Judith Berman has spent extended periods of time in Idaho, Vermont, British Columbia, and Alaska, and since 1979 she has lived in Philadelphia.
The author received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, and attended Clarion in 1994. Currently she is employed as a guest curator at a Pennsylvania museum. “Lord Stink” is set in her “Mountain Land” universe, which is based on the mythology and traditional culture of the Native Americans of the north Pacific coast. The story (which is her first tale for
Only when the shadow of Feather Mountain reached her high grassy ledge did Winter realize how late the day had grown. For the last time, she emptied the little basket she wore strung around her neck into the bigger one at her feet. With care she picked up the bigger basket, now brimming with berries, and scrambled sweating along the narrow trail that led down through otherwise impenetrable thickets of scrubby spruce and blueberry. She had come farther than she meant to. Four-Legs used this trail; while yanking her hair from the prickly clutches of a spruce, she nearly stepped into a day-old pile of grizzly droppings.
The other Sandspit Town women had already gathered at the steep meadow where they had left the pack baskets. Winter poured her blueberries into the emptiest one. As she tipped her basket, her hair fell forward, and stuck to her sweaty cheek. She brushed it back impatiently.
“Pick them, don’t paint your face with them,” said old Aunt Wren.
Winter looked at her sticky purple hand and laughed. Then she glanced up and saw her older cousin Thrush, and stopped laughing. Thrush gave her a pretty smile. Thrush was immaculate, as always: glossy black hair falling straight down her back without a snarl or straying lock, cedar-bark cape and skirt spotless. No sweat or dirt or blueberry juice on that perfect face. Her fingers were barely stained. Winter didn’t know how she managed it. Thrush had spent the entire day picking berries, too; she was, after all, a king’s daughter and she had to set a proper example.
“You wandered off,” Thrush said.
“I didn’t mean to,” Winter said quickly, as if she were one of Thrush’s attendants, bound to wait on her every second.
“You should be more careful,” Thrush said. “There are Four-Legs around. Rumble told me one broke into Father’s salmon trap last night.”
Familiar anger scalded Winter and she looked away. Her brother was one of Thrush’s hapless suitors. She did not ask if Thrush had begged Rumble to kill the grizzly, as she had done last year with the king of Round Bay’s unfortunate nephew. Four-Legs had acute hearing and were always alert for hunting expeditions against them. Winter did not want to endanger Rumble any more than Thrush might already have done.
It was time to return to the king’s fish camp. Attendants and slaves heaved the pack baskets onto their backs, adjusting the burden straps across their foreheads. Another of Winter’s cousins lowered her baby’s cradleboard from a tree. And then they all headed down the mountain, single file along the animal trail, chattering and gossiping. To avoid talking any more with Thrush, Winter stayed behind her, watching the walk that managed to be both prim and seductive. Slender ankles, brown, bare, delicate feet; too much to hope for that Thrush would tread on a sharp rock.
Thrush must have been daydreaming, because Winter clearly saw why the line ahead of them snaked to the left and then curved back. Thrush, though, kept walking straight along the trail. There was an instant in which Winter thought about warning her but, out of spite, did not. And so Thrush walked into it, stepping with her delicate foot right smack into a soft wet pile of blueberry-seeded bear shit.
“Aaahhh,” Thrush whimpered. She pulled her foot out, smeared to the ankle with the stinking stuff, and hopped on one leg. A wail burst from her: “The filthy bear!”
The line of women stopped. Every one of them fell silent and turned to stare at Thrush in horror, ragged slaves, commoners, copper-bedecked nobles. Thrush seemed oblivious to everything but her soiled foot. She tried to wipe the shit on a clump of grass, but there was so much of it, on top of her foot, on her heel, thick between her toes. “It’s disgusting!” she was moaning. “Oh, it stinks! The filthy bear!”
Then old Aunt Wren rushed from behind Winter. “That’s enough!”
She grabbed Thrush by the arm, and hustled her down the trail. No one treated Thrush that way—not Thrush, favored daughter of their king, Thrush, who never did
But Aunt Wren would not let her stop. Guilt-stricken, Winter ran down the trail after them, and the rest of the women followed. They passed from the blueberry meadow into deep, mossy forest, and the trail grew muddy, pocked with crisscrossing moose prints. She heard a rustle from a tall thicket of devil’s-club, then a crackle; and suddenly a huge shaggy shape crashed onto the trail, directly in front of Thrush, as high at the shoulders as she was. It was not a moose. Thrush screamed in raw terror. Aunt Wren threw herself in front of Thrush, but with a bloody sweep of its claws the grizzly sent her flying. Then it grabbed Thrush, and bared its fangs at her, drooling and growling.
In that terrible instant, Winter realized for the first time just how much she hated Thrush, how much she wanted the grizzly to rip Thrush to pieces. At the same time, Thrush had never seemed more precious and vulnerable. She found herself flailing at a huge, hairy leg, shrieking, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” The grizzly swung at her back-handed, smashing her against a tree. By the time she recovered, the grizzly had already left the trail, and was crashing through the devil’s-club, moving with incredible speed. In the blink of an eye it was out of sight, and Thrush was gone, too, her screams fading rapidly into silence.
Half stunned, shaking uncontrollably, Winter knelt beside Aunt Wren. Blood poured from deep gouges in the old woman’s shoulder and arm. “Run, you idiots!” Wren gasped, struggling up on one elbow. “Hurry and tell her father what happened!”
Winter raced ahead of the other women. She knew this was her fault. She should have known how her cousin would react: when they were little girls, Thrush had once gone into screeching hysterics after stepping on a slug.
She ran down through the immense cedars and hemlocks, across the grassy alder bottomlands, toward the camp on the shore of Oyster Bay. She found the king with her older brother by the river mouth. She could barely sob out the story to them. Rumble, in the midst of repairs to the king’s salmon trap, dropped all his tools and sprang to his feet in horror. “Thrush? Gone? Which way?”
“Not you!” the king said with such hoarse fury that Rumble took a step backward in confusion. His hand shook on his staff. “This is for her
Winter did not know until that moment that her uncle disliked Rumble’s attentions to his daughter. Not that she wanted Thrush as a sister-in-law, but the king’s rejection hurt.
“Go find Counselor,” the king ordered, and Rumble turned to obey, bewildered.
Men soon came running from camp, from the beach, from their fishing stations along the river. “We’ll use dogs,” Counselor said in his deep, confident voice. He had already armed himself with his slate-tipped spear and his long copper dagger. Thrush’s oldest brother was the bravest and most skillful hunter in Sandspit Town. He had killed grizzlies before, single-handed. The mere sight of him should have made Winter feel better, but it didn’t. “I’ll take ten armed men, and Orphan will take ten, and we’ll soon pick up the trail.”
