by neetha Napew
But now the People were no more. Torka was alone in the world with Umak and Lonit. Both had worked to save his life; but now that he was well and strong again, he knew the truth, which Umak might well deny. Their lives depended upon Torka. The girl was so young, and until this moment, Torka had not realized just how old Umak really was. Perhaps Egatsop had been right about him. Perhaps his wisdom, like the resiliency of his body, was a thing of the past. His strange attachment to the dog seemed to confirm this.
Gently Torka said to him: “Grandfather. It is time to forget the dog. Torka did not intend to drive it away, but now that it is gone, Torka says that this is a good thing. Never before have dogs and men walked together. Never before have they shared their kills or their encampments. If the dog comes back, it will follow us on the hunt. It will drive away the game.” Umak harrumphed, irked by the unmistakable condescension in his grandson’s voice. “As it drove the sun eater away from Lonit to send it banking downward onto Torka’s spear?”
Lonit felt her face flush. The tension between the two hunters seemed to stress the very air she breathed. She knelt and began to pick up her spilled tools. If only Torka had seen the way the dog had stood with Umak against the foxes! If only he had seen the animal lie down at the feet of the hunter! If only he had seen the beast take food from the hand of a man! If only she were not a female, unfit to speak her thoughts to anyone not of her own gender, she would tell Torka of these things; then he would know that Umak was a great and powerful spirit master and that the wild dog had been under the spell of his magic. “Torka needs no dog to assist him with his kills!” Torka responded hotly to Umak’s cool sarcasm.
“Hmmph!” replied Umak. “We will see. Come. Let us prepare for the hunt. Let us don our stalking cloaks. This old man is cold. This old man would kill caribou. This old man would see how much Torka has remembered of all that Umak has taught him.”
They killed. And killed again. When the second cow went down, twitching and slobbering with two spears in her belly, the herd broke and ran before them—a teeming river of bawling calves and snorting, an tiered cows, which spread outward before them from horizon to horizon, as far as their eyes could see.
“No dog could drive away so much game!” said Umak.
Torka made no comment. He did not want to admit that the old man was right. Still, he felt better now that his blood was up from the killing, and he was actually glad that Umak had outperformed him. Despite his stiff leg, the old man had been directing their hunt as though he, and not Torka, was a man in his prime. Torka had not allowed Umak his kills. The old man had taken them, and he knew it. Of the five spears that had been thrown, each had found its target; only one of the weapons belonged to Torka.
There was a cagey squint to Umak’s eyes and a wry grin of smugly suppressed superiority upon his face as he retrieved his weapons and stood by while Torka withdrew his own.
Their eyes met and held. As often happened between them, their life spirits seemed to meld. Each knew the thoughts of the other. This old man is not so old that he cannot still out-hunt his grandson.
Torka nodded, chastised. This man has misjudged one who could still bring down a great white bear if he chose to do so.
Umak’s grin widened to show strong, time-worn teeth. He knelt, peeled off one of his gloves, and thrust a bare hand into the wound that Torka’s spear had inflicted upon the now-dead cow. “This was a death wounding,” he conceded.
Torka smiled, knowing that his grandfather’s words had been meant to soothe feelings from their earlier conflict. He knelt beside the old man, took off one of his gloves, and thrust his hand into the wound that Umak’s spear had made.
“Torka and Umak are a good team,” he said. “Working together, we have killed this cow twice!”
They killed no more that day. They made the song that generations of hunters of the band had made in gratitude to the spirits of slain game. They tried not to think of those who would not hunt with them again, but they were there, whispering in the wind, watching from the sky.
But the dead could not eat, and Umak and Torka were both ravenous. They gouged out the eyes of the caribou and sucked the bittersweet black juices from them. They pierced the upper bellies of their kills, pulled out the hearts, and ate them, making a ceremony of the eating as they felt the life spirits of the caribou fill them with warmth, strength, and renewed purpose. They smiled at one another. It had been too long since they had eaten of the blood and flesh of the caribou; this was the best meat of all.
