Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  The morning sun, high in the spiky trees, glinted brilliantly in the dew that beaded everything. Soon enough that dew would be frost. Maybe even tonight (though, seeing the clear atmosphere to the north and puffs of warm clouds flocking from the south, he doubted that). Soon, anyway, the frost would set.

  In the night, as he had run through cold vapors of fog, he had felt the girl's body chill, and he had lifted her from his shoulders and carried her against his chest, even though that slowed him down. Today, he had decided not to sleep but to get the hides they would need to face the frigid nights ahead.

  Baat signed for Duru to wait for him, then picked his way nimbly along the rock spine to a vantage that looked down on a narrow gorge. It promised good hunting, choked with scree and thornapple whose glossy, lobed rose-madder leaves were favored by Red Deer. A dozen of the deer grazed in the ravine as Baat silently crawled across the ridge to a cairn of sharp rocks.

  The cairn, a tall heap of stones piled here by the People, served for killing animals that entered the gorge. In the years since hunters stacked these rocks, no one had come to use it until now. Baat rejoiced to find that the trigger stone at the base of the pile still had a sturdy vine-rope attached to it. He gave it a mighty tug, and the stack of rocks tumbled down the steep slope.

  Most of the deer bounded agilely to safety. Three of them stumbled among the scree and fell under Baat's avalanche. He drew his knife and swiftly scrambled down the incline to where the deer lay stunned among the thornapples. In moments, three big deer carcasses lay before him.

  A jubilant cry came from above. Baat looked up to see Duru clapping her hands over her head. She crawled down into the gorge, favoring her good leg, and together they skinned the beasts and disjointed several haunches.

  Duru jubilated at the bounty the Great Mother had given them. She felt another joy that they two had come together—this great being and she, laughing together, empty of regard for tomorrow. If only the Great Mother would unite her with Hamr and Timov, all would truly be well.

  That strove for more than she dared ask. Mother had taught her never to pray for kindness to happen, only for strength of purpose. In the simplicity of her joy, she believed that getting the ghost dancer north, where he could commune with the Bright Ones, would be enough. She laughed away her doubts and fears, and Baat laughed with her.

  After cutting free the hearts and livers, breaking off the antlers, smashing the skulls for the sweet and tender brains, they left the rest for scavenger birds and animals. At the place where the cairn had stood, Baat situated the antlers for the Old Ones, who had thought to make the cairn in the first place. No need to pile the rocks again. And no time. Already the sun peaked.

  Baat built a large fire on the ridge. He knew the smoke would alert the trackers, but the meat had to be cooked, the hides seasoned. After eating his fill of brains and liver, he left Duru to tend the fire, and walked the ridge. Scanning the convoluted land of the south and opposite that—the expansive plains where the mountain-high ice had once rested—he searched for danger.

  He had planned a vigil of watchfulness, hoping to locate his trackers. What he looked for he found almost immediately: They had approached closer than he had imagined. Down a wrinkled granite incline, flashing in and out of pine shadows, a human spark scrabbled—Duru's brother. Yaqut would be nearby, though nowhere to be seen.

  Facing the other way, Baat spotted another dot of motion among the yews of the taiga. Squinting, he distinguished that distant point of color for a lone horse. The beardless one. He traveled with someone, a youth, maybe a woman—too far for him to tell.

  The trackers had locked him in—unless he tried to skirt them. That would use up precious time, and increase the likelihood that the first winter storm would catch them on the tundra. No—I must face them.

  Baat looked south again, watching Timov’s tiny jig of movement zig-zagging among clumps of pine. He shifted his gaze and let the broken landscape float before him, searching for Yaqut.

  In a cluster of cedar, deer glittered like red stars, and on a far hillside he recognized the slouching motions of Bear. Jays swirled above folded and twisted hills, and flicks of dragon-flies, too. His attentive mind opened clear and cold as any of the rock pools glinting below in noonlight—and then he discerned him, a tiny blur among the tortured trees on a high ledge above where Timov ambled. He disappeared into the juniper shadows and did not reappear.

