Solar Storms by Linda Hogan

Author:Linda Hogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2003-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

LATER, as I knelt above the pan of warm water, I thought of the ancestors who showed Dora-Rouge the directions for travel. My life, before Adam’s Rib, had been limited in ways I hadn’t even known. I’d never have thought there might be people who found their ways by dreaming. What was real in those land-broken waters, real even to me, were things others might call the superstitions of primitive people. How could it be, I wondered, that all people who came from their own earth, who lived there for tens of thousands of years, could talk with spirits, could hear land speak, and animals? Northern hunters were brilliant hunters. Even now they dream the location of their prey and find it. Could they all have been wrong? I didn’t think so.

The old world dawning new in me was something like the way a human eye righted what was upside down, turned over an image and saw true.

IT WAS only a short time later that we once again came across the pale woman and man. Agnes looked at them with foreboding. “They’re following me,” she said.

They weren’t happy to see us, either, nor had they expected it. They were sheepish and embarrassed about leaving in the middle of the night.

“Are you guys lost?” the man asked Bush, but he already knew the answer; he’d been in these parts before. He knew he was the lost one. Even so, he looked at Bush in hope that she would say yes. She reached inside the pack for a piece of map. This time, she knew for certain where she was. The presence of smoke from the peat fire was still a gray cloud in the far south sky. If they had gotten turned around with the thickness of smoke to show them the way, it didn’t look good for their survival skills the next winter.

The couple pulled their canoe alongside Bush’s. I paddled over to them, too. On a fragment of map, Bush pointed out where they were.

The water was deep green there, with algae and plants. As Bush went over the map with them, holding two pieces of it together, Tyler looked into the water, panting, ready to leap on quick-striding water bugs. I didn’t talk to him; he would have overturned their canoe.

“We must have gone in a circle.” Without hesitating, he said, “Thanks,” turned the canoe around, and started away.

“Wait,” Dora-Rouge called after him. “Do you have a pencil?”

He reached into his shirt pocket. His pen was hooked to a credit card. Bush tried not to smile.

“Thank you.” Dora-Rouge took the pen and handed it to me. “Do you have any paper?” she asked him.

He looked at his companion. She was thin-lipped. She shook her head no. She was anxious to leave, and probably happy we didn’t ask why they’d pulled up stakes in the middle of the night, but I could see that she was simply too exhausted to dig around for paper. By then, Bush had handed me another paper bag.

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