Still Water - Chapter 4
The world had always been one way. Until it wasn’t.
Chapter Four
By the time the snow turned to water, hunger had learned our names. It followed us from place to place. It waited when we slept. It sat with us when we rose. We spoke of it little, because to speak of hunger was to give it weight, and it was heavy enough already.
The women went into the birch stands while the ground was still soft with melt. I went with them part of the way and stopped, because there was nothing for me to do that they couldn’t do better. They carried stone scrapers and baskets plaited long ago, when hands had been stronger and bellies fuller. They cut the bark carefully, lifting it just enough to reach the pale inner skin. That skin they scraped away in thin curls. It tasted of bitterness and water, but it filled the mouth and slowed the shaking.
Morning Dew worked among them. She had grown quieter since winter began to loose its grip. Her face had become sharp at the edges, as if it were being pared down. Still, she worked harder than any of the others. She scraped bark until her fingers bled. She carried loads heavier than her share. When one of the Old Aunties told her to rest, she smiled and said she would rest later.
The bark curled away in thin, pale strips. Some of it fell to the ground and was lost in the mud. No one bent to pick it up. Even scraps had become work.
The smell of the scraped birch was sharp and green. It made my mouth water and my stomach knot at the same time. I chewed a piece myself, though no one had offered it to me. It filled my mouth but not my body. I swallowed and felt it settle like wet clay.
Beyond the birches, the forest stood quiet. Too quiet. No birds were calling. No small things rustling. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. I remembered other springs, when the meltwater ran loud, and the woods cried out with life. This spring felt thin, as if stretched too far.
One of the younger women whispered that the ground had been picked clean already, even in places no one had touched before. Bent Willow told her to hush. Words, she said, had weight. Hunger listened.
I watched her from where I sat on a fallen log. I was trying to mend a net that had torn again, though I knew it would not hold. My hands were slow. The cord slipped from me as if it did not wish to be held.
Morning Dew stood up, too quickly. I saw it before she did. Her head lifted, and her eyes went empty, as if something had blown through them and taken her with it. She swayed once, and then her knees folded.
I was on my feet before I knew I’d moved. I crossed the ground badly, stumbling in the wet leaves. When I reached her, she was already on the ground. Her face had gone pale, and her breath came in short pulls, like a child who had run too far.
I called her name. At first, she didn’t answer. I touched her cheek. It was cold, though the day was warming.
The women gathered right away. Hands pressed her shoulders, her arms, her back. Someone lifted her head. Someone else brought water in a bark cup. Bent Willow pushed me aside without looking at me. I let myself be moved. I always did.
Morning Dew’s eyes fluttered open. She frowned, as if confused by the sky.
“I’m here,” I said, though I didn’t know if she heard me.
After a while, she sat up. She drank the water slowly. Her hands shook, and she laughed once, softly, as if embarrassed by her own body.
“It is nothing,” she said. “I stood too fast.”
No one argued with her. The women knew better than to speak certain truths aloud.
We walked her back to the hearth circle. Bent Willow wrapped her in an extra skin. She pressed a lump of scraped bark into her hand and told her to eat it slowly. Morning Dew did as she was told.
She ate slowly, breaking each curl of bark with her teeth as if it were something precious. I watched her throat move as she swallowed. I watched the way her hands rested in her lap, lighter now than they had been in winter.
Bent Willow sat close to her. She said nothing, but she kept one hand near Morning Dew’s arm, as if to steady her without touching. I saw her slip a small piece of dried fish skin from a pouch and place it beside Morning Dew’s knee, hidden by the folds of the fur. Morning Dew did not look at it. She waited until the older woman turned away, then folded it into her palm.
I felt the old heat of shame rise in me. Not sharp, not sudden. It was a familiar warmth, like an old bruise that never quite fades. I sat near her, useless as ever, and watched the smoke rise and fall. It was then that I remembered how she had first come to us.
I had been a boy then, still unmarked, still listening for the spirits’ voices in the night. The band had returned from a raid far to the east. They brought meat, hides, three women, and a girl. I hadn’t been part of that raid. I was meant for other things. I had stayed behind with the old men and the children, learning the names of things that can’t be named.
