Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming story, Run Hard, Run Fast. It’s a post-apocalyptic fantasy, and also the sequel to Winter Spirits. It’s scheduled to be released at the end of September, 2025.
Forty-one days into her spiritwalk, Kateri Ismo-ji of the Maheega, the Wolf tribe of the nomadic people known as the Gaheoj, climbed one of the rolling hills that marked the western edge of the Shadoah mountain range. She was careful not to silhouette herself against the horizon. You never knew who might be watching—hostile tribes like the Aldora or the Danang sometimes lurked around the edges of the territory through which her people ranged.
She gazed over an incredible vista, leaning ever so slightly on the spear she held upright beside her. The sun was soaring into view, and the sky was awash with shades of red and orange. The mountains were a purple outline in the distance, veined with lavender where glaciers descended into the foothills. Trees, primarily evergreens mixed with a few hardy spruce and cedars, climbed out of mist-filled valleys. The air was crisp and fresh as she filled her lungs, bringing with it the scent of nearby pines and distant ice.
She’d headed steadily northeast after leaving her clan, figuring to turn southward after reaching the foothills of the Shadoahs, making a wide loop before working her way back to her people. By her reckoning, she was nearing the halfway point of her planned journey. She’d never been this far from her clan before.
Still, she was content in a way she couldn’t remember being in a long time.
Certainly not since Xian had died. The old shaman had been her mentor since she was a small child. Sometimes, she thought Xian had been the only one who’d ever understood her; he’d thought her incessant curiosity a virtue when everyone else found it annoying.
Descending the hill, Kateri saw signs of spring everywhere. The snow was melting, the creeks were running high, the pines on the hillside were growing new needles at the ends of their branches, and buds could be seen on shrubs everywhere she passed. She smiled when she saw a few squirrels scampering around.
She briefly considered taking out her sling and adding some squirrel meat to her next stew—the flavor would be a welcome reprieve from the monotony of her winter provisions—but found their lively antics too amusing to disturb.
Her life had become intolerable since her mentor’s death. Nobody cared how long she’d been his assistant, how much she knew about medicine and the Histories, or that she dreamed of becoming a shaman. Her mother, the chief’s second wife, had told her, “You’re seventeen now. It’s time to grow up and put these foolish ideas out of your head.”
Her stepfather had been even more blunt, “Girl, you’re no shaman.”
Stymied in her ambitions, she’d left the clan compound during a blizzard, gone over the palisade without a word or note to mark her leavetaking, not even to her boyfriend, Bili.
Her musings were momentarily interrupted as she stumbled over a snaking root, saved from falling only by a lightning-fast repositioning of the spear she was using as a walking stick. The ground was covered in slushy snow, with numerous patches where the pine needles underneath were visible. It was quiet, too, with the pine needles muffling her footsteps and not much in the way of wildlife stirring—those squirrels and a few birds were all she’d spotted today.
Between the solitude and the quiet, she found her mind drifting again. Her one regret was that she hadn’t been able to tell Bili she was leaving on a spiritwalk to find herself, as he’d once done.
He’d married into the clan, but his wife, her cousin Aneela, had died only a few years later. After his wife’s final rites, and with the clan’s blessing, he’d left to consult with the spirits and decide whether to stay or return to his birth clan. He’d come back from his spiritwalk a changed man, as well as accompanied by a gyrfalk with which he’d formed an uncanny bond. He’d stayed, of course, and become, perhaps, the clan’s best hunter…and later her boyfriend, too, though they’d kept that quiet. Not because of his age—they were only five years apart—but because the elder clanswomen had plans for both of them that weren’t to their liking.
Of course, she could guess what her stepfather would have told her: “Girls don’t go on spiritwalks.”
Kateri cocked her head and chuckled softly as she realized how deep in thought she’d been not to notice some small juniper trees, about eight feet tall, that she’d been walking past. Often found where pines grew, the hardy trees produced clusters of bluish berries almost year-round. After a quick examination, Kateri recognized them as one of the tasty varieties.
Xian had taught her to be careful with juniper berries. Besides the kind she was hungrily popping into her mouth, there was one poisonous type, another best used as a flavoring for fermented drinks, and a couple with medicinal uses.
Kateri started gathering berries, dumping handfuls in a pocket within her leather satchel, grateful for the opportunity to add more variety to her diet. She chuckled at the sheer joy of it all, then froze as a massive bear rose on the other side of the tree, its face smeared with berries, and looked down at her.
It wasn’t a snow bear, though it looked just as large. It was dark brown, with a patch of white fur around one of its eyes. It…no…he…was gaunt from the long winter.
The tableau held for a moment, then the bear dropped to all fours and disappeared from her sight.
What was weird was that she wasn’t afraid—surprised, yes, but not afraid. Maybe fear had been burned out of her thanks to the supernatural dangers she’d previously encountered during her spiritwalk. But she didn’t think that was true. Just as she somehow knew the bear was male, she didn’t feel he was a threat to her, though she didn’t understand why.
What she sensed—somehow—was satiation, pleasure, curiosity.
Well, that might be all good and true, but testing that feeling seemed like a bad idea. Best to make tracks before the bear decided to come around the tree and add some variety to his diet.
She slowly and quietly backed away.
***
Shortly after dawn, some six days later, upon reaching the ridgeline of yet another hill, she spotted something in the distance that jarred her out of her reveries—a column of smoke rising into the air. It was neither the drifting spirals of a campfire, which likely wouldn’t have been visible from this distance—she judged the smoke to be at least a day’s walk away—nor the billowing curtain that signified a forest fire. Unlikely, given all the snowmelt and recent rains.
Kateri had a bad feeling about that column of smoke. There were raiders that preyed on other tribes. The Aldora came to mind as the most likely, or the painted cannibals that lurked north of the mountains, or even the Danang, though she was considerably further east than the Danang generally roamed. Mostly, she worried that a sister tribe might have been attacked. Her people, the Gaheoj, were organized into twenty-nine tribes, each named after a different animal. She knew that at least two tribes—the Adjidamo and the Esiban—had clans that ranged further eastward than her own clan.
For a moment, she wished Bili was present with his gyrfalk, Aki. He’d confided to her that sometimes, on a good day, he saw what Aki was seeing. That would have been a good capability to have here and now.
Uncertainty firmed into action. She’d investigate, but carefully.
About to leave her vantage point, she spotted movement near the base of the hill, in a clearing where a fallen giant of a tree had taken out a swathe of other trees when it tumbled to the ground. A familiar brown shape ambled across the open space.
Even from this distance, Kateri could sense the bear’s contentment. He’d brought down a deer the night before and had fed well. She’d caught glimpses of him perhaps a dozen times since their first unexpected meeting. He’d filled out since that first time she’d seen him.
She no longer wondered how she could sense what the bear felt. Their connection had to be something akin to what Bili had. This odd bond had just become a fact of her existence, albeit a strange one, that the massive bear seemed to have adopted her. He ranged back and forth across her trail, following her but never coming too close. At first, she’d spent each night high up in a tree, petrified that the beast would sneak up on her in the night. But never once had she felt anything inimical from him; toward prey, yes, but not toward her.
Finally, she’d named him Biffbee.
The name was a joke in the Old Tongue, a play on the initials for “Big Fornicating Bear.” Of course, only another shaman would ever understand the joke. After she’d named him, she’d stopped sleeping in the trees.