by neetha Napew
She stared at him, her mouth quivering. “Not magic!” she accused, then turned and stamped back toward camp.
Karana followed, but neither he nor Demmi spoke when they returned to the encampment. In the days that followed, the child refused to eat the various eggs that her people gathered in the surrounding grass and marshlands. He alone understood. He did not ask why lest she publicly name him Liar.
Summer gradually yielded to autumn. Beneath the returning skies of night, the people of Torka looked up, waiting for the first glimpse of the new star that had appeared when little Umak came into the world.
He was a strong baby now, crawling energetically around the encampment. Wallah predicted that before the time of the long dark was over, he would be walking and talking nearly as well as Dak, Eneela and Simu’s boy.
“Dak is much older!” reminded Eneela, indignant that her offspring’s excellent qualities were in danger of being overshadowed by another’s,
“They will be as brothers,” Lonit enthused. Although she felt the ever-present pang of longing for her lost twin, she forced a smile at Eneela. “They will grow and learn together in this wonderful valley!”
And it was so. Each day Lonit and Eneela fed their sons together, and as Umak’s serrate-edged little teeth began to sprout and Lonit winced and frowned, secretly comparing them with the teeth of Navahk, Eneela assured her that her own son once had had similar milk teeth.
“Dak had put more than a few holes in me before I toughened up to him!” she recalled. “Many infants have such teeth—especially boys. Little lions they are! Perhaps they need a little blood in their milk to make them strong!”
For a moment, the white lion growled within Lonit’s memories, but Eneela talked happily on and on, reminiscing with pride about her son. In spite of her longing for her sister, Bili, Eneela was such a cheerful companion it was impossible for Lonit not to be cheerful herself.
At each day’s end, Lonit took Umak into her arms, held him up, pointed to the sky, and spoke to him about the new star, which had been such a good sign at the time of his birth. He gurgled and mimicked her sounds and her gestures. Together, night after night, while Torka engaged in talk of the day’s hunt with the men of his band, mother and son sat with Demmi and Summer Moon outside their pit hut, eagerly awaiting the return of “Umak’s star.” But as the nights grew longer, only the old, familiar fires burned in the black skin of the sky.
“Has Brother’s star gone away forever?” Demmi asked.
“We will ask our magic man,” Lonit suggested.
“Not ask him. Mother knows better than Magic Man about Brother’s star.”
“This girl will ask him!” Summer Moon volunteered.
“No! Not ask about Brother’s star! Not ask Magic Man about anything!” countered Demmi.
Lonit did not fail to note that for unknown reasons Karana had fallen out of favor with her little girl. And secretly, as night followed lengthening night and the new star did not reappear, Lonit decided to seek comfort in the words of a seer.
“What does the absence of the new star mean?” she asked the magic man as he sat alone outside his pit hut.
He was so withdrawn these days, so consistently sad. And because of his aloof bearing he seemed so old. She knew him to be young, but the look of the boy whom she had raised to manhood was gone forever. And Mahnie had been looking unhappy, too, these last few days.
Karana’s face was a man’s face now; and although he had always strongly resembled his father, on this night, with the starlight illuminating his handsome features and shining sparkling-blue upon his black hair, he looked .. . identical to the man whom she would prefer to forget, and yet could not: Navahk, the beautiful, whose outward perfection was equaled only by the inner hideousness that was his soul. She almost spoke the name of the hated dead man aloud.
“Perhaps the new star was a sign for only one time....” Karana was saying, staring at the sky, unaware of the strange, strained expression that had tightened Lonit’s features as she looked at him, and then away. “The new star,” he went on thoughtfully, “was an omen, of course, a sign from the forces of Creation that the birth of Umak, son of Torka and Lonit, was a good thing. But once the omen was given, the sign made, the star had no need to come again.”
Although she had the uneasy impression that he was trying to justify himself, his reply satisfied her—in the way that all things are satisfying when they gratify a need and assuage a fear. Besides, she felt so distressed and disoriented from seeing the visage of his true father on Karana’s face that she was anxious to get away.
