by neetha Napew
He stood tall. He puffed out his chest so that he would look big and bold to the watching predators. He growled again, as the dog growled. He snarled, as the dog snarled. With a brash gesturing of his spears and a telling grunt or two, he showed Lonit what she must do.
The spears seemed awkward in her hands, but they did not melt or sag as her female fists tensed around their shafts. Perhaps, now that the band was no more, the usual prohibitions concerning the use of weaponry were no longer in effect? The girl had no way of knowing. She only knew that she must follow Umak’s instructions. If she did not, it would be his right to beat her or abandon her.
He strutted forward toward the foxes, and Lonit strutted beside him, silently invoking the spirits that lived within the spears.
Forgive this unworthy girl for holding you. Give strength to her hands and courage to her spirit. For Torka and for Umak, be strong and swift. Strike true.
The spears responded to her plea as, with Umak beside her, her arms seemed suddenly strong. The old man took huge, stomping, swaggering steps forward. He shouted at the foxes to retreat. Lonit copied him, surprised at the sound of her own voice. It did not sound afraid.
Ahead of them, some of the eyes blinked and vanished; but others glared and glowed as the remaining foxes stood their ground. As Lonit and Umak stalked forward, the wild dog looked back at them. The leaders of the fox pack took advantage of the dog’s movement. They sprang at it from out of the darkness. Lonit saw them clearly now for the first time. She gasped. They were like lemmings, surging toward the dog in droves. Never had she seen so many foxes in one place, nor had she imagined that there could be so many of them in all the world. For a moment the strength went out of her arms, and her throat constricted with fear. She could not move. The wild dog could easily have run. It could have turned tail and vanished into the night. Instead, it stood its ground, circling, snapping and snarling, savaging its adversaries as they swarmed around it and leaped against it with ripping teeth and slashing jaws.
Instinct told Lonit to turn and flee. The foxes would consume the dog. If she and Umak went quickly from this place, the foxes would not follow; they would be content to stay and feed. But why was the dog staying to fight them? It was as though the animal were deliberately putting itself at risk for them; as though, somehow, it considered them its pack and found itself bound to protect them.
“Aar!”
Umak’s scream caused the girl to jump with fright as the old man ran howling to the dog’s side. He was knee-deep in foxes as he stomped and stabbed downward with his spears. She heard yips and barks of pain. And then, like a wedge of birds suddenly banking away across the sky, the main body of the fox pack was gone. Umak and the dog stood together, panting, surrounded by the torn and bloodied bodies of foxes that would never rise to follow their kindred. Umak raised one of his spears. He shook it, along with the spitted body of the fox that was impaled upon it.
“Now we feast!” he proclaimed in triumph.
Lonit blinked, staring as the old man looked down at the dog. Except for a torn ear and a bloody snout, the animal seemed unhurt; its thick coat had evidently prevented the foxes from doing much damage. It stood so close to Umak that, had the old hunter wished to touch it or to drive his spear downward through its back into its heart, he could have done so. The dog looked up at the old man and, obviously unafraid, made no move to back away as Umak slid the body of the fox from his spear and dropped it at the feet of the animal. The dog sniffed it, then calmly lay down and began to feed upon it, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a dog to keep company with a man.
But it was not natural. Lonit continued to stare at Umak. Truly, he was a spirit master, a hunter so skilled and powerful that, by magic, he could enter the mind of an animal and coerce it to work his will. Not only had he frightened the foxes away and killed others to make a meal for them, he had also put his spirit into the dog. He had made it stand and fight beside him as though it were his brother. With the wind rising steadily around them, they hunkered down in the snow and devoured two of the foxes raw, skinning the carcasses with their stone daggers as they ate, sucking sweet, hot, life-giving blood from the fibrous flesh.
