by neetha Napew
Now it was the old man’s turn to frown. “For what purpose do men ever survive? To make new life! To hear the laughter of their children! To hunt boldly for their women! And to sing the songs of life in the winter dark.”
Torka closed his eyes. “This man will sing no song of life until he has dipped his spear in the blood of the Destroyer. This man’s life spirit will be as dead as the spirits of his people until he eats of the flesh of World Shaker and leaves the bones to bleach beneath the eye of the midnight sun.”
Umak stared at his grandson, aghast. “The Destroyer is a crooked spirit. It cannot be killed!”
Torka’s eyes met the eyes of the old man unflinchingly. “For my woman. For my unnamed infant. For Kipu, my son. For all of those who now lie looking at the sky. Torka will kill Thunder Speaker. Or he will join it in the spirit world, to hunt it forever as it walks upon the wind.”
The days passed. In the clear, brutal cold that followed the storm, ice crusted the land, covering the tracks of man and beast alike. Even if Torka had been well, he could not have backtracked to pick up the trail of the mammoth. Umak and Lonit had brought him farther than the band of hunters had ever ranged. Not a single familiar landmark pointed the way back to the winter camp, and yet he remained obsessed with the need to return, to pick up the trail of the beast that had killed his people, to stalk it, face it, and kill it. He knew that he had virtually no chance of surviving the confrontation. He did not care. As far as he was concerned, his life was over. It had ended days ago, miles away, in the bloodied snow where his woman and children now lay looking at the sky forever.
It was warm and dark within the pit hut. Umak sat cross legged, scowling at Torka through the gloom. “The mammoth you seek, you will never find. Forget him. Before he kills you.” Torka scowled back at him. “Thanks to you, the Destroyer walks one part of the world while I walk another. If I cannot find the mammoth, how can it kill me?”
Umak harrumphed. “The beast that walks within you is feeding on your life spirit. Let it go, Torka, before it is too late.”
“It is already too late.”
Lonit listened in silence. The two hunters sat opposite her, close to the little lake of fire that danced within the concave stone that served as both lamp and a source of cooking heat. It was not a large stone; she had easily carried it rolled in her traveling pack, along with her fire-making tools: the notched, well-worn fire stick of bone; the drill stick, also of bone, with its mouthpiece of polished stone and its double-handed drill cord. These had lain close to Lonit when the mammoth had charged the hut. Like the girl, they had not been damaged.
The making of fire with the stick and drill was art. Today, sensing the depths of Torka’s black mood, she had prolonged the ritual. Through the light and warmth of her fire, she hoped to drive back the darkness in which Torka’s sadness grew. With the capstone held in her mouth and the end of the drill inserted into one of the notches of the fire stick, Lonit had held the ends of the cord in each hand, the tension of the sinew strung around the drill. With expert manipulation, she was able to keep the drill spinning in the stick until friction sparked a flame this she nourished with bits of dried moss pinched out of her tinder box of hollowed antler.
Fire starting was woman’s work. Lonit’s mother had taught her well. The girl was proud of her skill; in this, at least, she did excel, and she had wanted Torka to be cheered by her fine fire. She had made a thick oil by pounding the last of the fat that she had packed out of the winter camp on a scrap of leather with the heel of her hand. This she had placed into the hollow of the stone, and into this she had dipped one of her few remaining wicks of moss. Saturated with precious oil, it was the wick that took the flame and held it, burning smokelessly under Lonit’s constant vigil. The stone bowl now glowed softly, held in place by a circle of sods. Cut from the skin of the tundra, the sods were composed of moss and lichen. They absorbed the heat of the little fire and then radiated warmth outward to cut the chill of the interior of the pit hut. But neither Torka nor Umak paid much attention to her fire. They were too absorbed in their conversation and simply took it for granted that, as a female, Lonit would possess the skills of hearth making.
Torka stared into the flame. “I will return to the winter camp to pick up the trail of the Destroyer. The days are growing longer and are bound to become warmer. I will be stronger soon. With the weight of your packs and sledge, your marks will be deep in the land. The tundra holds its scars forever. When the ice melts, I will follow the trail that you have left beneath it.”
