proceedings. He had hooked his hands over a low branch of a nearby birch, and he dangled by his arms, feet on the ground still, but knees bent so that the tree swayed with his weight as he bounced. Rolke was staring at him, his upper lip drawn up in distaste. Kerlew spoke suddenly. 'Joboam had a vision of Wolf in the night.
He yelled out, 'Wolf!' and Tillu jumped from the bed to grab her stabbing spear!'
'Kerlew!' Tillu rebuked him, not so much for the gossip as for the way he told it, his amber eyes probing Capiam for a response to the story. For an instant, it might have been Carp hanging in the tree, working his magic on Benu's folk with his sly intimations and cryptic insinuations. But if the story meant anything to Capiam, he covered it well. He gave the boy the sickly smile adults often gave her son when they did not know how else to respond to his strange behavior.
'He does well to fear Wolf,' Kerlew added, ignoring Tillu's glare. 'For one of Wolf's own will pull him down one day. Joboam may fancy himself a Bear, but that is not what looks out of his eyes at me. I am to be a shaman; did you know that?'
Before anyone could respond to this latest comment, the squeak of Joboam's pulkor was heard and he drove his harke from behind the tent. He seemed oblivious of the changed mood that greeted him. He pulled his animal to a halt and, smiling, glanced from one face to the next. 'Well. Shall we be going, then?'
'When will the herdfolk be leaving?' Tillu asked suddenly.
Capiam answered her. 'Some of the folk are still in the higher country with their animals. When spring is a bit stronger and the ice has left the moss, they will come down from the hills, and we will go.'
'West?' Tillu guessed, thinking of more hills and forest.
Capiam looked surprised. 'North. From the hills out onto the wide tundra, and across it to the Cataclysm. To follow the wild herd, and to meet with the other herdfolk for the summer.' He turned a bemused smile on Joboam. 'She has much to learn of our ways,'
he commented affably.
'I shall not mind teaching her,' Joboam assured him. Tillu seethed at his proprietary air, but said nothing. She'd let him keep his game intact, until she had her bronze knife.
Then they would come to an agreement on her terms. The thought brought a real smile to her face as she bid them farewell. She marked how Joboam brought his pulkor abreast of Capiam's, to converse with him while Rolke trailed behind them. She sighed softly when they were out of sight. If it were only the healing she had to deal with! But if she went with them, it would be the day-to-day life among the herdfolk that would be hardest for her. And for Kerlew. She glanced about, but didn't see the boy.
'Kerlew!' she called, hoping desperately he hadn't followed the men and reindeer.
There was no answer. 'Kerlew!' she called again sharply and pushed her way into the tent. He bounced up quickly, guiltily, from his pallet, furtively stuffing something inside his shirt. She knew of the shaman's pouch he had made by taking one of her herb bags and marking it with charcoal and blood. She had even see it once, when he had thought she was asleep and had come to the fire to examine his treasures. She never spoke of it; she didn't want to encourage him. She knew it held his red stone and other oddments. What other bits he added to it were no concern to her. His behavior was.
'Whatever made you speak our that way?' she demanded angrily. Snatching up a cup, she dipped up some of the tea she had set to steep earlier.
'Whatever made you keep silent?' he returned, his eyes gone flinty.
The tea was cold and bitter in Tillu's mouth as she met his stare.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
'It's the last flurry of winter,' Lasse observed.
Heckram assented silently. There was a peace to the thickly falling curtain of white flakes that he was reluctant to disturb. All day he had sensed the snow coming. The thick clouds had been snagged on the near crest of the mountain like a swatch of gray woolen stuff. All day the softening snow had been slogging underfoot, sinking undetectably, glistening on the trodden paths but white and blue-shadowed under the trees. The reindeer had grazed easily, nuzzling the soft wet snow from tender moss, or reaching their shaggy necks to nibble the suddenly tender tips of the birches and willows. Even the sunset had not brought the cold back. The snow that fell now was wet, sticking to the branches of the trees but doomed to melt before noon tomorrow.
Heckram and Lasse sat back to back in a crude shelter of branches leaned against a tumble of jutting gray boulders and shist, memorial of some glacier's ancient passage.
The tangle of branches kept out most of the snow, but not the diffused light of the overcast moon or the soft placidity of the snowy night.
For the first time in many days, Heckram felt at peace with himself. Here at the winter pasturage there were no reminders of pain and failure. But for Lasse's company, it was like any other early spring he had passed in the mountains. They hadn't bothered to bring a skin tent with them, but only sleeping hides sewn into a sack. The bunched hides were beneath him now, atop a cushioning pad of pine boughs. The night was too mild and Heckram too comfortable for him to think of crawling into his bed and sleeping. He would doze back to back with Lasse, occasionally stirring to look out on the gray and brown backs of the forty-odd animals scattered across the slope below them.
A soft, almost warm wind crept through the trees, now parting the snow flurries, now swirling the falling flakes more thickly than ever. The steady fall of the white stuff was almost as restful as sleeping. Heckram was not sure he was awake when he heard Lasse's whispered 'What's that?'
Heckram cleared his throat quietly. 'What's what?' he murmured softly. He squinted his eyes, tried to focus his gaze through the falling snow. He could see nothing.
Confirming his own lesser senses were the peaceful attitudes of the animals below.
They were not milling in agitation or muttering to one another in their coughing grunts.
Whatever had disturbed Lasse had nor bothered them at all.
'There. Hear that?' Lasse whispered.
'Just the wind,' Heckram muttered irritably. The wind had many notes on a night such as this. It soughed through bare branches, overbalanced snow loads on heavy ones to make soft plopping sounds, and set smaller limbs and twigs to creaking and clattering softly against one another. Lasse should know those sounds as well as Heckram did himself.
He tried to go back to sleep, but found himself annoyingly alert, listening for whatever peculiar note had roused Lasse. The wind blew harder, the snow swirled and for one moment seemed to coalesce into a crouching wolf by a pale-trunked birch, but the next swirl of wind dispersed it and revealed the cheat of an old lightning- blasted stump. Heckram sighed, letting the tension ease out of his back. Was he a child to be spooked by shadows and shapes in the night?
Lasse's back was still tight against his. 'See anything?' Heckram asked, his deep voice soft in the night.
'I almost did. I mean, I thought I did. Like the biggest wolverine ever made, but white, every bit of it. Just the snow playing tricks on me.'
'Moonlight through clouds on new snow will do that,' Heckram acceded. Silence followed his words, falling and drifting as deep as the snow. His eyelids began to sag again.
'What will you do when we go back?' Lasse asked suddenly.
Heckram opened his eyes, frowned into the night. 'Do? What do we always do in spring? I'll put my winter gear up on the rack, load my summer gear onto a harke or two, and follow the herd. What will you do?'
'The same, I suppose.' Lasse sighed. Heckram felt it more than heard it. 'I'll spend the first day or so listening to my grandmother recount every little incident that occurred while we were gone. And the next few days trying to account for every moment that I was up here, while she imagines a dozen things wrong with every reindeer I've tended.'
Heckram nodded. 'There's a lot of silences up here. But all the talk when I get home somehow seems lonelier than this.'
Lasse paused, considering the sense of his words. Then: 'Won't it be strange for you, to go back to your own