Energy returned slowly to their starved, exhausted bodies. They worked together to assemble a pit hut to shelter them against the coming storm. Umak used a stone ax and wedge to break the surface of the permafrost. He whisked the snow away with the side of his ax and hacked the broken surface into small, uneven sods. These Lonit carried away to stack into a pile for later use. With the pronged stalk of a caribou antler, the old man and girl took turns scraping out a hollow circle, approximately six feet around and one foot deep. When the hut was complete, Umak, Torka, and Lonit would be able to recline fully within, with room to spare for their supplies; and the below-ground floor would prove an effective protection against the wind and cold once the warm air from their bodies and their cooking fire filled the interior.
When the circle was dug and smoothed, they dismantled the sledge and laid the still-unconscious Torka down upon the snow-covered earth, on a bison skin that they then wrapped around him. With the runners of mammoth ribs and with the large antlers that had formed the body of the sledge, they quickly erected the domed framework of their shelter. It was cross-braced with thong wrappings at all critical joinings, and the bottom ends of the ribs were stabbed as deep into the frozen ground as it would allow. Next they brought in the floor skin of oiled hide, the only one that they had been able to salvage from the ruined camp. It was ripped in several places, but Lonit would mend it later. The walls of fur and hide were staked and raised, draped in layers over the frame and cross-lashed with thongs all around the bottom and across the top. The last touch was the piling of sods at the base, not only to weight the bottom of the walls but to serve as additional insulation.
When this was done, they brought Torka in and laid him down gently, close to where they would build their fire. He lay inert. Umak touched his pulse, high at his temple. He was still feverish, but the beat of his heart was strong and even. The old man smiled. Torka would live, Umak was certain. He dared not speak this certainty to the girl lest the utterance rouse crooked spirits that would work against his belief, but he told her that Torka seemed improved and heard her exhale with relief and joy.
Now they dragged in their supplies, including one of the foxes, which had frozen stiff. They would skin and butcher it later when the growing warmth of the hut softened it a little. The rest of the dead animals, six in all, they stacked in a small, hastily dug pit close to the hut. Covered with a staked down skin, the pit would serve as a deep freeze; even in summer camps, meat could be kept cold indefinitely in such storage holes because, beneath the thin top layer of the tundral soil, the earth was perpetually frozen.
Umak seated himself as Lonit laced the hide door skin closed from the inside. It was dark within the hut. Outside, the wind lessened a little, then changed direction. Almost instantly, the air grew noticeably colder. Experience told the old man that the storm that would now descend upon them would be so viciously cold that only the hardiest creatures would survive against it.
We will survive, thought the old man. He was beginning to relax now and thought of the dog, wishing that he had been able to lure it into the shelter of the hut. It had accepted food from him, but it had backed away when he had beckoned to it, inviting it into the hut. Now it lay outside, close against the skin walls, using them as a windbreak as it curled protectively about the remains of its fox. With a belly full of meat and marrow to generate body heat, the dog’s thick winter coat would provide adequate protection against the cold.
It too will survive, thought the old man.
As if affirming the old man’s thought, the wild dog lifted its head and howled in defiance of the rising storm. Lonit sat very still, listening, trembling against a sudden desolate sense of loneliness. She and Umak and Torka were all that was left of the People. The full impact of this settled upon her now. Within he
r heart there was no gladness, no guilt; there was only the terrible, crushing weight of despair. Outside in the darkness, the wind and storm and wild beasts ruled a world that stretched on forever. They were alone in that world, a girl, an old man, and a wounded hunter. Beneath the vast and savage Arctic sky, the wild dog sang a lament to the endless night.
“What does your brother dog cry to the wind, Spirit Master?” she asked the old man, trying hard not to sound frightened, hoping that he would not strike her for daring to put a question to him.
He listened to the dog. He heard tremulousness in the girl’s voice and knew it for what it was. He too felt the desolation of loneliness and the nagging beginnings of fear, but unlike the girl, he was Umak, spirit master, and would have none of it. “That we are alive,” he replied with the grim ferocity of absolute resolve. “And that we shall stay alive.”