“There will be no footprints,” replied Umak. “The tundra was frozen hard. We walked in snow all the way.”
“Hmmph!” Torka muttered, and Lonit looked up from her fire tending, startled to note how similar the speech patterns of Torka and Umak were. “Then I will look for circling birds,” said Torka. “The carrion eaters of both land and sky will come to feast upon the dead.”
“They have already come. Before the storm, Umak sensed their threat. It was for this reason that this old man chose to walk ahead of the storm.” Lonit shuddered against her memories.
Torka’s face was set, shadowed by weariness and sadness in the fire glow. “You have taught me well, father of my father. I will walk west until the land is familiar. I will find the camp. I will keep death watch. Then I will hunt the Destroyer.”
“This old man will not go with you!” snapped Umak, angry and impatient all at once. “This old man will continue east and seek the caribou. Umak has been given back his life; he will not throw it away. Umak has Lonit to care for. She is a girl now, but she will be a woman. The People may yet be reborn through her, to make a new band, to begin a new life for us all. But life feeds on life, Torka. When you find the Destroyer, if you kill it, how will it feed you? It is a crooked spirit. When it dies, it will disappear, into the mists of the ghost wind.”
“Its flesh will feed me.” A muscle pulsed high at Torka’s temple. He recalled the smell of the mammoth’s blood. He remembered stabbing it again and again before, at last, it had hurled him to what had seemed certain death. “It bleeds....”
“Hmmph!” Umak was so upset that he cracked the edge of the spearhead that he had been re knapping “So do you!”
Torka would never know exactly when he began to accept Umak’s opinion about the mammoth. Time was passing quickly. His bruises faded. His gashes and abrasions were becoming scars. Spring was beginning to drive back the winter dark. Each day, during the brief hours of light, he went out. He searched for the way back to the winter camp but could not find it. He searched for game and mammoth sign but found his strength instead. Slowly, his body healed. His spirit did not.
He was obsessed by his memories. Whether he was awake or asleep, Thunder Speaker dominated his thoughts. Then, one night, he slept and did not dream. For the first time since the mammoth had walked into his life to destroy it, he awoke refreshed, glad to be alive. He could not forgive himself for this. His people, his woman, his infant, and his beloved son were dead. He could not allow himself to forget them. He would not. As Umak had warned, the beast that walked within him fed upon his spirit. He let it browse. In some dark, perverted way that he did not wish to analyze, it soothed him even as it sapped the joy from his life. They ate the remaining fox, and even before they scraped the marrow from the last of the bones, Lonit was busy setting snares. Soon there were lemming and pika to roast. Umak speared a motley-feathered ptarmigan. The first of the season’s returning migratory birds were skeining across the sky. Shyly, Lonit came to Torka to present him with a new tunic that she had made for him out of the skins and tails of the foxes. It was a beautiful garment. The girl’s workmanship far excelled his dead woman’s skills with the needle. He resented her for causing him to make such a comparison and was loath to wear it. With his own tunic in tatters, he had no choice, but he lamented the loss of Egatsop. She should have been there to mend and make for him, not this coltish girl with her round eyes and her long, boyish gait. He had admired
the child once. The tenacity with which she clung to life despite adversity was admirable in one so young. But he hated her now. His feelings toward her were irrational and he knew it, but he did not care. She was alive when his woman was dead. She was alive when his son and infant daughter were dead. She was alive, and because of Umak’s concern for her, the old man would not seek out the Destroyer.
For this Torka hated her. She was the only female left alive in all the world, and Umak was right when he said that, if the People were not to die forever, they must someday be reborn through her. The thought was so repugnant that Torka would not dwell upon it. But then the day came when he awoke and ate a meal of roasted lemming, and as he went out of the pit hut to stand in the warmth of the rising sun, he reluctantly admitted that it was good to be alive. The beast of memory stirred, but unlike the last time when he thought of the Destroyer, he knew that, in truth, he never wished to see it again—unless it was on his own terms and he had a chance of coming away from the encounter alive. He could never do that alone. Nor would he put Umak and the girl at risk by allowing them to follow him into the shadow of the Destroyer. Umak was an old man. Lonit was a half-grown child. In this savage, hostile world, they were all that was left of his people. Torka would not abandon them. They broke camp and moved eastward into the light of the rising sun, seeking the caribou. With the return of light and rising temperatures, the texture of the tundra was changing. Land that had lain hard and brittle beneath winter’s thin layering of snow and ice now began to emerge resilient and yielding beneath the feet of the travelers.
