FIGHTING OFF, OUTWITTING, burning, even leaving food behind for the head to gobble, just to slow it down, the girl, Wolfred, and the dog traveled. They wore out their snowshoes. The girl repaired them. Their moccasins shredded. She layered the bottoms with skin and stuffed them inside with rabbit fur. Every time they tried to rest, the head would appear, bawling at night, fiery at dawn. So they moved on and on, until, at last, starved and frozen, they gave out.
The small bark hut took most of a day to bind together. As they prepared to sleep, Wolfred arranged a log on the fire and then fell back as if struck. The simple action had dizzied him. His strength had flowed right out through his fingers into the fire. The fire now sank quickly from his sight, over some invisible cliff. He began to shiver, hard, and then a black wall fell. He was confined in a temple of branching halls. All that night he groped his way through narrow passages, along doorless walls. He crept around corners, stayed low. Standing was impossible even in his dreams. When he opened his eyes at first light, he saw the vague dome of the hut was spinning so savagely that it blurred and sickened him. He did not dare open his eyes again that day, but lay as still as possible, only lifting his head, eyes shut, to sip water the girl dripped between his lips from a piece of folded bark.
He told her to leave him behind. She pretended not to understand him.
All day she cared for him, hauling wood, boiling broth, keeping him warm. That night the dog growled ferociously at the door, and Wolfred opened one eye briefly to see infinitely duplicated images of the girl winding her hand in a strip of blanket to grip the handle of the ax, then heating its edge red hot. He felt her slip out the door, and then there began a great babble of howling, cursing, shrieking, desperate groaning and thumping, as if trees were being felled. Every so often, silence, then the mad cacophony again. This went on all night. At first light, he sensed that she’d crept inside. He felt the warmth and weight of her curled against his back, smelled the singed fur of the dog, or maybe her hair. Hours into the day, she woke and he heard her tuning a drum in the warmth of the fire. Very much surprised, he asked her, in Ojibwe, how she’d got the drum.
It flew to me, she told him. This drum belonged to my mother. With this drum, she brought people to life.
He must have heard wrong. Drums cannot fly. He was not dead. Or was he? The world behind his closed eyes was ever stranger. From the many-roomed black temple, he had stepped into a universe of fractured patterns. There was no relief from their implacable mathematics. Designs formed and re-formed. Hard-edged triangles joined and split in an endless geometry. If this was death, it was visually exhausting. Only when she started drumming did the patterns gradually lose intensity. Their movement diminished as she sang in an off-key, high-pitched, nasal whine that rose and fell in calming repetition until, at last, the concatenations ebbed to a mere throb of color. The drum corrected some interior rhythm; a delicious relaxation painted his thoughts, and he slept.
Again, that night, he heard the battle outside. Again, at first light, he felt her curl against him and smelled the scorched dog. Again, once she woke, she tuned and beat the drum. The same song transported him. He put his hand to his head. She’d cut up her blanket, crowned him with a warm woolen turban. Toward night, he opened his eyes and saw the world rock to a halt. Joyously, he whispered, I am back. I have returned.
You shall go on one more journey with me, she said, smiling, and began to sing.
Her song lulled and relaxed him so that when he stepped out of his body, grasping her hand, he was not afraid to lift off the ground. They traveled into vast air. Over the dense woods, they flew so fast no cold could reach them. Below, fires burned, a village only two days’ walk from their hut. Satisfied, she turned them back and Wolfred drifted down into the body he was not to leave again until he had completed half a century of hard, bone-break, work.