“I’ll start on the east side of the ridge and sweep westward,” said Orphan, the second brother. “You start on the west side. We’ll find her.” Like Counselor, he was careful not to mention the grizzly by name or even, now, by respectful title.
The two brothers organized the men and dogs quickly. Everything began to seem horribly unreal to Winter: Thrush’s mother sobbing and wailing, the noise of men shouting back and forth, dogs barking with the excitement, children running under everyone’s feet. She felt as if she were a ghost among a crowd of the living, seeing everything, knowing everything, but unable to speak. She knew, for instance, that the men would not find Thrush’s trail. She knew that the bad things had only started to happen. She knew, with awful, gut-wrenching certainty, that she would never see Counselor or Orphan or any of the men again. It was all her fault.
“And where do you think you’re going?” spoke the king’s voice in her ear.
She turned to look. The king was not speaking to her, or to Rumble, who stood beside him now. He addressed his words to his youngest son, a boy Winter’s age, who stood among the hunters, a black-spotted dog lying at his feet. Otter whittled on a stick with a mussel-shell knife, but carried no weapons.
“I’m going to help find Thrush.”
“You are not going,” said the king.
That tone of voice would have been enough for anyone else, but Otter chose to argue. “My dog can help,” he said. “I can find her.”
“They have plenty of dogs!” said the king.
“Dirty is smarter than any of them.”
The king turned on his son with the same harsh fury he had shown Rumble earlier. “You are no warrior, boy! You are staying here!”
The parties of men and dogs jogged off. Otter took a step after them, yearning. Rumble turned and walked blindly into the river, and stood there, staring at the half-repaired fishtrap, hands clenched at his sides.
“If
The stick rolled to Winter’s feet. Otter had carved the tip into an exquisite eagle’s head. Dirty picked up the stick in his mouth, and, tail wagging, turned round and carried it to his master.
The grizzly galloped three-legged through the steep forest, one huge paw crushing Thrush against its enormous chest, so that her face was pressed into its coarse fur and she was forced to breathe its rank and oily stench. The pain where the enormous claws had ripped her back was worse than anything she had ever felt in her life. The blood soaked into her clothing, so that the fabric stuck to her as it dried; when the bear shifted its paw, the scabs would rip loose, and the blood would start to flow all over again.
The grizzly ran upward, into the last light of day, until the high mountain grass turned to loose, rattling scree. But when Thrush expected it to cross the pass and descend into the wild valley beyond, the Four-Legs kept heading upward, until only hard stone lay beneath its claws, and gulfs of air hung below them on either side. Already they had passed out of the human realm; the summit of Feather Mountain did not soar so high toward heaven. A river of blue ice flowed down to meet them, and the grizzly ran alongside it, untiring, climbing another, higher peak.
The eastern wall of the world had turned from purple to inky black before the Four-Legs began to descend once more. Without warning, it stopped and loosened its grip. Thrush slid until her feet touched grassy earth. Before the rest of her could follow, the grizzly seized her shoulder and hauled her up again. Claws tore her flesh anew and she nearly fainted.
They stood in a clearing in a dense forest. Overhead, stars blazed in a black and moonless sky, so brightly that faint patterns of starlight silvered the grass at her feet. In front of her loomed an enormous old house of carved posts and weathered cedar planks. A hearth fire glowed orange through cracks in the wall.
Those thin rays of firelight revealed a strange figure, small and hunched, sitting by the door. As the grizzly shoved her forward, Thrush saw the head swivel in her direction. Before she could even guess what crouched there in the darkness, a voice boomed, so deep and powerful it shook the earth beneath her feet, “Lord Stink! Lord Stink! Lord Stink! Lord Stink!”
Four times, the number of power. Another rush of fear poured over her. The grizzly shoved her roughly forward again. Thrush stumbled, and flung out her hands for balance, expecting to meet the immense carved post through which the door of the house had been tunneled. Instead, her hands touched moving flesh.
“Hhwaaa!” said the deep voice, and the hot wet flesh twitched away from her. Thrush screamed at the same time, and utterly terrified, jumped backward into the hairy belly of the Four-Legs. It snarled in anger and flung her through the low door. She landed sprawling on the earthen floor by the hearth, amidst a litter of soiled mats, dirty spoons, splintered bones, and ashes.
Now, on all sides of them, a chorus of hollow, booming voices trumpeted in unison, “Lord Stink! Lord Stink! Lord Stink! Lord Stink!” The firelight showed Thrush that the house frame was supported not by carved wooden beams, but instead by living bears who greeted her captor with these shouts.
A crowd of men and women, all larger, hairier and far more muscular than any humans Thrush had ever seen, gathered around her and her captor. And then that grizzly turned to face her, rising to its full height on two legs, and put paws to snout…
Grizzly flesh, grizzly shape, peeled off and sagged like clothing. A massive man with powerful muscles stood there. He was dark, hairy and utterly naked. The only thing that seemed unchanged were his huge, hairy, bull-grizzly’s balls. His reddish member looked incongruously human in front of them.
“Here she is,” he said. His voice was deep, powerful, and full of rage.
The crowd of men and women pressed toward Thrush. One of the women kicked her, and shouted, “I suppose you think you’re better? I suppose your shit doesn’t stink?” When Thrush didn’t say anything, the woman grabbed Thrush’s arm with an immensely strong hand and hauled her to her feet. “Answer me, girl! Who are you to pass judgment on the shit of Lord Stink?”
Thrush knew they were going to maul her to death. Or, worse: they might make her into their slave. Then the mauling would go on forever, a little bit every day, and the terror and the shame would last until the day she died.
Up to that point she had felt so dispirited and terrorized she had ceased thinking. But the thought of becoming a slave brought forth another emotion. She was a
“Well,” she said, and suddenly she was shaking with rage and despair that the grizzlies
The grizzlies fell silent. Thrush waited for the final explosion, and her bloody and painful death.
The explosion never came. After a long moment, Lord Stink said, slowly, “Copper? You pass copper? You don’t shit?”
“Oh, no,” she said, in her coldest, angriest, primmest voice. “I never make a
“Well, maybe,” Stink said, “I suppose… But you shouldn’t say I’m disgusting.”
You
“You’re beautiful,” said Stink, suddenly, in an entirely new voice. “I’m going to marry you.”
Thrush’s heart seemed to stop beating. This was not what she wanted. She wanted to go home to her mother and father, where everything would be right again.
