by neetha Napew
Looking up and around, he saw no sign of seepage in the walls or ceiling. It was unlike the cave in which he had dwelled long ago; there had been a glacial ice pack atop the range of hills that leached through the ceiling of the caves, and in warming days, such masses of ice had presented the possibility of ice falls which could mean disaster and death for any living thing that might be trapped within. Satisfied, Torka rose, wiping the dust from his fingertips.
Simu and Karana had already looked around and were standing at the broad, cornice-shaded entrance to the cave. The view was extraordinary: a vast, sweeping panorama of the lake country and surrounding valley, with vistas of soaring, glacier-ridden mountains to the southeast.
“It is good,” Torka said, coming to stand between them.
“It is a cave,” responded Simu, unconvinced of its merits.
“It is our cave,” said Karana, and without another word he began the descent back into the valley to tell Grek and the women and children what they had found.
In the land to the far west, the world was red and gold and burnished umber, and all the way down from the cave of the wanawut, the beast ling found himself pausing to draw in deep breaths of the autumn morning as he made small, staccato exhalations of delight in it. Something special was happening today. Something wonderful!
Mother stopped and turned back. Sister was following obediently;
Sister always followed obediently. Mother stared past her female cub. Beneath her heavy brows, Mother’s eyelids half closed as she looked directly at the beast ling She showed her teeth to signal her displeasure with him, then turned away and continued to pick her way down the mountain toward the vast and beautiful world.
The beast ling frowned, his sense of wonder momentarily shadowed. He wished that he were more like Sister, who never disobeyed and was never distracted by the views. And Sister was bigger, stronger, and growing so much faster. Sister had claws and sharp, stabbing teeth, and Sister had fur—just like Mother’s, long, thick strands of silky gray fur with a thick, mist-colored undercoat. The older Sister got, the more she resembled Mother.
He sighed. It made him sad to know that Mother was not pleased by his lack of fur. Whenever she groomed him, she frowned with worry and poked at his bare skin. The stringy, dark fur that grew from his head, at least, was growing very long. It hung to his shoulders now. It was odd fur, not at all like Mother’s and Sister’s. It made him think of the tails of the horses.
Below him on the mountain, Mother turned back once more. With a series of irritated hoots, she gestured him forward. He followed, tugging at his hair with one hand while he plucked at his tattered elks king tunic with the other. It was a ragged, foul-smelling, ill-fitting garment. Mother had only recently given it to him, stripped from one of the legs of a lion-killed elk whose haunch she had stolen from the willow scrub where its killers had cached it. The tube of skin was still drying upon his body. Now it fit him like a casing, much too tightly across his shoulders and hips and much too loosely across his belly.
Given a choice, he would have preferred to be naked in the sweet yellow light of this golden autumn day. The wind was mild against his lean, lithe, nearly four-year-old body. But he knew that Mother would not tolerate his nakedness, and he did not want Mother to be angry with him. Not today, when, at last, she was guiding him down from the heights to the world below!
His sense of wonder in the day returned to him. For months, Mother had been leading her cubs out of the cave, teaching them to hunt on their mountain’s boulder littered summit. But never before had she taken them down the mountain. The way down from the cave was much steeper than he had imagined it would be.
Today he would learn to stalk with her and run at her side as he had so long dreamed of doing when he and Sister had been confined to the cave, where there had been little room to run—really run—as the herd animals of the world below ran from lions and leaping cats and wolves and dogs.
Mother was well ahead of him now, moving slowly, cautiously. Her leg was stiff—the one with the long shiny patch of exposed skin that ran from her hip to just below her knee. Now and again she rubbed the scar as she walked. The beast ling gave this little thought. He could not remember a time when Mother had not favored her scarred leg.
He hurried on, and soon he was walking beside Sister. She was picking her way with infinite and indecisive care. New situations always frightened Sister as much as they intrigued him. She did not enjoy the forays from the mountaintop, and today Mother had had to cuff her to get her to leave the cave. The older they grew, the more there was about Sister that eluded him. She was as slow on her feet as he was swift, as quick to hang back as he was quick to run ahead. He huffed at her now, encouraging her with a loving touch. She mewed pathetically.
Mother looked back and grunted hard and loud. Sister fell silent. The beast ling walked beside her, crouching down to use the knuckles of his hands for balance, although he found his own upright gait easier and more natural.
The angle of their descent lessened, and soon they were crossing the vast alluvial fan that opened onto the broad river-cut valley. With the sun on his back and the world looming all around him, the beast ling could not contain the fire of joy that exploded within him. He began to run. For the first time in his life, he ran full out, upright like a boy, with his back erect and his strong young legs pumping and stretching beneath him. He ran with his head thrown back and his long black hair whipping in the wind. The feel of tundra beneath his feet was as natural and good as the feel of the grasses that whipped against his arms like stalks of warm, silken sunlight. He ran and kept on running, although he heard Mother screeching at him to come back. Birds scattered and flew upward all around him. He laughed with delight and waved his arms as though he would join them. When a herd of antelope broke from the shelter of a scrub grove and ran ahead of him, he lengthened his stride to match theirs.