The cows that they had taken were relatively small, tender haunched yearlings with no calves that would starve for want of their milk. The hunters hefted them with ease and plodded back to their encampment, where Lonit awaited them.
She offered the traditional female greeting, which they, as males, pretended to ignore. They dropped their offerings before her, then removed their antlered stalking cloaks and hunkered down by the fire that she had made within a wind-protective nest of stones and sods. Now she began the obligatory litany of praise. Custom decreed that the man speak no acknowledgment, but although they kept their silence, their faces showed their surprise. The cadence of Lonit’s praise song was perfect. Her voice was so pleasant and soft, it seemed to gentle the cold, flat breath of the ever-present wind. The little side-stepping dance, performed slowly, with ritual simplicity, took the girl in a graceful circuit of the game. When she paused before them, Umak made a loud exhalation of approval, and although Torka made no comment, Lonit beamed with delight—not only because she was pleased by the game, but because her praise song had been accepted by her men.
Her men. The concept made her giddy with happiness. She set to work, dragging the carcasses downwind and well away from the pit hut, lest predators be drawn by the smell of meat and happen upon man instead. With her sharp fleshing knife, she opened the bellies of the caribou and cut out the blood meats. These she brought to the hunters, carrying the livers and kidneys in her hands. Still warm with life, they steamed in the chill air, and the smell of their rich, dark sweetness was heady. To her amazement, while Torka took his portion and began to eat, Umak magnanimously shared a part of his treasures with her, slicing off dripping ribbons of what were his by right and insisting that the girl consume them on the spot. This she did and was further delighted when she brought the long lengths of intestines to the hunters. These, too, Umak shared with her, portioning off generous sections that were filled with a delicious puddinglike mass of highly nutritious lichens and mosses made soft by the sharp, acidic tang of digestive juices. Not since childhood, when her mother had shared such delicacies with her, had Lonit tasted any of the prized portions of any big game. Her food had been leftovers, cast-off sections of marrowbones with the best parts already chewed by others, scraps of meat too tough to be eaten by any but the most unworthy, and whatever “woman meat” she had been able to catch for herself: birds and rodents and fish, grubs in season—all considered meat unfit for males, except during the time of the long dark when the starving moon rose and the People ate without complaint whatever they could get.
Their hunger sated, Torka and Umak rose and completed the skinning of the caribou while the girl stood by, admiring their skill. The skinning of big game was a man’s work; no female would dare even to think of doing it lest she offend the spirit of the deceased animal. Yet Lonit found herself watching curiously, observing the swift, sure movements of the hunters’ hands as, with beautifully dressed blades of flint, they lifted the skins and drew them away from the flesh beneath.
This done, the men returned to the fire and seated themselves. They picked at the remaining pieces of liver, kidney, and intestine. Soon they were dozing.
Now Lonit set to the butchering. First she spread out the skins, hair side down, and weighted them with stones. She was careful not to stretch them. Hides stretched when still wet would soon stiffen and become unworkable. The girl eyed the expanse of bloody, cursorily scraped skins. They were already crusting in the dry, freezing wind. T
omorrow, she would scrape more fragments of tissue from them. Several days would pass before they were ready for additional working. When she was satisfied that they were dry enough, she would sleep with the raw skins, flesh side down against her body. The warmth of her skin would permeate them with curative oils that could only be obtained by prolonged contact with human skin. The next day they would be scraped again and stretched tautly in the freezing wind. Eventually, after several more scrapings and stretchings Lonit would have hides soft enough to be formed into new garments for her men. She would sew them with infinite care and join the seams so that not even the coldest wind could penetrate them. Then, on stormy days, when the hunters went out into the brutal cold of the time of the long dark, they would know that, at least in some small ways, Lonit was not without value. Perhaps then Torka would smile at her. Perhaps then he would begin to see that she was not totally without worth.
