They exclaimed loudly with the discovery of each of the stones, of the waves and the animals and the images carved into the largest stones at the base. When the pit was cleared, they too gathered wood for fires.
Then all went to their ceremonial pools for cleansing.
Though snow lay upon the ground, they adorned themselves in their tribal regalia as if at the First Gather of the Spring Solstice, and added many furs and hides and things of beauty. Energy rose from the gathered. Vines and leaves pushed through the frozen ground as the trees and the forest responded to their massed power.
???
At dusk Old Mother made her way through the narrow, curving Passage of the Womb. It took all of her strength to crawl across the staffs of time buried in the clay of the Passage. This was the final time she would leave her circle, in nine hands and six fingers of years.
Her women had rubbed her body with rendered fat cooked with mint leaves, and drawn symbols of war and trees across her body in chalk and hematite powder, in the dark shades of stones and plants. She was dressed in wool and hides. Lengths of hide thongs tied with bones and stones and shells and clay beads adorned her neck, her wrists, her knees and ankles. Her shoes were made of warmest lamb skin, the wool against her flesh, the tanned hide against the cold. Her delicately pointed ears were hung with the feathers of the blackbird and the vulture; more of the feathers were twined into her braided vines. A bone of the eagle pierced through the hole in her nose. She wore all her finest clothing, including the small leather bag around her neck, the bag made by her own hands to be given to the staff’s chosen one, the next Old Mother.
Exhausted, she crawled into the night and let her women lift her, to carry her outside the outer walls. They placed her atop the side flat stone in the sheltered spot between the men’s outer circle wall and the women’s, the one place with a clear view down the low hill, so that all the gathered could see her. In front of her were three singing stones and the stone firepit, the pile of dry wood and other flammable material stacked within it. Her women placed heated rounded river stones from her own fire all about her, and wrapped her in more furs from the Womb Circle. They added furs from every clan, and every tribe until she was swathed in the skins of animals. Yet, even with the extra warmth, she felt the cold of winter. Soon, before dawn, she would be within her tree and she would be cold no longer. Her heart beat unevenly, booming and fluttering. Her breath blew pale clouds into the dark of night.
Sees into Darkness took his place beside her and his men wrapped him within his own skins and furs, and then stepped away. Silent, together, the Speaker and the Old Mother sat, facing away from the spot where the moon would rise.
The scent of smoke, salt, old snow and ice, bear fat, dried fish and shellfish cooked in ocean water, and the scent of the gathered—the blood of Moon Times from the women, and the scent of bear blood from the hunters, was a ripe miasma on the air. Old Mother breathed the wind. It was fresh, from the unpassable ocean to the west.
She looked up, and saw that the clouds had blown away. The brightest of the night’s stars were visible, and more would have been, had her eyesight not lost the sharpness of her youth. She let her eyes drift down.
The hillside was full of silent people sitting around their tribal fires, the men on her right, on their side of the hill, the women on her left, all looking up at her, and toward the place where the Cold Wolf Howls Moon would rise behind her, in the east, full and majestic. The women sat with their kindred by birth, each tribe with its own fire. The mated sat closer to a woman’s tribe, but seated outside of it. The unmated men and hunters sat in loser groups, close enough to try to catch the eye of a woman.
A baby wailed, shushed by its mother. Some of the Elders coughed. Old Mother of Winter Trees took a sip of the sweet and potent berry juice, boiled from dried berries and water with honey.
All the darkest shades of blue spread across the rare, cloudless sky. True night fell, and it grew colder, darker. All the people were staring in the direction of the moonrise, waiting for it to appear on the far horizon. A shout went up. The first glimmer of the moon’s fullness could be seen behind her, in the distance. Sees into Darkness raised one arm and brought it down on his drum, the head tanned from the last piece of the skin of the lion he had killed, the lion that had given him his hunter-name.
Again and again, three times in all, his drum boomed out into the silence. On the fourth downstroke, the men and hunters began to beat to their drums in time with his, slow and steady, the sound rising and falling like a wave in three beats and three beats and three beats, over and over as the silver orb of the moon lifted from the far hillside.
