Free The Shaman Laughs by James D. Doss Page A

Louise Marie was certain that she would live to regret this error.
    And she would. But in a way that she could not have imagined.
    Daisy Perika stretched out onto her bed. She imagined what Father Delfino Raes would say about what she was about to do, then pushed the St. Ignatius Catholic priest from her thoughts. The old woman relaxed for several minutes, then closed her eyes and remembered the rhythmic chant that was centuries old when the Pharaoh's astronomers still believed the earth to be flat. Over and over the words pulsated in her consciousness… a song sung by women in trances who had heard the whisper of the Spirit. After hearing, they had used sharp awls of fish bone to stitch the tough walrus hides together. Their men had stretched the walrus skin over skeletons of green birch to fashion the sturdy little boats. The First People had chanted the words to the rhythm of their whale bone oars as they rowed their tiny craft across the dark waves among the floating mountains of blue ice. To a land that was harsh and sweet, old and new. To a world that, for two hundred centuries, would belong to their sons and daughters. But the song, which was to pass through a thousand generations and a score of languages yet unborn, remained fresh and vital.
    Now the shaman chanted the sacred psalm of the people who had heard the urgent voice of the Spirit:
    That Great Mysterious One… listen it is he who whispers whispers to our women
    We would stay here… ooh near the graves of our fathers in the arms of our mothers
    But he whispers to us… listen he whispers to us
    and we hear his voice
    Now across the dark waters… away we go away forever
    from the graves of our fathers
    Under the face of the moon… see we go away forever
    from the arms of our mothers
    These cold winds carry us… far away like leaves
    away like dead leaves
    The old woman's throat was dry; Daisy licked her lips and swallowed. She waited for a moment and the words began to flow again, like sweet water from a spring of ages.
    That Great Mysterious One… listen he calls us to this quest
    a hard journey to a far land
    To another world… away into a darkness
    into a great darkness we go
    We are now become… new children without fathers infants without mothers
    We are now become… old grandfathers of tribes grandmothers of nations
    Ve who were last… see we are now become the First People
    Now the song was sung. Her whispered words were replaced by a thumping sound, in rhythm with the beating of her heart. It was like the hollow fump-fump call of the Lakota medicine drum, the rawhide relic that now hung on the wall in her kitchen. Since her second husband had died, there was no one to tap his palm on the drum, to aid Daisy's entry into the misty edges of Lowerworld. By necessity, the shaman had trained herself to hear what must be heard.
    As the imaginary drum beat filled her consciousness, Daisy gradually lost awareness of her surroundings. The gray shadows in her bedroom were replaced by the familiar streaks of colored light and the heady odor of moist black earth, that rich soil found under the shadow of rotting pine logs. Daisy felt herself floating; then, without warning, she was falling. The shaman instinctively grasped for a handhold, but there was nothing solid in the dazzling array of flashing lights. She was under the branches of towering pon-derosas… then passing through the earth, along the roots of an ancient juniper in
Canon del Espiritu
. Her journey ended abruptly, the flashing lights were replaced with a flickering yellow glow. Firelight. She was in that place that other Utes whispered about in campfire stories—the subterranean abode of the
pitukupf
.
    The dwarf seemed surprised at the sudden entry of this creature of Middle World into his subterranean domain. He was busy sewing up a tear in his green shirt. He paused from his chore, dropped the deerbone awl into a sandstone pot with a humpbacked red rabbit painted on the bottom. The