She thought these thoughts as she imagined the many caribou that Torka and Umak would bring to her for butchering in the days to come. She would make new clothes for them all! She could see the hides stretched out beneath the sun and smiled as she worked to cut the meat from the bodies of the caribou. Her back ached and her hands were raw, but she did not care. This meat was for Torka and Umak. She was proud to be their woman and to be able to prepare the meat for them. She worked and worked, and soon thin red fillets of muscle tissue were hanging to dry over frames of bone. Ignoring her fatigue, she turned her attention to another task and began to pound the joint bones, cracking them open, preparing to extract the marrow that lay within.
“You will stop now! You will come to the fire!”
Torka’s voice startled her. She looked up to see that he was awake. He scowled at her as he sat cross-legged beside the sleeping mound of a snoring Umak. To her surprise, the world had gone dark. Bold auroral patterns of gold and blue and green pulsed in the night sky. The smell of roasting meat readied her. Her stomach growled. She realized with a start that she was hungry again.
Torka beckoned. His face was immobile as she went to him and took from his hand a bone skewer upon which long strips of caribou tongue had been roasted. In the soft glow of the fire, with the multicolored luminescence of the aurora at his back, Torka’s handsomeness was so overwhelming that Lonit could not move. Her hand froze in midair. She trembled visibly.
“Take! Eat! Almost A Woman has done a woman’s work . the work of a dozen women! Does she not know when it is time to stop? Does she not know when it is time to rest?” He patted the ground beside him irritably. “Here. Sit on the skins beside Torka. Be warm by the fire. Rest. Eat!”
The invitation was so overwhelming that her knees nearly buckled. She sat down. They ate in silence beneath the dancing colors of the night, with the wind whispering all around and sparks rising from the fire like stars trying to climb into the sky. The girl watched them, eating slowly, tasting nothing, thinking only of the closeness of the man who sat beside her. She was so aware of him that every nerve ending in her skin seemed raw, waiting for the slightest word from him, wanting to be touched by him, but he sat in silence, unmoving, staring into the night, lost in his own thoughts. His face was set. Not even the fire glow could warm the sadness that Lonit saw in his eyes. In time, that sadness filled the girl, for she knew that, although he had called her to sit beside him, he was unaware of her. His heart was with his woman, with his children, with all that he had lost and would never be able to hold close again.
As the night deepened, the wind rose and the temperature dropped. They went into the pit hut to take shelter against the cold. Before dawn, Lonit was awakened by the howling of a wild dog. She lay awake in the darkness, wondering if it was Brother Dog, listening to its cries and to the low, even pull and release of Torka’s breath. Rolled in his sleeping skins, he slept soundly beside her. It was a while before she realized that she could not hear the familiar snoring of the old man.
She sat up, squinting, trying to see into the dark and succeeding. Umak was gone.
She had been so tired from her labors that she had discarded only her bloodied outer tunic before crawling beneath her bed skins. She did not don it now. She wrapped herself in one of her bed skins and, after pulling on her boots, tiptoed out of the pit hut to stand in the wind and the first blue light of morning.
She saw Umak at once. He stood silhouetted against the dawn. His head was thrown back. His hair whipped in the wind. With arms raised, he cried aloud to the rising sun. But he did not cry with the voice of a man. He howled with the voice of a wild dog.
And as Lonit listened, Brother Dog answered from out of the distant hills, and the voices of man and beast were one.
The next day, when Torka and Umak went out to hunt again, the dog was waiting for them. It stood on a tundral hillock, its thick fur ruffling in the wind. It watched the caribou as they grazed. The wind blew past the dog, taking its scent. The caribou caught no smell of it, nor did they note the smell of man; for as the hunters approached the herd, they rubbed fresh caribou feces onto their stalking cloaks, thus masking their own scent.