The women walked with their heads down. Their hair had been shorn. Their wrists were raw from binding. The girl, unlike them, brightly looked around, unfazed by her predicament. She didn’t cry. She didn’t beg. She looked at us as if she were counting us, one by one. Her eyes were dark and steady. She was thin, but she stood straight. Then she looked at me. Our eyes locked, and she smiled. And something flipped inside my stomach.
I remember thinking that the spirits had gone very quiet then. I had been taught that silence from the spirits was not the same as absence. Silence meant listening. It meant waiting. But in those days, the quiet felt empty, like a place where a fire had burned and left only cold stone.
The other apprentices spoke of signs they’d seen. Dreams. Animal tracks that bent the wrong way. I said nothing. I watched Morning Dew from across the camp, learning the set of her shoulders, the way she moved among strangers as if she were already half-gone from herself. It was not her name yet; she wasn’t yet one of us, a woman ready for her marriage.
When she was given her new name, I spoke it once under my breath. It tasted like water after thirst. I knew then that I would lose something I had not yet fully claimed. I didn’t know how much.
She was taken from the Lone Rock People in that raid. She was brought into our camp with no ceremony. The women washed her. They gave her a new name. Morning Dew.
I fell in love with her at once. I didn’t know that was what it was called. I only knew that when I looked at her, the world did not move as it had before. Things paused. Sounds came from farther away. I had known, even then, what it would cost me. Someone said that they would be traded on. Someone else said that they would be worked until they broke. Instead, I was the one who broke.
Now she lay beside the hearth, breathing shallowly, her face turned toward the smoke hole. I wondered, as I often did, if love had been a kind of hunger, and whether it ever learned to stop.
* * *
The stranger’s coughing grew worse that afternoon. He had been with us a couple of weeks by then. We had not killed him when he first came. That felt like a mistake at the time, and more so later, though none of us said so.
At first, he had eaten little and spoken less. Then the heat came. I heard him at night, even from where I lay. His coughing cut through the dark. It was dry at first, sharp and tearing, as if his chest were full of splinters. He couldn’t sleep. None of us could.
He burned with a fever none of us had seen before, not even the oldest. When I brought him water, his skin was hot to the touch. I was the only one who came near him by then. He shivered even as sweat soaked his furs. His heat came as if a fire had been lit inside him.
After a day or two, he began having trouble standing upright. His limbs trembled. He lay down often, even during the day, his eyes squeezed shut against the light. He pressed his hands to his head and groaned. He said it felt too full, as if something were pushing from behind his eyes.
The Stranger’s smell changed as the sickness took him deeper. It wasn’t the smell of rot or blood. It was sharp and sour, like breath held too long. When the wind shifted, it carried that smell through the camp, and people turned their faces away without speaking.
He tried to rise once, gripping my arm with surprising strength. His fingers were hot and slick. He said something in his own tongue, fast and broken. I didn’t understand the words, but I understood the sound. It was the sound of someone asking not to be left alone.
When he collapsed back onto the ground, he wept. Not loudly. Just enough to wet the fur beneath his face.
That was when I first felt fear move through the camp like an animal with many legs. No one named it. But people began to sleep farther apart. Mothers pulled children close and then pushed them away again, uncertain which was safer. The children were told to stay away from him. Some didn’t listen.
He stopped eating. When the cough worsened, it brought pain with it. Each breath seemed to scrape him. At night, his breathing grew fast and shallow. Sometimes he spoke to people who were not there. Cold Crow might have known what to do, but he was still in the forest.
After more days passed, he stopped keeping water down. It came back up, sour and thin. His chest began to sound wet, as if something were sloshing inside him. He gasped when he tried to speak. And then, one night, the choking began.
I went to him when I heard it change. It was a thick, bubbling sound. I thought, foolishly, that I could help. When I reached him, his eyes were open, but they didn’t see me. His mouth worked soundlessly. Then he was still.
There were no marks on him. No wounds. No blood. It was as if something inside him had burned itself out and left nothing but ash. We wrapped him and dragged his body away before morning. No one sang. No one asked the spirits why.
Soon, within days, others began to sicken. The children went first. They burned hotter and faster. Their mouths went dry. Their breathing grew quick and thin. Some of them died before we could even decide what to do. The women whispered that the sickness came from the Stranger. Others said it came from the smoke across the river. Some said nothing at all.
