Aurora

Editor’s note: “Aurora” is one of the stories in Bob Love’s new book, “Pathfinder.” We republish it here with his permission.

I

KAH HAD BEEN HUNTING for one turn of the moon, roaming in circles, further and further outward. But the moose had vanished; he could not catch their scent, or cut their trails, or find their beds.

Sometimes he snared a squirrel or a hare, but there was little strength in their meat, and he was tiring. At the end of each day, boneweary and disheartened, he made fire beneath a spruce and ate what meat he had, chewing it with frozen cranberries. Leaning back against the flame-warmed bark he would drift into sleep, and wake, shivering, in the glow of the coals. When he built up the fire the smoke braided its way skyward through the spruce boughs, where the aurora shimmered behind the stars, like minnows swimming in the sun across warm sand shallows. He watched them turn into animals he knew: wolverine, lynx, wolf and black bear; marten, otter, beaver and muskrat; moose, caribou, kingfisher, eagle and weasel; lake trout, char, pike, and whitefish. Moonlight passed through them, flowing over the snow like the blood of spirits. He sang his medicine songs to the moose and called them in, but when he shot at them with his bow the arrows couldn’t cut them.

One night he saw the future in a dream. He watched wolves cracking his bones with their marrow-stained teeth, blue flies boiling in his eyesockets, and chickadees weaving his hair into their nests.

Each morning Kah rose and walked into the wind, beginning another circle, and each night, having wandered deeper into unknown territory, he stared into the fire, wondering why his luck had left him. His senses were sharp and his mind was clear. His arrows were straight and well-fletched, their flint heads flaked to cut clean. And his bow was strung with the finest sinew. But he couldn’t find any moose tracks, or where they had nipped the redwillow buds, or where they had broken the river ice to sip the softroaring water.

As he traveled there were fewer signs of life: no alders gnawed by hares, or spruce cones shucked by squirrels, no jays visiting with one another. The creaking of his snowshoes hung in his trail like scent, betraying his presence, and when the frozen birch branches clattered in the north wind, warning of a storm, he felt like the only living creature in the world.

II

One morning a raven flew in low circles over his camp, speaking to him. Kah watched and listened, and answered him, doing the best he could to speak Raven. When the raven knew that Kah understood him, he lifted from the spruce and flew. Kah followed him. Every so often the raven stopped and talked so he could track him. They traveled this way in the forest through the day, until they came to some muskeg, where there were alder thickets and scattered larches. The raven was waiting for Kah in a spruce snag and flew off as he approached. When the raven was nearly out of sight, at the far side of the swamp, he swooped, then rose, and circled back to the snag. He looked down at Kah and spoke softly, his voice like water running under deep snow. Kah knew what he was saying. He strung his bow, drew an arrow from his quiver and checked the wind. It was faint, and in his favor. He walked towards the spot the raven had marked, staying in the shadow of the forest. The moose was feeding when he saw her, facing away from him. He nocked the arrow and stalked her, close enough that he could taste her scent.

Sensing Kah’s presence, the cow turned broadside and looked at him, her hooves squeaking in the snow. Lifting her head, she snorted through her nostrils. Kah drew his bow. The frost in the bowstring cracked under the tension of the flexed birch. The raven watched from the snag, murmuring. Kah released the arrow. It sank feather-deep into the cow’s chest. She wheeled, and ran, disappearing into the alder brush. The raven lifted from his perch and flew after her. Kah waited, giving the cow a chance to lie down and bleed out. In the distance the raven was talking, but Kah could only hear snatches of his voice, like he was chanting. When the light began to fade Kah followed the cow’s trail. Beads of blood were sprinkled along the left side, where she was wounded, and further along he saw where she had coughed up a froth of bright lung blood. He found her lying on her side, pawing at the air with her front legs. The raven was perched in a larch. He cocked his head and looked at Kah. Putting his hand to his heart, Kah thanked him, and they watched the cow die. Her last breath caught in a gurgle of blood, and her legs stopped moving. She didn’t blink when Kah touched her eye with the tip of his bow. He pulled the arrow from her chest and sucked blood from the wound as her pulse ebbed and stopped. It felt like the sun in his belly.