But what choice did she have? He had abducted her. She was lucky he wanted to
He had made his public announcement; now all that remained was to consummate it. He took her to the rear of the house, to his lightless, fetid bedroom. With one hand he pushed her down on all fours; with his other hand he yanked up her skirt, and thrust himself in. It hurt, especially at first. He growled, drooling onto her neck, and suddenly his strong teeth sank into the muscle where her neck met her shoulder. Pain erupted like pure white fire. After everything that had happened that day, she could only moan and whimper. Princes from a dozen towns had courted her, with song and compliments and tears, and this lout of a grizzly
He finished with a great heave and a grunt, and his teeth released her neck. She collapsed onto the bedding with another involuntary moan. Something, probably his seed and her blood mixed together, began to dribble out of her. King’s daughter as she was, she managed not to cry.
In the morning he was hungry. “Cook me some salmon.”
Because of her wounds and his marital exertions, she could barely walk, but she obeyed him. A wife obeyed her husband.
The woman who had interrogated her last night handed her two square wooden water buckets without a word. Thrush was not sure how to leave the house, but as she approached the mouth-door, it yawned for her, pink tongue lolling between discolored fangs. She stepped onto the soft, scummy surface of the tongue with distaste. The grizzly woman followed Thrush to the door, and watched with suspicion, lifting her nose to sniff the breezes.
Thrush filled the buckets in the clear, swift stream that flowed along the far side of the clearing. She did not notice the old human woman until she had nearly reached the door again. That was when the grizzly backed through the doorway to make room for her to enter, and the mouth-door closed for a moment.
The old woman sat to the left of the door to the spirit house. She was white-haired, bony, frail, and hunched, and leathery flaps of breasts hung to her lap. From those bare breasts and the ragged skirt, Thrush judged the hideous old hag to be a slave, and so would not have looked at the woman any further, if the other had not addressed her first.
“Don’t eat his salmon,” the old woman whispered urgently. “Don’t eat it. I ate his father’s salmon, so I could never go home.”
A slave would not have spoken to her. Thrush deigned to turn her head, look down. An involuntary shiver ran through her. The hag sat with her knees drawn up in front of her, arms resting around her knees. Up close, Thrush could see that the rotten skirt failed to cover what was necessary. Through the holes Thrush saw the column of reddish, wrinkled flesh that descended from the old woman’s crotch and rooted itself deep in the ground.
“Don’t eat anything you haven’t caught or picked yourself,” the old woman said.
Thrush fled inside. There she filled a wooden cooking box with water, heated the stones in the hearthfire, tonged red-hot stones into the box. Enveloped in a cloud of steam, she dropped in large chunks of fresh salmon, probably, she thought, stolen yesterday from her father’s fish trap. Why should she listen to the old woman? It looked like salmon, smelled like salmon.
When it was cooked she lifted the box lid and ladled the salmon into a dish, and went to call her husband. He lay in the bedding on the floor of his room, hands behind his head. When she crawled in, he looked at her, a look that was soft and hot at the same time, and he laid his hand on her knee. She wanted to jerk away, but she did not. A proper wife would not.
She ducked her head. “It’s ready.”
He ate noisily, slurping from the side of his spoon. Watching him, Thrush thought again of that wrinkled column of flesh that rooted the old woman to the ground, and found she had no appetite at all.
The smoke-filled beams of sunlight that now fell through the roof vent showed her the inside of the immense house. The floor was dirt and all at one level, unlike her father’s tiered cedar-floored winter house at Sandspit Town. And unlike that well-appointed house, only one room had been partitioned off. That was Stink’s, at the back. A brown bear slept in front of the low circular door of the room.
Along the walls elsewhere lay pdes of bedding and stacks of immense wooden storage boxes that reached to the rafters. Most of the boxes were old, blackened with years of woodsmoke. All had animal faces, some sleeping, some awake, eyes glowing with power.
Her husband wanted more salmon, and she brought it to him. Then he wanted a dipperful of water. Thrush drank, too; it was the water she had carried from the stream. When he was done, he snapped his fingers, and the grizzly in back of the house scrabbled to its feet and loped over to him. He stripped off the tunic he had put on that morning, revealing his powerful, muscular body again. Then he picked up the grizzly by the ears, shook it until it hung limp like clothing, and dressed himself in it. The door to the house lolled open. He bounded through it in a single leap and was gone.
Thrush found she smelled all over of her new husband’s rank and musky sweat. After breakfast, she bathed in the stream, carefully because of her wounds. Two of Stink’s sisters kept watch from the grassy bank—the one who had first questioned her, whom she learned was named Growl, and a smaller, younger, fiercer grizzly woman named Nose.
Back at the house, she couldn’t stand it, finally, and asked her sisters-in-law, “Do you have a comb?” The state of their hair left this open to doubt.
“A comb?” Growl asked, suspiciously. “A comb? What for?”
“My hair,” Thrush said.
Both women stared at her. “Oh,” Growl said, at last.
Growl began to rummage through the animal boxes. She pulled a large frog out of the first one, its eyes unblinking, white throat pulsing. In the second she found a great armful of carved bracelets of a metal Thrush had never seen before, much yellower than copper. A third held a robe of white wool that smoked clouds of chill, damp fog. Growl immediately shoved the robe back in the box, but veils of fog floated away, drifting through the house. As she searched, one of the boxes, wolf-faced, nipped at Growl’s foot. Growl kicked at it and snarled a word. The admonition snapped in Thrush’s ears like the sound of stone breaking stone.
The comb Growl finally handed her was carved of ivory and exquisitely inlaid with abalone. As Thrush pulled it through her hair, she felt the first stirrings of pleasure since arriving in the grizzly house. A queen deserved such a comb. Too bad the rest of the house was so foully dirty.
“Don’t you have any slaves?” she asked Growl.
“Sometimes.” Growl gnawed at a flea bite on her shoulder, and then shook herself like a dog. “Brother had a feast last winter, though, and we ate them all.”
A chill ran down Thrush’s spine. She struggled to maintain her composure. “Who cleans for you, then?”
“Cleans?” Growl asked. “Cleans what?”
“The dishes. The house. Clothing. For instance.”
Growl gnawed at her shoulder again, bored with the subject. “Go ahead, if you want.”
Thrush felt as if she had been slapped in the face. They expected her, the king’s wife, to sweep the floor and scrub the dirty dishes? She sat all morning staring at the filthy hearth, with its mounds of dirty bowls and spoons, the buzzing flies, the piles of bones and discarded salmon skin black with swarming ants. Fury and disgust vied for the upper hand. All the grizzly people departed the house except for her and Growl, who seemed to be the designated wife-watcher. Growl curled up on a filthy mat and did nothing but scratch herself occasionally, and doze, eyes half-open.