Some said the sickness rode on breath. Others said it came from the belly of the earth, stirred by too many feet walking the same paths. One woman swore she had seen a pale shape leave the Stranger’s mouth at dawn and drift toward the river.
I felt it settle on me more heavily than on the others. I had been marked once already, set apart by choice. Now, even the sickness seemed to know my name, too.
I watched Morning Dew closely. I counted her breaths when she slept. I pressed my hand to her back at night, feeling for heat. I did not sleep much. I sat beside Morning Dew and listened to the coughing fade into the night, and I wondered which of us the spirits would choose next.
That evening, as the light thinned, I saw smoke again across the river. It rose straight and dark, too steady for a single hearth. I didn’t speak of it. No one asked me what I saw.
Morning Dew slept fitfully. Her dreams pulled her hands into fists. Once, she murmured the name of the band she had been taken from, a name she never used while awake. I lay still beside her, afraid that if I moved, she would slip further away.
* * *
Cold Crow came at dusk, when the light goes thin and yellow, and the world feels unfinished. I saw him first from the edge of the hearth circle, his silhouette cut into the trees as if he had been carved out of bark and shadow. He walked slowly, leaning on his staff, and the people rose to meet him before he spoke a word. No one touched him. No one asked what he had seen. You don’t question a man who has just come back from where the spirits breathe.
Cold Crow’s face was streaked with ash and old blood. Pine pitch still clung to his hair. His eyes were bright in a way I didn’t like. When he lifted his staff, the murmuring stopped, and even the children fell quiet, as if a hand had pressed down on their heads.
The ash meant he had burned the old things away before he went in. The blood meant he had let something of himself be taken. I knew the order of those acts, because once, long ago, I had been taught them too. Ash to make yourself empty. Blood to give the spirits something to hold.
People think the spirits are like people. They are not. They don’t listen because they care. They listen because they are hungry.
Cold Crow spoke of the deer as if they were thoughts moving through the forest, and that was right. A deer was not one thing. It was the body you cut and the breath that fled and the shadow that stayed behind. If you took only the body and did not feed the shadow, the shadow followed you. It whispered to the other deer. It told them where not to go.
That was what he meant when he said the deer were too many. Too many shadows. Too many un-fed deaths clinging to the trees.
When I was younger, before I chose wrong, I had been told that a great taking was like closing a wound. You pressed hard, you made it hurt, and then the bleeding stopped. After that, the flesh could grow again.
I wondered, listening, whether the spirits had truly said this, or whether Cold Crow had heard what hunger wanted him to hear. But that was a dangerous thought, and I let it sink back down where it belonged.
“The deer are too many,” he said. “And that is why there are none.”
No one laughed. This was not a riddle. This was how the world worked.
He told them what the spirits had shown him in the deep forest, where the ground is soft with rot, and the trees lean close to hear secrets. The deer were not flesh as we saw them, he said, but breath and hunger given legs. When a deer was killed properly, with the right words and the right ritual, it went back into the ground eager to return. One deer became two. Two became many. That was how it had always been, when the old ways were kept.
But when deer were taken in fear, or singly, or without thanks, they did not return. They hid themselves. They became as smoke. They slipped between the trees and did not come back.
“The spirits are angry,” Cold Crow said. “They say we have been greedy without knowing it.”
He said the answer was not to take less, but to take everything. To empty the forest of deer in one great breath, the way fire empties grass. A slaughter drive, as our grandfathers had done when the winters were cruel and the rivers failed. Smoke and shouting. Men moving as one body. Women and children keeping lines. No deer left alive to carry resentment into the ground.
“When the last deer falls,” he said, “the forest will be clean. The spirits will make them again, quick and strong. They will come back to us in herds so thick you won’t see the ground between their legs.”
I listened from the shadows, where the firelight broke before it reached me. No one looked my way. No one ever did anymore, unless it was by accident. I wasn’t called closer. I wasn’t asked to hear more. That, too, was part of the answer.
It had been like this since I chose to marry instead of following the spirits all the way. No one had shouted at me. No one had struck me. They had simply begun to act as if I were already gone.
A band can live without a poor hunter. It cannot live without someone who speaks for it to the unseen. By stepping away, I had not just refused a calling. I had thinned the walls around us.
