Silence was broken only by the snapping impact of the stone hammer on the hardwood stake.
Finally Snow Otter asked, “So what do you want? I’d really like to know. Season after season, you travel the length of the rivers, make the portages, and carry your goods from one end of the land to the other. In all that time, never have I heard you talk of home. You speak fondly of no people. I don’t even know your nation. Not one single woman seems to linger in your thoughts, yet you watch any attractive female with a wistful longing in your eyes. It’s as if you are cast loose, like the wild birds … a thing that migrates and has no will to stop.”
Trader looked up, rubbing a grimy hand across his forehead. “Maybe that’s what I am, nothing more than a bird.”
“What’s your name? Seriously. You just go by Trader. It’s as if you’re not even a full person. You have to have a name.”
“Trader is enough.” He lowered his eyes to the stake where it wedged into the rock. “A name is nothing. A word. Once it passes from the lips it might never have existed. Like the breath behind it, it’s gone. And so shall I be. And soon, Snow Otter. Very soon.”
“That’s all you want from living? Just to pass like a word?”
Trader managed a bitter smile. “Maybe all I want is wealth. Something that will take a high chief’s breath away. Something so precious I can Trade it for a whole fleet of canoes. Yes, that’s it. I want something so precious that the very sight of it will make people swoon and gasp with awe. I want to see their eyes fill with envy!”
“For what purpose? Just to have it? To hoard this great wealth like a packrat over a gleaming white shell? Bah! You’d rot on the inside trying to keep it.”
“Maybe I’d Trade it for something.”
“Ah, now that makes sense. Would you buy yourself a farm, slaves to work your fields, and compliant women? Is that it? You’d lie around, get fat, and sire children?”
Trader shook his head. “What? And send my harvest off to the high minko of whatever land I ended up in? No, I’ve seen that and want no part of it.”
“So I’m back to my original question. What do you want?”
Trader hammered absently at the stake. “Great wealth.”
“Just wealth?”
“That’s right.”
“Just to have it?”
“That’s why I’m down here digging,” Trader muttered. “I can feel it.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, I can feel the copper. It’s here.”
“Of course it’s there,” Snow Otter agreed. “I’ve pulled a lot of copper out of that pit, but it’s all been small nuggets. Small nuggets aren’t that bad. You can take a lot of little pieces of copper and beat them into one sheet.”
“The color’s not consistent.”
The first drop of rain spattered on Trader’s neck. He grunted at the cold trickle that ran down into his collar. As the rain increased he resumed his hammering, letting the cold impacts on his back goad him to further effort. Sand caked his damp hands, grating on the wooden handle of the maul. Snow Otter’s questions left him irritated and touched at the old wound deep between his souls. He had been stripped of all the essentials that made a man: family, status, place, and possessions. A man with nothing wanted everything. One day, he would obtain some item so valuable and rare it would be the envy of all: chief, Priest, warrior, farmer, and slave. Then, by blood and pus, he’d show them.
“You’re a fool!” Snow Otter called from the rim of the hole. He was holding a section of tanned deer hide over his head. Rain battered at them.
“So are you … for staying here.”
“My conscience won’t allow me to leave an idiot to his fate.”
“And you’re curious,” Trader muttered under his breath as he straightened his back against the strain and selected another of the hardwood stakes. Through the pelting rain he could see another crack opening to the side of the rock he worked on. Bending at the hips, he began hammering another of the pointed stakes into the faint gap.
“You’re a lunatic!” Snow Otter called from above.
The rain fell in relentless sheets, turning the hole into a mucky mess. Trader slopped about on soaked moccasins. He could feel sand between his toes. His long black hair had matted to his head, and cold droplets were tracing paths down his cheeks. The stone mallet head now slipped when he pounded it against the mushrooming wood.
“That hammer’s going to fall apart,” Snow Otter observed from above. “The head is only held on by shrunken rawhide. Once it’s wet …”