  A shiver shook Baat. He did not want to face Yaqut. Throughout the summer, the Dark Traces had taunted him with nightmare images of that ruined face. Facing the other way, looking down into the Forest, he found clusters of granite monoliths that the ice of long ago had bunched and stacked. The People knew that place for its caves and for the lions that dwelled in them.

  An evil idea offered itself. He sweated, feeling as damp in his bones as though the Dark Traces themselves had suggested the idea to him. The ul udi slept now, far up in the blue. The idea belonged solely to him. To fulfill its evil, he would need the help of the Dark Traces. Though not sure they would obey him, if he chose he could talk to them. They would not answer him now. They slept, but in their sleeping they would hear him. Maybe, when they woke tonight, if the evil of his prayer pleased them, they would heed him.

  As a young man, the elders had taught him how to pray to the Dark Traces. Only rarely—and not in many years—had he availed himself of that grim knowledge, and he wondered if he still could.

  With eyes fixed on the distant stacks of granite rubble, he began to hum the hunger music that the old ones had first wept for him. The sound he made voiced a gasp—soft, a beast in pain with too little life left to cry out, calling crows to take his eyes, strangling on his own breath. To hear it would not be to call it music but suffering, suffering that held music to Raven and Hyena, and to the Dark Traces, who relished evil.

  Now that Baat had bid for the ul udi's attention, he hoped to impress on them his prayer: Be lion's flesh—and the hunger that lives in that flesh.

  He lifted his gaze slightly and fixed on the moving motes of the horseman and his companion.

  Be lion's flesh that stalks the horse. Be lion's hunger that devours the horse. Rage with the hunger of the lion. Come down through me and be lion's flesh and lion's hunger. Come down through me.

  Duru found Baat squatting on the chine of the ridge, eyes half-closed, arms hanging limply between his legs. His breath came out of him in muttering and faltering, and he did not respond when she called his name. How can he sleep in so uncomfortable a position?

  Since last night, when the blue blaze of his touch had sent her flying out of her body, alert for the first time, she had been afraid for him. Her flight had taken her to Timov, and she had clearly seen the fear in her brother.

  Hamr and Blind Side had been nowhere near Timov, yet Yaqut appeared there—and now Duru feared that the Longtooth hunter stalked nearby. Tonight, if Baat danced and touched her with his celestial fire, she would concentrate harder, and try to see exactly where Timov and Yaqut moved.

  While waiting for Baat, Duru had fashioned a poppet from a pinecone. It had grass stem limbs and acorn caps for breasts—the kind of image that she and Cyndell used to offer the Great Mother. She had made no offerings since—each day of survival had been its own deep, thankful offering—but now she wanted to leave a sign for Timov that she was all right. After crafting the poppet, she had propped it beside the fire and come looking for Baat.

  She called his name several more times, but he did not stir. She reached out. At her touch, he sagged forward, so heavily she feared he would fall over the precipice, and she seized his arm. He rolled backward and lay blinking at the amber sun.

  Baat roused slowly, then flashed into alertness when he sensed the girl beside him. Quickly, he looked north and south and detected no sign of the trackers. Afraid that if she glimpsed them she would not go on with him, grimacing against the cramps in his legs, he stood and they limped back to the fire.

  The skins that had b
een stretched on birch poles to dry close to the flames remained damp. There would be no time to finish curing them today. The moon hung like a half-blown ball of dandelion seed in the blue sky, and clouds cluttering up the horizon in the west already shone orange. Duru lashed the cooked deer haunches together with strips of tendon, and Baat unstrung the hides and rolled them up.

  Satisfied that her leg had healed strong enough to walk on until she needed sleep, Duru leaned on her staff and shambled after Baat. He carried the pelts across his shoulders and later, when Duru grew sleepy, he would roll her up in them. By then, night would have descended. With chill darkness, the ul udi would bring their living fire—and their deepening hungers.

  )|(

  Yaqut and Timov found the ghost dancer's fire-site on the spine of the ridge early in the morning, before the sun cleared the treetops. During the night, they had camped on a hillside so nearby that, until dawn, they had listened to scavengers fighting over and devouring the deer carcasses Baat had left in the gorge. The fierce noises had kept Timov from sleeping deeply, and he had experienced no further dreams of the ul udi or Duru.

