People of the Sea(74)

A hand roughly shook his shoulder. He blinked himself awake.

“Lambkill, wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”

“Yes,” he whispered hoarsely and let out a halting breath. He rolled onto his back. The scent of dew-soaked dirt drifted on the wind. Clouds must have filled the night skies, for no light penetrated their brush lodge. He couldn’t even make



out the shapes of their bedding hides. The horror of the dream lingered like a foul stench in his soul. Groping in the blackness, he found his pack and pulled it against his chest—keeping his son, Little Coyote, safe. “A very bad dream. One I’ve had many times.”

“I didn’t know you had such a dream. What is it about?” “Don’t concern yourself with it. I—I’m all right. Go to sleep, Tannin. Thank you … for waking me.”





Sixteen


High above Sunchaser, clouds painted delicate white brush strokes on the lupine-blue belly of Brother Sky.

Sunchaser carefully worked his way along a creek bed, listening to the water babble as it percolated through a crust of ice. The game trail had veered into a sheer-walled canyon where sunlight rarely penetrated. Wavy lines of snow clung in the shadows. As the day lengthened into late afternoon, a chill breeze blew in off the ocean, rustling through the trees and whistling along the faces of the cliffs. It probed his clothing with such glacial fingers that he couldn’t help shivering. He pulled up the collar of his hide shirt and held it closed. Helper had trotted so far into the lead, hands of time ago, that Sunchaser had lost sight of him.

He’d been following Helper for two days. The bulls had fallen behind late yesterday, disappearing into the forest to die. Only the wounded mammoth cow now walked the trail ahead of them. With each step she took, the obsidian points of his darts would be cutting deeper. By now her pain would have grown unbearable.

You’re to blame, Sunchaser. You caused her to hurt this



way! When Mammoth Above had come to him on his first vision quest, he’d promised her that he would never again lift his atlatl against one of her children. Would she understand that he’d had no choice? That these children had gone rogue?

He lowered his eyes, studying the pale light that mottled the canyon. On the rocks that poked up in his path, dark red spots gleamed. The cow had lost a lot of blood. How could she keep going?

Ahead, the game trail meandered through a shaded glen and disappeared around a bulge in the canyon wall. Sunchaser plodded forward. As he followed along the curve, he saw a small waterfall cascading down a twenty-hand drop, splashing on rocks in the bottom of the drainage, and heard scavenger birds calling to each other. Ravens and magpies squawked, and buzzards circled overhead. The musty odors of mold and decay accosted him long before he finished rounding the bend.

The first skeleton took him by surprise. Here lay the remains of a mastodon. Though the mastodons had died out long before he’d been born, he knew their bones well.

Good Plume had taken him to a Dying Ground when he’d been a little boy and had taught him the differences between mammoths and mastodons. The massive’ animal before him was smaller than a mammoth and had a flat skull, not a domed one. The tusks recurved, unlike mammoths’ tusks. As he went closer, he noticed that the teeth resembled rounded cones. Good Plume had told him that mastodons needed such teeth because they had lived in wooded areas and browsed on leaves and twigs, unlike mammoths, who needed flat teeth for chewing grasses.

A long dart point lay half buried in the mastodon’s third rib. Made of fine red chert, it glittered in the deepening shadows. This animal had been hunted, probably killed, by humans, but its bones showed no signs of having been butchered. So the bull had escaped its hunters and bravely journeyed here to die.



“Bless you, Father. I hope your soul is running free through the forests in the Land of the Dead.” Sunchaser stroked the huge skull.

More skeletons met his gaze as he continued into the hidden valley—dozens of them, perhaps even a hundred, some with hairy hides shrunken over their bones, like great gray cocoons. They filled the box canyon.

He heard a soft whine and turned.

Helper lay on the grass with his nose touching the trunk of the dying mammoth cow. He had his ears down and his eyes wide open, peering intently at the mammoth’s closed lids. The cow had stumbled and fallen atop her two front legs. She hadn’t the strength to rise again. Her back legs twisted hideously in the tall grass. Dart shafts protruded like perverse quills from her blood-soaked hair. But she lived. Puffs of breath condensed into silver clouds near her open mouth. The sight wounded Sunchaser’s soul.

“Oh, Mother, forgive me.”