Great Sky Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

momentous decision. “He will be a skilled hunter,” she said. “A jumper,” she continued, remembering the vision. “I call him Frog Hopping.” Her eyelids were too heavy to prop open any longer.
    Break Spear discerned what she tried to conceal. “Mother is tired,” the boma father said. “No more. More when the sun rises. Now she must sleep. Come! Show Stillshadow to shelter!”
    As they led her to the meeting hut, she glanced back at the newly named Frog Hopping, wondering if she should have spoken more bluntly about what she saw. But at her age flesh was sometimes stronger than will, and the crone allowed herself to be led away to a place of rest.
     
    Curled on her side against the matted grass, Stillshadow drowsed, staring up at the darkness, her mind wandering in that odd place between the dreaming and waking worlds. In that place just before sleep, where the worlds of day and night melded, Great Mother sometimes whispered to her.
    Something was amiss, but what, she could not say. A mild, cool wind filtered through the boma’s thorn wall, and then into her hut. She shivered.
    Was that shudder from the cold? Or something else?
    Had she made a mistake? Had she…
    Then fatigue overwhelmed her, and she fell asleep again, trusting that the night’s walk in the world of dreams might resolve the mystery, if mystery there truly was.

Chapter Five
    Water Chant crouched in the dry streambed, rubbing crumbly gnu droppings between thumb and forefinger. Spit on his fingertips made the flakes gummy. Chant sniffed deeply, then touched them with the tip of his tongue. Judging by texture, the droppings were at least seven days old. The acid taste suggested that the gnu had been sick and tired. The streams feeding Water boma had dried, forcing the shaggy, horned beasts to begin their yearly migration unseasonably early. Their local water holes were now little more than mud.
    Water boma’s folk had taken to eating fill-cactus to still their stomach rumblings, and this was bad. Fill-cactus pulp quieted the belly but did not feed the flesh.
    Discouraged, he trudged back to Water boma’s high, familiar thorn walls. If things did not improve, they might have to move farther south. The bhan sometimes moved several times a year. In all the world, perhaps only the Ibandi knew where their children would sleep next year. Was that about to change?
    “Chant!” called his cousin Leopard Paw. “We have meat!”
    “Your hunt has been good?” Chant called hopefully.
    Leopard shook his head. “No. Great Father smiled on Earth boma’s hunters. A giraffe welcomed their arrows. They followed until the poison made it sleepy. Then they sent it to Great Sky with their spears. There was meat to share.”
    Water Chant nodded, too ashamed to speak. Ibandi rarely went hungry. By tradition and inclination, the bomas shared. Still, it was not right. Was he not a man, and therefore capable of feeding a family?
    But an even greater shame gnawed like a snake in Chant’s gut as he approached his hut and bowed to crawl through the door. The roof flap was open, and dusty yellow daylight eased the darkness. He would have preferred not to see what it revealed.
    Zebra nursed her daughter with a desperate intensity, flinching as he entered. Even after four moons, his newborn still gazed blankly out at the world, still registered nothing at all.
    Chant felt his breath stop within him, heating until he thought he would burst. Then the words flew from his mouth like angry birds. “We cannot feed such a child!”
    “She is my flesh,” Zebra Moon insisted, as she had every day since their daughter’s birth.
    Water Chant fought to keep his temper. “Every day the pigs and deer are harder to find. My body aches, but I hunt. I bring you whatever meat I find. The fruit of my body is given to the fruit of yours, and it is wrong!” Chant slammed his fist against the ground.
    She flinched away, raising a protective arm over her child. “She is mine!” Zebra