She scatters a little of the seed every day, until they flitter and flutter and settle at her feet-not trusting, exactly, but side-eye greedy enough to risk a girl’s presence. The other children have dismissed her as a lost cause the adults are beginning to furrow and frown. She strips the grasses of their seeds and collects them in a little pouch until it bulges like a he-lemming’s sack. Her twists are not so smooth and her knots fray and fuzz and the spaces between her links would barely keep a minnow from slithering through, but all she needs is all she needs, and it only needs to work once. She watches the fisherwomen at their weaving, twisting reeds and tying knots with their flashing hands until a tangled nest of net nestles at their feet. She turns a bundle of sticks and twigs and sinew from the midden pile into a cage. “Come and pick hazelnuts! Come and hunt lark eggs! Come play Bear-And-Elk!”īut the girl sits beneath the tree, listening, head cocked to cup the notes in her left ear. There are blue flowers in the grass like stars, a mosquito buzzing in every ear. Warmer weather shuffles in, longshadow days when the sun lingers at the edge of the world like a wandering storyteller at the end of a feast. “Come play with us!” the other children tease. She wants to take that feeling and hoard it deep down where the frost never thaws, beneath the roots and sod. She wants to share that feeling, but she’s no boar-dancer. Every day she listens, and it makes her feel things she can’t describe, like when the boar-dancers charge and prance and the fire flickers so they almost look real. A fox is a white spirit barking curses until an arrow finds it and turns it into a friend that shields your ears from the wind’s teeth.Īnd before it is a flute, a bird is a song lodged in a treetop. Before it is a meal, a mammoth is a squealing calf tagging along behind its mother. This is the first lesson the girl learns, when the world is still young and shaggy-coated with lingering winter. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirtheīefore the flute is a flute, it is a bird.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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