People of the Raven (North America's Forgotten Past) by W. Michael Gear, Kathleen O'Neal Gear Page A

from hand to hand.
    Pitch blinked, shoved the tanned elkhides down around his waist, and raised himself on one elbow. His red war shirt was rumpled, and his skin itched where the thick fabric had eaten into his flesh. How long had he slept? The heaviness in his limbs told him it couldn’t have been too long. “Who is it?”
    “It be me, Whisker.”
    He blinked in the faint glow of the fire and saw the young woman standing in the cave’s rounded entry. She must have run to get here. Sweat glistened on her catlike nose, and black strands had torn loose from her bun and straggled around her oval face.
    “Please, come, Pitch. Elder Ragged Wing say for you to come. Now. ”
    The Cougar People, distant relatives of the North Wind People, had a strange accent that had always been difficult for him to understand. They were hunters who lived for the most part east of the mountains at the edge of the plains, rarely fished, and insisted that fish did not feed the blood.
    Pitch clambered unsteadily to his feet. “What’s happened?”
    She wrung her hands. “Dzoo gone.”
    “What do you mean? Where did she go?”
    “Don’t know. Men hunt for her.”
    Pitch pulled his cape from the floor and swung it around his shoulders. When he’d arrived at dusk, Dzoo had ordered him to get some sleep before they began their journey back to Sandy Point Village.
    “She must be somewhere close by, Whisker. She wouldn’t have left the people in the sick cave for long.”
    “Hope so.”
    Whisker’s right hand rose, to clutch the little fetish tied around her throat, and revulsion ran through Pitch like a cold wave.
    Witches’ fetishes had become so valuable that even ordinary people had begun to prowl the burned villages, collecting ears, toes, sexual organs, or a lump of human liver from the dead to make fetishes to sell. Those who bought them believed that the gods could not protect them from the North Wind People, so they had to protect themselves. Only that morning, a passing Trader had shown Pitch a hideous doll made from dried seaweed mixed with human fat and baked hard. He’d said the maker was a Powerful witch called Coyote. The Trader promised that if Pitch carried the doll, no spear would be able to penetrate his body.
    “Dzoo probably just needed a moment alone to gather her thoughts, Whisker.”
    “Yes. Please, hurry.” She grabbed his wrist and dragged him out into the cold wind, then rushed ahead.
    Pitch tied the laces of his cape as he walked.
    The night smelled pungent—a mixture of wood smoke and boiling willow bark tea they had Traded for from the far south. Big bags bubbled near the fires in the sick cave ten and five paces ahead.
    Whisker sobbed suddenly and looked at Pitch over her shoulder. Her wide eyes were startlingly black in the firelight. “My mother gone, too.”
    “Your mother?”
    “Yes, I go to cave to talk. She gone.”
    A chill settled on Pitch’s heart. In a gentle voice, he asked, “Did your mother’s soul fly, Whisker?”
    “Don’t know.”
    Whisker broke into a run, heading away from the caves and out into the forest.
    Pitch stopped. “Whisker? Where are we going?” He could see that other feet had beaten a path into the snow.
    “This way. You come this way.” She waved him forward. “Elder Ragged Wing needs show you something.”
    “Show me what?”
    The shake of her head looked more like desperation than a refusal to answer.
    As they entered the forest, Pitch heard voices and caught the glimmer of a shredded-bark torch. A group of six or seven people stood near a large boulder. They had their backs to him and, for the most part, resembled dark, amorphous figures floating in the halo of torchlight.
    “What are they looking at, Whisker?”
    “Skinned … wings,” she said, and hesitated as if she wasn’t certain that was the right word. “Bloody feathers. You must see. Come. The elders wait for you.”
    “The elders want me to see skinned wings?”
    “Not all. Broken Sun not