Kah slit the cow open and dragged out her entrails. He ate slices of her liver and heart.

The raven picked fat from her stomach and kidneys. Night fell, and Kah crawled into the steaming cave of the carcass, the scent of blood sweet and heavy in his nose. Cradled by the cow’s ribs, with his head at the base of her windpipe and his feet tucked into her pelvis, Kah slept. In the larch, the raven kept watch as dry snow fell, rasping through the frozen alders, covering every trace of their passing.

III

That night the aurora flowed through the stars like colored wisps of smoke. Inside the carcass, Kah couldn’t see them, but he dreamed them. They wove themselves into an Eagle whose feathers shimmered like rainbows, whose eyes were like fire behind blue ice. The Eagle swooped, snatching Kah in its talons. Kah watched the earth shrink beneath him as the stars blurred past in swaths of light. They came to a place where the stars faded into the dawn of another world. There was a birch tree at the center of that world. Its canopy supported the sky. At the top of the tree a branch grew in each direction. Four branches, spanning the horizons. Four rivers flowed from its roots: red water in the eastern, yellow in the southern, green in the western, blue in the northern.

The Eagle dropped Kah in the place where the tree branched. He circled the tree, screaming; the only sound in that world.

Swirling wind rose in the wake of his wings; the only wind in that world. Kah looked up through the birch leaves fluttering in the wind, and saw pieces of sky, bluer than any on earth. Then he saw the Eagle descending on him, still screaming, wings and talons flared. The Eagle pierced Kah’s chest with his talons, pinning him to the tree. He plunged his beak under Kah’s ribcage and tore out his heart and lungs, sliced his belly open and ripped out stomach, liver and intestines, plucked Kah’s tongue from his throat, drew his brain out from his eyesockets, then stripped the flesh from each bone.

Kah watched this from a place outside his body. He saw the pieces of his body falling like rain into the rivers, and his blood flowing down the tree, into each river at its source. And then he was traveling in the rivers, each part of him feeling as one. The water carried him.

He was sipped by deer, moose, elk and caribou, and lapped into the red throats of wolves, foxes and bears.

He was drawn through the feathered gills of trout, tasting their cold moss-scented blood.

He was sucked into the roots of plants, emerging from the darkness of the earth into leaves that greened the sunlight, flowers that scented the breeze, berries that ripened in the summer sun.

He flew over mountains in wind-driven clouds and returned to the earth, falling through rainbows.

He was dew, beaded on a spiderweb at dawn.

He was frost, splitting granite.

And he was fog, rising in the breath of streams.

He was the spray on the crest of a whitecap, the foam in the curl of a breaker.

He rested in lakes and traveled in rivers.

He was frozen in blue glaciers and drawn by the moon through the oceans.

He was blood and milk, rain and snow, sap and nectar, sweat and tears.

The water carried him.

And each piece of him died, and was reborn,

until he knew the lives of all things,

and saw how they all shared the same Spirit.

IV

One day Kah’s pieces came together into a salmon, swimming upstream to her birthplace. She was resting in a pool when the Eagle’s shadow darkened the streamstones. As the talons pierced her skin, threaded through her ribs and clasped her spine, Kah remembered who he was. The Eagle soared, and the salmon’s last breath became a lone cloud in the empty sky. Rain fell from the cloud, and sunlight passed through it, brilliant with the hues of the aurora.

V

Kah opened his eyes. The cow’s skeleton clasped him like a pair of hands. Wisps of sinew hung from the ribs, fluttering in the morning breeze. He smelled thawed soil, melting snow, swollen alder buds, sun-warm larch bark. Kah crawled out and stood, wobbly like a new-born fawn. His arms and legs tingled as the blood surged through them. Chickadees flitted back and forth, carrying tufts of moose hair to their nests. Gray jays pecked dry fat from the backbone,

The raven called from the spruce snag. Kah answered him. The raven appeared and perched on the ribcage. Cocking his head, he listened while Kah told him about the Eagle, and the Tree, and his journeys in the rivers. When he was finished, the raven lifted from the bones and flew.

Kah gathered his knife, bow, and arrows, and followed the raven. And as he walked, everything he saw called him Brother.