1
Luck
Jim Patrick Kelly
2002 by Davis Publications, Inc.
First Published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June, 2002.
Thumb sat on a rock, soothing his sore feet in the river, in no hurry to get home. The stories the shell people had told filled him with foreboding. Meanwhile, he was certain that the spirits had taken Onion's soul down into the belly of the earth while he'd been gone. The sun was still two hands from the edge of the sky. There was plenty of time before dark. Before he reached the summer camp of the people. Before they would tell him his lover was dead. While he tried not to think of her, a dream found him.
In his dream, a great herd of mammoths tracked down from the stony northern hills through the pine forest all the way to the river. There were five and five and five and five mammoths and then more, more than Thumb could have ever counted, even if he used the fingers and toes of all of the people. They were huge, almost too big to fit in the eye of his mind. They trampled trees like tall grass, dropped turds the size of boulders.
Old Owl told a story about the spirit who became a mammoth. He called the beast a furry mountain of meat. Owl had been the last to see a mammoth, years ago when he was just a boy. The rest of the people knew mammoths only from the drawings in the long cave.
An animal the size of a mountain -- how could that be?
When Thumb's herd of mammoths reached the river, they dipped their trunks into the water. In a dream moment, they drank the river dry. Turtles scrambled into the reeds for shelter. Fish flopped in the mud and died.
After her last baby had been born dead, Onion flopped on her mat like a fish.
Ruc-ruc-r