Luck | Page 6

of a man.
Leaves grew into long gray hair and a beard. The tree man was wearing
a deerskin shirt and leggings. He did not speak but held out open hands
to show he meant no harm. Thumb thought this might be the stranger
who had saved Onion.
Man, I am. It was the voice Thumb had heard by the river.
Singer approached the mammoth. He touched one of the dark eyes and
the lid closed. He whispered to the mammoth and its trunk twitched.
When he shouted, the sound staggered Thumb and he fell backward.
The mammoth shivered, rolled over, and got to its knees. Thumb let out
a strangled cry of joy and surprise and fear. No animal had ever come
back from the dead. The mammoth stood and shook the spears out of
its side. Thumb's eyes burned.
Singer loomed over Thumb and started kicking at the ground. He bent
to uproot grass, clear leaves. The mammoth trumpeted and lumbered
into the forest as Singer squatted. He began to draw in the dirt.
The lines were swift and sure. Round head, sloping back, trunk, long
tusks.
"Thumb, are you all right?" Oak was trying to sit him up.
"You shouldn't touch him," said Blue, but he didn't interfere.
Thumb's ears still rang with Singer's shout. He tried to focus on Blue
and Oak. They shimmered like they were under water.

"He's crying," said Oak. "Brother, what's wrong?"
Thumb wiped at the wetness under his eye and touched the fingertip to
his tongue. In the taste of his tears he saw mammoths flickering on the
walls of the long cave. The vision shook him. It was dream knowledge,
but the dream was over. The spirits must be very close. They had come
to push him to his luck.
Thumb struggled up and pulled his water skin from the tree. "No more
talking." He dipped the skin into the current and let it fill. "I'm going to
the long cave." He slung it over his shoulder and started toward the
camp at a trot. "I'll know what we should do when I get back."

Owl liked to call the cleft the new cave, but then he liked to stretch
words. Actually it was a place where two huge rocks had fallen against
one another, and it was mostly open to the sky. All the paintings and
marks on the walls of the cleft had been made either by Thumb, or his
teacher, Looker, or Looker's teacher Thorn. They had painted reindeer
and red deer and ibex and horses and bison and the secret names of
spirits.
But no mammoths. The mammoths were in the long cave.
The long cave was a mystery. Nobody knew who had put their dreams
on its walls. Nobody knew how big it was. Owl told a story about the
time old Thorn had found a tunnel that led from the long cave to the
belly of the earth. The keeper had blocked it with stones to keep the
dead from coming back to life. The women told stories about souls
without bodies, who wandered the earth, forever alone, but none of the
people had ever seen one. Thumb had looked many times for Thorn's
tunnel. He had never found it. But even though he knew the long cave
better than any of the people, there were still parts of it that he had yet
to see. He had never quite gotten the courage to lower himself into the
well in the Lodge of Mother Mammoth. And he was too wide in the
shoulders to wriggle through the narrows past the abandoned bear
nests.

"I don't care," said Onion. "I'm coming with you."
Two mothers who were chipping new stone scrapers covered smiles
with their hands.
Thumb wrapped a lump of boar fat in a maple leaf and bound it with
braided grass. "But I don't want you to." He put it with his lamp.
Onion didn't bother to answer. She was already packing food for the
trip, a handful of hazel nuts, a parsnip, salsify root, and a dried fish.
"You're not strong enough." Thumb didn't like to quarrel in front of
other people.
Onion liked nothing better, especially since his shyness gave her an
advantage. "I'm strong enough to sit and tend fire." She stooped to tie
the sinew laces of her boots. "And that's all I'll do if I stay here."
Thumb made his best argument. "It's too far." The long cave was a
good day's hike from the river. Its mouth was set into the stony ridge
that divided the river valley from the lands of the horse people.
"Besides, I might be gone all night. Maybe longer." Thumb continued
to wrap leaves around pale chunks of fat for the lamp. "I