Stands-with-demons, stood, not with a demon by his side—which had somehow not frightened him—but rather with his looming doubts. Before him, just over a bowshot off, up the gradual incline so well cleared by Father in his maimed quest for firewood, stood three warriors, fierce killers of the Mud Water People, come from the flat, naked lands of sunset with their un-cropped hair. The largest among them, wearing a bear skin, with five eagle-feathers proudly announcing that five lives had been sent by The Beginner to feed his soul, did not bear a bow, for he came without one, war club in hand, a bison hide shield strapped to his left wrist.
This is the warrior Father spoke of, the one that might bend this bow—by the looks of him, with ease.
Can you bend this bow again, today?
What of the quality of your shot?
And so his doubts assailed him, worse than demons, tiny, fleeting, nagging in their way, carving away at his will like evil crones crawling up from his bowels.
The smaller man with two feathers sprouting from his platted hair crept off to the right, seeking cover, knocking an arrow to his short self bow and beginning his stalk.
The third warrior, taller, younger, but like the second, having two feathers decorating his crown, though these were worked into his hair so as to fan out to the side, as if his left ear had wings, stepped forward, and knocked an arrow, seeking no cover, but getting set to test the range.
Instinctively, the tiny portion of him who did not fear, did not entertain his teeming doubts, drew his knocked arrow to ear with one easy motion even as the enemy arrow thudded into the mossy log at his foot with barely the velocity to stick.
That tiny portion of him grew large.
The great bow bent, creaked and groaned with its deadly burden.
His back creaked, and he groaned from the chest, in answer.
In the still morning the great bow thrummed, deeper somehow than the twanging of his own self-made bow, and launched the arrow out over this cold, sleeping, snow-blanketed world.
He had adjusted, without a conscious prompt, for the stepping forward of the warrior who was casually knocking another arrow and watched clear-eyed and somewhat sad as the arrow traveled faster than he had expected, in a slightly arced path that cut well under the plunging trajectory of the enemy’s recently sent probe. This arrow, sent by his hand, darted like a water moccasin for the enemy and was no sooner at him, than it was in him and through, having split the bone vest of the warrior, torn through the blue painted body, and hung but barely from its feathers out of the man’s back as he staggered sideways and fell back, slowly, as if laying down, into the position of a resting infant.
I am to be sick—the shameful flow rises from my belly even now!
A wolfish bark was heard coming from the quarter of the second warrior and an arrow took flight in his direction, an arrow which he lacked the courage to turn and see in its death-seeking flight, as he waited for it to pierce his body and end his unalterable suffering, his hateful existence as this thing called a man.