I could feel that judgment now in the way backs turned, in the way voices softened when I came near and then rose again once I passed. They were afraid of what might follow me. Fear is careful. I didn’t blame them. Blame is for people who believe the world is fair.
Cold Crow spoke of signs. Of a wind that had shifted in the night, though the leaves hadn’t moved. Of bones he’d found stacked neatly beneath a fallen pine, gnawed clean by nothing that lived. Of ravens that had followed him for half a day, silent, waiting.
The people nodded. They were thin now. You could see it in the way shoulders cut through skin, in the way children cried without tears. Belief comes easier when hunger sits beside you.
Plans grew quickly, as they always do once the spirits have spoken. Men were chosen to cut brush and drag it into lines. Others would gather pitch and rotten wood to make thick smoke. The best runners would be placed where the forest narrowed, where the deer always fled. Old arguments about where to stand and who should lead rose and fell, but no one questioned the wisdom of the drive. That had already been decided.
They spoke of the old slaughter drive, the one that had been done before Red Antler was born, before Bent Willow had bent. Men remembered stories told by men who were now only names. How the forest had shaken with hooves. How the air had been so thick with smoke you could taste it for days. How the children had eaten marrow until their mouths shone. I noticed how no one spoke of the year that followed.
A drive took more than strength. It took agreement. Every voice raised had to be raised for the same reason. If one man shouted in fear while another shouted in joy, the deer would hear the difference. They would turn away. Cold Crow said the spirits demanded unity. That meant there would be no place for doubt. That meant there would be no place for me. I felt that knowledge settle over me like frost. Not sudden. Not cruel. Just there.
I stayed where I was, half-hidden behind a drying rack with nothing on it. I could feel the shape of the hunt forming without me, like a body growing a limb I would never have. It didn’t hurt anymore. Or if it did, the pain had gone dull, like an old scar that only aches when the weather changes.
Cold Crow’s gaze passed over me once, just once. His mouth tightened. Then he turned away. In that look was a question he didn’t ask. Whether I had heard anything myself. Whether the spirits had whispered another answer in my ear.
They had not. Or if they had, I no longer knew how to listen. Once, I would have gone into the forest after him. I would have fasted and cut and waited. I would have come back with something shaped like truth, even if it hurt. Now I stayed where I was. That, too, was a kind of answer.
After that, the men moved. Fires were laid but not lit. Brush was dragged until the forest floor showed pale beneath it. Voices were low, careful, as if the deer could already hear them through the trees. I watched hands knotting cord and tying bundles. I watched Red Antler give orders without raising his voice, his back straight despite the way his cough had worsened.
The work went on without songs. That told me more than words could. When people are confident, they sing. When they are afraid, they count and measure and keep their breath inside.
I saw one of the younger hunters pause with a bundle of brush in his arms and look out into the trees, as if he had heard something. Another man hissed at him to hurry. The moment passed.
Later, someone said they had seen marks by the riverbank that were not made by hooves. Too straight. Too regular. Someone else said it must have been driftwood dragged by ice. That explanation was accepted quickly. No one wanted new questions tonight.
No one told me to help. No one told me to leave. I drifted to the edge of the camp and crouched where I could see without being seen. From there, the preparations looked like something happening in another world, one I’d once belonged to but had stepped out of without knowing how.
From there, the forest looked closer than it should have, as if it were leaning in. I remembered being a boy and thinking the trees were watching me learn to walk, learn to throw, learn to fail. I wondered what they saw now.
I thought of the People of the Tall Reeds, and the story they had brought with them before they moved on. Of voices that rose and fell together, not in song but in something heavier. Of shapes moving where there should have been none. At the time, I had dismissed it. Hunger makes stories grow teeth. Now, with the drive being laid like a trap across the land, the story felt less soft.
I thought of the spirits then, and of how I had once believed they spoke through me. I wondered if they had said my name to Cold Crow in the forest, and if so, how. As a warning. As a mistake. Or not at all.
When daylight finally went, and the first stars showed themselves like pinpricks in a stretched hide, the people broke apart to sleep. Tomorrow would be the drive. Tomorrow, the forest would be emptied.
I went back to the hearth circle last of all. Morning Dew sat with the women, her hands folded in her lap, her face drawn and pale. Bent Willow pushed a scrap of dried root toward her without looking up. Morning Dew took it, nodded, and ate slowly, as if she were afraid the food might vanish if she hurried.