At last Thrush could stand it no longer. I’ll just pick up the salmon bones, she thought. It’s not right for them to sit there, and it’ll help keep the ants out. She limped over to the hearth and, slowly and awkwardly, collected all the bones and bits of rotting salmon skin. She carried the remains out to the stream and spilled them in the water, the proper way to treat the remains of the Bright Ones. Growl woke long enough to come to the door to keep an eye on her.
When Thrush returned inside, she couldn’t help but start on the dirty dishes. It was utterly disgraceful, the wife of a king of the First People washing spoons. But if
By late afternoon she had washed every dirty box and bowl in the house. She had shaken out the mats and furs in her new bedroom, discovering multitudes of fleas, and she had cleaned the furs with old and pungent urine from a long-unemptied chamber pot. By that time she had grown light-headed from hunger and was feeling very sorry for herself. The claw wounds from yesterday were becoming more and more stiff and painful with every minute. Thrush made one final trip outside to break off spruce branches for a broom, and then stopped, staring down at the clear, sweet water of the rushing stream. Sunlight flashed in the water, once, twice, a flick of the tail, a leap through the air: the Bright Ones, salmon, emblem of hope.
All of a sudden a series of intensely sharp images descended on Thrush: Rumble, earnest and lovelorn; her tall, strong older brothers, bronze-skinned, black-haired; intense, clever young Otter whittling at a trap stick, his adoring dog at his feet; silly little cousin Winter; her mother, regal and lovely in her painted hat and raven’s-tail robe. And last of all, her father the king, leaning heavily on his staff, frowning at her. He would be proud, she told herself, to learn that she was married to a king of the First People.
She wanted them all so badly. She would never see them again, and they would never know what happened to her. She was beyond the mortal realm. Her father would hire wizards to search for her, but who was sufficiently wise and powerful to find his way to the country of the First People?
Thrush tried without success to blink away her tears, and turned toward the house again. She had been trying not to notice the old woman all day. Now she could not help but look, because the old woman shifted position on the ground, and the wrinkled root of flesh stretched and heaved like a living organ. Thrush averted her eyes once more and walked as swiftly as she could toward the door.
Toward evening the inhabitants of the house began to return, bringing firewood, baskets full of berries, fish. Soon boxes were boiling away by the fire and the delicious smell of poaching salmon filled the air.
Thrush’s stomach rumbled painfully. Growl sniffed at her shoulder. “Aren’t you going to eat something?”
Thrush managed not to flinch from that damp nose. “I’m not hungry.”
Nose thrust a bowl of hot, steaming salmon at Thrush. “Fucking is hard work,” she said. She grinned coarsely. “You’d better eat to keep your strength up. Brother will want to fuck when he comes home.”
Thrush shook her head, but her stomach rumbled again. The two kept staring at her. Nose set down the salmon in front of Thrush.
“What a wonder,” said Growl, at last. “She doesn’t shit, and she doesn’t eat, either.”
“She doesn’t need to shit if she doesn’t eat,” said Nose. “Maybe she isn’t eating because we’ll find out she was lying, hmm? We’ll find out her shit stinks just like everyone else’s.”
Thrush sat by the fire, nauseated by hunger, dreading her husband’s arrival. The house’s residents began to move from the hearthside to the beds around the walls of the house. As Growl pawed and nosed at her own bed furs, rearranging them, Thrush was shocked to see a long-armed man grab her from behind, sink his teeth into her neck, and begin humping her buttocks. Growl, however, snarled, and clouted him so hard he fell backward onto an ancient, smoke-blackened raven box. He crawled back toward her, and squatted, warily, while she finished with the furs.
Then Growl looked up, and for a moment their eyes met. The man took a step forward so he could sniff at her crotch. She clouted him again, only this time she pushed him down on the furs beneath her. He grabbed at her, and, snarling and roaring and biting, they rolled and crashed together into the wall of the house. Boxes tumbled and fell to the floor. For a moment all Thrush could see were flailing limbs, and then they came up again on all fours, stark naked. The man wrapped his arms around Growl from behind. She snatched at his huge hard prick and pulled it between her legs, jamming it all the way inside of her. The two of them rocked and writhed. More boxes tipped and crashed. One of them spilled eagle down across the floor like an avalanche of snow. Thrush finally managed to avert her eyes, and then noticed, to her shame, that despite the din, no one else was paying the slightest attention.
Stink arrived shortly thereafter, heralded by the shouts of the house-posts. Once again he did not bother to dress himself after shedding his grizzly mask.
Thrush preceded him docilely into the bedroom, where events went much as they had the night before. The inflamed gouges on her back and the bites on her neck and shoulders throbbed so intensely it took her mind off the other things. When he was done, he flopped down half on top of her, and she gasped and whimpered involuntarily. That made him nose at her back, sniffing, and then he began to lick the wounds with a coarse, warm tongue. She held herself rigid, filled with disgust, until he finished, and then she lay there, unable to sleep. What she could not get out of her head was the memory of Growl, naked, sweat-slicked, ecstatic with passion, pushing herself along her husband’s prick as though it were the very last moment of her life.
Thrush awoke in the morning, starving, with a picture of her father’s fish trap in her head. It couldn’t be that hard to make, she thought. She had never made one, but she could twine baskets so fine they held water, and what was a fish trap but a big, loosely woven basket weighted down on a stream bottom?
She asked Growl for a hatchet.
“A hatchet?” Growl said. “A hatchet? What do you want that for?”
“I want to cut cedar withes for a salmon trap.”
As on the previous day, Growl stared at her for a long moment before saying, “Oh.”
Growl rummaged through the boxes again, pulling out a kelp bottle full of angrily buzzing wasps, an exquisitely painted spruce-root hat, and a single enormous tail feather, white like an eagle’s but four times as large. The hatchet she finally handed to Thrush was made of polished deep-green jadeite, and hafted with pale maple wood carved all around with eyes.
Thrush, attended by Growl and Nose, spent the morning cutting cedar withes and picking and eating large quantities of berries. She worked that afternoon and the next day on the salmon trap, a small one. The fish basket, with its narrow, inverted mouth, was simple to make. The hard part proved to be building the little stone dam that blocked off the stream so that the salmon would be funneled into the basket. She would have been embarrassed for Rumble or any of her brothers to see it, but the grizzly people did not seem to care that she was attempting man’s work, and doing it badly to boot.
When the trap was finally in place, she sat on the rocky bank, eating berries, watching for a flash of silver in the stream. That was when she felt the first movement in her bowels since arriving at the bear house. She turned and looked behind her. Growl and Nose lay at the top of the bank amongst the tall grass, dozing.