They walked out across a landscape that differed from any other on earth. As in other lands and times, moisture and sunlight were the determining factors of life, but here the cold, bitter wind was ever dominant. Except during the longest days of summer, when the sun never set, the chill breath of the polar wind kept the air temperature low enough to prevent snow from melting on the north-facing slopes. Even on the warmest days, when the tundra swarmed with insects and flamed with the colors of hundreds of species of flora, snow lay in hard-packed drifts on windward hills and in the shaded fissures of boulders. Although rivers and ponds were free of ice, less than a yard beneath the tundral earth the ground was perpetually frozen. The mountains that reached to the western edge of the known world were never bare snows that fell upon them in winter remained to greet the snows of the following autumn, growing thicker and thicker until the combined weight formed great, smothering blankets of white that lay upon the ranges, burying all but the highest peaks.
Far to the west, much of Eurasia was entombed in ice. Eastward, beyond the distant horizon toward which Torka, Umak, and Lonit plodded, bent beneath their pack frames while the wild dog trotted after them, an unknown land also lay entombed. Beyond savage, soaring, ice-mantled peaks, this land mass had almost vanished beneath the crushing weight of an ice sheet two miles thick and over four thousand miles wide.
The little traveling band, however, saw only the greening tundra as they walked ever eastward in their search for the returning herds of caribou. The going was slow. The tundra had split into oddly uniform wedges, the result of the ground’s contracting during periods of intense cold, then cracking open. Now that the days were growing warmer, melting snow seeped into the fissures. When temperatures dropped, the meltwater froze and expanded, forming ice wedges that filled shallow gullies ten to one hundred feet in length.
But neither Umak nor Torka nor Lonit complained. Skirting the gullies, they gave thanks to the spirits that the long, rolling valley within which they walked had only a thin coating of snow and was alive with the sound of meltwater running off into icy streams and rivulets. They paused, breathing hard. Umak nodded, content with what he saw. “Soon many birds will come to nest. To raise young and be food for us.”
Lonit was heartened by his words. Within her pack, she carried more than enough sinew thong with which to fashion a stone hurler. If she could find four small stones of equal weight, she could put together an admirable weapon with which to capture waterfowl in the time-honored way of the women of the band—by hurling the bola like device so that its stone-tipped thongs wrapped around the feet of its victim, grounded it, and prevented it from flying. Lonit was as adept with a stone hurler as she was with the setting of snares and the weaving of nets for either birding or fishing. She thought of this and was glad for her skills and of the many hours that she had worked to perfect them, knowing that an ugly girl must be good for something if she was to be of value and worthy of survival.
Torka stared ahead into the narrowing neck of the valley. How far had they come? How many miles now lay between him and the desolation of the winter camp? He thought of Egatsop and the infant; it had been such a pretty girl, with its mother’s long, sloping eyes and lashes. How he longed for her! And for little Kipu. He closed his eyes. He felt suddenly weary beyond bearing.
“Look!” Umak shouted, suddenly rigid, pointing a bony finger skyward. Torka and Lonit looked. High above and perhaps as far as a mile ahead of them, an enormous broad-winged bird was riding the thermals.
“Sun eater!” exclaimed the old man, naming the bird for its ability to block out the light of the sun when it flew before it. Weighing at least fifty pounds, with a wingspan of some fifteen feet, the giant condor made Umak’s heart leap with joy, and the wild dog, standing close but not too near, looked up at him as though he had suddenly become addled. Umak hopped on one foot, and then upon the other, feeling so strong and happy that he could not remember which was his good leg and which was his lame. “Sun eater! We will follow your shadow!” he proclaimed, knowing that the giant condor was a scavenger of big game and that where sun eater flew, in the shadow of its great wings, there walked the caribou!