Bent Willow didn’t look at me when I came close, but she shifted slightly, making room where none was there before. That was kindness, from her. It was also a boundary.
Morning Dew’s eyes met mine only once. In them was trust that frightened me more than blame would have. She believed I would find a way. I did not know how to tell her that ways are not always found. Sometimes they end.
When I lay down beyond the fire, the ground felt colder than it should have. The wind carried the smell of damp earth and something else beneath it, something I could not name. I told myself it was only the coming drive. I told myself the spirits knew what they were doing. I told myself many things.
I didn’t join them. I lay down beyond the fire’s reach, wrapped in my skin, and listened to the forest breathing. I slept poorly. The deer did not come to me in dreams. That absence felt like a warning.
Somewhere out there, the deer were still alive. They didn’t yet know about their upcoming rebirth.
* * *
The drive began before full morning, when the frost was still half-alive, and the ground held the night in its mouth. Smoke crept first, low and gray, curling through the brush like something waking unwillingly. Men moved into their places without speaking. The forest took them in and made them smaller.
I was not among them. I stayed where the land dipped, behind a screen of young birch and deadfall, close enough to hear but far enough not to be counted. From there, I could see the edge of the smoke wall being built, thin at first, then thickening as more rotten wood was fed to the fires. The smell was sharp and bitter. It caught in the throat.
Shouting began soon after. Not words, not names. Just noise. A tearing of the air meant to push deer in one direction and nowhere else. The men had practiced this once, quietly, the day before. Now it came out ragged, as if each voice carried its own fear.
The women and older children held the far lines, rattling sticks, waving skins. They were small against the trees. I thought of Morning Dew sitting by the hearth instead, bent slightly forward, hands over her belly as if already guarding what was there. I did not look back toward camp again.
At first, all worked as planned. I heard the deer before I saw them. A deepening sound, like rain falling upward. The ground trembled. Birds burst from the canopy in a scatter of wings. Then the smoke shifted, and I saw brown bodies flickering through it, legs pumping, heads low. The herd was large. Larger than I had expected.
For a moment, belief rose in me like warmth. Cold Crow had been right. The spirits had not abandoned us yet.
Men ran alongside the smoke wall, shouting harder now. The deer streamed toward the narrowing, just as they always did. Hooves struck stone. A young stag stumbled and went down. Another leapt over him. The sound of breath and panic thickened.
Then the wind changed. It was not a great wind. It did not howl or announce itself. It came as a soft hand from the wrong direction, pressing against the smoke and lifting it in folds. The wall thinned. Holes opened. The forest showed through.
I saw the first doe turn her head. Animals know things before we do. She slowed. Her ears angled back. Then she veered, sharply, and others followed. A ripple ran through the herd, fast and decisive. The mass of them swung, not toward the kill ground, but back toward the line of men.
I heard the first crack like a tree splitting in frost. Then another. The wind came down the slope in a single breath, colder than before, and the smoke wavered. Men shouted, not words but sounds, as if lungs were being emptied. The deer didn’t turn as we had planned. They surged back toward the river, eyes white, mouths open, hooves drumming the ground into pain. I crouched deeper in the brush, the stink of burned dung and pitch thick in my nose.
One buck broke through the line, close enough that I saw a long scar on his right flank and the foam at his lips. A hunter lunged and missed. Another fell, trampled, and did not rise. Spears struck wood, struck air. The dogs went wild, barking their heads off and lunging at the running animals, getting underfoot. Arrows went wild.
One hunter went down hard, his leg taken from under him. Another was struck in the chest and thrown backward. I heard the sound of bones breaking. I didn’t know whose. The smoke collapsed in on itself, rolling low and blinding. Men emerged from it coughing, eyes streaming. The deer burst through them like water through reeds.
When the herd was past, there was only noise left behind it, echoing, like water after a boat. Someone shouted a name. Someone else shouted a warning. Too late. The shouting turned wild. Voices rose and cracked. Orders were lost. Fear took its own shape.
Some of the deer had been killed, but not at all well, not properly. Spears went in where they could. Knives flashed. Blood slicked the ground. The air filled with the iron smell of it, hot and sudden. A young man I knew—Soaring Eagle, before his manhood name had settled into him—missed his throw and fell, trampled, his scream cut short.
