Ivory and Bone

by Julie Eshbaugh

  We continue down the trail and the smoke from the hearthfires of Lo’s camp disappears behind a wall of trees. From here, the path descends sharply; it won’t be long and this walk will be over.

  “So what happened to end that trust?” I ask. I’m not sure if I’m pushing too hard or asking the wrong questions, but I want to keep Lo talking.

  “All right.” Lo stops beside a fallen tree that looks as if the last bad storm uprooted it. Its trunk crosses the path. Leaves, still green, sprout from branches that fan across the sloping ground like the spread fingers of a hand of the Divine. She sits down and pulls her legs up, perching her chin on her knees. I sit opposite her, in a patch of ferns that edge the path. “Olen began to lose the clan’s trust when he turned us away from the ways the Divine had ordained for us as mammoth-hunters—the ways of our ancestor, Bosha. Do you know her story?”

  Bosha . . . The ancestor Lo’s clan—your clan—is named for. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I may have heard it when I was a boy, but I don’t remember.”

  “I’m happy to tell you,” Lo says. “It’s a story I love to tell.

  “Bosha lived a long time ago. She was a great hunter. With her husband she had two children—twins—one boy and one girl. One day, while Bosha was out hunting alone, she brought down a mammoth. The mammoth did not die quickly, though, and while it still had strength, it began to crush her. Knowing that her death would mean hunger and suffering for her family, Bosha pleaded with the mammoth. She didn’t beg for her own life, but for the lives of her husband and children. She asked the mammoth to use its dying strength to travel to the door of her family’s hut so that, when the mammoth died, they would have food to survive. The Spirit of the mammoth was so impressed by Bosha’s love for her family, it honored her request.

  “After Bosha’s death, her husband grieved her deeply. In memory of her and her great skill as a hunter, he promised the Divine that he and his family would eat only mammoth and other herd animals for the rest of their lives.

  “The Divine was moved by the sacrifices of Bosha and her husband, and she brought a great clan out of their offspring. Since then, the Bosha have always lived off the herds.

  “But Olen turned us toward a new way of life. We built kayaks to hunt on the sea and we gathered more greens and berries. Some people murmured that Olen was forgetting the old ways. But there was still balance. We still relied on the herds.

  “Then a day came that Olen and his wife announced a gathering trip. They wanted to travel to the other side of a stream where more shrubs and sedges grew, hoping we’d find a variety of berries and greens. The plan was to gather, but also to scout for a new home. The grassland where we camped at that time was heavily grazed by bison and mammoths, and the greens were growing scarce.”

  She tips her face away from me, pivoting her weight so she is facing the sea breeze. Her gaze skims across the tents that make up her clan’s camp before turning to the sky like she’s studying the clouds.

  “Mya was my best friend.” This statement pulls my spinning mind to a sudden stop. “We had grown up together. Our fathers were like brothers. I was like a fourth sister to Mya, Seeri, and Lees. So when this trip was planned—just overnight—as usual, I was included. The six of us went—their mother and father, the girls, and me—and in the beginning, I was excited. I was always happy to do things with that family.

  “But the day we were gathering, Mya’s father ordered us all to split up. He said we needed to cover as much ground as possible. He wasn’t worried about any dangers. Cats, bears—our scouts had not spotted any on this side of the creek since the last full moon. He said we were safe. We were all given a digging stick and a large basket of our own and told not to come back to the place we had set up camp until it was full.”

  I picture the group of you in my mind. I see your father—an older version of Chev—muscular, sharp-featured, intimidating. I see Lo, Lees, Seeri, but most of all I see you, looking much the way I remember you when we first met five years ago. Your hair was shorter then, with pieces that whipped around your face when the wind blew from behind you.

  “I was out gathering, and my basket was not quite full when shadows started to close in and become nightfall. I called out Mya’s name, then Seeri’s, then one by one the names of each member of their family. Nothing. No reply came. Darkness fell fast and I was lost, alone.”

  Lo drops her head and rubs her forehead.

  “How long—”

  “All night,” she says, cutting off my question as if the words would hurt to hear. “I spent the night walking and calling out their names. By the time the sun came up, I was half frozen. I curled up in a patch of brambles on the bank of the creek that blocked the wind just a bit. When they found me, I was slipping in and out of dreams. . . .”

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

  “When we got back to camp, her family told my father and mother that I had wandered too far and become lost. They put the blame on me. They said that my carelessness had almost killed me. They wanted me punished.”

  “But you had been in their care—”

  “They have no care. They care for no one but themselves. And many people agreed. They’d seen the way the High Elder and his wife acted. They were becoming too proud to follow the ways of the Divine. Their daughters, too, became proud. They began to treat everyone as if they were beneath them.”

  I wish I could doubt Lo’s story. I wish I could believe that your family had never treated her with such callousness. But I know you. I’ve seen you do exactly as Lo says—I’ve seen you treat people as if they were beneath you.

  And of course, Lo’s story brings to my mind the story you told me yourself, about a girl getting lost—the story you told me the night Lees took off with Roon. “She told me—” I start.

  “What did she say?” Lo’s head whips around and her eyes drill into mine. “She told you about me?”

  “About a girl who became lost. She showed me scars she got when she fell, searching—”

  “As if those scars are my fault! Those scars are the work of the Divine, to remind Mya of how she wronged me.”

  The strength of these last words strikes me. After all, you were only a twelve-year-old girl at the time. But then, I don’t have firsthand knowledge of that night.

