The Whispering Gem

By the time Oots had found the still waters of the pond at the edge of the wood, the bear was far enough away for him to sit and rest. Oots was limping along, nursing his torn-open thigh and carrying a fawn carcass—what was left of it—over his shoulders. He was lucky the bear left him alone. It was not a large bear, as bears go. Oots knew the hunger and tenacity of any bear, especially the larger brown bears. And to be a bear’s prey at any distance meant a race for your life that would only end if the bear died, found easier prey, or caught up to you.

But this bear was not that kind. Smaller, darker, this was a bear who split his meals between berries and honey, the slow and small, the broken—much like Oots. This was, in fact, how Oots and the bear had met. Even now, wincing and bleeding, he smiled at the memory.

He had been hunting an elk mare and its fawn into the high forest for three days now, following the creek. The waiting had been worthwhile. The mare was there, early in the hazy morning of the third day, her fawn lowering its head to drink. Oots had managed to distract the great elk mare with one stone from his hiding place, and with a mighty throw, had brought down her fawn. It was a good throw and a clean kill. The elk mare was away into the woods without a sound, silent as if she had never been.

There, distracted by his kill, Oots had not considered that another patient hunter had been eyeing the fawn. The black bear came, teeth flashing just as Oots had hoisted the fawn over his shoulder and neck. In one swipe of its paw, it had eviscerated the fawn and followed through to Oots’s thigh. The pain was tremendous and would have hobbled him then and there, but the fear of this sudden bear gave him the impetus to start running, fawn awkwardly on his shoulder, bits trailing and bleeding down him in a warm rush.

The bear followed him. And as he hobbled away, weighed down by his kill and slowed by the burning pain in his thigh, he thought quickly enough to pull out his oyster shell knife and cut at the hanging sinew of the fawn’s trailing parts. Soon, he was leading a macabre trail, him, trudging and cutting forward, the bear slowing down at every piece of fawn that fell away, buying Oots time to put distance between them. After an hour of this, Oots was horrified to note that not only was his hunt dwindling, piece-by-piece, but he was essentially teaching the bear to follow him.

“I would have shared this with you without the scratch, bear!” he yelled over his shoulder and laughed at the thought of sharing his dinner with a bear. He knew that the high, dark woods were the bear’s home and that he was a guest here. Oots put that grace and gratitude before his own safety, knowing his place in the forest. He was not like other men, fat and comfortable in the caves above the coast.

He was willing to walk away from the village, and make his way into the dark forest, trees thick like walls of wind that one must wind through obliquely, dark before the sunset, and misty in the mornings. And like any path not so well-worn, there was treasure. Returning to the village with red meat and sinew and hide—antlers made such good tools—berries and garlic and onions, and the special mushrooms grandma used to talk to the gods, his exploits were well known. There was bounty in those woods, as much as the sea, but elusive. It was not work for everyone. And the mountains beyond the forest, visible from the village on the sea, they looked to Oots like a giant, cresting wave made of stone.

“The next wave to crash down on us all,” he tried to explain to Tak and her sister, as they ate the berries he had collected especially for her. He needed to make sure he had enough for her sister too, or Tak would not come out with him to the first scattered trees of the wood above the bluffs and sit still enough for him to tell her things. Oots drew in the dirt between them, Tak, interested and berry-faced.

“Elk,” he said as he drew it, its sloping flank and high shoulder, erect head, and impossibly large rack of antlers. “Oots,” he drew a stick figure of a man next to it for scale and gave her a braggard’s look.

“Nahhh,” she scoffed and scrapped the drawing away with her foot. If Tak were a man, he would have bristled at the rebuke. But she was Tak.

Now, beside the still pond, high above the forest and away from the sea and Tak, after the black bear drew away, belly-full or bored or both, Oots sat down to rest his bleeding and tender leg. He slid the remains of the fawn off his shoulder and shuddered at the pain in his leg. Without looking at the wound too closely, he knew it was bad. But he was so covered in the fawn’s blood that he could not see how much was his own. He put his oyster knife away and, in the dirt next to him, Oots drew himself and Tak (and Tak’s sister), under a tree.

“Tak,” he said simply, and with his foot, smoothed his drawing away.

He heard before he saw that the bear was back and not yet sated. He sighed and really only had one option. Rising with some effort, he took a few steps forward into the cold, still pond. Growing up in the village by the sea, he was a strong swimmer and knew how to enter the water without a splash and slip away. It was a wide pond and would be a good enough barrier for a lazy bear, especially one faced with the remains of the fawn. Oots swam the pond and pulled himself out the other bank as quietly as he had entered it, looking back, he raised his arms and silently yelled at the indifferent bear.