Most of the herd escaped. They poured past me, so close I could see the whites of their eyes. I stayed still, pressed into the earth, breath held. One brushed my leg, and I felt the heat of it, the living force. Then they were gone, crashing away into the trees, carrying the forest with them.
Silence followed, heavy and wrong. Then came the sounds of the injured. Men lay scattered, some unmoving, some clutching limbs bent where they should not bend. The smoke drifted off in tatters. Fires burned unattended. No one sang. No one thanked the deer.
Red Antler moved among them, his face set, his voice low. Cold Crow knelt beside a fallen man, his hands already red. He spoke words meant to call the deer’s shadows back, but they sounded thin, hurried.
They gathered what meat they could. The dead animals were dragged together, cut quickly. There were more carcasses than hands to tend them. Blood soaked into the warming ground. Flies came fast.
Later, when the killing finally ended, I could see that it was wrong killing. Too many of the carcasses lay where they fell. Bellies were opened in haste. Hands shook. No apologies were made to the dead deer, no thanks rendered to the forest for letting us take them. The sun was warm, and flies came quickly. Meat darkened before it could be cut thin. Fat ran into the dirt. We said prayers anyway. We always did. It did not matter; the fear had remained.
By midday, the sun was high and merciless. Meat lay piled where it could not all be smoked in time. Fat melted and ran. The smell turned sweet, then sour. Some of it was left where it fell, arranged carefully, skulls turned toward the trees, as offerings. It didn’t feel like offerings. It felt like an apology.
I did not help. No one told me to. I stayed where I was until the work was done, until the men limped back toward camp with what they could carry and what they could not bear to leave behind.
The forest felt empty then. Not simply quiet. Empty. As if something had been taken out and the space had not yet decided what to do with itself.
That night, the coughing worsened. It had been there already, threading through the camp like a bad dream you wake into. Now it grew louder, deeper. I heard it from the edge of sleep, a tearing sound from inside a chest. A child cried, then went silent.
The chief’s youngest son now burned with fever. I stood outside the shelter and listened as his breath came faster, then faltered. Cold Crow sat with him, chanting softly, cutting his own arm again and again to feed the spirits with his pain. The boy did not wake. By morning, he was dead.
Children dying was not new. We buried them with little ceremony, returning them quickly, gently. But this was different. Others had taken sick in the night. A young woman vomited until there was nothing left in her. An old man raved and did not know his own name.
The people looked at one another with new eyes. Counting. Measuring loss. Someone said that it was the deer taking their revenge for the disrespect. Someone else said the spirits were still angry. A few said nothing, but their eyes found me and did not look away.
Mist on the Water began to cough that afternoon. It was dry at first and painful. She waved it away, annoyed more than afraid. By evening, she lay curled on her side, breath shallow, sweat soaking her hair.
I thought then of the stranger who had died a few days before, cut off from his own, and burning from the inside. Of how his body had not been marked by wound or rot, just emptied. I wondered if death could travel, unseen, the way stories do. No one spoke of that thought. It had no place yet.
In the days that followed, no deer came back. Traps stayed empty. Tracks vanished. The forest held itself apart from us. Meat spoiled. Fish came up dead or thin, their bellies swollen, the water carrying a smell I did not remember from before.
People began to say my name more often. Not loudly. Not together. Just enough. They said I had watched when I should not have. That my presence had leaned the wind. That the spirits had seen me there and remembered my refusal.
I did not argue. Words would not have helped. I knew how it looked. I had stood apart while the old world broke open.
At night, I dreamed of deer running in the wrong direction, again and again, their eyes fixed on me as they passed. I woke with my hands empty.
The drive had been meant to close a wound. Instead, it tore it wider. And the spirits, if they were listening at all, did not answer.
Morning Dew told me she was with child again that night. She said it quietly, as if afraid the night might hear.
I laughed before I meant to. It came out sharp and wrong, like a bark of surprise, and I reached for her hands as if that would steady the feeling in my chest. Joy rose in me, sharp and immediate, followed by fear so cold it stole my breath. I held her and did not know what promise to make.
For a moment, there was only warmth—her face, the closeness, the thought that something might be beginning instead of ending. Then a shadow passed over the ground between us. I looked up.