He was in deep grass now, but he did not slow his step. Somewhere ahead, wild dogs yipped and barked. The sound filled him. With his arms flung high, he barked and yipped in response as he ran wildly toward the river. He broke through the high cover of the grass. The sun was high, and the beast ling was a part of the world’s colors and scents and wondrous sounds. Its hugeness failed to overwhelm him. The spirits of ten thousand generations of nomadic people of the tundra sang in his veins, and although he did not know the song, he sang it. As he ran and ran it seemed to’ him that his very soul was bleeding joyfully into the earth and sky.
And then, suddenly, he stopped dead. Wolves stood between him and the river. He stared at them. Where had they come from? How could he not have seen their approach?
If he had possessed the gift of the language of his ancestors, the word careless would have risen from his memories. He remembered the dangers of the hunt on the mountain summit, then realized that there were also dangers in the world below.
He had never seen wolves close before. He had never imagined that they were so tall and lean and long legged, with coats like the grass of the steppe when it has been frosted by new snow. The sun was in their eyes. Gold eyes. Watching eyes. Hungry eyes. Predators’ eyes.
His stomach lurched. He was hungry, too. Given time, he would be a predator. But now he was only a small, hairless cub with the uncured pelt of a dead elk around his body.
The wolves smelled the dried blood and flesh of the elks king The lead wolf was a big animal with the scars of many a hunt and battle with his own kind on his ears and muzzle. He took a step forward.
The beastling swallowed hard and did the same.
The wolf stopped.
The beastling stopped.
The wolf lowered its head.
The beastling did the same.
The wolf showed its teeth.
The beastling felt sick. The wolfs teeth were wonderful things, but his own teeth were small and flat, no match for the teeth of wolves. Intimidated, he took a step back.
The lead wolfs head went up as the wanawut suddenly came crash
ing through the grasses at a pounding, arm swinging run. The wolves turned and ran.
The wanawut did not pursue them. She stopped just short of running over the beast ling With her errant cub cowering in her shadow, she waved her great hairy arms and showed her teeth as she screeched and roared with anger. When at last she looked down, he nearly lost control of his bladder. He had never seen Mother enraged before. It was a sight he would never forget.
Mother’s wrath, however, lost its intensity when she looked at him. He knew she loved him. He was small and bald and of questionable value as a potential hunter, but he was her cub nonetheless. As her left arm swooped downward, the beast ling messed himself and his elk skin, but Mother did not seem to mind as her massive fingers curled about his buttocks and brought him up into her embrace. She looked at him long and hard, but he could see that her eyes expressed reproach and relief. She turned toward where Sister was hiding, and, taking her man stone between her teeth, she picked the second cub up by the scruff of the neck without even slowing her stride.
They were back in the cave before the day was done. Mother cuffed him hard, sent him to the nest, and would not groom or cuddle him. He came close and did backward vaults to please her, but she remained unmoved by his antics, even when he peered at her upside down from between his legs, grinning in a broad attempt at apology. She eyed him coolly, grunted, and ignored him.
This will not happen again, he thought. I will obey. I will learn. Mother will be proud of me.
But in the days and nights that followed, the beast ling had no chance to prove himself. Mother had lost confidence in him completely, and under her watchful eye, the cave became his prison.
It took Torka and his people many weeks to relocate their encampment completely. They managed it slowly, in several stages: first the women and children along with their sleeping and cooking supplies—and Wallah’s dismembered leg, for she would not move from the encampment without it.
“It is a part of me,” she said, “and a portion of my life spirit still lives within it! I will die without it. I know I will!”
It was Grek who dug up her leg, wrapped what was left of it in soft furs cross-laced with elks king thongs, and carried her and it in his arms all the way to the cave. Wallah held her severed leg and was content even though she was in pain; with the leg in her possession, she did not think of herself as a one-legged woman.
The band’s caches were left where they had originally put them, scattered across the land around the site of the now-abandoned encampment. Some stores were buried in deep pits, others were secreted in high, craggy places, and still others were within painstakingly erected cairns of heavy boulders. Despite their best efforts of concealment, the men acknowledged that some caches would be ransacked and destroyed. As a precaution, many had been made and filled with identical contents: dried food, bladder skins of water, spears, snares, sinew line, knapping blades, chisels, pounders, fishhooks, and nets, as well as extra boots, gloves, and warm furs. Emergency packs and bindings for injuries were stored, with packets of green willow stalk for pain relief, fire-making tools, and oil soaked bones wrapped with dried grasses and roots, which would serve as quick, long- burning fuel to warm a hunter caught away from camp in a storm.
Now, at last, the old camp was no more. Lonit stood at the edge of the cave with Torka. It was night, and stars sparkled as though they were ice crystals strewn across the black skin of the sky. All along the horizon, the far ranges glistened like the fanged teeth of a predatory beast. Wolf song reverberated within distant canyons, and now and again mammoths called to one another as the wind wailed across the world, chilling the air with the promise of winter soon to come. The people of the band slept deeply within the warm, sheltering hollow of the mountain.