Determined not to return to the village empty handed, he turned away from the thieving bear and faced the looming mountains and their various high passes. The elk mare had surely made her way up one of these. Finding her trail would be impossible in the stone, but he might get lucky. And there were plenty of rocks he could use to bring her down. But thoughts of redeeming his loss washed away as quickly as the pond water had cleaned him of the fawn’s blood.

A fresh sheet of his own blood pulsed down his leg and around his leather moccasin. There would be no tracking elk into the high mountain passes. So he chose a pass at random and began slowly hiking up the trail that thousands of animals before him had etched into the rocky spill of the gentle slope. Up and higher, away from his misfortune at the pond, away from the thrill of waiting for the elk mare and her fawn, away from the paths he himself cut into the dark woods on the bluffs above the cliffs over the sandy coast where the village clung to the safety of the fishing and oysters. Away from Tak.

It was already cold, even with the sun up, but as he crested the saddle of the high pass, he felt the full blast of the cold and pulled his leather skins tighter around himself. They had served well enough down in the thick woods and even cut the wind that whipped up on the coast. But in the heights, it was meager shelter. The wind reached him despite his wrappings and brought new pain to his leg.

When he finally reached the snow and ice, the sun was touching the sea. He found a rock at the end of a fan of scattered stones and chunks of ice that had tumbled down the mountain from the glacier even higher up, and slowly lowered his aching body onto it. It was a lovely vantage, the forest a dark band, thinning into the bluffs above the sandy beach. He could not see the village, but he could see wisps of grey smoke pulled into the sky. Tak was somewhere down there with her ever-present sister. They were probably eating oysters and fish, he thought ruefully, looking at the caked fawn blood in the cervices of his hands. He looked away from the sea in frustration. His leg would make walking back impossible. Even if he tried, that bear would sniff him out. He could not go up the icy mountain, there would be no better shelter there.

And that’s when he saw it. Sticking out of a dull grey rock behind where he sat, in and among the rock fall and ice. The rock was the size of a coconut, he bent to lift it gingerly to him. There was color poking oddly out of one facet of the stone. It was the color of the deep water out in the offing, past the white foam of the reef, and was poking out about his thumb’s width, like a blue gem, set in the grey rock. He supposed it was a gem. Rocks with specs of color, themselves like ice but not cold, could be found in the deeper parts of caves of the village. But this gem was different. It was so smooth and purposefully so. Not smooth like a stone in a riverbed, but smooth like the handle of an axe or the mouthpiece of a flute. It stuck out from the rock and cornered back into it with an edge that looked worked by the most masterful hand.

He set the rock down at his feet, found another rock of about the same size, and began gingerly tapping at it until, after a bit of frustration, he brought the rocks together with a grunting force. The rock on the ground split in two and out popped this blue stone. It had four neat and smoothly rounded edges filling out an area that was about the size of his hand.

He turned it over and over, wiping the dust and dirt from its surfaces. For its size, it had barely any heft, so it could not have been a tool or a weapon. It had a black surface on one side that was as smooth as the pond—even when he shook it—smooth enough for him to see his own shaggy face. But the back was blue, like a cloudless sky at noon. He poked at it with his fingers and felt how brittle it could be. He ran his nails into the dirt-filled cervices along its edges, the only imperfections on its smooth surfaces.

This was a thing he had never seen. How long had it been embedded in that rock? Was he meant to find it? Would he ever be able to show Tak. Was it magic? His father had told him tales of his father’s fathers, about a time long gone, when men ran all over the ground and the water and in the sky, like the winged ants that cut a swath through the woods every other springtime, devouring everything in their path and re-making the ground to be their homes. He said that these men had magic that could create as well as destroy, that would protect them from sick and heal their hurt, let them whisper out of sight to each other.

With a start of realization, Oots rubbed this blue thing on his thigh, wincing through the pain it caused, and whispered to Tak “I cannot see you, but I am calling to you from high in this cold mountain. I hope I can see you again and this magic will bring me to you.” His wound did not heal and he heard no whispers in return, save the cold wind winding down the mountain.

Oots let the weight of his aching body and burning thigh slump him on his rock and he held the strange thing in both hands, letting them fall with it to his lap. Soon his exhaustion wrapped around him in a warm haze and he fell asleep, head hanging down over the dark reflection of his shaggy face staring silently back at him.