Two ravens sat in the bare branches above the shelter, close enough that I could see the pale seam where one beak met the other. They weren’t calling. They weren’t restless. They simply watched, heads tilted, as if they’d been there some time already.
And suddenly I knew. Not as a thought built step by step, but all at once—the fishing net slipping from my hands, the stones of my manhood trial cold against my knees, the small, still weight of our first child wrapped too tightly in fur. Every turning I could not undo.
They had been there. I couldn’t remember a moment that mattered when they hadn’t been nearby.
The joy drained out of me so quickly that it left me dizzy. What remained wasn’t certainty, or meaning—but the sense of being seen across time, of something keeping count when I had not.
Morning Dew squeezed my hands, mistaking my stillness for awe. I didn’t tell her what I was thinking. I didn’t know how to ask whether the ravens followed me, guided me, or whether they were merely waiting to see if I would fail again.
* * *
Death came faster after the drive. It came like rot after rain, as if the ground itself had been waiting. It now came for Mossy, Broken Elk’s third son.
He was a quiet boy, slim as a reed, with a laugh that always came slow, as if he needed time to decide whether a thing was worth laughing at. I had seen him that morning, sitting near the fire with his blanket pulled up to his chin even though the day had turned warm. His eyes were too bright. His skin shone with sweat. When he coughed, it sounded as if his chest were full of bark.
By evening, the coughing had grown worse. It came in tearing fits that bent him double. His breath rattled. Women brought him water, but he couldn’t keep it down. He vomited bile and lay shaking, his limbs thin and twitching. The Spirit Talker came and laid his hands on the boy’s chest. He sang softly, a song for cooling heat, for calling the breath back into its proper path. The boy’s skin burned under his hands.
That night, the coughing changed. It became wet and choking. I heard it even from our shelter, a harsh bubbling sound that rose and fell, rose and fell, until it stopped.
At dawn, his mother wailed. The sound cut through camp like a blade. It was not the sharp cry of sudden loss. It was long and low, the sound of something being emptied out. They said the boy had drowned on dry land.
After him, more followed. Two children from the hearth circle by the river. A young woman who had been heavy with milk but whose breasts dried as her fever rose. A hunter who had taken a hoof to the thigh during the drive and had seemed to be healing well, until the coughing took him, and he began to cough up blood. The sickness moved through camp like a wind we could not feel until it had already passed through us.
Those who died didn’t look struck down from without. There were no sores, no bites, no wounds that one could blame. They burned out from the inside, like some trees after they had been struck by lightning, the ones the spirits used for their own hearths. Their eyes sank. Their breath shortened. When they died, they looked used up, as if something had fed on them and left only husks behind.
The children died the fastest. That frightened everyone.
Children die. We know this. We expect it. The spirits take many before they are fully shaped. But not like this. Not so many. Not so quickly. Little bodies went from running to stillness in a handful of days. Mothers carried them to the edge of camp, wrapped in furs that were too big, their arms shaking with the weight of how light the bundles were.
Cold Crow did what he could for them. He chanted, danced, made herbal preparations, but to no avail.
The Old Aunties said little. They watched. They whispered to one another. They made remedies and poultices. Bent Willow sat longer than usual by the hearth, her hands busy with nothing, rubbing ash between her fingers as if feeling for something hidden in it.
Mist on the Water sickened three days after her youngest died. She was Red Antler’s second-eldest wife, broad-hipped and strong, a woman who laughed loudly and worked without complaint. I saw her stumble while carrying a skin pot. She caught herself and laughed it off, but her face had gone pale beneath the paint. That night, she didn’t eat. The next morning, she didn’t rise.
Her fever came on hard. Her skin was slick and hot, her breath fast and shallow. She spoke nonsense, calling for her mother, who had been dead since before she was taken in her first raid. When she coughed, she pressed her hand to her mouth as if ashamed. The cloth she used came away stained dark.
Red Antler sat with her through the night, his face turned away from the fire. He did not speak. When the Spirit Talker came, Red Antler stood and moved aside without a word, as if already preparing himself for the space she would leave.
It was then that Cold Crow made his next move. He said the spirits were angry, and that their anger was old and deep. He said the deer drive had not failed by chance. He said the sickness was not a thing that wandered in on its own feet. It had been sent.