“Come, woman of my heart. It is late. You should sleep,” said Torka.
“I cannot see to the west,” she told him.
“The west is yesterday. It is behind us. It is good that we do not look back.”
She knew that he was right; yet the sadness and longing for her lost twin was there. It was always there, deep within her heart.. . sleeping .. . waiting to be roused by a word or a thought or a dream. Would it never heal?
“Does Torka never look back and wonder? Does Torka never feel that one’s presence or hear his voice calling on the wind? Does Torka not turn around and expect to see him following?”
With a broad, strong hand on her shoulder, he turned her toward him, bent, and kissed her mouth to silence her. It was a soft kiss, a deep kiss. It was a lover’s kiss. And more than that, it was the kiss of one who knows the pain of another’s soul and would ease it.
Lonit trembled. Her arms went around his neck. Her love for him was so intense that it hurt. From their first kiss to their last, it would always be the same for them. Like the mated pairs of great swans that graced the tundral ponds and lakes of summer, together they were one—one heart, one breath, one being, always and forever! How could she have asked him whether he felt the pain of the loss of their son? He was Torka! He had risked everything in the hope of saving the life of that poor, abandoned infant and bringing it back into the warmth and life of the band.
Breathless, she drew her mouth from his and looked directly into his face. Starlight illuminated the pain in his eyes—pain for a lost son and for the woman whose longing for that child could never be assuaged. His lips glistened with the moisture of her kiss. Once again she trembled. He was no longer the youth she had adored as a child and no longer the man whom she had loved from afar as a young girl. He was a mature hunter in the full power of his prime whose face and form were infinitely more wonderful than they had ever been. Strength and compassion were etched into his handsome features as though time had taken a blade and carved them there for all to see. No man in the world had a face as magnificent as Torka’s. Not even the incomparably perfect Navahk—for his face, though handsome, had been as sharply drawn as the face of a raptorial bird, lean and cruel, and with odd, serrate-edged teeth.
She shivered. She had wanted Navahk once, long ago. Her wanting had had nothing to do with love, or even with liking, for she had detested the infamous magic man from the moment he had strutted brazenly into the Great Gathering at the head of his band. She had no desire to walk at the side of any man but Torka, but all women burned for Navahk. It was an enchantment that he put upon them.
In the end, the fire she had felt for him had been quenched by rape, yet in her heart she knew that at the moment he took her, although she had fought against him, she had wanted him and had nearly given herself—until she had looked into his eyes and had glimpsed his black soul. She had learned that to yield to him was to die. No, worse than that—to yield to him would have betrayed her love for Torka. And so she had fought him until the end, and when at last he had come to his savage release, she had ruined it for him by proclaiming:
“I am his woman, always and forever.”
And although he had beaten her into unconsciousness, she had placed herself beyond his power. Yet the memory of the man still filled her with revulsion and shame at the knowledge that she had ever desired him in the first place.
Torka drew her close, held her gently. “You must put the sad things of the past behind you, Lonit. Come now, woman of my heart, in my arms you will forget.”
And in the fold of one powerful arm he guided her into the cave and to the place where their sleeping skins lay piled upon a thick mattress of lichens and grasses. lana had taken her bed furs to the fire of Grek and Wallah, so that she might aid the matron at her daily tasks and be there for her in the night; this allowed Grek to sleep and be strong for the days of hunting, and Mahnie to be at ease about her mother’s care while she tended her own fire and the needs of Karana. Summer Moon, Demmi, and little Umak lay in a fur-covered heap nearby, close to the sod-and-stone curbing of the fire circle that Lonit had raised for her family.
“Come,” whispered Torka, untying the soft thongs that held Lonit’s dress in place. It fell aroun
d her hips, exposing her body to the chill of the night. He touched her, smiled at the sight of her, then lifted her in his arms and laid her down. When he had undressed, he lay over her, warming her. “The west is yesterday. This cave is now. Our children sleep safe in the night. Let us be one in the dark, and let there be no sadness between us.”
A hard wind was driving snow before a rising gale. The last of late autumn’s color was sheathed in white as animals sought shelter from the first cruel storm of winter. But within the cave in the hills above the lake country, the people of Torka were warm, dry, and relaxed in their fine encampment.
“Chant, Magic Man! Chant now in honor of the great spirits of the mammoth and the bear!”
As on the night of the great storm, Karana could not refuse the command of his headman. He took his place within the center of the cave, and as his people gathered around, he seated himself and began to chant. His song was long and thoughtful, honoring the power of the spirits of the mammoth, the bear, and the brave woman who had been dismembered but now sat propped up on her bed furs, leaning against Grek, her body swathed in the shaggy, well-combed skin of the beast that had maimed her, with one leg extended and the other lying across her lap in an elks king bag. He chanted until he saw Wallah smile with wan pride, and when he thought that he could not say another word to praise her, the great bear spirit, or the great mammoth spirit, he closed his eyes and rested his hands upon his knees. He was surprised to hear Torka whispering in his ear.