SPIRIT WALKER

Chapter 4: A Spirit Walker (part 2 of 2)

A Pwi woman shouted, "It was a saur! A saur ate the goat!"

All among the Pwi, the cry went up that a dinosaur was in the bay.

The great beast remained in one spot for a moment, then turned, and its shadow in the water moved under the bridge, heading downriver. Tull watched its massive shadow, sixty feet long, with huge fins arcing out to either side like wings. It seemed to fly underwater.

Tull and Ayuvah raced along the street to follow it, heading uphill through the human part of town, up to the lookout point by the inn.

Everywhere, people were running and shouting, pointing at the shadow in the water, for never in all of memory had a dinosaur managed to swim across the ocean from Hotland.

Tull and Ayuvah rushed up to the lookout point, scattering the peacocks that thought they owned the street, and stood, staring.

Smilodon Bay sat between two fingers of mountains, and the bay widened just past the inn, so that it turned from a narrow river into a wider sea lane. The saur swam past the ships anchored in the harbor, then dived.

The sun glinted off the rolling swells in the bay like beaten copper, greened by age. Tull watched the water for all of five minutes, and then the saur rose and lay in floating at the surface, his great front flippers spread wide, his tapering neck as long as a small boat, sunning himself. A great school of fish had gathered, and the saur sat, head tilted to one side, and waited for a fish to scrape his flippers; then he casually dipped his head underwater and came up with a wriggling salmon between his teeth. Resting in the water that way, the monster looked much like a giant green sea turtle.

"I'll be damned," a human said beside Tull, "That's a plesiosaur."

Tull was tense, knowing the plesiosaur was out of place, that a serpent should have devoured the monster while it crossed the channel from Hotland, and he waited for a moment to see the water churn in a maelstrom beneath the plesiosaur, the rush and roar of the serpent's bony gray head and barnacle-encrusted body as it wriggled up to grab the plesiosaur in its scimitar teeth and pull it under. The sailors in town all said that the sight of a serpent making its strike would stop your heart for an hour, stop your breath for a week. Until one saw a serpent strike, one did not know the meanings of the words awe or majesty.

Yet the plesiosaur kept sunning, and there was no sign of a serpent.

"What should we do?" someone shouted, and Tull looked back toward Pwi Town to see a dozen young Neanderthal men grabbing their spears, heading toward a rowboat. They were shouting and laughing, thinking to kill the plesiosaur.

"The Saur must taste bad!" a young Pwi boy said, "So the serpents won't eat it! One taste, and they spit it out!"

"We shouldn't let those young men go out in the water in that boat," Ayuvah said. "This isn't like hunting on land!"

Tull agreed, but the young men were already in the boat, eager to prove their courage.

A tyrant bird flew out of the redwoods from shore, soared over the water and circled the plesiosaur. Its genetic programming told it to kill the plesiosaur, yet the small dragon could not quite get down into the water to strike a blow with its poisonous horn.

Suddenly, one of the ships in the bay fired two of its cannons, and the tyrant bird dropped, startled, and then caught itself and flapped away. The plesiosaur had been a mere hundred yards from the ship, and it took a ball in the neck and dove. Red water boiled to the surface, and everyone cheered the sailor who'd shown such skill.

The young Pwi men rowed their boat into the harbor, watching the water, spears in hand, but the plesiosaur never surfaced.

Tull stood there for a long time, breathless, filled with anticipation. It wasn't just the plesiosaur, it was the expectancy that arose from what he felt inside.

A Spirit Walker was trekking the paths of his future. What will Chaa find, Tull wondered.

An hour before sunset, Tull went home. He lived in a small stone cottage set on the shelf of a cliff overlooking the ocean a mile past Pwi Town. It was a secluded spot, without a neighbor or roads; only the tinkling of a small creek that ran past his doorstep gave him company. Wisteria grew at one side of the house, and the sweet scent of the white flowers filled the cliffside and carried the kwea of stolen kisses.

Tull had bought some plums and a small melon at the market, and he put them in an earthenware jar, then wetted a cloth in the stream and placed the cooling cloth over the jar so that he would have the fruit later in the evening.

He looked out at the sea, still watching the water for sign of a serpent, or sign of the plesiosaur. The gravitational winds were blowing Tull, as if to lift him, and the hair rose on the back of his neck.

For a thousand years great sea serpents had formed an eco-barrier, a living wall of protection, from the beasts in Hotland. But now a plesiosaur had made it across the ocean, and Tull could feel that wall crumbling. He could almost feel himself being borne like a leaf on the wind, and he knew his world would never be the same.

The thought left Tull unsettled, and he felt a need to open himself to this new idea. In a while, I need to go see the Pwi. Fava will be concerned about her father on his Spirit Walk, and we have two deaths to mourn. But for now . . . He stripped off his bracelets and necklace of colored clam shell, pulled off his long black cotton loincloth with the emblems of the silver wolves sewn into it, and stood in the wind. He let the evening sun shine over every inch of his skin.

He thought of Craal, and felt the shadow of Adjonai to the west, the God of Terror. Certainly, Adjonai sent the plesiosaur to frighten the Pwi, Tull thought, and he chuckled, for it was a strangely Pwi thought. He opened himself to the fear he'd felt upon seeing the plesiosaur.

In Hotland Tull had seen gray sixty-foot crocodiles with jaws longer than a man, sailfin carnosaurs that sunned themselves in the shallows in the early morning, duckbills that traveled in herds of thousands along the lakesides and trampled everything in their paths.

The plesiosaur was not much, but it was out of place. It was just the first to come. Tull remembered how Ayuvah had killed the tyrannosaur only a week before, throwing his whole weight against the beast's belly and then riding the spear down to slit it open. He imagined himself with his spear, fighting such beasts here in Smilodon Bay, and imagined that the fear was blowing through him.

Up in the sky, two great horned dragons soared on the winds, out to sea. They were long-distance hunters, and would ride the wind for hours, intercepting any of the larger reptiles that sought to fly from Hotland.

Neanderthal ears are more sensitive than human ears, and far down the dirt road in Pwi town Tull heard a girl call his name. He pulled on his breechcloth and his bracelets, and walked the trail to the road to see who called him. On the road, a half-mile toward Pwi Town, Fava was running, kicking up small puffs of dust with each step.

"Tell," she shouted. "Father has returned from his Spirit Walk! He is calling for you!"

Belatedly, Tull realized that Chaa had left him. The cold in his belly had drained away, imperceptibly.

Fava shouted again, "Something is wrong!"