  Yaqut held up a pinecone braided with grass, and Timov snatched it from his hand. "That's Duru's!" He turned it around, recognizing his sister's handiwork. And he noted how the arms of the poppet crooked at the elbows, touching the acorn-cap breasts, to signify child or caring. "She's all right!" A smile flickered, lingered, over his smudged and scratched face. "My dream was true! She's helping the ghost dancer. Somehow, she's caring for him."

  "Bah!" Yaqut knocked the poppet from Timov's grip, and smashed it into the ashes with the blunt end of his spear.

  When Timov sprang forward, to strike the hunter, Yaqut did not flinch, and the boy shrank back. "You do not know the devilish powers of the bonesucker or the Invisibles. Do not believe what you see. That is how we lost your sister in the first place."

  Timov stared angrily after Yaqut as the bony man turned away and strode across the crest of the ridge, looking for signs of the ghost dancer's new camp. Timov knew that with a running push he could send the old man careening down the rockface into the green tapers of fir below. That would redeem the humiliations the boy had suffered with Yaqut—the menial work of chewing hides for Yaqut's winter garments, eating gristle while Yaqut took his fill of the best meats and left the rest in the ashes for the Beastmaker, and, worst of all, running ahead through the woods alerting Bear and every other beast, just to disguise Yaqut's secret moves in the shadows.

  One shove now, and the Beastmaker could share his beloved hunter with the Mudman.

  "Timov—look!"

  Timov stepped behind Yaqut and stared along the extended length of his lance, expecting to see the plume of the ghost dancer's new camp. Instead, what he eyed brought a joyful cry from him. Tiny figures moved among the trees, specks of pollen glinting in the violet morning haze—barely recognizable as Hamr, Kirchi, and Blind Side of Life.

  Not waiting for Yaqut's order, Timov scurried ahead along the ridge's downward slope, using his spear to keep his haste from tumbling him among the rocks. Yaqut let him run ahead and watched the surrounding tree-shagged hills carefully, feeling for the threat he knew lurked there.

  Down in the sapphire mist, Blind Side of Life moved warily, and Hamr did not hurry him. The tracking stone felt very cold in his grasp when he pointed it toward the fog-hung hills.

  Kirchi, too, held tight to Hamr's arm. The land had become rough since they had turned south at the bend in the Big River. Among the numerous clumps of boulders and half-buried rock slabs, large animals could appear from anywhere.

  With her moonstones held close to her mouth, Kirchi had already talked Wolf and Panther into leaving them alone. Both times, Hamr had infuriated the beasts by trying to drive them off with thrown rocks. He had been amazed that Kirchi's soft mutterings had made the snarling creatures back away. "What do you say to them?"

  "That there's easier prey in the Forest."

  After the attack of the Moon Bitch, Hamr had become disposed to believe anything Kirchi told him. Neoll Nant Caw had not appeared again since that evil night, but as the moon grew, so did Kirchi's fear.

  "You wounded her terribly," she told Hamr that first day after the confrontation, when he started at every colorful tree and dew-baubled bush. "Those half-formed monsters you spilled from her are all her rages—monstrous angers that have been growing in her a long time. She's furious that the Old People are dying out, and that the men of our tribe, of all the tribes, are devoting more of themselves to politics than to the Mother. She sees ahead, far, far ahead. The Invisibles give her that power to see what will happen to our furthest children, high in the tree of generations. And what she sees maddens her."

  "And so now we are the target of that fury," Hamr said. "To what end is all her knowledge if she uses it to do us evil?"

  Kirchi sighed. "She will not let us escape. She rests now, rebuilding the strength of the Moon Bitch. At the full of the moon, she will attack again. I'm sure of it."

  Blind Side of Life balked and would go no farther. "Get your moonstones out," Hamr said, surveying the airy open woods. He fixed on black granite platforms inset among the trees. "There are beasts ahead."

  A small group of antelope emerging from the maple grove, where they had spent the night, walked sedately onto the pale grass. A growl vibrated loudly from the rocks, and the antelope bounded away, disappearing into a beech thicket. Blind Side of Life trembled and backed away.

  "What was that?" Hamr asked. His heart pounded with the nearness of the roar. "Panther?"

  "No, the cry was too deep. Lion."