Hope walked with them now. They proceeded onward, across the shallows of an ox bowed river. They had been traveling for hours. Weariness brought them to a halt. They set up a temporary camp in which they would pass the night, raising a lean-to instead of a pit hut, for they had no intention of lingering, certain that, only a few miles ahead, they would encounter the herds of caribou.
As Umak and Torka took up their spears and went to scout for any small game that might be in the vicinity, Lonit drew a scoop net of sinew meshing from her back. While the wild dog sniffed at marmot sign and chased the molting male ptarmigans that issued raucous mating challenges to one another from every knoll and snowbank, Lonit knelt by the river. Careful to cast no shadow across the water, she leaned out and dipped her net into the flowing current. She held it with its open end facing upstream. In no time at all, a sleek, fat grayling was splashing in the pale light of day’s end; then another was entrapped beside it, and another, until the girl’s net was filled to bursting. She laid the fish in a neat line upon the bank, kneeling back to admire them until the wild dog caught her attention. She was afraid of the dog. She knew that Torka also distrusted it. The animal’s size was such that, if it chose to attack, it could do damage to a man, and a girl would be no match for it at all. But the dog was Umak’s spirit brother, and if it was a ghost dog, there was nothing very frightening about it now. It chased the elusive ptarmigan, dashing from one knoll to another, snapping at flying feathers as the pugnacious birds squawked and cheeped and succeeded in frustrating the dog’s best efforts.
“Did your mother dog not teach you to hunt? You will catch no meat like that!”
Shaking water from her scooping net, Lonit bent to break two stalks from a clump of dwarf willow that grew, fuzzy with catkins, at the edge of the embankment, close to the water and out of the wind. With these, and the net in one hand, she walked slowly to a nearby knoll, one of the few that were not occupied by courting ptarmigan. Snow lay banked on the northern slope of the little rise. It was hard packed in the main, but she was able to dig out enough soft snow to form two small balls. The larger of these, about the size of a ptarmigan’s body, she placed atop the knoll. The smaller, a tiny, slightly elongated ball the size of a bird’s head, she placed firmly atop the l
arger. At the joining of the two, she placed a few pickings of brown moss that grew at the edge of the snowpack; this approximated the first tufts of summer plumage that were appearing at the necks of each bird amid the molting fluff of its white winter feathers.
She observed her creation, remembering others that she had made in happier times. She forced herself not to think of the past. It was gone. But she was alive, satisfied with her work. From a distance, her snowbird would look real enough to fool any feather brained eager-to-mate ptarmigan. She smiled a little as she packed snow in front of her decoy, placing her net over it, staking it down with the twigs of willow.
Now she scooted out of sight. She lay flat, concealed behind the knoll, listening to the calls of the ptarmigan as, having paid not the slightest attention to her efforts, they continued to sound their territorial challenges to one another. With well-practiced skill, the girl echoed them. Within moments a nearby bird was flying to attack the decoy. It swooped low, feet forward, squawking a warning; but when its talons raked into the snow that lay before its opponent, they tangled in the net. Off-balance, the ptarmigan fell, flapping its wings, into the decoy, as Lonit, alerted by its cries, raced to the top of the knoll, pounced upon it, and promptly broke its neck. Holding her trophy high, she gave a little whoop of triumph. When Umak and Torka returned to camp, they would feast upon bird and fish. They would be pleased and would find her worthy. She could see them now, trotting toward her out of the distance. Both had their spears raised. They were gesturing, no doubt in pleasure, as they saw the ptarmigan held high in her hand. She shook it so that they could not fail to see it. Umak shouted her name. He and Torka began to run. Lonit was elated.
But not for long. The cries of another species of bird caused her to wheel around. Facing back toward the river, she cried out in dismay. The wild dog stood at the edge of the embankment, wolfing down the last of her fish. Above him, a shadow turned the last of day into dusk, as the giant condor tucked back its enormous wings and dove straight down at her.