Clear your mind. Run, Wolf Dreamer, run until your body is oblivious, until you are outside your mind, looking in. Dance . . . Dance.
He drifted in and out at first, tendrils of the feeling of freedom, of floating, barely perceptible. Then he was free, soaring beyond his flesh. In his joy at the accomplishment, the bubble burst and he was back, sensation crawling over his body like a swarm of insects.
He plodded to a stop, bending over, coughing, as his lungs bellowed for air. Sweat trickled down his face, steaming in the glacial breeze. Vaguely aware, he took one slow wobbly step after another, trying to still his lungs, rest the ache that knotted his legs. Like a bleached bone, the tongue in his mouth had gone dry. It stuck to the back of his throat.
He straightened, scooping the dusting of crystal snow from
a hummock of grass, letting the cool moisture seep through his mouth, trickle down his throat.
A line of white etched the eastern horizon. The Big Ice. He gasped, blowing hard as he walked, feeling the fire in his legs. Around him, glacial rubble piled high, the haunts of the frozen ghosts. The gravel underfoot insulated layers of ice. Water had pooled here and there, freezing into slick snow-covered traps. To the west the giant mountains shot up in icy splendor. To the east, the Big Ice had fractured, tilted, and crumpled, a jagged landscape of fissures and edges impossible to traverse. Only to the south did the ice flatten out. Overhead, the clouds streaked mauve, the coming of night imminent not just for this day—but for all of the Long Light as well.
The ice to the south drew him. Unlike the Dream, it didn't loom up like a massive wall, rather it had been broken, cracked and tumbled, sun-rotted and wind-buckled. Gray-white outcrops canted, angles rounded while weird shapes and spears of blue crystal jutted into sharp lances. Layers of sand and gravel streaked the mass, lining the white blue with black smears. Not so broken as the eastern ice, it still sent a chill down his spine.
"Can I cross it?"
He forced his weary muscles to climb a promontory. The ' lee side of the rock stretched out in a fan of ice, the cap rock polished, striated, and scoured.
To the south, the ice rose, white, sullen, to mix with the grayish clouds. His heart pounded in his breast. At the edges of his exhausted mind, a whispering of desire called, taunting, drawing. A high-pitched wail came faintly to his ears, drifting down over the southern ice. Ghosts? He strained to listen, but the blood rushing in his veins, the rasping breath in his windpipe, blotted the sound.
Below him, an undulating plain of snow-topped moraines and eskers mounded and rolled—tumbled waves of rock left by the retreating ice.
The stiffness out of his legs, he settled on a snow-encrusted rock, studying the gash cut by the Big River. Even now, when the Long Dark closed its freezing grip on the land, water roared and pitched, an incessant outpouring.
"So much."
The words died in his throat as something black and twisted rolled out, swirling in an eddy, catching on the rapids-washed rock. Curious, Wolf Dreamer worked his way down the polished top of the ridge, carefully moving along the piled boulders. Father Sun had dipped below the ragged mountain wall to the west by the time he picked his way through the treacherous rocks, some larger than a bull mammoth.
The dark spot swirled, battered, one horn broken off even with the skull. A leg had been violently ripped from the body-The reality remained.
"Buffalo! Did you come through underneath?" A giddy rush swept him as hopes taunted. "Somewhere, on the other side, there's a place where buffalo live." He swallowed hard, feeling tendrils of Wolf's promise twine through him.
Balancing, he leapt from rock to rock until he made it to the snagged buffalo. Grasping a torn hoof, he dragged the animal back, slipping and splashing in the frigid water.
"Maybe you didn't come underneath," he lamented, struggling to be realistic. "You could've been frozen here for hundreds of Long Darks."
While the cold water lapped his feet, he dragged the animal as far as he could toward shore, as far as the beast's dead weight could float. He wedged it against the current, snagging the gouged hide on a spike of wave-lapped rock.
Twilight glimmered brassy from the white crests of water rushing around his feet.
Heart beating, light failing, Wolf Dreamer used a chert flake from his pouch to cut open the gut cavity. Entraps bulged out in blue-gray ropes. He sliced open the paunch, green matter spilling into the water. A tapeworm twisted and wiggled before it disappeared in the sandy wash of icy water.
He dove for the worm, missing. "How long does a tapeworm live when it's frozen?" Fishing around in the paunch, he found a second, carefully catching it up. "Think," he gasped to himself, turning in the darkness. "Think how to find out."