Thrush crept quietly up to the clearing, glancing behind her all the while to see if they woke. She had nearly reached the trail that led behind the bear house into the woods, when she heard a voice behind her:
“Wait! You’ll need these!”
She started, and turned. The old woman by the doorway held out her hand.
“Here! Take them! Hurry!”
Thrush took a few steps back. In the old woman’s hand sat four hard, greenish lumps—nuggets of pure copper. “How—” Thrush began.
“Take them, you idiot girl!”
Thrush reached for the nuggets. At that moment, Growl appeared on the other side of the clearing, crawling sleepily on all fours. Thrush quickly grabbed the nuggets and hid her hand in a fold of her skirt.
Turning away, she marched across the clearing into the forest behind the house. She found a good spot at the foot of a gigantic hemlock, amidst the litter of deer fern, fallen branches and ancient, rotting trunks. She glanced back: Growl was approaching quickly, and now Nose had appeared as well. Quickly Thrush pulled up her skirt and squatted down, hidden behind a tall clump of ferns. She dropped the nuggets between her legs.
She really did have to go, but she held it in. After a moment she stood again and rearranged her clothing, and started to cover up the nuggets. Heavy footsteps crunched in the litter behind her and she looked up to see her giant, long-armed sisters-in-law.
“Wait!” said Nose, coarsely, grabbing Thrush’s arm. “Let’s see just what does come out of your pure little asshole!”
Growl dropped onto her hands, face low to the ground, and snuffled all around where Thrush had been squatting. She soon found the little pile of copper nuggets, and nosed the sticks and needles aside, sniffed at the nuggets, licked them with a long, pink tongue.
“Well, look at this,” she said, picking them up and holding them out to her sister. “It’s real copper.”
Nose sniffed them, licked them twice, then grabbed Thrush and yanked up her skirt, forcing Thrush to bend over at the waist. She was terrifyingly strong. She sniffed at Thrush’s vagina, and, using her long-nailed hands to part the buttocks, snuffled at Thrush’s anus. She was so close Thrush could feel her hot breath on the little hairs there. Then Nose licked Thrush, a coarse, warm, wet tongue between her buttocks. Thrush jumped into the air at the loathsome touch, and then stood there, trembling, humiliated, hating the sisters, hating all the grizzlies, only the greatest effort of will between her and abject tears.
“Oh, she’s such a sweet little thing,” said Nose. “Only pure copper falls out of her asshole. But she smells like a man’s been with her.”
“Of course she smells like a man’s been with her,” said Growl. “Brother fucks her all night long.”
“What a perfect little beauty,” said Nose. “It’s too bad she doesn’t like our food.”
After that the grizzlies did not keep such a close watch on her. No one followed her the next time she slipped behind the house, and she was careful to cover everything very thoroughly. They did not, however, let her wander freely. Growl or Nose always appeared if she stayed away too long.
Her trap caught a modest number of salmon. Thrush asked Growl for a knife so she could slice the fish thin enough to dry. Growl, suspicious as always, rummaged through her animal boxes to find a knife of polished black slate. While cleaning and drying the salmon Thrush began to feel a slight hope that she might somehow get home. Then, one brilliantly clear day, she embarked on a berrying expedition up the side of the tall and glacier-clad mountain to the north of the bear house. Growl and Nose came along, though they didn’t do much berry-picking. Thrush climbed high above the timberline and gazed out westward, at range after jagged blue range. Nothing looked familiar, not even the farthest, bluest, faintest peak.
The king died in Sandspit Town in winter, three and a half years after Thrush disappeared. He had aged rapidly after his two eldest sons died searching for her.
In that time any number of search parties had gone out and, if they had not been scattered or destroyed by the Four-Legs, had returned without finding clues to Thrush’s whereabouts. The king had, of course, consulted wizards near and far. The wizards claimed the Four-Legs had abducted Thrush, and not killed her, but none could tell the king where in the east the bear house lay, in forest or meadow, beyond how many mountains. “Not even wizards can travel easily to the other world,” they would say, “The First People show themselves when
And they would say, “If a brave young man purified himself, bathed and scoured himself with hemlock branches until he had scrubbed off his human scent, perhaps he might take the Four-Legs unawares. Perhaps he might find his way to the spirit house. But these things don’t happen often.”
The king died from a sudden pain in his chest. He lay in state in Storm House for eight days, attired in his cloud robe and abalone-inlaid crown, surrounded by all the treasures of the house: carved and painted chests, painted hats, copper bracelets and plaques, feast dishes, brightly figured robes and tunics of mountain-goat wool, the masks of the First People used in the winter rites. On the eighth day they burnt his body behind the ice-covered house, with most of the town in attendance. Rumble presided. With his hair cropped short and his face painted black in mourning, he looked as grim and implacable as if he were setting off to war.
Otter should have been there, too, as the king’s only surviving son, but he had taken the wizards’ advice to heart. If indeed he still lived, he was somewhere in the eastern mountains, purifying himself, searching for power, searching for Thrush. It had fallen instead to the queen’s brothers to build the funeral pyre and deliver the speeches of praise. The brothers did not look happy; Rumble, inheriting his uncle’s place, was supposed to marry the queen, but so far he had been silent.
Winter had been feeling ill through the long days and nights of the king’s wake. As she and her mother headed back to her father’s house, a wave of dizziness overwhelmed her. She had to lean against the painted front of Frog House, panting little puffs of fog, while the line of massive, snow-laden houses along the frozen shore wavered and rippled like water. Away from the fire, the air was bitterly cold. Her head felt like a hollow cave of ice, and her heartbeat throbbed inside it, echoing. Something shoved from her gut through her lungs and into her head, until it shattered the ice that was the roof of her skull. She spun upward into vast and empty blackness. Later, her mother told her that she had crumpled as though clubbed on the head.
She lost half a month in the sickness, and when she finally came back to herself, she had a hard time staying there. After a few days of this, her mother brought a wizard to examine her. It was the old woman wizard, Diver, from Snag House. “So you have dreams?” Diver asked, squatting beside Winter’s pallet.
“They’re not dreams,” Winter whispered. Talking exhausted her, and the waking world still seemed fragmentary and insubstantial. “I travel.”
“And where do you travel?”
“I don’t know,” Winter whispered. “Here and there. Flying. I’m a petrel.”
Diver nodded. “Are you just traveling, or are you looking for something?”
“Thrush,” Winter said. “I’m looking for Thrush.”
