by neetha Napew
Now, as her weary eyes scanned the tundra, she was puzzled. Where were the herds? They had vanished at the onset of the time of the long dark. Ever-moving in their constant quest for food, vast, rive ring herds of bison, camel, and elk, of musk ox, horse, and mammoth, and of moose, yak, and caribou had always returned to graze the seas of summer grass and tundral scrub. Their antlers, tusks, and horns pricked the horizon of the Ice Age world like a forest of living bones on the move. But the time of light had returned to the tundra, and still they had not come. The time of the long dark had seemed longer than usual this year. The beasts had returned to the tundra to wait for the coming of the great herds, as she herself waited, with wolves and lions, and a winter-lean child that needed to be fed.
Thus she had come to hunt the beasts, certain that she was well out of range of their throwing sticks. But when she had noticed the straggler, hunger had made her bold; hunger and the hatred she bore for their kind. When they saw her leap at her prey, the other members of the pack had not run away; they howled and stomped and shook their sticks at her. Yet she had sensed more fear than hostility. Only one of them, who walked ahead of the others, had hurled a stick at her. That one had been encased within the white belly skins of winter-killed caribou, and its narrow, hideous face was bald except for a lateral strip of white fur that encircled its elongated brow. Black hair grew in abundance upon its skull, falling downward over its back to its knees; rather like the mane of a horse, yet so thick and glossy that, at first, she had thought the beast possessed wings and would fly at her. It had thrown its stick instead. And the stick had flown with the speed of a plummeting eagle attacking its prey. But the attempt had gone wide, striking the straggler instead, making her kill easier.
Any other animal would have backed away then, granting deference to a superior hunter, allowing her to take what she had slain. But again the beasts had howled and stomped and shaken their sticks at her, and then, led by the one in white skins, they had advanced even though she waved her fists and displayed her teeth to warn them away. The entire pack had run like bears moving downhill, crouched forward, heads out, forelimbs dangling. They were dangerous, unpredictable creatures, but she knew their ways and was not afraid. Then the beast in the white belly skins had stood erect, reared back, and hurled yet another stick, screaming like a bull mammoth.
Never had she seen a stick fly so far or so fast or with so much power. It had struck her before she could turn away. The child had not seen it happen; she had sent the little one running ahead when the beasts had not fled from her. Her cry had been more an exhalation of surprise than of pain. That had come later, after she fled.. ..
A single sharp, bright tangle of red pain put an end to her thoughts. She felt as though the core of her body was filled with molten light. It pooled outward and filled every portion of her body, expanding with excruciating brilliance within her head. Then it ebbed like a river at full flood, flowing backward into the stone-headed tip of the flying stick that was embedded all too close to her heart.
She shivered. Her heart lurched, then beat madly as the stone tip invaded it and drew blood. Unable to pull the stick from her chest, she had broken it instead, leaving its stone tip buried within her breast. She could feel it now, the source of her pain and bleeding as it worked deeper and deeper .. . into her heart.
There was no pain, only coldness. She was desperately in need of rest as, with her free hand, she nudged the child. They went downward now, into the narrows of a dark, spruce shaded ravine. Soon they would be home. Soon they would rest together within their nest of branches, bones, and lichens. Soon they would feed upon the forelimb and head of the beast, which she had managed to rip from its body before the others of its pack had driven her from her decapitated kill.
She was suddenly warm with hunger and intensely aware of myriad, multicolored scents of the mountain: time-scoured rock and alpine glaciers ... a pair of marmots cautiously observing from beneath the protection of a lichen-flowered boulder ... a wolverine prowling far below the ridge .. .
Despite her weakness she still clutched the forelimb, carrying it tucked high beneath her thickly furred upper arm while the straggler’s head dangled from her hand by its hair. Both would nourish her child while she herself rested and recovered. When stripped of the skins of dead animals in which it covered itself, the meat of the beast man was the best meat of all.
“Let it go, Navahk. It and its little one. Let it die. If it can die.”
