was rich with the smells of the freezing night and with life.
In silence, they climbed up the gentle slopes of Winter Pock. The hill was treeless and barren at the top, like an old man whose hair has fallen off the crown of his head. Set into the snow around a large circle were wooden stakes. Each stake was topped with the skull of a different animal. There were a hundred different skulls: the great, tusked skull of Tuwa, the mammoth; the skulls of Nunki and long, pointed skulls of the snow fox and wolf; there were many, many smaller skulls, those of the birds, Ayeye, the thallow, and Gunda and Rakri, and Ahira, the snowy owl. Danlo had never seen such a sight in all of his life, for the boys of the tribe were not allowed to approach Winter Pock. In the twilight, the circle of greyish-white skulls looked ominous and terrifying. Danlo knew that each man, after his cutting, would look up at the skulls to find his doffel, his other-self, the one special animal he would never again hunt. His doffel would guide him into the dreamtime, and later, through all the days of his life. Beyond this bit of common knowledge, Danlo knew almost nothing of what was to come.
Soli kicked off his skis and led him inside the circle of skulls. At the circle’s centre, oriented east to west, was a platform of packed snow. ‘When we begin,’ Soli said, ‘you must lie here facing the stars.’ He explained that it was traditional for the initiate boy to lie on the backs of four kneeling men, but since the men had all gone over, the platform would have to do. Around the platform were many piles of wood. Soli held a glowing coal to each pile in turn, and soon there were dozens of fires blazing. The fires would keep Danlo from freezing to death.
‘And now we begin,’ Soli said. He spread a white shag-shay fur over the platform and bade Danlo to remove his clothes. Night had fallen, and a million stars twinkled against the blackness of the sky. Danlo lay down on his back, with his head toward the east as in any important ceremony. He looked up at the stars. The lean muscles of his thighs, belly and chest were hard beneath his ivory skin. Despite the fires’ flickering heat, he was instantly cold.
‘You may not move,’ Soli said. ‘No matter what you hear, you may not turn your head. And you may not close your eyes. Above all, on pain of death, you may not cry out. On pain of death, Danlo.’
Soli left him alone, then, and Danlo stared up at the deep dome of the sky. The world and the sky, he thought – two halves of the great circle of halla enfolding all living things. He knew that the lights in the sky were the eyes of his ancestors, the Old Ones, who had come out this night to watch him become a man. There were many, many lights; Soli had taught him the art of counting, but he could not count the number of Old Ones who had lain here before him because it would be unseemly to count the spirits of dead men as one did pebbles or shells by the sea. He looked up at the stars, and he saw the eyes of his father, and his father’s fathers, and he prayed that he would not break the great circle with cries of pain.
After a while he began to hear sounds. There came sharp, clacking sounds, as of two rocks being struck together. As the fires burned over him, the rhythm of the clacking quickened; it grew louder and nearer. The sound split the night. Danlo’s right half knew that it must be Soli making this unnerving sound, but his left half began to wonder. He could not move his head; it seemed that the eyelight of the Old Ones was streaming out of the blackness, dazzling him with light. The clacking hurt his ear now and was very close. He could not move his head to look, and he feared that the Old Ones were coming to test him with terror. Suddenly, the clacking stopped. Silence fell over him. He waited a long time, and all he could hear was his deep breathing and the drumbeat of his heart. Then there came a dreadful whirring and whooshing that he had never experienced before; the air itself seemed to be splitting apart with the sound. The Old Ones were coming for him, his left side whispered. He dare not move or else they would know that he was still just a frightened boy. How could Soli be making such a sound, his right side wanted to know? He dare not move or Soli would have to do a terrible thing.
‘Danlo!’ a voice screamed out of the darkness. ‘Danlo-mi!’ It was not Soli who called to him; it was not the voice of a man. ‘Danlo, dorona ti-lot! Danlo, we require your blood, now!’
It was the voice of a terrible animal he had never heard before. It screamed like a thallow and roared like a bear, all at once. He began to tremble, or perhaps he was just shivering, he couldn’t tell which. Despite the intense cold, drops of sweat burst from his skin all across his forehead, chest, and belly. The animal screamed again, and Danlo waited motionless for it to tear at the throbbing arteries of his throat. He held his head rigid, pressing it down into the fur. He wanted to close his eyes and scream, but he could not. Straight up at the dazzling lights he stared, and suddenly the lights were gone. The animal was standing over him, bending low, blocking out the night sky. It wasn’t really an animal at all; it was the Beast of the young men’s stories. It had horns and great conical teeth like a killer whale; its cruel, hooked beak was dipping toward his face; its claws were the claws of the snow tiger, and they were sweeping down toward his belly and groin. He had never seen a man wearing a mask before, but even if he had, his left side would still be shouting that the Beast was about to rip away at him. He held himself very still.
‘Danlo, we require your blood!’ the Beast growled out again.
To live, I die, he thought, silently repeating the Devaki prayer of initiation.
Ever since he could remember, ever since he had seen the older men naked and looked between their legs with dread and wonder, he had known this moment must come. The Beast reached down and grasped his membrum. Its claws were cold and sharp against the shaft. In his fear and cold, his unprotected stones tightened up in their sac. He was very afraid; never had he known such a belly-tightening fear, not even when Haidar fell sick from the slow evil and began bleeding from his ears. The fear was all over him, like dead cold air falling down from the sky, suffocating him, clutching in his lungs. He was afraid the Beast would cut him, yes, afraid of the pain, but even more he dreaded convulsing like a frightened snow hare and trying to run away. And if he did that, he would be slain. The Beast would kill him for giving in to his fear. This thought, in turn, fed his fear, intensified it until the sweat poured off his ribs and soaked the furs beneath him. The wind began to blow, chilling him to the core, and he despaired because he felt himself falling through a black bottomless night from which there is no escape. Fear is the consciousness of the child – he remembered Haidar saying this once when they were lost out at sea. He stared up at the brilliant stars, waiting for the Beast to cut him, or tear open his throat, and in a moment of exhilaration he realized that he was here to surrender up his fear, or rather, to lose a part of himself, to let die his childish conception of himself as a separate being terrified of the world. All men must be tested this way, he knew, or else they could never become full men. Just then the Beast roared something into the night, a huge, angry sound that rattled the skulls surrounding him. He felt his foreskin being pulled away from the bulb of his membrum, and there was a tearing, hot pain. He clenched his jaws so hard he thought his teeth would break off in splinters and be driven into his gums; his muscles strained to rip apart his bones, and instantly, his eyes were burning so badly he could not see. He could still hear, though, and in many ways that was the worst of it, the crunching, ripping sound of his foreskin being torn away from his membrum. It hurts! he silently screamed. Oh, God, it hurts! The pain was a red flame burning up his membrum into his belly and spine. The pain ate him alive; the world was nothing but fire and pain. There came a moment when his body was like a single nerve connected to a vastly greater ganglia and webwork of living things: trees and stars and the wolves howling in the valleys below. He could hear the death scream of churo and yaga, and all the animals he had ever killed exploding from his own throat; he remembered the story of a Patwin boy who had died during his passage, and he felt a sudden pressure below his ribs, as if a spear or claw had pierced his liver. In one blinding moment, he saw again the faces of each member of his tribe as they prayed to be freed of the slow evil. The hurt of all these peoples and things, and everything, flowed into him like a river of molten stone. He ached to move, to scream, to pull himself up and run away. Only now, wholly consumed by the terrible pain that
