“Have you a better plan?”
“Back,” said Kestrel, and they edged backward, toward the gap in the cliff where the dry stream opened.
Otter could hear them, but she could not answer. Her mind was full of sound. Like the wind across a smokehole, the White Hand raised a howling in her. Sometimes it was wordless and moaning, and sometimes it sounded like a voice. Sometimes it sang.
Daughter, it sang. Daughter.
“Mad Spider had no children,” she told it.
It hissed and surged. Otter yelped and yanked her casting taut.
The Hand stopped.
It was close now. Otter could easily have stepped forward into its arms. “Mother,” she said.
“What?” Kestrel and Orca spoke together, a voice in each of her ears. Otter fought down the dizziness.
“It’s lonely; it’s trapped,” she said. “We have to let it go.”
“It speaks to you,” Orca whispered. That a Hand should speak was impossible. But there was no doubt at all in Orca’s voice.
“Let it go,” said Kestrel. “You mean unmake it?”
Did she? Otter shook her head to clear it and tried to keep her hands steady. A tremor was beginning, running in shudders from her shoulders to her wrists. “Unmake it,” she said.
Otter could hear Orca struggle with his drum, his fingerpads striking here and there, looking for a spot that would still sing. “How do we do this thing, this unmaking?”
“We must wrap a cord around the Hand,” said Kestrel. “There is a knot that Otter can tie — and then, pull the noose closed.”
“There is cord at my left hip,” said Otter.
“Tveh,” swore Orca. “Sooner I would rope a grizzly.” But she heard the shuffling behind her, and then felt the tug as the pouch at her hip was opened. There was binder’s cord in there: four or five pole-lengths, coiled tight and well, ready to unwind. It must have been Orca who took out the cord: The world seemed very silent without his drum. She could feel all three of them breathing, harsh as deer blowing.
“There is no room for such work,” said Orca.
This was true. In their panic, they had backed the way they’d come, into the mouth of the wash. They stood now in a little bowl of stones, with cliff faces all around them — the cut of the wash behind, the slot of the way to the beach in front. It had been long since the rain stopped, and the water was only trickling now, running in little channels that looped together like the veins in a wrist. It was clearly not enough water to stop the White Hand. It had followed them as far as the slot. It was a small slot, narrow as a door. The White Hand filled it, like the buffalo trying to enter the earthlodge in the Red Fox story. Like a wolf scrabbling at the entrance of a rabbit burrow.
There was no way to get a loop around it. No gap between it and the rock wall.
Otter could feel Orca at her back, tall and strange. Kestrel at her side, like the sun.
“Let it in,” she whispered, and stepped backward, as if in welcome.
Like mud between the toes, the dark stuff of the White Hand squeezed through the gap, and into the pool of stones.
For no longer than it would take one leaf to burn, they all stood frozen. The three living people made an arrowhead, with Otter and her cords at its point. The dark thing had seeped in feetfirst, and then bent itself three times, like the leg of a spider, and twitched its way through the gap. It put its hand above its head and grasped an outcropping, as anyone might do when ducking under a doorway. That gesture was the only human thing about it. The gesture, and the hand, white as birch bark, but human. A White Hand.
“Mad Spider.” Otter said the name without meaning to, without thinking. She said it breath-soft. But behind her the name came back as a larger, warmer sound: one drumbeat.
In that drumbeat, the White Hand paused.
“Spider.” Orca’s voice. He added to it a long hiss, rubbing his hand over the drumhead. And then he started to play, very slow and very soft, a two-beat of edge sound and center sound: a heartbeat. The White Hand seemed to breathe in time to it, to pause there, caught in its human gesture, listening. Orca turned the drumbeat into a name: “Spider, Spider,” he murmured.
Little echoes fluttered back from the stone walls like butterflies.
Otter’s breath was slowing toward the drum. The star spread across her fingers pulsed to the beat. She folded it away. Still the Hand stood, listening. Moving slowly, as if trying not to startle a rabbit, Otter turned to take the cord from Orca.
The cord was looped around the hand that was holding the drum. It was delicate work, freeing the cord from Orca’s hand without disturbing his grip. They had to do it finger by finger, without speaking, because Orca was still murmuring the single word of his song.
Spider, Spider.