Grek’s voice was an imperative whisper, yet it struck his fellow hunters as though he had screamed. They murmured, intimidated by his audacity and by their surroundings. Mountains were not a place for men. Nevertheless, Grek was risking the anger of the magic man by urging him to turn back from his purpose.
“Navahk—your brother, Supnah, is dead. We will die, too, if we go on. Let us go back now, before the wind spirits kill us because we have succeeded in spearing one of their own.”
“We?” The magic man turned with the sharpness of movement of a man in his prime. In garments cut entirely from the white, silken belly skins of winter-killed caribou, he seemed larger than his followers, although he was actually smaller and leaner. Starving times had threatened his people twice in the three long years since Torka had left their band, but the cutting edge of hunger had only sharpened and more fully defined his beauty. His body and face were still as finely honed as the most perfectly chiseled spearhead .. . and as hard and as dangerous. He looked at the older, stockier hunter out of eyes that were as black as obsidian, as if measuring whether Grek was worthy of his contempt. “It was the spear of Navahk that struck the killer of my brother. Would Grek, would any man, contest that?”
They would not. Navahk’s spear hurler had loosed the weapon that had struck the wind spirit and driven it away from Supnah’s mutilated body. The had all seen it: Grek and Stam, Mond and Het, and aging, albeit still wiry-legged, Rhik. They had also seen Navahk’s first throw miss its intended target and strike the headman instead. It was this wounding that had made the hapless Supnah unable to escape the wind spirit.
The creature’s first attack had been a sudden, bold leap out of the willow scrub in which it had lain in wait for unwary prey. A heavy ground fog lay upon the tundra. The hunters waded through it, knee deep, as though through the shallows of a river. As Supnah had paused to relieve himself, the wind spirit had hurled itself at him. It was the wanawut of legend and nightmare, the beast that no men saw unless they were marked for death at its hands. With one terrible, ripping swipe, it had torn the headman’s arm from his body. But Supnah was strong and quick and unwilling to die. With blood spurting from his horrendous wound, he had run with a speed fueled by panic until Navahk’s spear had struck him. He had fallen with the wanawut at his heels, and Navahk, raging in anguish, had then made his second throw. It was this spear that had struck the spirit’s hairy, grotesquely human torso. It had been shaking huge, hirsute fists at them and displaying canines that rivaled those of the feared saber toothed leaping cats. Its hairless chest had been bared to them, with two spatulate breasts swinging. When Navahk’s spear had found its mark, the men had cheered even though Supnah was dead by then, his head torn from his body.
Their cheering had stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The wind spirit did not die. They watched in silence as, shrieking, it ran off after its child. Navahk had struck it a heart wounding, but still it ran! Sobered, they remembered that men could not kill spirits. That was why only Navahk had done a forbidden thing and risked loosing his spears against the creature that had killed his brother. If the spirits turned upon him, perhaps Navahk, as magic man, could fight them in ways that other men could not.
Now, as Grek deferred to Navahk with a grunt and a nod, he knew that the magic man was justifiably mad with grief and rage and, yes, shame for his failure to save his brother’s life. If Navahk insisted upon following wind spirits, he and this small group of the band’s bravest hunters would shadow him, ready to spring to his defense, until his
madness passed, lest the wanawut fall upon Navahk and deprive the band of its magic man. Navahk had been brave this day. They owed him an equal display of courage. Although all of them would have preferred to turn and flee from the mountainous realm of wind spirits, their pride kept them at Navahk’s heels .. . pride and the knowledge that Navahk’s powers were great and that he was not a forgiving man.
In the shadowed narrows of the cold, spruce-choked ravine, the child crouched over its mother. With wide, long, hairy fingers, it mewed with compassion as it probed the extent of its parent’s devastating wound. Blood was everywhere, darkening her chest, forming a black skin over her bare breasts, and bubbling in a warm, pulsing spring around the child’s fingertips as it pinched at the stem of the spearhead, trying in vain to dislodge it.