The wind slapped at the little shelter, but it held fast even though snow blew into its interior through the seams that Lonit had been too exhausted to mend. In the darkness, with the wind drowning the howling of the dog, Umak felt the temperature falling dangerously low. Alarmed, he rose, hunching forward, for although the pit hut would accommodate the full length of his reclining body, he could not stand erect within it.
“Up!” he half shouted at the startled girl. He commanded her to undress, so they might bundle together beneath the combined weight of their furs. The combined heat of their naked bodies would serve to warm them against the worst of any storm.
Shivering, Lonit complied as Umak stripped himself, then bent over Torka and, not without effort, peeled off the bulk of his grandson’s torn and bloodstained garments. “Come!” he then demanded of the girl, and told her to lie down against Torka’s right side, while he stretched out against his left.
With the bison hide beneath them all, skin side down so that its thick, rough hair cushioned their bodies, they shivered themselves warm beneath their piled sleeping skins. For a long while they lay awake, listening to the storm while Torka slept, oblivious to it, between them. After a while, only the hut shivered in the wind, and in the darkness, Lonit heard the old man speak with quiet, absolute determination.
“You see? We are alive. We shall survive.”
But for how long? wondered the girl, not certain if Umak had spoken to her or to the storm. It did not matter. She sensed his drifting off to sleep and knew that she was following. Within the soft, warm limbo of total exhaustion, with her slender body naked against Torka’s side, she closed her eyes and shivered once again, but not with cold as she thought: In all the world, there is no woman for Torka now. There is only Lonit. I am his woman. He shall be my man. In time. Yes. It shall be so. He shall forget that I am ugly. I shall make myself so worthy that he shall have to forget! A sweet sense of euphoria nearly overwhelmed her. She pressed closer to him. She felt the heat of his fevered flesh melding into the heat of her own skin, into the rising pulse rate of what was more than a child’s infatuation. She was not a child—not after today, not ever again. One small hand strayed upward to rest open upon Torka’s shoulder.
“Lonit is Torka’s woman,” she whispered barely audibly, sleepily, feeling herself slipping into dreams.
But suddenly she was wide awake. Staring. Every muscle in her body rigid. Umak slept on. Torka breathed evenly. But outside, the storm had reached a demonic intensity. There was something unnatural about it, something threatening. Lonit sat upright. Wind-driven snow was streaming into the interior through the gaps in the seams. As she stared, the streams of snow ribboned out, whirled in the air, took on the forms of ghosts and demons as they swirled around her, plucking at her bare skin.
She gasped. She knew the faces of these ghosts. They were the members of her band, yet they were changed. They had no form, no substance. They were the stuff of storms and snow, as gray and as dank as mists as they solidified into a single diaphanous column. The column took on the form of a woman, but unlike that of any woman who had ever lived. Its flesh was ice rimed, broken, and torn. It bled mist from a thousand wounds. Out of a frozen, ruined face that had once been beautiful, eyes as cold and unforgiving as the Arctic night fastened upon Lonit and, from out of a skeleton’s mouth came a single moaning word. “Torka ...” Lonit stared, knowing that the ghost woman was Egatsop, Torka’s woman, come to claim the life spirit of her man. “No!” Lonit cried, throwing herself across Torka, feeling the snow-driven hands of death raking downward across her back. “He is alive! You cannot have him! He is my man now!”
The wind intensified; it roared inside Lonit’s ears. The cold was so bitter that it burned her nostrils and filled her lungs until she could not breathe. She could feel bone-sharp spears of ice, Egatsop’s fingers, piercing through her body to get at the man who lay beneath her. She felt Torka move as he suddenly cried out the names of his dead woman and children.
A terrible wave of anguish ran through her. What a fool she had been to imagine that Torka would want her, even if she was the last woman in the world. Here was the woman he loved, come back from the dead, to claim him. But she could not let him die—not Torka, not the one whom she loved more than her own life.