Later, watching Karana from the windbreak of her pit hut, the resemblance to Navahk seemed less marked. She chided herself for having reacted so intensely to it. If Karana looked more like him now that the full maturation of manhood was his, was this not only natural? After all, he was Navahk’s son. But he was also the brother of her heart, and she would not turn away from him because it was his misfortune to resemble one whose memory he despised even more than she did.
Everywhere upon the steppe, animals were changing back from summer brown to winter white; man-tall stalks of fireweed crisped in the cold, dry air and turned the land red with the color of fading blossoms and setting seeds; and the softest dusting of snow fell but was gone on the back of the wind practically before it had a chance to settle.
The days were still long and full. The women gathered and gleaned, using their digging claws and sticks to root up succulent tubers and sweet, albeit fibrous, roots. Craneberries were ripe in the hills now, and although picking them was woman’s work, even the men joined in. All gorged themselves except Demmi, whose mouth puckered against their sourness, and helped to pile skins high with them as they set them to dry in the now-oblique light of the sun.
It rained several times. The skies grew thick with clouds, then cleared. Vast wedges of migrating birds headed southeastward, into the face of the rising sun.
“Where do they go?” Lonit asked Torka, her eyes locked upon a pair of black swans as they rose from the earth together and took wing into the dawn.
He smiled tenderly to hear her phrase the question that he had asked himself so many times. “To a place far away, where, perhaps, the sun never sets and the world never grows cold.”
Grek, within earshot, looked up from the bone stave that he was hardening in a fire pit made for that purpose. Smoke and steam were rising. He peered through the fog at his headman and his headman’s woman as Wallah emerged from their pit hut to stand behind him. “We could go there,” he suggested. “Then, when the time of the long dark is over, we could follow the winged ones back to our valley, into the face of the setting sun.”
“With my bad hip, I hope that we will fly, as they do,” said Wallah sourly.
“Restless as always, old friend?” Torka teased, ignoring Wallah’s uncharacteristic dourness. “Always the nomad. Grek, even in such hunting grounds as these?”
Grek ground his teeth and looked around, conceding: “It is a good place, this valley. A good camp. If the winter does not last forever, it will serve us well.”
And it did—for that winter, and for the next two winters.
But after the red dawn of their fourth autumn in the wonderful valley, many moons would rise and set before anything in Torka’s world would seem so wonderful again.
The great short-faced bear came by night, as do all true horrors, for darkness is the accomplice of fear, making all things that men dread seem larger and more dangerous. But this animal was already so huge that the night could do little to make him seem larger or more deadly. On all fours, he stood well above five feet tall at the height of his massively fat, thickly furred shoulders. Now, as he rose on his hind limbs and sighted across the night, he was twelve feet tall. By sheer girth and height and weight of mass, he was one of the largest mammals ever to walk the earth. He did not carry the fatty hump of his cousin the grizzly, but he was larger by nearly a third, sleeker, and therefore fleeter of foot. His oddly for
eshortened face was not that of an omnivore; the great short-faced bear of the Age of Ice was exclusively a carnivore. His diet consisted of meat, any meat—alive or dead, freshly killed or putrid.
And now his broad snout drew in the scent of the cache pits, and the meat and hides that lay drying and stored within the encampment of Torka’s people. Salivating with anticipation, the great bear began to move forward.
Slowly, long before the great bear was close enough to be heard or scented, its presence began to rouse the people and set them to sighing and thrashing restlessly in their sleep. Soon, in each of the individual family pit huts, the people of Torka lay wide awake and absolutely still. Something was into the cache pits beyond the camp.
Snares and pit traps all around the encampment had been carefully devised to keep predators away. For four autumns no predator had violated this safety system. But now a low, snapping sound that could have been the tripping of a snare line broke the silence of the dark.
In his hut, Torka listened, waiting, trying to put an image and a name to whatever was moving in the dark. He could hear it clearly now—soft paddings, softer exhalations, and low, slobbering gnawing barely audible above the constant sighing of the autumn wind. It sounded big, but in the dark, rodents could sound as large as wolves, and wolves could sound as large as lions, andAar barked once from where he slept outside Karana’s hut, but to Torka it sounded as if the dog was not certain of what he was barking at or if he was barking at anything at all. Because his man pack punished him when he woke them for no reason, Aar had long since learned not to alert them unnecessarily. Yet now, the dog was barking wildly, ferociously, fierce and mad with fear and aggression.
