Shaman, Robert Shea [new ebook reader .txt] 📗

She allowed the chant to settle into a simple, repetitious humming that slowly, with the help of the magic mushroom, drew her soul out of her body.

She stood up. The three people gathered at the foot of the bed did not see her standing. They were looking at her seated body. She looked down at White Bear. She saw through the leaves she had spread over him and right through his skin.

Five glowing streaks ran from his collarbone to his belly. The claw marks of his guardian.

She saw the hole in his chest, how it ran between his ribs. In the eight days he had been lying here, the wound had closed up. If he lived long enough, it would heal slowly. But there was water pooling in his chest, and the longer he lay there unconscious, the more the water would fill up his chest until he drowned.

His spirit must be coaxed back from the other world.

She began to walk the sunwise circle around White Bear's bed, from the east to the south, White Bear on her right. She passed Yellow Hair, White Bear's grandfather and the old servant. They stood like carved statues, unseeing. She walked around the west side of the bed. The head of the bed was against the north wall of the room, but she simply walked through the wall on one side of the bed, took a few steps along the north side of the cottage, then entered the wall again and continued her circle.

When she had completed her ninth circuit of the bed, she saw a cave mouth in the eastern wall of the bedroom. Unhesitatingly she walked into the black, circular opening.

She could not see where the light in the cave was coming from, but its curving walls were clearly visible to her. Here and there she passed paintings. She had seen them when she made her first journey to the other world, after she buried Floating Lily. She saw the Wolf, the Coyote, the Elk and the Buffalo. Near the floor of the cave she passed paintings of the Trout, the Pike, the Salmon and other fish. She looked up and saw the Owl, her father's guardian spirit.

The passage slanted downward and grew narrower until her head[490] brushed the cave roof and her shoulders touched the walls. Then she rounded a bend and bright blue light greeted her.

The cave opened out high on a hillside. She was looking down at tall yellow grass rolling in waves to distant hills.

A black cloud of crows flapped up out of the grass and flew over her head, laughing raucously.

Then she heard a marvelous singing.

She recognized it at once, the song of her guardian spirit, the Redbird. She saw a blood-colored flash, and then the Bird perched on a branch of blue spruce on the hillside. He had one bright eye cocked at her, ringed in black. His red crest stood up on his head as Wolf Paw's had in better days.

"White Bear is out there on the prairie," the Redbird spirit sang. "He is hunting his uncle."

"Can I heal him?" Redbird asked.

The dazzling Bird chirped a yes. "He is lost. He is wandering with his other self, the Bear spirit. He will not leave the spirit world until the Bear finds his uncle."

Redbird shivered. "What will White Bear's guardian do to his uncle?" She remembered both Owl Carver and Sun Woman saying that a shaman's power must never be used to harm any person.

"What must happen, must happen," the Bird sang. "If White Bear is to be free to go back to his body."

Redbird still felt uneasy. A shadow, like a sudden prairie storm, seemed to fall upon the landscape.

The streak of scarlet sailed out over the endless grass, and Redbird ran down the hill until the tassels were waving high over her head. She could see nothing on all sides of her but yellow spears of straw. Overhead was a patch of bright blue framed by tassels. In the center of the blue the Bird spirit hovered, wings a blur of red. She pushed her way through the stalks as the Bird led her.

On and on flew her spirit guide. Redbird did not tire either, as she would have in the ordinary world, trudging through the grass. She could not see the sun, but the light seemed never to change. And no matter how long she walked, the same bit of cloudless sky remained overhead.

Then White Bear stood before her.

He was wearing only a deerskin loincloth and moccasins. His long hair was bound with a beaded band. The scar on his cheek stood out white against his tan skin. She looked at his naked chest[491] and saw the five shining claw marks, and the small navel-like opening of the bullet wound.

She looked deep into his dark eyes. His love flowed out to her, and she bathed in it, as in a warm river. She knew his thoughts, how happy and surprised he was to see her.

I was lost out here. You have come for me.

He held out his arms, and she rushed into them. She felt his arms around her even though he was a spirit and she was a spirit. She laid her head against his scarred chest and listened to his beating heart. Would she ever again, back in the world of flesh, hold him like this?