On the third night after Mist on the Water took to her bedding, Cold Crow went to the burial place beyond the reeds. He went alone. We watched from a distance, no one daring to follow.
He returned before dawn with the skull of Grey Ash, the Spirit Talker who had taught his teacher, and whose power was still spoken of in whispers. The skull was dark with age, its teeth worn smooth, the eye sockets deep and empty. Cold Crow carried it cradled against his chest, as if it were a living thing.
They cleared a space near the old fire pit. The women moved back. The men stood in a loose ring. I stayed at the edge, half hidden by shadow, where I always seemed to end up now.
Cold Crow set the skull on a bed of bark and feathers. He cut his arm with a flint blade and let the blood run down over the bone. He sang as he did it, a low, grinding song that pulled at the ear and would not let go. The blood soaked into the cracks of the skull, darkening it, making it shine.
He asked Grey Ash to wake. He asked him to look. He asked him why the spirits had turned their faces from us.
When no answer came, he cut again. Deeper this time. His blood fell in heavy drops. He swayed but did not stop singing.
The watching men murmured. Some turned their eyes toward me, then quickly away. No one spoke my name. No one had to. I felt the looks like insects crawling over my skin.
I knew what they were thinking. I had known it would come to this, sooner or later. The band had lost its protection when I turned away from the spirits. Everything that followed could be laid at my feet. Hunger. Bad hunting. Sick children. Now this sickness that burned people from the inside.
I did not argue with it. I could not. It was true. I had broken a path that had been walked for generations. Of course, the world would stumble.
Mist on the Water died before the ritual was over. She went quiet just before dawn, her breathing slowing, then stopping as gently as a bird settling its wings. Red Antler let out a sound then that I had never heard from him before, a broken, wordless cry that seemed to tear itself out of his chest. No one comforted him. Grief is a thing each person must carry alone.
That same morning, Morning Dew frightened me again. She had been sitting with the women, scraping birch bark into thin curls, her hands moving steadily, though her face was drawn and gray. I was gathering sticks nearby when she bent over double, the bark scattering across the ground like pale fish.
I ran to her. My heart struck my ribs like a trapped thing. For a moment, I thought she might be dying, and the world narrowed to a single point of pain. Then she straightened up and smiled.
Bent Willow pushed past me and knelt, her movements sharp and sure. She pressed two fingers to Morning Dew’s neck, then slapped her cheeks lightly. Morning Dew stirred, her eyes fluttering open.
“She’s empty,” Bent Willow said. “Too empty.”
Morning Dew tried to sit up. Bent Willow held her down.
“She is with child,” Bent Willow said then, and the words fell into me like stones into deep water.
I nodded. Hearing Bent Willow say it made it fully real, and with it came a rush of fear so sharp it left me dizzy. Joy came too, tangled with it. A small, bright thing struggling to breathe beneath the weight. They would have seen signs—a tenderness, a change in the way she moved—if anyone had paid attention. Now, what had been held between us now stood out in the open, subject to the same forces that shaped everything else.
Bent Willow looked at me then, her eyes hard. “If she’s not kept fed,” she said, “you will lose them both.”
By the time the sun rose again, three more were dead. Cold Crow said the spirits demanded more attention. More care. More obedience.
Some of the hunters muttered that the sickness had begun after I had been seen near the drive. That my shadow had crossed the smoke line. That my breath had carried wrongness into the killing. No one accused me outright. They didn’t need to. Silence can say many things.
I moved more carefully after that. I kept my eyes lowered. I stayed away from gatherings unless called. I did not want to give the spirits—or the people—any more reason to turn against us. The sickness did not care. It took another child that night. Then another woman.
Bent Willow burned herbs until the air was thick and bitter. The Spirit Talker sang until his voice grew hoarse. He cut himself again and again, his arm wrapped in filthy bark cloth, his face drawn tight with pain and effort. Nothing stopped it.
By the end of the week, the camp felt hollowed out. Fires burned low. Voices were quiet. Even the children who still lived no longer played.
I sat beside Morning Dew and listened to the coughing rise and fall around us. Each sound felt like a step closer to the edge of something I couldn’t see. I knew then that the world was breaking. I didn’t know yet how completely.
To be continued…
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