This was like that time, except the smoke was warm and soft and there were no great stones to batter him. It carried him up and around, toward the peak of the tent and the smoke hole. He brushed past the old shaman's bent head, heard a few lingering notes from the skin drum. For that instant he remembered that he was supposed to be going down, into the earth to seek the depths of the spirit world. Then he swirled past Carp and was carried aloft on the smoke. The old shaman's instructions no longer seemed important. He floated up and out of the smoke hole.

The night was black, studded with stars. Winter was but a breath away, yet Kerlew did not feel the cold. He hunted across the sky, the smoke soft beneath him, his every stride a stag's leap. Then, as he felt the smoke grow thinner and fade, he began to step from star to star just as one could step from stone to stone in a stream crossing, or from hummock to hummock in a bog. Gone was his usual clumsiness and halting stride.

Here he walked as a hunter and a man. The night wind touched his hair.

Higher and higher into the sky he climbed, until far ahead of him he saw the pale hides of the moon's caribou. Far above the stars behind the moon, the herd was scattered out across the black sky. Kerlew stood on the highest stars and lusted after them. Their coats shone like lake ice and their antlers swept white and gleaming over their backs. Their heads were down and they grazed across the night sky. He knew that the smoke of their breath formed the clouds, and the clash of their antlers presaged thunder and lightning. Their power and majesty made his heart ache. He knew that if he touched one between the eyes and claimed it as his spirit brother, he would be a powerful shaman indeed.

But between him and the herd the stars were few and widely scattered. He stood teetering atop two stars, yearning after the sky caribou, and wondering what he should do. Briefly he recalled that Carp had told him to go down into the earth, not up into the sky. With a sinking heart, he knew he had disobeyed his master; he would fail in his hunt. He would return from this journey, no shaman, but only the healer's strange boy.