turned back, were long years; and his bones stretched, and his hands—large and strong. There was no fat on him (but there was no fat on anyone in the country of sliding stones) and he was a foodbringer, though he dreamed strange dreams. When his thirteenth year was almost done his mother and old Bloodyfinger and Flying Feet decided to send him to the priest, and so he went out alone into the wide, high country, where the cliffs rise like banks of dark cloud, and all living things are unimportant beside the wind, the sun, the dust, the sand, and the stones. He traveled by day, alone, always south, and at night caught rock-mice to leave with twisted necks before his sleeping place. In the morning these were sometimes gone.
About noon on the fifth day he reached the gorge of Thunder Always, where the priest was. By great good luck he had been able to kill a feign-pheasant to bring as a gift, and he carried this by its hairy legs, with the long naked head and neck trailing behind him as he walked; and he, knowing that he was that day a man, and that he would reach the gorge before the sun set (Flying Feet had told him landmarks and he had passed them) walked proudly, but with some fear.
He heard Thunder Always before he saw it. The ground was nearly level, dotted with rock and bush, and held no hint that there was less than stone forever beneath his feet. There was a faint grumbling, a muttering of the air. As he walked on he saw a faint mist rising. This could not indicate the gorge of Thunder Always because he could see plainly farther ground, not far off, through it; and the sound was not loud.
He took three steps more. The sound was a roaring. The earth shook. At his feet a narrow crevice opened down and down to white water far below. He was wet with the spray, and the dust ran from his body. He had been warm and he was chill. The stones were smooth and wet and shook. Carefully he sat, his legs over the darkness and white water far below, and then, feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lower place, climbed into Thunder Always. Not until he searched just where the water foamed, where the sky was a slot of purple no wider than a finger and sprinkled with day stars, did he find the priest’s cave.
The mouth was running with spray, and loud with the rushing waters—but the cave sloped up and up on broken stones fallen from the roof. In the dark Sandwalker climbed, climbed on hands and feet like a beast, holding the feign-pheasant in his teeth until his fingers found the priest’s feet and his hands the withered legs. Then he laid (he feign-pheasant there, feeling like cobweb the hair and feathers and the small, dry bones dropped from earlier offerings, and retreated to the cave mouth.
Night had come, and at the appointed spot he lay down and after a long time slept despite the roaring water; but the ghost of the priest did not come into his dreams. His bed was a raft of rushes floating in a few inches of water. Around him in a circle stood immense trees, each rising from a ring of its own serpentine roots. Their bark was white like the bark of sycamores, and their trunks rose to great heights before vanishing in dark masses of their own leaves. But in his dream he was not looking at these. The circle in which he floated was of such extent that the trees formed only a horizon to it, cutting off the immeasurable concavity of the sky just where it would otherwise have touched earth.
He was, in some way he could not define, changed. His limbs were longer, yet softer; but he did not move them. He stared at the sky, and felt that he fell into it. The raft rocked, with a motion hardly detectable, to the beating of his heart.
It was his fourteenth birthday, and the constellations, therefore, occupied just those positions they had held on the night of his birth. When morning came the sun would rise in Fever; but sisterworld, whose great blue disk now showed a thin paring above the encompassing trees, obscured the two bright stars, the eyes, that were all that could be seen of The Shadow Child. None of the planets were the same. He wiped from his mind the knowledge that The Snow Woman now stood in Five Flowers, and imagined her in the place of Seeing Seed, as he knew she had been on his birthnight. And Swift in the Valley of Milk, Dead Man in the place of Lost Wishes… The Waterfall roared silently across the sky.
Feet splashed close to his head. Eastwind sat up, by long practice imparting only the slightest motion to the tiny raft.
“What have you learned?” It was Lastvoice, the greatest of starwalkers, his teacher.
“Not as much as I wished,” Eastwind said ruefully. “I fear I slept. I deserve to be beaten.”
“You are honest at least,” Lastvoice said.
“You have told me often that one who would advance must own to every fault.”
“I’ve told you as well that it is not the offender who passes sentence.”
“Which will be?” asked Eastwind. He strove to keep apprehension from his voice.
“Suspended, for my best acolyte. You slept.”
“Only a moment, I’m sure. I had a curious dream, but I’ve had these before.”
“Yes.” Serene and commanding, Lastvoice leaned over his pupil. He was very tall, and the blue light of rising sisterworld showed a bloodless face from which the few wisps of beard, as ritual required, were plucked daily. The sides of his head had been seared with brands kindled in the flows of the Mountains of Manhood, so that his hair, thicker than any woman’s, grew only in a stiffened crest.
“I dreamed again that I was a hill-man, and I had gone to the source of the river, where I was to receive an oracle in a sacred cave. I lay down, that I might be given it, near rushing water.”
Lastvoice said nothing, and Eastwind continued, “You hoped I had been walking among the stars; but as you see, it was a dream of no spirit.”
“Perhaps. But what do the stars tell you of the enterprise tomorrow? Will you wind the conch?”
“As my master says.”
When Sandwalker woke he was stiff and cold. He had had such dreams before, but they faded quickly and if there was any message in this one he did not understand it, and he knew that Lastvoice was certainly not the priest whose ghost he had invited. For a few minutes he toyed with the idea of staying in the gorge until he was ready to sleep again, but the thought of the clear morning sky above and the warmth of the sun on the plateau decided him against it. It was almost noon when, ravenously hungry, he made the last climb and flung himself down to rest on the warm, dusty ground.
In an hour he was ready to rise again and hunt. He was a good hunter, young and strong, and more patient than the long-toothed bitch cat that waits flattened on a ledge all day, two days, remembering her cubs that weaken as they mew for her and sigh, and sleep, and cry again until she kills. There had been others when Sandwalker was only a year or two younger; not, perhaps, quite so strong as he; others who, after running and stalking and hunting again until the sun was almost down had come back to the sleeping place with hands empty and slack bellies, hoping for leavings and begging their mothers for breasts now belonging to a younger child. These were dead. They had learned the truth that the sleeping place is easily found by a food-bringer, not hard for a full belly to find; but shifts and turns before hungry mouths until it is lost in the stones, and on the third empty day is gone forever.
And so for two days Sandwalker hunted as only hill-men hunt, seeing everything, gleaning everything, sniffing out the nest of the owl-mouse to swallow her children like shrimp and chew the hoarded seeds to sweet pulp; creeping, his skin the cold stone color of the dust, his wild hair breaking the telltale silhouette of his head; silent as the fog that reaches into the high country and is not seen until it touches the cheek (when it blinds).
An hour before full dark of the second day he crossed the trail of a tick-deer, the hornless little ungulate that lives by licking up the brown blood drinkers its hoofs’ click calls from their hiding places near water holes. He followed it while sisterworld rose and ruled, and was still following when she had sunk half her blue wealth of continents behind the farthest of the smoking mountains of the west. Then he heard spring up before him the feasting song the Shadow children sing when they have killed enough for every mouth, and he knew that he had lost.
In the great old days of long dreaming, when God was king of men, men had walked unafraid among the Shadow children by night, and the Shadow children, unafraid, had sought the company of men by day. But the long dreaming had given its years to the river long ago, floating down to the clammy meadowmeres and death. Yet a great hunter, thought Sandwalker, (and then because he had held since least boyhood that milk-gift that allows a