As the days passed, the world began to seem more real to her again, but the ice had long melted and the herring had spawned before she was strong enough to go outside. The first time, she walked only as far as the seaside platform in front of her house. The bay enclosed by Sand Spit was still as a pond, perfectly mirroring the row of plank houses and the forest and the misty grey sky. Woodsmoke drifted through the trees. She could see Rumble standing by the door of Storm House, a tiny figure beneath its tall painted façade. He was speaking with one of the north-side house lords. Rumble had grown colder and harder-edged every time his uncle had forbidden him to search for Thrush, and sent him instead on a raid or a sea-hunting expedition. Now that he was king it was even worse. She sometimes felt he didn’t recognize her.
After a while, Diver happened by, and sat down beside her. For a long time neither of them said anything. “You were traveling again last night,” Diver said, finally.
“Yes,” Winter said. “I know she’s there, somewhere in the mountains east of Oyster Bay. But I never see the trail to the bear house. I fly and I fly, and I don’t see anything.”
“If you flew less far and less often,” Diver said, “you would get well sooner.”
“I can’t help it,” Winter said. “I have to find Thrush. It’s my fault. I saw she was going to step in it, and I didn’t say anything.”
Diver sighed. “It wasn’t your fault, child. You didn’t insult the Four-Legs, did you? Thrush brought it on herself.”
“If I’d warned her, it wouldn’t have happened. I have to make up for it.”
“I didn’t know you loved Thrush so much,” Diver said.
Winter began to cry. Diver stroked her hair soothingly. “You’ve ridden the air, and you’re going to be a seer. I suppose that you have as good a chance as anyone of finding her. But you have to give yourself time. You have to get well. And you have to learn what it means to be a seer.”
Winter gulped down air, trying to stop her tears. Her lungs still hurt when she took too deep a breath. “What is there to learn? I know how to fly. I know what I see beneath me!”
“The First People aren’t like us,” Diver said. “Their country isn’t like ours. They have more than one form. They exchange forms the way you and I change clothes. To find the path to their country, a seer has to understand the essence, the whole nature, and not just one form or another. Not just how they show themselves to us.”
Thrush had worried that the grizzlies would change their minds and tear her to pieces when she started her first period among them. Woman’s blood sometimes sent Four-Legs into frenzies of rage. But she never had to face that problem.
She had been abducted by Stink in the month of blueberries; four months later, when the maple leaves had dropped and the dog salmon ran in the stream, she had already grown as big as she had ever seen any pregnant woman. She could not imagine how she would last another five months.
Before the dog salmon had finished running, and Thrush had dried and smoked the last of the fish from her salmon trap, she gave birth. In the early morning dark the pains started; she sweated and labored and bled, and by dawn it was over. Not one spirit child: four. Four little bear cubs snuffling at her sweaty belly and mewling for her teats. Their eyes had not even opened yet. Three boys and a girl, Growl informed her, though Thrush had no idea how she could tell.
“Why are they born dressed in their spirit masks?” Thrush asked her sister-in-law.
“They’re babies,” said Growl, tying off a little umbilical cord. She gave the struggling cub a lick or two to calm it down, her face softer than Thrush had ever seen it. The cub nosed her hand and mewed. “They can’t master their bear shape until they come to know themselves.”
Growl returned the cub to the bed next to Thrush, and pulled another one toward her. The cub she had released nosed blindly along Thrush’s belly, crying. Thrush reached out a tentative hand, touched the still-damp forehead of the cub with a finger. The cub was soft and warm, nearly hairless, with big ears, blind eyes, huge paws. It began to suck on her finger.
“Oh, here, baby,” Thrush said, pulling the cub toward her swollen breasts.
It was hard feeding them all. She could manage two at once, but she could never let them have as much as they wanted, or the second pair would have none. When they were born, they were so small she could hold each in one hand, but they grew as fast out of her womb as they had inside it. By the fourth day they were as large as a newborn human baby and as thickly furred as Lord Stink in his grizzly shape. The sisters gave her a charm to keep her milk from running out, a kelp bottle of oil to rub on her breasts, but
The first snows arrived. The bear people began to drowse away more and more of each day. Thrush herself spent more time in bed, next to her snoring husband, cubs nestled between them and around them, while the snow piled up in the clearing outside. It was almost peaceful, as long as their children slept, until she thought of her dwindling food supply, and the old woman sitting outside in the snow, and how as soon as she weaned her babies her husband would start his insistent attentions all over again.
She knew that if she was ever going to leave, it would have to be soon. Humans didn’t belong in this realm. Sooner or later, no matter what she ate, she would begin to change, too, gain strange spirit powers like the old woman’s, strange deformities and mutations.
Her children grew. Their appetite grew. They clawed her as she nursed them, and their teeth sank into her breasts until she bled. Sometimes she thought the fate she had faced her first night in the bear house was at last coming true: mauled and eaten by grizzlies. Except that these grizzlies were her beloved children. She loved their milky, damp, furry smell. She knew each one by its face, the way it cocked its ears, the look in its eyes. She called them by the names her husband had given them: Claw, Tongue, Hungry, Black.
One snowy night, after her husband licked clean the latest gouges on her belly, he spoke to her unexpectedly. He almost never spoke to her. “You don’t like me, do you?”
It was a strange thing for a grizzly to say. Thrush didn’t know how to respond. “I’m your wife,” she said, at last.
“But you don’t like me. You don’t like me fucking you.”
Thrush took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “it isn’t very nice for me.”
“Because I’m disgusting,” her husband said. “Because I have no manners.”
Again Thrush felt completely at a loss. What she had meant was that he did not caress her and whisper loving words to her. He did not match his actions to her needs. The thought of pleasuring
“You act like a grizzly,” she said. “I’m not a grizzly.”
“You’re so beautiful,” he said. “I wish…” And then he fell silent again. A long while later he began to snore.
Thrush found she wanted to cry.
In the early morning, when she went out to relieve herself, the old woman spoke to her. “It’s time for you to go, if you’re going. This is when they sleep the soundest.”
“I don’t know how to get home,” Thrush said.
“Follow the stream down to the sea,” said the old woman. “That’s not the hard part, not while they’re sleeping. Take the things you got from Growl, your comb, the hatchet, your knife and the bottle of oil. Each time your husband catches up with you, throw one of these behind you.”
“Why are you helping me?” asked Thrush.
The old woman sighed, and looked across the snowy clearing. “Once I was like you,” she said. “No, that’s not true. You’re an ordinary girl. I had a trace of wizardry in me when I came here. I saw and understood far more about these people than you. I was of two minds about leaving. But I didn’t understand enough until it was too late, and I never gained enough power to free myself. Now, as for your children,” she went on, briskly, “I’d advise leaving them here. They’re almost grown enough to be weaned.”
Thrush started to panic at the mere thought. “I can’t leave them. Oh, no, I can’t leave them behind.”