The dog watched the hunters as they bent forward, imitating the slow, halting steps of grazing game, disguised as caribou within their an tiered stalking cloaks. It was difficult to tell that they were men at all. But the dog knew—it had walked too many miles with Umak not to have been imprinted by him. The old man’s howls had drawn it back toward the encampment from across the lonely distances into which it had fled. The pack instinct was strong in the dog. Although its hackles rose when it thought of Torka, Umak had become its brother. They were of one pack. And the dog, by nature a social animal, had no wish to hunt or live alone.
Born for the chase, Aar did not have to be instructed in the best way to help the pack make a successful kill. To the amazement of Torka and Umak, the dog trotted down from the hilltop, gaining speed with every step, and raced through the rivering herd, driving caribou in every direction until the entire herd was on the run. Barking aggressively, singling out its intended prey and cutting them from the herd, the dog snapped at flying hooves as it drove several cows and calves straight into the waiting spears of Umak and Torka. Hamstringing the beleaguered game, the dog then backed away and stopped, watching as the men made their kills, and by this behavior conceding to them their dominant role as masters of the pack.
Umak was elated. “Brother Dog drives the game,” he said, reminding Torka of his earlier words. “But not away. He drives it to the hunters!”
Torka stared at the panting, bloody-muzzled dog and tried to make sense of what he had just witnessed. It was not possible for a dog to hunt with the wisdom of a man, but Aar had done just that, and more. The dog had made it possible for Umak and Torka to take twice the game with only half their usual effort. Torka frowned, admitting to himself that Umak must truly have mastered the spirit of the animal. He nodded, wanting to be convinced for the old man’s sake; yet he was not entirely satisfied. No matter how he reasoned it out, it was not natural for a dog to keep company with men. Something about it made him uneasy. But the animal had earned its portion this day; this much Torka would not debate. Life was good. Even if ghost spirits from the abandoned winter camp followed to whisper on the wind of death and desolation, Torka, Umak, and Lonit were too busy to listen. The girl tended the new camp while the men hunted. The dog always ran ahead of them, driving game toward their waiting spears as though it had been trained to do so. They took much meat, enough to last through the ripening time of light and on into the dreaded return of the time of the long dark. The girl cured many hides, enough to make new garments for them all. Soon there was no need to hunt. Still the caribou continued to move across the land, pouring out of the east in numbers so vast that it seemed as though the herds were not composed of individual animals but were one endless, teeming being.
And then they were gone.
Torka stared across an empty, silent world. He stood upon a tundral hummock. Below, the scars of the caribous’ passing lay dark upon the st
ill-frozen land. They had vanished into the far western hills.
“They will return,” said Umak. The old man had come to stand beside his grandson. The dog was with him, close, but not too near, and well out of Torka’s reach. Umak drew in a deep breath of the morning, then exhaled it with enthusiasm. The last few days of food and rest and good hunting had made him feel young again. “This is a good camp. When the caribou come east, we will be here to greet them. They will be meat for us in the time of the long dark.”
“From where do they come? To where do they go?” queried Torka. Umak harrumphed. “That no man may know. The caribou walk back and forth across the world. They go to secret places where only the caribou may go.”
“I wonder....” Torka turned his gaze eastward across the vast, rolling plain over which the caribou had come. On the horizon, a broad, snowcapped mountain shimmered in the haze generated by the distance through which Torka viewed it. Beyond the mountain, the tundral steppe rolled on into infinity. Torka stared at it thoughtfully. “It is from somewhere beyond that mountain that the caribou have come to graze, to calve, to eat of the tundra in the days of sun. But always, when the time of the long dark comes near, the caribou turn back, returning eastward. Where do they go? Why do they go? Upon what do they feed when they disappear in the days of the starving moon? If hunters could follow, if men could hunt caribou in the winter dark ...”
Umak interrupted Torka with another harrumph. “No man may do this! The sun calls to the caribou. They follow, to a secret place in the sky, above the mountains, into the face of the rising sun itself!