Once again the mother stayed the child’s gentle hand. The little one was too cautious, too afraid to be the cause of pain. The mother’s massive, hirsute hand formed a fist around the projecting end of the shaft. She must be rid of it; it was the source of her pain, and to be free of her agony, she must first increase it. Her powerfully muscled arm, apelike in proportion to her broad, foreshortened torso, wrenched the spearhead free, hefting it high. Colors flared, merged, and became one searing flame of white. Her pain neither decreased nor increased; instead, she grew smaller, fell into it somehow, and became the pain. Disoriented, as frightened and confused as her child, she howled as though in supplication to the bright hole in the springtime sky. It seemed to be sucking her upward, out of her body, drawing her into distances where the teratorns had flown and disappeared.
The child cowered. Beneath its sloping, bony brow, its small, gray eyes were wide. Fear and perplexity lived in them. Its mother had never made such a sound before. Suddenly the contorted body went limp. The spearhead fell to the ground. The mother stared, gaping at the sky, not breathing.
The child jumped away, then ventured close. It picked up the bloodied spearhead, sniffed it, cut its soft, hairless palm on the sharp edges of the flat bit. of stone, and cried out, dropping it. The child whined a little to itself, sucking its wound and wondering why its mother did not rise to offer comfort. It bent over her and sniffed her open mouth. Bewildered, it breathed into her. She did not breathe back. Puzzled, it hunkered on its strong, gray-furred limbs and whimpered, then carefully picked up the projectile and reinserted it into its mother’s gaping wound. It still bled, but thickly, smoothly, no longer pulsing. The child pressed the spearhead deep, as though the killing stone might somehow draw death back into itself and thus restore life to the mother.
A cold wind gusted through the narrow, stunted, misshapen trees of the spruce grove. Although the naked child was as heavily furred as its dead mother, it shivered. Unable to rouse its parent, it made a series of high, thin little shrieks of near panic, then fell to silence, listening. Its head turned upward upon its thick, maned neck, and it sniffed the air with broad nostrils that flared beneath the elongated bridge of a nose that gave its heavy-jawed face an almost bearlike appearance.
Beasts.
The child could smell and hear them. They were ascending the ridge. Soon they would stand high above the ravine, beneath the hole in the sky. Then they would descend into the gorge, where beasts had never dared to come .. . into the high vastnesses of the tortured ranges where their kind were unknown .. . where the child had been safe with its mother until now.
Mother. Safe. The child began to whimper again. The beasts were coming, with their flying sticks and stones that cut flesh and took away the breath of living beings. Of mother. How could the child put the breath back into her, if not through the offending stone? It jabbed it in and out, in and out, desperate now. The mother must breathe, must be roused, to show the child what to do and where to hide, for surely the arms of her little one were not strong enough to rip the beasts limb from limb, nor were the clawed fingers and stabbing canines of the child long enough to open their bellies or slash their hairless throats in order to suck them dry of blood. This was the way of the hunt, but the mother had just begun to teach the child. This was the way to defend against predators, but the mother had always defended the little one. Always. Alone, the child had no defense—none except its raw instinct for survival, and in this, the child was strong.
The beasts were close now. Through the deep-green shadows of the trees, it could see straight up along the wall of the gorge. Stone and ice reached to the sky. The beasts stood high above, upon the ridge, blocking the light given off by the hole in the sky. The child shivered so hard that it was afraid the beasts would hear; but they were vocalizing in the odd way of their kind, briefly and in whispers, as though to prevent the child, with its small, intricately lobed, batlike ears, from hearing them. It heard them clearly; it could even hear the turn of a larva wriggling within the skin of the land. Although language was alien to its kind, it sensed their intent.
Panic screamed for release, momentarily winning over judgment as the little one screeched an echo of its mother’s dying howl. “Wah nah wa!
Wah nah wut!” The sound had that deep, flat resonance of a creature twice the size of the child and a thousand times more dangerous. It was the roar of a trapped lion, of an enraged bear, of a wind spirit shrieking across the world—a threat of power that would not come to fulfillment until the child was grown.
