People of the Sea(42)
His brother, Balsam, followed quietly behind him, watching for animals that might have been weakened by the long moons
of darkness and bitter cold. They hadn’t eaten since early morning, as the growls of their stomachs kept reminding them. Balsam, only twelve summers old, had yet to fill out in the shoulders, and now his clothing hung from his skinny frame like the hide on a winter-starved buffalo.
Horseweed had two summers on his younger brother, and he stood a full hand taller. He had begun to develop broad, heavily muscled shoulders as a result of his constant training with atlatl and dart. But the boys looked strikingly alike, with round faces, pug noses and owlish eyes. Each carried an atlatl and had a quiver of darts slung over his right shoulder. Small packs rode their backs.
When the trail turned to the right and they could see through the thick boles of the pine and fir, the blue body of Mother Ocean spread in silent glory out in the distance, only a few days’ walk from where they stood now. The sparkling water touched and blended with the darkening sky in the west.
Horseweed pushed a pine branch out of his way and began climbing a series of switchbacks. He lost sight of the Mother. The bark of the aspens had been gnawed by the elk’s chisel-shaped lower teeth. A man could easily tell where the deepest snow line had been by noting the highest patch of chewed bark and subtracting from that the height of the elk. The drifts here had stood twenty hands high.
Balsam, glancing around at the silent wall of green and shadow, asked uncertainly, “Oxbalm told you to bring Sun chaser back at the point of a dart?”
“Yes. If necessary.”
“Don’t you think… well, that that’s a little risky? I mean, Sunchaser is a great Dreamer.”
“So?”
“What if Sunchaser doesn’t want to come back with us?”
“Then I’ll stick my dart in his back and force him to, just as Grandfather said I should.”
“If Sunchaser doesn’t kill you before you have the chance. Or turn you into a rabbit louse or something.”
Horseweed turned to glower, and, when Balsam smiled, he said, “You’d better hope he doesn’t. That would mean you’d have to bring Sunchaser back by yourself.”
Balsam’s smile faded. In silence, they trudged the rest of the way to the top of the switchbacks, where the trail leveled off and meandered due east through a meadow.
An enormous pink granite cliff loomed into the sky along the meadow’s northern edge. It blazed in the pastel light, contrasting with the patches of dirty snow lying in the meadow’s protected areas. Thousands of cycles of violent wind and storm had weathered the rock until a thick talus slope had formed at the base. High above, boulders perched precariously on the crest. The Dream Cave—about one hundred hands higher than the meadow—made a dark hole in the cliff’s lower half. A wide ledge, like a tongue, stuck out from the mouth of the cave, protruding just above the talus. Across the ledge, a deer trail cut a swath through the sprouts of grass, wound down over the talus slope and wedded with another trail in the meadow.
Horseweed’s skin tingled just looking at the cave’s empty eye socket. They couldn’t avoid passing it. The trail to Brushnut Village narrowed to nothingness here where it curved around the base of the cliff. Catchstraw claimed that Evil Spirits secreted themselves in every crevice here, waiting to pounce and eat the first warm body that happened by.
Horseweed slid behind a towering fir tree to study the meadow. Crusted snow clung stubbornly to the ground where the grass met the trees. Only the dainty runs of mice and voles marked the fringes of the meadow. Still, Horseweed searched each tree for the flick of an ear, the swish of a tail. With the stealth of Weasel, he edged up to the next tree and braced himself on the balls of his toes to examine the berry brier that skirted the cliff beneath the cave. A herd of four deer usually grazed there, but no one could hunt them. Catchstraw talked to them in his Spirit Dreams. They gave him advice about the weather and political matters.
Horseweed frowned. There used to be a pile of wood at the base of the cliff. He had gathered it himself during the last Moon-of-Losing-Antlers. What had happened to it? Catchstraw hadn’t been to the Dream Cave at all during Winter Boy’s reign.
Balsam gasped suddenly. “Look! Who is it?” His arm shot out toward the granite cliff.
“Who?” Horseweed spun around. “Where?”
“Up there! In the Dream Cave.”
Horseweed squinted against the slanting rays of sunset. An old man balanced on the cave’s ledge, his arms spread like Eagle’s. White braids framed his square-jawed face. “Can’t be Catchstraw. We left him in the village two days ago.”