The Reindeer People Read Online Free PDF Page A

berries. They giggled but refused to confide it to the other children.
    Kerlew had been picking alone, the other children long gone, when he heard the first of the growls. That much Tillu had been able to piece out from his hysterical account. Then he had seen Reena's boys stagger from the bush, screaming and choking, red flowing down their faces and hands. 'The bear has crushed us and clawed us, we die, we die!' With a terrified howl, Kerlew had fled, racing back to the tents, where he screeched out the news of the slaughtered children. In moments the armed hunters and frantic women converged on the berry-covered slope, to find all the children clustered about Kerlew's near-empty basket, filling their mouths with the sweet berries as they shrieked with laughter. The red stains had been only the crushed juice of berries smeared on their hands and faces. After the first commotion, all saw the fine jest that Reena's boys had played. There was much laughter that night around the cooking fires.
    But in Tillu's tent, a shaking Kerlew refused to believe that all was well, that it had been but a jest. 'The bear got them. The bear got them!' he tearfully insisted. His breathing would not slow, and Tillu heard the long thundering in his thin chest. His eyes darted about the tent, and he winced fearfully from the shadows he himself made. She put him to bed and urged errimi tea into him, which he drank in gulping gasps. His face was white, his lips red as he panted. And as she knelt beside him that night, silently baling all children but her own, he had sunk finally into a stillness deeper than sleep.
    It frightened her and she tried to rouse him, with no success. Abruptly his body began to jerk in sudden, painful spasms like a fish on a riverbank. His face contorted; he opened his eyelids on white eyeballs that stared blindly about. His breath shrieked in and out of his body, and yellow foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. In all her years as a healer, Tillu had never seen the like. She was trying to still his frenzied jerkings with the weight of her own body when she sensed the others behind her.
    Carp had pulled her roughly away from her son, his face tense with excitement. 'He sees, he sees!' the old man had exulted, and, as if in answer to these words, Kerlew had begun to speak. The voice was not his. He sighed and moaned the words. Tillu's Kerlew spoke as a child still, in a voice that piped like a shore bird. The voice that came from his heaving chest and snapping mouth now was the deep voice of a grown man. 'Ah, they bleed, they bleed!' he gasped. 'The bear has found their blood! It spills from their mouths, see it drench their shirts. They will die now. They will die!' The last words came out as a roar as Kerlew sat up on his pallet. His eyes rolled suddenly and were their startling hazel again, their foreign, empty hazel, as awful as their whites had been. He bit his tongue, and the froth that dripped from his lips was suddenly pink.
    The children had shrieked and tumbled from the tent, with their frightened mothers close behind. Even the stalwart hunters had muttered uneasily and found reason to leave. But Carp had been exultant, and had sat by the now quiescent boy, holding his thin hand until the day dawned again. The next day he had claimed the weak and baffled boy as his apprentice.
    Kerlew had no recollection of his seizure, but rejoiced in the sudden exclusive attention of a man held in such great respect by the rest of the folk. In the old man he had found not only a willing audience for tales of his fragmented dreams, but one who attached great importance to them. He had begun to mimic Carp's gait and inflection, even his overbearing manner that made every request a veiled demand. He absorbed avidly all of Carp's teachings about the shaman's world, learning it as easily as other boys learned to make a spear head or draw a bow. After her first resentment, Tillu had grudgingly told herself that it might be a