In spite of his multilayered garments, Grek was colder than he had ever been in his life. In a meticulously stitched patchwork of the skins of caribou, hare, dog, wolf, bear, and yak, he stood beneath the oblique glow of the springtime sun and was as cold as if he stood naked in the depths of the storms of the winter dark.
The voice of the wind spirit reverberated within the gorge. Grek could not tell if it was the sound of one creature or a dozen. It rose from the darkness, from the lake of shadows far below. Trees rose from that lake, and Grek, a man of the barren tundra, did not like trees, especially when they formed groves. Predators could hide within the woods, and the trees were conspirators with them, concealing them. A man was at risk when he walked among trees, and it seemed to Grek that the trees knew it as they stood as tall as a man, many armed, their twisted bodies stinking of pitch and needlelike foliage palatable only to mammoths—and to wind spirits; they were creatures of the mountain groves, of the misted heights where the people of Grek’s band never ventured. Until now.
“To go farther .. . this will not be good.” Grek’s statement was spoken casually. It was not ‘the way of his people to reveal the depth of their inner feelings, and it was not the way of any man of any band to admit to fear. Now that Supnah was dead, Grek was almost certain to be named headman when he returned to the encampment of his people. His woman, Wallah, would smile and say that this was only as it should be, and his daughter, Mahnie, would be Kroud. When Supnah’s daughter, Pet, came to her womanhood, she would come to share Grek’s bed skins and dwell once again at the fire of headman of the band. These prospects were pleasing to Grek; the prospect of the gorge was not. But if he wanted to be named headman of his people, he must display no fear of it.
Nevertheless, he was afraid, of the mountains, the trees, the shadowed gorge into which the wind spirit had fled with its little one, and of Navahk, who still had the madness of pursuit in him.
At first it had seemed to be a maned man clad in the skin of a strange, never-before-seen kind of bear; but it was too massively boned for a man, and it leaped and ran with the power and speed of a lion. When it had stood over Supnah’s corpse, they had seen that it was naked, furred, female, and more terrifying than any beast that stalked a hunter’s dreams to mock his boldness. It was its striking similarity to themselves that roused a terrible outrage within them because somehow it was not a beast. It was human, and yet not human.
Apprehension in their dark eyes, the hunters looked at Navahk, then at Grek. Their silence conceded leadership to the older man. It was a sudden and unexpectedly heavy burden, as though they had slung the invisible carcass of a slain bison upon his back and now waited to see
if he could carry its weight alone.
At this moment Grek was no longer certain that he wanted to be headman. His fellow hunters wanted to go back; the magic man wanted to go on. If he spoke for the hunters and against the magic man, he was certain that Navahk would accuse them all of being fearful and would never approve of Grek being chosen as headman. If he sided with Navahk against the hunters and urged them to go on, they would have to face their fear or be shamed by it; either way, they would never forgive him for forcing them to make such a choice. If they survived their encounter with the wind spirits within the gorge, they would not elect Grek to lead them. They would boast of their bravery, and when the time came to choose a new headman, they would turn their backs upon Grek and name one of their own number. That man would have the right to bring Supnah’s women to his own fire and Pet to his bed skins. Grek would have to turn away in silence and see the disappointment in his own woman’s eyes.
The older man scowled, drawing the back of a brown, unsteady hand across his mouth. He had already challenged Navahk once and had been ignored. He understood why the magic man wanted to risk his life and the lives of the hunters to take his brother’s head and arm back from the wanawut that had stolen them—without its head, Supnah’s body could not be laid out to look upon the sky; without an arm, his spirit could not hunt in the spirit world until it was ready to be reborn into the band through the birth of a new child. In time, when what was left of Supnah’s body was consumed by predators, the wind would transform his spirit into a crooked spirit, a ghost that would haunt those who had failed to retrieve its head and arm, a phantom that would tear them limb from limb as Supnah had been torn. Not one of them would be born again. They would wander the wind forever, and future generations would forget that they had ever lived at all.