She rose, turning to face the spirit. “Take me! Come! Live again in my body if you would be with him!”
It seemed then that the specter laughed at her, and never in her worst nightmares had Lonit seen anything more ugly than the sight of Egatsop’s ghost. Half-fainting with terror, Lonit flung herself back across Torka’s body and sobbed in terror as the wind rose and the pit hut shook. Suddenly, above the storm of death, she heard the snarling of the dog, and as quickly as they had appeared, the apparitions vanished.
She turned to see that Umak had risen. He was doing what he could to close the seams and asked her to help him. He had seen no ghosts. He had heard no voices. It had all been a dream, he assured her.
In the darkness, fumbling amid her belongings, she found her sinew thread and with trembling hands managed to thread her needles and sew the seams as best she could. By the time she finished, the wind had dropped. She helped Umak to remove the snow from the hut and crawled back under the sleeping skins to shiver herself back to sleep.
But she did not sleep. Beyond the walls of the pit hut, the wild dog growled, and all night long, although Umak swore that it was not so, crooked spirits walked the night while Lonit kept watch against them. Dawn rose out of the east. The wind rushed toward it across the crumpled, glacier-laden peaks and frigid polar steppes of Siberia. It blew past the barren, storm-blasted expanse of tundra upon which Umak and Lonit had labored to raise their little shelter of bones and fur. If crooked spirits had ridden the wind, they were silent now, for the wind was gentler. The storm had spent itself, leaving a dusting of dry snow on the arching roof of the pit hut and on the coat of the sleeping wild dog.
Lonit slept at last; the deep, dreamless sleep of total exhaustion. Beside her, Torka awoke, his fever broken. For a long while he lay still, staring into darkness, feeling the warmth of the two who slept on either side of him.
Their presence gave no comfort, for the memories that washed through him were more painful than the dull ache of his injuries. The ghosts of the past lived within his eyes his woman, his infant, the faces of friends lost to him forever. He saw the bloodied snow of his people’s devastated winter camp. He saw little Kipu and heard his cries as a terrible shadow fell upon him. He saw the mammoth .. . Thunder Speaker .. . World Shaker ... He Who Parts the Clouds. With eyes round and dilated with its hatred of Man, the Destroyer thundered within Torka’s head as its impossibly huge body raged over little Kipu and nearly everything that Torka had ever known and loved.
Anguish choked him. The confines of the pit hut were suddenly suffocating. Torka could not bear his memories. He rose, wincing against his pain. He stepped over his sleeping grandfather, took up one of the sleeping skins of caribou hide, and wrapped it around himself as he unlaced the door skin and went out.
The world was white and unfamiliar. It stretched eastward for
miles in broad, rolling waves that shimmered with a lustrous patina of ice in the Arctic dawn’s light. To his left, a snow-covered mound of fur suddenly rose, shook itself, and backed away, growling.
Startled, Torka hunched forward into a defensive posture, ready to strangle the beast if it came at him; but he had awakened Umak when he had left the pit hut, and now the old man appeared at his side.
“It is only Brother Dog,” explained Umak. “He too is alone, without a band. He has followed this old man and prevented his spirit from walking away upon the wind. He has fought beside Umak. He has won his place within this encampment.”
Torka frowned, feeling suddenly weak and disoriented. He had no recollection of the hours that had passed since he had succumbed to delirium in the winter camp. Umak’s words made no sense to him. The moment seemed unreal, a part of his dreams. He reached out and put his hand upon his grandfather’s forearm to make certain that he was real.
Umak nodded, understanding. “It is so,” he said. “Umak lives because Brother Dog would not let him die. So it was that this old man found you. Together with the girl, I have brought you out of the place of death to a new life. We are all that is left of our people. But we will survive.”
Within Torka, weariness and pain merged to become something else, something harder and darker and sharp with the bitter edge of total desolation. “For what purpose?”