this afternoon. Perhaps she could sense the fear that clawed at her mother’s heart. Kestrel couldn’t keep her eyes from straying to the top of the bluff. She half-expected to see men with atlatls aimed down at them. But only the condors perching on the rugged cliffs met her gaze.
She had waited until early afternoon to test the temperature of the water, and she’d found it barely tolerable. It would still be a freezing trip. They wouldn’t reach the opposite shore until just before nightfall, but they could make it. Suddenly she felt sure of it.