A huge white-furred head crashed through the wall of grass around them, and enormous golden eyes looked at her. White Bear had described his guardian spirit to her, but she had never realized the Bear was so big. She looked at black lips that bared yellow teeth longer than her fingers, she stared down at claws that crushed the grass and sank into the prairie sod. She shivered at the thought of what might happen to White Bear's uncle if this spirit found him.

Perched on the head of the Bear was the tiny red spirit Bird.

We are looking for my father's brother, came White Bear's thought. He killed my mother and many brothers and sisters of yours and mine. He shot me.

The Bird sang to Redbird, "I know where the uncle is, but I can only lead the Bear to him if you say I must do it."

"I say you must, then," she said, just above a whisper. Whatever was needed to save White Bear's life, she had to do it. Whatever she must give up in return.

The Bird leaped into the air, his crest a bloody spearpoint. The Bear lifted a black nose the size of Redbird's fist, and the white body turned to follow, passing before her like a mountain of snow.

Hand in hand White Bear and Redbird followed. The Bird flew far ahead, and they could not see him, but the Bear trampled down the grass and left a path that was easy to follow.

Loving thoughts passed between White Bear and Redbird. If they always met like this, Redbird thought, they could know what was in each other's heart and their love would be deeper.

Then she remembered Wolf Paw and the new life that she alone knew was growing in her belly. The life that fulfilled Wolf Paw's wish to have a child with her.

She felt like a statue carved in ice. And at that very moment[492] White Bear let go of her hand. Somehow she knew that he was withdrawing from her, not because he had sensed her thought about Wolf Paw, but because he was troubled by some thought of his own. But instantly there was a space between them, and she no longer knew his mind.

He was still walking beside her. He walked straight ahead, not looking at her. She turned her head to the front and did the same.

She felt as if she had been pushed away, hard, and it hurt.

It seemed to her that they walked for days through the unchanging grass, but the sun remained fixed somewhere beyond the tasseled curtain.

Yellow and blue, yellow and blue, the whole world had been reduced to those colors. And to one sound, whispering grass.

The Bear stopped walking. Redbird and White Bear went around the huge animal, Redbird to the right and White Bear to the left.

She found herself on the edge of a great crack in the ground, so deep that its bottom lay in shadow. It zigzagged from somewhere, appearing out of grass, and continued toward somewhere, vanishing back into the prairie. A stream of bright blue water wound through the dark bottom of the ravine; water had cut this wound in the prairie. The Bird spirit swooped and darted in the crack like a living fire arrow.

"White Bear's uncle hides there," the Bird trilled.

She heard a growl beside her deep as distant thunder, and the ground seemed to tremble.

The Bird flew up, swooped to hover over the Bear's head, then dove down into the canyon. Down to an entrance into the earth framed by two upright wooden posts and a beam laid across them.

Beside the square of darkness were abandoned wooden carts and a hill of gray gravel that partly blocked the stream. This was a mine, Redbird understood, where the pale eyes dug metal out of the ground.

The Bear spirit put one paw in front of the other and, with grace and balance astonishing in a creature so huge, walked down a narrow path Redbird had not noticed before to the shadowy bottom of the ravine. Then it lumbered up to the mine mouth.

She opened her mouth to cry out in fear, but the Bear was gone.

There is a man in there.

And her spirit helper, the Redbird, had led that giant Bear to him. She had commanded it. She had not wanted to use her shaman's[493] powers to hurt anyone, not even one she hated as much as this uncle of White Bear's. White Bear had saved many lives and never killed anyone.

Even though she was a spirit and this great grassland was sunny, she felt cold, and her stomach knotted.

I will lose something because I did this. I only did it to bring White Bear back to his body. But I will suffer for it, even so.

And so will White Bear.

Only let White Bear live, she prayed to the powers that brought life into the world.

White Bear turned to her. It is done, said his spirit voice. My other self has found Raoul de Marion.

Now you can come with me, she answered him. Back to your body.

Back to my home, came his whisper, and she shuddered even as she turned, following the Bird spirit as he fluttered over her head. When he thought of his home, he meant the great lodge the pale eyes called Victoire.

Redbird opened her eyes in the room where White Bear lay, to find herself once again sitting on the floor beside the bed. The three people were looking at her, Yellow Hair with tears running down her cheeks, the grandfather's withered face paler than the fur of White Bear's guardian spirit, the old servant's bloodshot eyes wide.

She remembered that the sun had been low in the west