People of the Fire by W. Michael Gear Page A

The smooth white
underbelly gleamed like snow in the sun, in contrast to pink-padded feet.
                   Bull lifted him up to stare into the
frightened black eyes. "You ate the last of my jerky. What you didn't eat,
you pissed and shit on. To make matters worse, you chewed the thong of my atlatl in two! It takes time to make an atlatl just so . . . get the right Spirit Power into it."
                   The whiskers continued to quiver, the beady
eyes bright with terror and hurt.
                   "So what I'm going to do," Bull
continued, "is get even. Tonight, we're going to eat you for dinner. Get
you back for our jerky, huh?"
                   He winced at the sting of the cactus spikes in
his flesh and grabbed the beast about the chest, ready to break its neck.
                   Undaunted, the scrambling captive sank long
white teeth into the web of skin between Bull's thumb and forefinger. He howled
in pain and surprise, slamming the creature to the ground. Again, Trickster
Coyote made a fool of him, providing a soft tussock of grass for the thief to
land in. Like a shot, it bolted into the sage.
                   Bull stared stupidly at his hand for a second,
realized what had just happened, and thundered his anger as he crashed after
his vanishing quarry.
                   The threads of the Starweb had begun to tighten. The Wolf Bundle had watched as the world changed. Part of
it had cried out as the last of the mammoth died under the hunter s darts. The
way of the Spirals permeated everything, reaching from the roots of the
winter-dormant plants to the shining glitter of a fly s buzzing wings. How odd
that the last mammoth had been an orphaned calf. When the Wise One Above
created the universe, he made everything balance, pain and ecstasy, birth and
rot, heat and cold.
                   Now the Circles were coming full again. Wolf
Dreamer waited, watching from his Dream. Something new would be spun into the Starweb . . . or its new Dreamer might fail where Wolf
Dreamer had succeeded. It did not matter. If this Circle of the Spiral would be
famine, the next might be feast.
     
     

Chapter
5
     
                 As the morning sun
threaded yellow beams into the canyons, Hungry Bull trotted along a deer trail
that wound through the thick sage in the canyon bottom. As his legs pumped, he
bit cactus spines one by one from the palm of his hand, spitting them away.
                 To either side, the
eroded hillsides rose in gentle slopes dotted with sage and occasional bitter
brush. This buffalo hunt had turned into another debacle. Occasional chips had been
located—all of them years dry, beetle-riddled and gray white from sun
bleaching. Where were the buffalo? As he trotted down the trail, a limp
brown-and-white body dangled and jerked from his swelling right hand.
                 He could count off a
finger for each day since he'd left Sage Root and camp and add another three
toes to the list.
                 Never had the animals
been so few, so far between. And if the faces of the People had looked gaunt
when they left—
                 "Hey, you!"
The cry hung on the still morning air.
                 Bull slowed to a
stop, looking around warily as he tried to pin the location of the call. Cautiously
he slipped his atlatl from where it hung on his belt.
He pulled a long dart from the quiver over his back. Practiced fingers nocked the dart in the hooked end of his spear thrower. The atlatl added leverage, acting like an extension of
his arm, allowing a man to catapult a dart three times as far as he could throw
a spear by hand. He missed the chewed-away rawhide loops that had secured his
fingers to the polished shaft.
                 "Who is
it?" he shouted.
                 "Here!"
                 This time he caught
the direction of the voice.