  "I've never seen a Lion. Can you talk to it?"

  Kirchi already had her moonstones out, cupped in both hands, and began chanting to them in a persuasive voice. Another resonant roar shook the air, and Blind Side whinnied with fear and pulled away. His hind quarters hit Kirchi, and she dropped her stones.

  As she stooped to retrieve them, she froze. Hamr too staggered backward and reached blindly for her. His gaze locked on a massive silhouette rising from the mist around the granite outcropping.

  A red-furred lioness, her black mouth hanging open with the breadth and weight of her fangs, slumped closer. Now other huge silhouettes appeared. Three more lionesses, muscle-shouldered, heads slung forward, prowled out of the shadows, followed by a male the size of a horse, mane a blaze of black.

  Blind Side reared up in a panic, and Hamr, holding his rope, jerked backward. Kirchi fumbled with her moonstones and could already tell something was wickedly different. The brutes lumbered forward steadily, haze steaming off their rippled backs, eyes tight as embers.

  "Get behind me," Hamr whispered. He gripped Blind Side's rope fiercely in both hands, not even bothering to go for the spear lashed to the horse's back. He judged the distance to the nearest heap of boulders: a hard, desperate run.

  The lioness roared again, battering the air with the mightiness of her signal. Blind Side bucked, eager to flee, and Hamr took advantage of his fright to lead him in a dash toward the granite blocks. "Hurry!" he called after Kirchi as she lagged, trying to make her moonstones work.

  The pride shot forward, roaring together, and in an instant, they lunged upon their prey. A lioness sprang on Blind Side's back.

  In a writhing panic, the horse threw off the giant creature. Hamr and Kirchi fell back, and Hamr swiftly leaped for his steed, grabbed his spear and pulled it free. The lioness had pounced atop Blind Side again. And, with a helpless cry, the horse fell.

  Yaqut and Timov had climbed down to the grassy verges, and halted at the sight of the lions. When the horse went down, Yaqut seized Timov's elbow. "Up into the rocks! Quickly! Before they spot us."

  Timov stood transfixed. Blind Side of Life went down, legs kicking, entrails tugged free in the black mouths of the lions.

  "Quickly!" Yaqut hissed in his ear and scampered toward the birchwood that led to higher ground.

  One of the lionesses—which the others had shouldered
away from the kill—sighted Timov and loped toward him.

  Timov darted across the clearing, away from Yaqut and toward the rockpile, where Blind Side had been headed. Glancing behind, he saw the big cat gather itself for a run and knew he had no chance of making the rocks. Thrashing through a brace of skinny hemlock pines, he bolted for a yew whose roots had pulled from the ground at one side and tilted against a rocky hillock.

  Breathless with terror, Timov clawed his way up the trunk, heard the lioness scratching after him. The dense branches slowed him down and also stopped the giant feline. After a desperate surge, he hung among the top boughs gasping with relief.

  Below, he made out Hamr and Kirchi dashing for the rocks. He heard tearing sounds and frenzied growls. Ahead, the wall of rocks lifted its jagged affliction. They vaulted the first low stones and drove their sandals hard into footholds choked with nettles. Hamr threw his spear onto a higher shelf, and helped Kirchi pull herself up the skewed steps.

  From atop the ponderous rocks, sucking deep breaths as Timov watched, they looked back. The lioness huddled over Blind Side, stiff legs sticking out from among their jammed shoulders. They had no time for anguish. The enormous male had followed them. With furious agility, it wended its way up toward them.

  The lion, too big to rush vertically up the jutting rocks, swerved among staggered shelves, and they had a long second to marvel at its muscled forelegs, thick paws, and fierce open jaws beneath eyes blind as fire. Then they hugged the rocks and climbed. Hamr cast his spear up to the next ledge, hoisted himself to it, and reached back for Kirchi.

  Timov, who had followed their retreat, discovered no hope: The rocks bunched to a tumblestone pinnacle inaccessible from where they stood. In moments, the predator would reach them.

  Swiftly, Timov edged out to the creaking limit of the bough where he perched and leaped onto the rock-strewn hillock alongside. Stones spun away under him, and he plugged his feet into the earth and dragged himself upward.