JAWBONE
My eleven-summers-old sister Little Fawn reaches her hand across beneath the sleeping hide and pats my arm. I’m breathing so hard my whole body is throbbing. Like pouring water into a cracked wooden bowl, it doesn’t matter how hard I suck at the air, my lungs won’t hold enough. I’m lightheaded and afraid one of my spells is coming on.
“You’ll be all right, brother,” Little Fawn whispers. “You’re strong.”
Her words float in the firelight that fills the lodge.
“Of course I am.” I snuggle deeper under the hides to stare at her eyes. Tangles of blond hair frame her small face. She’s biting her lower lip, squeezing my arm hard, trying to will her strength into me. “I’m very strong. I’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
“I know. You’ll find a very powerful spirit helper.” Little Fawn smiles and yawns before she closes her eyes and braces her forehead against my shoulder. “Every other boy who’s climbed the quest wall has found a helper.”
“Little Gull didn’t find a helper, or he’d still be alive.”
“I know, but you will.”
Far back in my head, the buffalo hide sways, and there’s the glitter of snow or the campfires of the dead falling around me, so shiny it hurts. Claws clicking on rock. A woman singing in a chirp-chirp voice that stabs at the backs of my teeth.
Little Fawn slides closer and drapes an arm across my chest to hold me. “Mother and Father won’t let anything hurt you. Try to sleep.”
I pull the hide down to look at our parents holding each other before the fire.
No words come out of their mouths, just daggers of breath puncturing the firelight.
I squeeze my eyes closed so tight all I see are sparks flying through chunks of darkness. There are thousands of them, so I make sure to catch the closest one and hold on while it drags me spinning down, down into the smooth black depths where Father doesn’t speak to Mother through gritted teeth.