The world was a dangerous place. The Shadow People were lurking in the woods.
In the end, Tal’s father made the decision, perhaps his last great one. He was weak in body but strong in mind.
Tal could embark on his quest.
The first time Tal swallowed Soaring Water, Uboas told him she would sit by his side and stay awake as long as it took for him to return. Deep into the night, she stroked his hair, tried to respond to his guttural sounds and touched his dry lips with her water-dipped fingers.
When he finally came back to her, in the bluish dawn, hers were the first human eyes he saw.
He reached out to touch her face and she asked him where he had been and what he had seen.
And this is what he told her.
He felt his body transform. First his hands turned into talons then his face elongated into a hard beak. With a few easy flaps of his arms he was airborne, making lazy passes over the fire, peering down on his own people, circling protectively, getting accustomed to tilting and turning. The whistling wind and the light, effortless travel exhilarated him and made his heart sing. Was he the first in his clan to experience such things, the first man?
In the distance he saw black horses grazing in the savannah and he flew towards them, attracted by their grace and power. He swooped over their broad rippling backs, making them gallop and sweat. He flew among them, eye-to-eye, matching their speed. Of course he had seen horses before. He had crept up to them and pierced them in the flank, spilling their blood. He had eaten their flesh, worn their hides. But he had never seen them before. Not like this.
Their huge brown eyes were clear like puddles on dark stones after a rain storm. There was no fear in those eyes, just a life force as strong as he had ever experienced. He saw his own reflection in those brown globes, the shoulders and arms of a man, the head of a hawk. And then he saw beyond his reflection into the heart of the beast. He felt its freedom and wild abandon. He felt its life force, its determination to survive.
He felt a stirring in his loins and looked down. He was large and erect, prepared for mating. He felt more alive than ever before.
He arched his neck and soared higher, leaving the horses behind. Something caught his keen hawk’s eyes. On the horizon. A dark mass. Moving.
He tilted and rode the wind across the flowing river, towards the vast plain.
Bison.
A huge herd, the largest he could remember, moving as one, thundering the earth with the power of their stampede. Would they let him into their midst?
He lowered his head and dove until he was skimming the ground, following behind, catching up. Haunches and tails, as far as the eye could see. His ears filled up with the sound of churning hooves.
Then they parted.
They were letting him inside.
Bison to the right, bison to the left, he flapped his arms and matched their speed until he was level with the lead beasts, two huge males with heads the size of boulders and horns as long as a man’s forearms.
While the horse eyes were full of freedom and spirit, the black bison eyes were brimming with wisdom. He was talking to them, not with words, but with a language more powerful. He was them, they were him. They spoke to him of his ancestors and their ancient ways. He spoke to them of his love and reverence. He told them he was Tal, of the Bison Clan.
They honoured him by letting him run with them. In turn, they demanded he honour them.
And after Tal told her everything, he drifted off to sleep, but when he awoke a short time later, his mood was as dark as the night. He yelled at her to withdraw. He threw off his skins. He was shouting, in blind anger, cursing the night, demanding the sun to rise. When the clan was awakened by his shouts and one of his cousins approached to calm him, he attacked the young man and tried to throttle him before other men pulled him off and held him down.
Uboas was frightened by his wild eyes but she came back to his side and rubbed his shoulders even as he strained against the hands and knees of the men who were restraining him with all their might.
And when his anger finally passed and he returned to his normal self, the men cautiously released him. Talking among themselves they drifted back to their skins. Uboas stayed with him, pressing herself against his now-calm body until the morning.
Following his first Soaring, Tal’s mind was never more active. He approached his commitment to the Bison Clan with a fury of purposeful activity. His determination was a source of awe and inspiration. It was almost as if he were growing into the role of head man before the clan’s eyes. His post-soaring rage scared them, but they also knew that a head man had to be fierce. The world was hazardous and they needed a warrior.
Tal became a font of activity, even more than usual. On one day he was leading a hunt, landing a good reindeer buck with one thrust of his spear. On the next day he was off on his own, collecting plants. Then he was knapping fresh sharp cutting blades and teaching Uboas how to chop the vegetation, crush the berries and place his mother’s stone bowl into the embers of the fire until the red liquid bubbled into Soaring Water.
He felt a tug towards the magical place he had found the time he had climbed the cliffs to commune with his ancestors – Tal’s cave. Uboas went with him, to watch over him and keep him safe. At the mouth of the cave, he lit a fire and the two of them sat in silence as night came to the valley. He warned her to leave him when the anger started.
Then he soared.
And she watched over him and trembled later in the night when he flew into a rage and charged deep into the black cave, shouting for his ancestors to reveal themselves.
The next morning she fed him chunks of reindeer stomach, roasted over the fire, its contents full of the mashed grasses that had been the animal’s last meal. He told her about the soaring and the creatures he had visited as half man, half bird. When he had eaten his fill he rose and paced the mouth of the cave until his legs became strong and sturdy once again.
The pale stone walls of the cave, that outermost zone that caught the morning sun dazzled his eyes. A few steps deeper and all was dark. He thought about his journey. He had been with the bison again. And the horses. And the deer. And the bears. Before his eyes, on the cave walls, he saw the images his hawk eyes had seen, these animals in all their glory and power. They demanded respect. The bison demanded his honour.
He rushed to the fire and grabbed a kindling stick, its end charred black. As Uboas watched, he strode back to the sunny wall and began to draw a long curving line, at eye level, parallel to the ground. The charcoal line was thin and poorly adhesive and the result was not pleasing to his eye, no better than the outlines he had drawn at his mother’s knee. He complained out loud. In a flash of inspiration, he poured out the remnants of the Soaring Water from his stone bowl and pressed a hunk of reindeer fat into the concavity. He took another kindling stick with a heavily burned end and twirled it into the fat until it was black and greasy. Then he retraced the curving line and this time it was thick and black and stuck smoothly to the rock surface.
He quietly worked into the morning, dipping fatted kindling sticks and painting in equal measures with his hand and his heart. When he was done he grunted and summoned Uboas to stand beside him.
She gasped at what she saw. A perfect horse, as real and beautiful as any living creature. It was running, its hooves in full gallop, its mouth open, sucking air, its ears pointing forwards. Tal had given it a thick mane that looked so real she was tempted to stroke it to feel its silkiness. It had a captivating oval-shaped eye with a black disc in the centre, a piercing, all-knowing eye. It was the most beautiful inanimate form she had ever seen.
She began to sob.
Tal wanted to know what was wrong and she told him. She was moved by its magnificence but she was also scared.
Of what?
Of this new power that Tal possessed. He was a different man than the one she knew. The Soaring Water had transformed him into a mingler with the world of spirits and ancestors, a shaman. The old Tal was gone, perhaps for ever. She feared him now. Then her real concern erupted in a geyser of tears. Would he still want her as his mate? Would he still love her?
He gave her his answer. Yes.
When Tal’s father finally died he had become an emaciated bag of bones. He was carried to a hallowed spot, a stretch of the river where the tall grasses and reeds gently sloped to the water, a spot he had come to throughout