“It’s up to you,” said the old woman. “Well, go on, then. Go and wake them up and get going.”
“Now?”
“While your husband and all his kin are asleep, you idiot girl! Get going!”
By early summer, Winter felt strong enough to travel to the fish camp at Oyster Bay. It was always strange returning to the beachside campsite, where every year the grass grew as luxuriantly as if no one had lived there for generations. It was stranger still returning with Rumble as their harsh and distant king. During the day Winter kept herself too busy to think or feel, cutting salmon into strips, feeding fires, moving ladders of half-dried salmon higher in the smokehouse to make room for the fresh strips. Every night, she sent out her spirit into the eastern mountains, searching for the bear house.
One day, as she carried a mat-load of fresh salmon to the smokehouse, a dog nosed her hand. She looked down, and saw a familiar black-spotted face. “Well, look at you, Dirty,” she said, her heart suddenly in her throat. “Where’s your master?”
“Right here,” said Otter.
Her wizard’s vision showed her the lonely power he had found in the high mountains, the power of the other world. Her eyes showed her a tall, lean and purposeful young man, dressed in plain clothing, who eyed her with uncertainty. She might almost have taken him for a stranger.
“You’re back,” she said, finally.
“I’ve been traveling.”
The familiar guilt rose in Winter. “Looking for Thrush,” she said. “I guess you haven’t found her.”
“I’m growing closer!”
“And has anyone informed you that your father died while you were gone?”
He glanced away. “Yes,” he said. “Rumble just told me.”
Winter’s hand reached toward his shoulder, as if she wanted to comfort him. She pulled the hand back sharply, and folded both arms tight against herself.
Then Otter looked at her again. “He said you almost died last winter, too. I’m glad you didn’t.” Those words robbed her spite of all its strength.
Otter spent only a week at the fish camp, and most of that he spent with Winter. On the evening of his departure, Winter walked with him and black-spotted Dirty to the end of the rocky point that guarded Oyster Bay. When they reached the very tip, and stood gazing toward the shadowed mountains of the east, he gave her an ivory carving, a petrel in flight, strung as a necklace on a fine white deerskin cord. He slipped it over her head, and as she looked down at it, admiring the line of the petrel’s wings, he touched her cheek and bent to kiss her. The kiss was a long one, and she melted into his arms, wanting to tug him down into the beachgrass and ride, skin against skin, sweat mingling with sweat, until they dissolved together into an ecstatic moment of heat and light.
But her wizard’s vision showed her that he had already turned from her, toward the mountains, toward the memory of his lost sister. There was nothing to be done about it.
She returned with him to his canoe. A snap of his fingers, and Dirty jumped aboard. He heaved the canoe down into the rising tide. One more shove and a leap, and he was waterborne. She watched him paddle into the dusk until canoe and wake were no more than a speck on the glassy seas. Storm clouds were moving in from the southeast, but he would reach camp before they broke.
She lay down that night in the bedroom she shared with her cousins, thinking of Otter, and suddenly, after all these years, scalding hatred for Thrush boiled over again. Thrush still dominated and twisted their lives: Rumble grim and unreachable, unable to marry or love; Otter an obsessed wanderer; and she, no less obsessed, but shut in by her guilt, only her petrel’s vision letting her fly high over sea and land. She and Otter might have had a chance to break away from Thrush, but that moment was already gone.
And then she realized how much she was angry at Otter, too, for his selfishness, for finding it so easy to leave everyone and everything. And Otter’s search was not even rightfully his.
The storm broke at midnight. Rain poured down on the roof of the camp house. Winter sent out her spirit as she did every night, but this time the petrel flew first along the shore, toward Otter’s solitary campsite, where she found him curled uncomfortably beneath his overturned canoe, and only then did the hurt and anger toss her eastward, into the storm, toward the high mountains. She flew past peak after peak, climbing toward the edge of the world. Never had she flown so far or so fast. Lightning forked from cloud to high summit, illuminating the eastern wall of the world, and there, at the edge of mountain and sky, she saw the spirit house at last. Its inhabitants were dark, wild beings whose souls welled up from the unknowable country beyond the world. In their house the bears kept the rage of the storm, the hurtfulness of love, the ecstatic heat of passion, the randomness of pain and death. They had taken Thrush because she had no respect for them or theirs, and they had hidden from Winter because she had wanted to believe they did not exist.
That night, Rumble had a dream. Winter did not hear about it until the very early morning, when she was awakened by a commotion outside the camp house. She crawled outside into chilly darkness. In the light of many torches she could see perhaps twenty of Sandspit Town’s most seasoned warriors, armed with spear and club and knife, performing the last few small tasks before departure: tightening straps, adjusting clothing, tying back their hair.
“What is this?” she asked Rumble, who stood at the edge of the group. Though it was still dark, she could see that he had painted his face black, the color of war and mourning. He looked cold, edgy, eager to be gone.
“I know where to go now,” said Rumble. “I had a dream last night that showed me the way.”
Rumble was not a full-fledged seer, as Winter might someday become, but he did sometimes have true dreams. They had helped him well during the war with Spruce Town. Dread filled Winter, though she could see nothing to suggest an immediate cause. “Don’t go,” she found herself saying.
Rumble looked at her with contempt. “And leave her there?” he said. “Is that what you’d like?”
“No,” Winter said, “that’s not it. I just…”
Rumble brushed past her and called to his warriors. They gathered in a loose line, and headed out of camp.
Winter watched them go. She
Thrush hurried her children through the snow, climbing down from the high country. At first her children thought it was a game, and ran alongside her happily, but then they grew sleepy again, and wanted to turn homeward. She drove them on. They were not old enough yet for human speech or human form, but she knew they still had more strength and endurance than she. Even though she was so much stronger than when she’d first come here…
She gave them a snack of dried salmon at midday, and nursed each one for a few minutes. They grew very drowsy, but she still would not let them sleep. She was hoisting her pack onto her back again when she heard Stink’s distant roar. A strange mixture of fear and regret surged through her at the sound, and then she was running through the snow again. The cubs loped after her, afraid of being left alone.
Running was useless, of course. Stink could race across the land faster than a bird could fly, and he didn’t even need the footprints in the snow to track them because he could smell his own children. In a few minutes she heard a crash on the hillside above her, and she twisted to see a huge dark shape bounding through the trees. He was almost upon her, roaring and snarling, when she remembered the old woman’s instructions. From her pack she pulled the first thing that came to hand, the bone comb, and threw it at Stink.
An impenetrable thicket of thorns sprouted from the snow and rose in a wall that ended high over her head. From the far side she could hear Stink’s baffled roars of rage, the futile crash of his body against the wall. She paused for a moment, gasping for breath, and then plunged onward.
