by neetha Napew
She drew back, puzzled and frightened, cocking her head as he fell back. She stared. She went close and sniffed his nostrils and gaping mouth. This time there was no breath. No breath at all! She breathed into him. She stabbed him again, more insistently now, trying to revive him, but the man stone that had served her so well at cutting and skinning meat refused to serve her now. In her frenzied attempts to revive the beast, she cut herself, drawing blood and pain, and howled in frustration as she threw the stone away, then crouched and howled and sucked her wound.
Although she stayed with him for hours, all through the long, cold night and into the brief, cold, sunlit dawn, Mother Killer did not awake to breathe or speak sounds to her or stroke her or join his body to hers. She held him in her arms and lifted his hands and tried to make him stroke her, but he would not. She grew lonely and slept at last, still holding him, hoping that when she awoke, he would be breathing again, and she would not be alone.
Sunset came before noon. Mother Killer did not move. His one eye was glazed. She put him down and went to search the tumbled snowdrifts for her stone. She found it and held it, then stood looking toward the east, where the other beasts had gone, into the face of the rising hole in the sky. She would go there. Perhaps one among them would hear her howls and know that she was lonely. But now Mother Killer was dead. It was time to dance in his skin.
They walked for many days across the eastern land, beneath the red sky, beneath the rising of the winter moon. Swans flying high against the brief glow of dawn led them to a valley where great herds grazed upon the rich, snow-dusted tundral grasses, and the trumpeting call of mammoths brought them across the broad flood plain to where Karana waited, wearing the hat of Zinkh that he had found along the bank as the great mammoth Thunder Speaker had found him and given to him once more the gift of life.
He raised his hand in welcome as Torka’s people ran toward him. Lonit wept, and Aar leaped in joy to see him, but it was Mahnie who embraced him as he looked at Torka and said: “What has taken you so long? Karana has been waiting many days and nights in this good land to greet his father.”