Smoke from the tribal fires swirled slowly up the hill and away as each tribe and clan fire was covered with fir boughs. Darkness, except from the moonlight on the hard-frozen snow, covered the Earth everywhere as the curve of the moon rose and the drums beat in harmony.
As the drums sounded, small lights appeared on the women’s side of the hill. Glowing, held aloft in fire-hardened clay or cupped in frozen wood bowls, fires began to move through the night and up the hill. The fires had been transported overland from every tribe, carried by each Old Mother. Now, she or her designated one climbed the hill to the firepit at the conjoined circles where Old Mother of Winter Trees and Sees into Darkness sat.
Salt Tribe’s Old Mother reached the hilltop first. She bent and began to feed her fire to the kindling of the Womb Circle firepit. Old Mothers from other tribes followed: One hand of the tribes of the People of the Trees. Two hands. More. The fires caught and blazed, creating both flames and glowing embers. The Old Mothers or their designated ones all sat around the pit in a circle before the fire, ringing the fire they had built together, from their own tribal and clan fires.
When the fires from each tribe had been added to the burning, Sees into Darkness set aside his drum, the rhythm continued by the men. He stood and walked to the Womb Circle firepit. He extended an unlit torch, its end smeared with animal fat and resin from trees. The torch lit, blazing from the women’scircle. He carried it to the wood of the hunters’ unlit firepit and placed the flaming torch within it.
This was a simple firepit, one not deep, never buried, not lined with huge stones, but a traveler’s firepit, lined with whatever stones were nearby, as hunters and warriors made when they were far from their tribes. It was a fitting firepit, as was the firepit of the Women of the Womb, fitting for them. Different. Side by side.
Sees into Darkness returned to his side of the hill as the branches ignited. The fire whooshed high. Sees into Darkness retook his place as Speaker of the Hunters and Warriors, sitting beside Old Mother, again leading the drummers, beating his own drum. Strong strokes, deep and rhythmic. The drumming echoed down the hill, and all the way to the great waters.
The important men and women of the hunters, those attached to the tribes by mating and children and three from among the unmated, took their places around their circle.
Old Mother watched the Staff Bearers as they watched the rising full moon. The moment the bottommost part of the fullness rose above the far horizon, they each dropped their heads in a bow. She raised her calling stone and brought it down on one of the three singing stones. One tone for each drumbeat, the three tones singing, calling into the night, into the moonlight. The drumming stopped, the last traces disappearing as she hit the singing stones again. And again. Three and three and three strong tones, echoing across the moonlit snow. The song sang out, fast and fast. The Women began to beat their own stones, the tones clear and sharp and calling to the trees.
Around the hillside the trees quivered, hearing the calling, their bare branches clacking. The silver orb rose higher, full and glowing. The Earth went bright, reflecting the moonlight from the snow. Power from the gathered, from the singingstones, from the drums, from the hearts and wombs of the People of the Trees rose, bright as the moonlight.
The trees shivered in expectation.
The moment the moon was full in the sky, Old Mother’s stones went silent. Her arm ached. Her fingers felt frozen. She pulled them into the furs and wrapped them around a heated stone for warmth.
The voice of Old Mother was weak, and so she had arranged for one of her granddaughters, Wise with Herbs, to repeat her words. The encircling tribal Old Mothers were to be witnesses that she spoke true when she called out the vision of the Old Mother of Winter Trees.
Her granddaughter introduced the words. “The Vision Moon has passed. Old Mother of Winter Trees, Old Mother and Staff Bearer of the Women of the Womb, Old Mother of All the Tribes, we have gathered. We attend you.”
Old Mother spoke, and Wise with Herbs repeated her words. “The Vision Moon gave unto me evil visions, dire and dangerous. Killer of Lion, now called Sees in Darkness, received the same visions. We sat together within the Womb Circle and shared the evil tidings.”
“Old Mother of Winter Trees, we attend you,” the gathered women said.
“Tonight Sees into Darkness and Old Mother of Winter Trees,” she tapped her chest, “will reveal these tidings to all the People of the Trees. Then I will pass my staff to whomever it will choose, for my tree calls to me. I will go to my tree this night.”