As they descended, the forest grew taller and gloomier, until huge hemlocks and firs arched hundreds of feet over her head. Soon they left the snow behind, and the going was muddy, but much easier.
It was not long before she heard Stink behind them again. This time she had the hatchet ready, and when he had come into sight, almost upon her, she hurled it to the ground. The head fell into the mud and all of a sudden she was looking down into a deep, stony gorge cleaving the mountainside. The stream she had been following was a silver trickle at the bottom of it. On the far side, beneath the towering forest, the tiny figure of Stink reared on two legs, snarling ferociously.
They ran. Later on that terrible day he caught up with them again, and she threw the stone knife; it turned into an immense, glacier-topped mountain, with sheer unscaleable cliffs. That, too, stopped him for only an hour or two. When she heard the sounds of pursuit behind her once more, she felt a wave of despair. “I’m sorry, babies,” she said. “I think he’s going to kill me. I’m sorry. I should have stayed with him, for your sakes.”
He bounded into sight. Thrush poured out the entire bottle of oil, and the smell of seaweed and cold salt spray rose up from a vast arm of the ocean that now lay between them, so wide the mists hid its far shore. As she turned away, she saw the familiar shape of Feather Mountain rising to the west, and, in the distance, the forested point of land that guarded Oyster Bay.
Winter climbed Feather Mountain as fast as she could go, running up the trail until every breath tore her lungs and a stitch cramped her side, walking only until she had recovered enough to run again. The animal trails wound up to the first snowfield. Beyond that, the snows stretched upward into the low-hanging clouds, white dissolving seamlessly into grey, only the tracks of Rumble’s party across the snow giving dimension and direction to the world. When she reached the top of the pass, a thousand feet above Oyster Bay, Winter could see nothing but cloud and snow and rock. She sent the petrel soaring into the air, flying ahead of her body, into the valley beyond.
Her wizard’s vision showed her that a vast new fjord now lay on the far side of the mountain. Struggling up the mountainside from the steep shore of that fjord was an exhausted, grim-faced woman and four balky, complaining, weary children.
That woman was the goal of two onrushing forces. One, a dangerous, powerful, wild being, raced along the shore of the fjord from the east. He wore the form of an enormous grizzly, but his essence was that of a man. Or perhaps it was that he wore the form of a man, but his heart was that of a grizzly. He seemed to shimmer as he galloped, between these selves and still others, and through it all she could see something else, bright, dark and wild, the true soul of an immortal.
From the westward end of the long, steep shore came Rumble and his men. They did not have the wild spirit power, but they had dogs, spears, and knives.
Winter ran down through the mists and the stony cliffs and drifts of old snow, down through the high meadows, down into the tangled forest, toward the woman and the point where everything would happen. She knew this was her chance to atone for everything. But her body could not fly as fast as her spirit, nor see as clearly.
She had to cross thickets, rockfalls, ravines full of snow, and each time she seemed to turn the wrong direction, take the longest way around. Agonizing pain lanced through her side, and her breath came in enormous, useless gasps. In the distance now she could hear men’s shouts, and then many dogs barking viciously. At last she burst out of the forest onto a long, rocky meadow. Below her she saw the woman driving four bear cubs ahead of her. They proceeded at hardly more than a stumbling walk now.
Winter ran toward them with all the speed she had left in her. She had almost reached the closest bear cub when the huge grizzly burst out of the woods, roaring at the woman, rearing up on its hind legs. The woman cowered back. Dogs barked furiously, racing toward the bear. The foremost dog leapt snarling at the grizzly’s flank. With a swipe of its paw, the grizzly disemboweled the dog and sent it flying. The men and their dogs surrounded the bear. It reared up again with three spears sticking from it, bloody now, foaming at the mouth, and then it charged the men. And suddenly Rumble jumped in front of the grizzly, screaming in battle frenzy, spear in hand.
Rumble struck at the bear, and the dogs charged again, and for a few moments the scene was incomprehensible chaos with the woman and the cubs caught in the middle of it. The woman was screaming. Then one of the cubs bolted in a panic, pursued by barking dogs and warriors with spears, and Winter realized Rumble’s men were killing the cubs as well as the grown bear. The cub ran helter-skelter across the hill, dragging a spear from its shoulder, crying piteously. Winter flung herself over the cub, tackling it. It clawed at her in fierce panic. “Don’t!” she screamed at the men. The dogs growled and tore at her, trying to get at the wounded cub, and one of the men seized her arm, trying to yank her off. “It’s just a cub! Don’t hurt it, don’t hurt it!”
Then the man crumpled to the ground. Otter stood there, club in hand, beating the dogs back. Black-spotted Dirty launched himself, teeth bared, at a second warrior, who raised his club against the dog, but Otter struck first with a spear, impaling him.
The wounded cub struggled in Winter’s arms, bloody, still crying in panic. Otter yanked the spear from its shoulder, and it screamed, flailing wildly. For a moment Winter nearly lost hold of it again. When she next looked, Otter was running down the hill, spear in one hand, club in the other. But the battle was over.
Winter limped after Otter, cub in her arms. The enormous grizzly lay on its back, bristling like a porcupine with spears and arrows, twitching, eyes glazing. Bloody foam blew from its lips. Scattered around lay men and dogs, mauled, whimpering, dying. And bloody-handed Rumble and the exhausted, grim-faced woman stood in the midst of it all, facing each other without recognition.
Winter herself would not have known Thrush without her wizard’s vision. Thrush looked too young, like an eighteen-year-old girl, as if only a few months had passed in the last four years. But she also looked as if she had endured a hundred years in that time. Her hair was matted and filthy, her clothing in tatters, her skin a crisscross of scars and scabs and fresh bloody scratches. Thrush was staring wildly at something by Rumble’s feet. She sank down, into the blood and stinking entrails of men and bear and dogs, and pulled her dead cub into her lap, cradling its head, kissing its snouted face. And cheek against its bloody nose, she started to wail like an inconsolable child.
“But—” Rumble said, bewilderment setting in. “That isn’t—it isn’t—”
“Go away,” Winter said to her older brother. “Just go away.”
Winter released the surviving cub. She knelt down, and with her free arm pulled Thrush against her shoulder, stroking the tangled hair, wiping away the tears. She seemed to have finished hating Thrush. “It’s all right,” she said. “They’re free now. They’re immortal.” But she knew that would be scant comfort to a mother who had seen her sons killed. Thrush was not a wizard. She could not see the dark, wild souls of her bear children as they were: beyond form and beyond essence, ancient and young, eternal and ever-changing in their house at the very threshold of the world, where sky and mountain and bears alike become sheer, burning light.