There was, in short, a little while in which she was warmly happy. She was happy one day lounging on top of their earthlodge with Kestrel, watching Cricket and nearly all the children of Westmost play hoop-and-lance. He stuck up from them like a sapling from a meadow, and yet they ran circles around him. He was good enough at rolling the hoop, but when he threw the lance the first time it went wide, and somehow swerved, hit a windpole, and went tumbling end over end.
“Behold, your future mate,” said Otter to Kestrel as the players pounded past. “Behold his aim. Were you hoping for children?”
“Oh,” said Kestrel, spinning a bit of grass between her fingers. “In that game the hoop can help the lance along.”
Otter laughed and was happy.
And she was happy at the great fire that opened the Pumpkin Moon. Happy to give the yellow shirts and see both her friends laugh helplessly. Happy to help Cricket fuss over his crown of sweetgrass. Happy to put ocher into the part of Kestrel’s hair. Happy to see them — they had each been in seclusion — see each other at last, and grow suddenly shy, as if they were pledging to strangers. Their eyes were very wide as the cords wrapped around their hands.
As a wolf loves another wolf. As an eagle loves an eagle. You only, mine only. Through our whole walk through this world. Okishae.
Soon the corn was cut and the beans were harvested. The days grew shorter. It was the season in which the Water Walkers came.
The Walkers came up from the prairies, and across the snake lands where no one lived, and into the spreading skirts of the black-shouldered hills. There, where the thin shadows of birch and aspen began to thicken with the dead, they sought and struck the River Spearfish, thirsty for the protection of running water. They went to Bluehold, the great pinch famous for its lupine dyes. They went to Little Rushes, where the silver was panned. And in the end they went to Westmost, the last human place in the world.
On their backs, and on the travois of their great, wolfish dogs, they brought the bounty of the prairies: Bales of buffalo hides, and skin bags of buffalo hair gathered after the spring molts. Cured meats and certain prairie herbs — coneflower against toothache, snakeweed against coughs. These they traded for the things only the forest could give: Silver hammered to look like running water, and said to repel the slip. Arrows by the bundle, for the prairie had neither wood nor flint. Herbs of taste and medicine. Ornaments of mica and quartz and porcupine. And above all, above everything, the dyed yarns, binder-blessed, to hold back the dead.
The coming of the Walkers transformed Westmost. For half a moon, the pinch was filled with new folk and new food and new stories. There was shouting and splashing as the travois were unloaded, there were new songs, there were dogs everywhere. From the poles of their travois, the Walkers pitched conical tents, and the ring of the earthlodges was circled by another ring: lighter and taller, and more full of music. The rolling hoops of hoop-and-lance and the shouts of players filled the palm. Fires burned in the open, extravagant of wood, and in the careful, modest pinch, no one was careful or modest.
Through it all strode Willow. Her unbound hair was full of silver disks, she had silver on her belt. She flashed like fast water. Her stride ate the ground, her laugh was hawk-wild. The people of Westmost watched her with an unease that looked like awe. To the Walkers, she was the forest made flesh: She was beauty and darkness and power.
Otter watched her from the roof of her earthlodge. She did not go to the palm to hear the stories, to try the new dances. She watched Willow and she waited. The fall fires were only days away. Kestrel would take her woman’s belt. And Cricket too: He would become the pinch’s second storyteller. Otter’s unbelted shirt felt loose around her waist. What would she do?
And what would the pinch do? How could the binder be without a second?
There was no one else.
And then, suddenly, there was.
Through the first half of the Pumpkin Moon, the people of Westmost and the Water Walkers gathered together. They traded news, goods, glances. But as the moon came full, they built the fall’s great fire, and there they traded their children.
The folk of Westmost were mostly women, of course. The Walkers were mostly men: young men, breaking free from the hunting or the wool gathering, looking for adventure. There were always a few Westmost boys, proud as young stags, who would walk away down the river. There were always a few half-grown girls from the Sunlit Places, seeking a place among the free women of the forest.