Stone Spring Read Online Free PDF Page B

sheltered with his hands, and Ice Dreamer helped him, feeding the flame with dried grass from the cave. When the fire was burning they sat back. It gave off light but little heat; for that they would have to wait for Mammoth Talker’s return with some decent fuel.
    ‘Mammoth Talker is right,’ said Stone Shaper. He loosened his tunic at the neck, and sat with his legs stretched out. ‘I am no priest. I am no man. I am shamed by my tears.’
    ‘Well, Talker isn’t much of a man himself to say such things. You’re the only priest we’ve got.’
    ‘I never wanted to be a priest.’ He flexed his hands. ‘I am Stone Shaper. That’s my name, that’s what I should do.’
    And, she thought bitterly, I never wanted to be Pregnant Woman, far from my grandmothers and aunts. ‘This is the pattern of our lives, Shaper. Why, do you think Wolf Dancer wanted to be a priest either? The last true priest was Eagle Seer, before the split . . .’
    It had been fifteen years since the True People had abandoned the houses by the lake and walked north in search of hunting lands free of the presence of the Cowards. Eagle Seer had been raised on the march. But the priest before him, who Dreamer remembered as a tired old man called the Coyote, had made sure Seer had been trained the way a priest should be trained - from boyhood, from the moment it was clear the spirits had chosen him.
    But there had been a split. When it began to seem that nowhere was free of the swarming Cowards, the hunters had started arguing among themselves. Dreamer remembered the long nights, the desperate men posturing and shouting, the women and children, hungry, exhausted, sitting at their feet and trying to keep warm. In the end the men could only agree to do what Ice Dreamer had always thought was the worst choice of all: to split up. Most had turned west. Some, including Mammoth Talker and Horse Driver, who was to become the father of Dreamer’s baby, chose east. The women and their children had to follow their men. Dreamer had said goodbye to her sister, her aunt, her mother.
    And the only priest, Eagle Seer, had chosen to go west. Talker’s group could not survive without a priest, without a door to the world of the spirits. There was no time for Eagle Seer to raise a new priest in accordance with custom. But Seer did his best. Talker and Driver and the other men had chosen Wolf Dancer, and Seer worked hard to train that young man in the arts of healing and weather lore and talking to the dead. He even made Dancer a new medicine bag and filled it with treasures from his own - to much hostility from those he would walk with, who thought he was diluting their own protection.
    Well, since the split Ice Dreamer had heard nothing of those who had gone west; even if they lived they were dead to her. One by one her own party had dwindled, as the old and the young failed to keep the pace, and anybody who fell ill was quickly lost. She had been dismayed to find herself pregnant.
    And then had come the night of the flood. It had been Horse Driver’s fault, Driver who insisted he had seen caribou in the shadow of a grimy glacier that scoured down from an eroded mountain. He had led them to the shore of a chill lake at the glacier’s foot, and left the women and children to make camp while the men hunted shadows. Nobody had wanted to be there. They believed that glaciers were the claws of the Sky Wolf, who had smashed the good earth, making it dark and cold and wiping the land clean of game. Driver would not listen.
    Well, the Sky Wolf had stirred in his sleep that night. A great piece of his glacier-claw broke away, and a wave of slushy water washed over their poor camp. Only four had survived, or five if you counted the child in Dreamer’s belly: Dreamer herself, Mammoth Talker, orphaned Moon Reacher, and poor Stone Shaper, who the hunters had thought was too weak to go with them, and who had found the dead priest’s medicine bag.
    Now Shaper, exhausted, hungry,