Torka pulled on his boots and was on his feet, his spear grasped in one hand and his bludgeon in the other before he reached out to sweep the weather baffle aside. Behind him, Umak was asking what was going on, and Lonit and lana were both shushing the boy even as they told Torka to be wary. As though he needed their advice.
The hunter’s heart was pounding as he warned his women and children to be still. His voice was so calm that for a moment he almost believed that he was not afraid. But he was afraid, for across the distance of time, he had lost a woman, a young son, and a suckling to a marauding mammoth.
Suddenly the intruder roared under the moonless sky. Torka heard a woman’s scream of terror. Wallah’s. And a man’s curse. Grek’s.
Trying to focus his night vision, Torka saw the bear, lit by dazzling starlight. Big it was, and fat from feeding throughout the endless days of light, but irritable—not only because it was near the time for its kind to den for the winter but because it had been driven away from its feeding by a circling, snapping wolf of a dog.
Across the encampment, from the lake of shadow that lay before Grek and Wallah’s pit hut, a woman was crying. Mahnie. Where was Karana?
Torka blinked; he could see clearly now. As the bear stood and wheeled, Torka saw Karana and Simu, two naked spearmen, screaming at the monster that loomed over them as the dog cut circles around its feet. There were two spears in the back of the bear; one was hanging loose, caught in fur and fat. Torka judged the other to be deep into muscle and bone by the way the bear was trying to paw it out.
He did not wait; he could smell it now, its big, meat eating, animal stench, and sense its enormous weight moving in the dark. Karana and Simu were already hurling two additional spears. As the dog’s hackles rose, Torka threw his own spear, but it went wide as the bear suddenly dropped to all fours and took off into the night with Aar at his heels.
Stunned, the three men stood in shocked silence. They came together instants later in an embrace of relief and satisfaction. The bear was gone! They had driven it away! Later they would wonder how much time had passed before they heard the crying of the women and children and the sobbing of the man, for Wallah lay bleeding from a gaping wound that began at the lower end of her hip where her right leg should have been.
Torka knew what must be done to stanch the flow of her blood. “As meat is seared in the flame, so it is with the flesh of man and woman,” he said. A look of disbelief and horror darkened the faces of the others.
“That which is burned will not bleed,” he assured them. “This I was taught by Umak, spirit master, and this Karana was taught by the seeress and healer Sondahr. Our magic man had been taught in the ways of healing by both Umak and by the healers at the Great Gathering. For Wallah, mother of his woman, Karana will be a healer to his people. Now.”
He stepped aside, and it was done. While compresses of hide were held against the wound, a stone was heated and laid against the flesh of the woman. Wallah fainted as the pain began. She awoke before it ended. But not once did the woman of Grek cry out.
Later that day the hunters found Wallah’s leg but did not know what to do with it. After a brief but unsuccessful search for Brother Dog, they returned to camp. The band was happy the bear had not eaten of Wallah’s leg; without it, she would become a crooked spirit, doomed to drag herself through the world of men as a ghost in search of her missing part. They brought it to her fire circle. After Mahnie had cleansed it, Grek stared at it and put it close to his woman, insisting that Karana make some sort of chant over it, as though the mutilated member might somehow fill with blood and life again and graft itself to her hip.
On the second day, the women lathered the severed limb in a purplish-red paint made of the reconstituted pulp of dried crane berries in hope that this would stimulate a responsive flow of blood. The leg, however, refused to return to life and rejoin itself to Wallah’s body. There was talk of trying to sew it back on, but by then the leg had begun to putrefy. The people gathered stones and buried it in a shallow pit outside the encampment. They mounded stones over it, to keep it safe from predators, and all gathered around the little grave to honor the spirit of Wallah’s leg.
On the third day, Brother Dog returned, battered and exhausted and missing most of his left ear.
