Trickster Races the Lightning Wolf
Meghann McVey
Copyright 2012
www.firesidestories.webs.com
Trickster Races the Lightning Wolf
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Trickster raised the bones to complete the toss that would decide all for this game. He sensed the burn of his fellow gamblers’ eyes, in spite of the smoke that filled their stuffy tent. Sweat matted his hair and feather necklaces to his skin. Trickster’s yell – the saving triumph would be his -- pounded for freedom against his chest. With this throw, thought Trickster, I will take back my family’s winter skins and meats, our medicine wheels…the virtue of my daughters and wife! Deft Hands will not defeat me, even though he is certain of victory, smirking in his corner of the tent!
As the bones landed, a shaft of light cut across the tent interior. Could it be, the hand of the gods pointing the way?
The five gamblers turned their heads as one; it was no god, but a woman. Trickster’s insides shriveled. It was his wife, her face dark and disapproving against the whites and golds of the winter sky.
“Look!” Deft Hands pointed at the center of their circle. Someone had lifted the small pot that Trickster used to hold his bones. Prudent Song had discarded it from their dishware because the crack on the side marked it as “a cup of ill omen.” Perhaps for drinking, Trickster had thought when he rescued it from the midden heap, going on to throw many winning tosses with it. But today, Prudent Song had been right.
“I have thrown four,” Deft Hands declared. “Trickster has thrown three.”
The lack of expression on his face increased Trickster’s humiliation. He stared at his dice, which lay forlornly on their convex broad side.
“This game has ended. As agreed, in six days, Trickster shall relinquish to me…”
During the lengthy catalogue, Trickster shriveled beneath Prudent Song’s glare; she was the sun, and he, a worm squirming to escape her wrath-filled fire.
“Come, honored husband,” Prudent Song said when Deft Hands finished stating his winnings.
Trickster hurried to his feet.
“As agreed, I will collect my winnings in six days,” Deft Hands reiterated when Trickster was almost free. Six days, the sacred number of a Yioka gambler’s debt, and the highest value of the bones. Deft Hands pulled back his lips just enough to show a glint of teeth.
“Deft Hands must have cheated me!” Trickster insisted to his wife on the way back to their tent, kicking his way through the brittle snow. “Turned my bones perhaps when your disapproval bound my gaze.”
“You forget that I stood above all in that foul tent,” said Prudent Song. “They did not touch your wretched bones.”
“You haven’t a gambler’s eyes…”
But what was in her eyes silenced his protest at once.
“Trickster is no name for you.” His wife’s growl was as blood-curdling as that of a she-bear. “Irresponsible Fool is more than you can aspire to in this lifetime!”
Trickster hung his head for but an instant. “Six days yet remain!”
“If we flee the tribe, Deft Hands will hound us. You know he never forgives his debtors. I would bet…” She cleared her throat in irritation. “I am certain he has hoards hidden throughout the grasslands. Perhaps in the forests as well! Even the wilderness will not stop him if he thinks wealth is at stake.”
“I alone will leave,” Trickster said. “There must be someone willing to make me a loan.”
Prudent Song snorted. “You will have to cross the western mountains or the eastern water to find someone who has not heard the warnings about you. How much debt have you attempted to wish away in the tent of Deft Hands?”
Trickster bristled, all the more for the truth of his wife’s statement. “Your family, then? Or mine? It is the Yioka tribe’s obligation to help one another in a time of crisis!”
“My family swore that it was the last time they would interfere when you lost our winter provisions in our second year of marriage. And we still had barely enough!”
Trickster dodged the guilt of that memory. “My family will not help, either.” Trickster remembered his father’s wrath at his choice of mentor, Knucklebones the gambler. Trickster’s father had longed for his only son to be a warrior or a rider, strong or swift, and filled with honor, that he take an adult name like Bright Blade or Wind Steed. “They have not since Knucklebones became my mentor.”
“This is your most impossible shenanigan yet, and on top of the debts you owe! Sometimes I dream that spirits have come to bear away our tent and furs to settle their spectral balances!”
“My luck has ebbed of late.” Trickster’s bones, his legacy from old Knucklebones weighed heavy in their pouch. “Perhaps after this great loss, a solitary journey will lead me to a treasure that Deft Hands will accept in exchange for my losses.” But Trickster did not believe his own words.
“Do not forget the high price of your wife’s virtue.”
Trickster coughed. “Yes, your precious virtue. It surpasses even our family jewelry in value.”
Prudent Song’s hand flew to her necklace of opaque white stones, her one vanity. “You bet my necklace? It’s been in the family for five generations!”
“Well, there were some minor debts that needed a committing pledge before I anticipated they would.”
“Get out! Go on your foolish quest!”
“Not even a last meal?
“My cooking is wasted on a worthless husband such as you!”
And thus, Trickster left the Yioka tribe without food, provision, or direction to wander a landscape as black and white as judgment. The evening of the second day brought him to a strange place of deep fog, where the crisp snow gave way to a landscape of gray, sepia, and pale gold.
“All wealth is hoarded in winter,” Trickster mused, poking at the fire with a stick. He gazed on the smoke that rose, hardly noticing until his reverie – hopeless circles of pointless thought – returned him to the present. A ghostly hand had risen from the fire. Trickster gaped at it. Never had he seen such a thing, even when it seemed he must sweat blood praying over his bones. His own hand trembling, he reached toward the hand with his own. In the manner of smoke, it scattered.
Yet Trickster slept easily that night, a familiar sense of luck rising within him. In the darkness of his closed lids, he could still discern the exact direction in which the hand pointed. The next day, he followed it. The sun’s rays, weak already from winter, were further muted; it seemed to Trickster, as though a haze hung over the colorless and uncanny land. Eventually Trickster reached a crumbling structure the faded red of forgotten blood. A dim shape kept watch atop it.
“Hello! Is anyone here?” Trickster called.
“What is that noise?” came a grousing voice.
Trickster’s first inclination was to be insulted until the speaker peered over the edge of his gate. Trickster’s mouth dropped open, and he backed away just to be certain. Sure enough, the speaker was the most enormous tortoise he had ever seen. He and Prudent Song might have used its shell as a table that would easily hold all the dishes she made for the harvest festival.
“Do you mind if I come up?” Trickster asked. “I am a vagabond and would like to know my way.”
“Please do. Half a century up here alone is surprisingly lonesome.”
“What use is a sentry that cannot descend his guard tower?” Trickster asked while he scaled the gate.
“I did not choose this post. Ah, to watch the birds’ flight, the ground creatures scurry, all in freedom… But I am not foolish enough to jump down, not with t
his weight I carry.”
“What do you call yourself, watcher?” Trickster interrupted.
“Merely ‘the gatekeeper’ will do, though ‘the reluctant gatekeeper’ would be more accurate.”
Trickster scanned the surrounding area, including the sky, but all remained unchanged from his ground view. “Why is it necessary to have a gatekeeper in this desolate place?”
“You would have to ask Yeves. The secrets are his, and this is his realm.” The tortoise’s wrinkled face contorted as though uttering the words brought him great pain.
“Are you alright, friend?” Trickster started to ask, but before the great tortoise could answer, something else he had said resounded in his mind. “Yeves! You don’t mean the mighty wolf whose speed through the sky is so great that fires start beneath his feet and fall as lightning!” Fragments of his grandparents’ stories filled Trickster’s mind. “Not the god who announces his presence with a roar that makes the hearers’ ears ring! The lightning
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