For days the pain and fever took Wallah in and out of delirium. She slept, and moaned, and woke, and moaned. Grek stayed by her side. Mahnie tended him and her mother. Karana tried not to think of the severed limb lying in its grave as he made the chants of healing and waited to see if his magic would bring Wallah through her ordeal .. . and while he waited, he wondered what life would be like for a one-legged woman in an unforgiving world if it did.
Wallah slowly healed, but Torka’s fear of the great bear did not. “If it lives, it may return. That is the way of its kind,” he warned.
While Grek elected to stay with Wallah and the women and children, Torka, Simu, and Karana tracked the bear. It was not difficult; the animal had been bleeding profusely, and after a few miles, it was circling, stopping often, and dragging its hindquarters. They found it dead in lake country to the southeast, at the base of a range of broad, ice-free, cave-pocked hills. They skinned it, but not one of them wished to eat of its meat. In silence they removed their spearheads from the carcass and took the claws and hide.
There was no celebration of its death. The women were not even interested in the skin and claws.
“Who will sleep in a robe made of the skin of one who has eaten of our sister?” asked Lonit.
“I will sleep in it!” declared Wallah to everyone’s surprise. Her face was unnaturally sallow, her features drawn and wan from hours of unrelenting pain, but her eyes were full of life for the first time since her dismemberment. “When all is said and done, Wallah thinks that it is better to be a one-legged woman than a dead bear without a skin!”
And so the bearskin was stretched and fleshed and cured for her.
As the skin was prepared, Torka, troubled, paced the camp. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he knew that he had erred, and badly. “We should have been more cautious,” he admitted. “I should have been more cautious.”
“Three winters is too long to stay in one camp.” Grek’s voice was hard, as were his eyes as he looked at Torka. “The spirits sour on men when
they stay too long in one place. This man has said this before, and he says it again . but it is too late for Wallah.”
“She lives!” Karana reminded him. “And from this time on, because we’ve found her limb, she will be especially favored by the forces of Creation. Not many women have lived to boast about running out of a pit hut in the black of night into the arms of a great bear—and ending up with the skin of the bear!”
Grek’s head swung on his neck. The hardness in his eyes became sadness. “The spirits give with one hand and take away with the other! You, Magic Man, you tell my Wallah that she has been favored instead of cursed! Ask her which she would prefer to own—the skin of a bear or her own leg!” He sighed and closed his eyes, then opened them and fixed his gaze on Karana once again. “How long will she live with a wound like that? How long? You are a magic man. You tell me, yes! All the time she hurts so badly that she can barely sleep, and when she does, she wakes up looking for her leg, saying that she can feel it. She makes me look to see if her toes are wiggling, but there is nothing there. Nothing to hold up the weight of my Wallah if someday she might have to rise and run to save herself from another bear or lion or—“
“She will not have to run. Ever again,” Torka told the old hunter. “In the hills above the bear’s carcass, I saw caves—good, high, dry-looking, south-facing caves—and we could make a good camp in one of them. Wallah could be comfortable and safe for the rest of her days, and we could defend ourselves against any predator that would try to come against us.”
“Men do not live in caves like animals!” protested Simu.
“Karana, Lonit, and this man have lived in caves. We are not animals,” countered Torka.
Karana nodded. “And as magic man I tell you that both Grek and Torka have been right all along. It is not good for the people to stay too long in one camp. And in this new land, even Simu must learn new ways!”
A preliminary investigation proved that the caves were everything that Torka had hoped for and more. A good climb through scrubby spruce and birch wood along a spring fed streambed was necessary to reach them. Water would be close at hand when it was needed, and large carnivores would pose no threat. Broad, dry, and deep, three of the caves had enough ceiling height for a man to stand with room to spare, and to Torka’s increasing pleasure, the largest of the three had the best southern exposure, as well as the smoothest, flattest floor. He knelt and fingered the gritty dust beneath his feet. There was only a shallow layer; this was a good sign. In the depth of winter, as well as being insulated from the cold by the hills in which it lay, the interior was evidently protected from the vicious, subfreezing, snow-and-dust-laden bite of the wind.