  “So . . . did your clan send them away?” I try to imagine the pain of that day. My father is our clan’s High Elder. I will be after him. If we were cast out by our own people—

  “Not right away. Everyone was either patient or terrified. Mya’s father was erratic. People were afraid of him.” Lo hops to her feet, standing above me on the fallen trunk she’s been sitting on. “But it was in the winter that followed that autumn that the High Elder died—”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I think the guilt of the wrong he’d done consumed him. He wasted away,” Lo says. I notice a biting satisfaction in her voice but I dismiss it. Lo is too kind to find satisfaction in the death of her friend’s father, no matter how much his poor judgment had hurt her. “My father, Vosk, argued that Olen had died by the will of the Divine. He said that he, himself, should be named the new High Elder. But Olen’s son, Chev, demanded the role for himself, since he was next in line after his father.

  “There was a schism within the clan. At the time of his death, Olen had been preparing the clan for a move to the south. We constructed more kayaks for the move, but also for hunting seals and fishing on the water. My father asserted that Olen had led the clan away from the ways the Divine had ordained for us as mammoth-hunters, and for this the Divine had struck him down.

  “The arguments over who the Divine wanted to bless with the right to lead were intense. Many people agreed with my father and promised to acknowledge him as their new High Elder. My father encouraged Chev to step aside and follow him, to help make our clan strong mammoth-hunters again. But Chev insisted he would carry out his father’s plan to move the clan south. Some followed Chev, clinging to the memories of his f
ather, the way these trees cling to the side of this eroding rock.”

  I drop my eyes to the windswept soil, gravelly and dry and so shallow the roots of the trees stand out above the surface like spiders’ legs. Lo jumps down from the trunk and a cloud kicks up from her feet—dry flecks of weathered bark. As she drops down onto the ferns beside me and stretches out, a musty scent of decay washes over me. “But memories can’t support the needs of a clan. The wise chose my father. The rest packed up and pushed off from shore.” Lo turns her face to the sky, sheltering her eyes with her hand. “As much as it hurt to see some of our clan choose to follow them, I didn’t condemn those who left—Chev, Mya—all of them have powers of deceit that rival Halam’s.”

  “Halam?”

  She squints up at me, her nose wrinkling. “You don’t know his story either? Halam was an ancient ancestor who was so charming and clever he befriended the Divine. He asked her one day if she would give him a gift—he wanted the power to change the shapes of things. She granted Halam’s request, but she warned him that if he used his power to deceive, he would come to regret it.

  “But Halam didn’t listen to the warning of the Divine. Instead, he transformed his little girl into the shape of a caribou, and sent her into the herd to deceive the others. He instructed her to speak to the other caribou in their language and convince them to run through a narrow mountain pass where he would be waiting with his spear.

  “She did as she was told, but when the caribou came running, Halam realized that he could not recognize his child among the animals. In a hurry for a kill, he threw his spear, but as soon as the animal was struck she returned to the shape of his daughter. She died at his feet.

  “There is strong danger in a person who can create such powerful deceit they can no longer distinguish their own lies from the truth. Halam was clever and gifted with the power of trickery. But these gifts led him to ruin, just as they will lead Mya and her family to ruin as well.”

  Sitting up, Lo turns to me. “Do you see this?” She leans close enough to show me the pendant she wears—a thin strip of leather is tied around her neck so that a round disk, a medallion of carved bone, rests just below her throat. On either side of the medallion, the strap is strung with round, uniformly sized beads. The carving on the disk is made up of four curved lines, like two crescent moons facing each other, or—I see now—two curved tusks. “This is the emblem of our High Elder. It signifies the Spirit of the mammoth that feeds our clan. Mya wore it as the High Elder’s oldest daughter. When my father became the High Elder, she still had it tied to her throat as they boarded the kayaks the morning they left. My father stopped her. She was told not to take it with her when she left our lands. It was to be passed to me.

  “But do you know what she did? She couldn’t bear the thought of giving a symbol of status to me—her lowly friend. So she took it off and in front of my father and everyone else she crushed it with her heel against a rock on the beach. She left the bits and pieces on the ground and climbed into the kayak without looking back. My father had to make me this replica.

  “I never thought I would see Mya again until we walked into your camp today. It was like walking up to a ghost.”

  Lo lies back again, and I stretch out beside her, propping myself on one elbow. For a moment, neither of us moves. Something flashes in Lo’s eyes—something like an invitation—and I decide to touch her face. But before I can, she sits up and jumps to her feet, checking the position of the sun. “It’s getting late.”

  As we descend out of the peaks, the air around me warms and I realize that sitting still in the cool air has chilled me. Or maybe it was Lo’s story. The thought of her alone all night, lost on the windswept grassland, sends a shiver through me even now. At least the rush of anger that rises in me at the thought of your family’s arrogance heats me from the inside out. Your father, you, Chev—it’s nearly universal.

  Seeri must take after your mother.

  I realize suddenly that I don’t know a thing about your mother, except that she must be dead. You’ve never mentioned her even once in front of me. . . .

  The path ends on the beach about fifty paces from Lo’s camp. A boy and a girl are fishing—Orn and Anki, the brother and sister I’d met yesterday, the same pair that Roon met when he first discovered Lo’s camp.

  Their eyes skim the trail behind us. “Where’s Shava?” asks Orn.

  “She stayed behind. There are other visitors in the camp today—Chev and his family.”

  The boy’s eyes briefly widen, but then narrow as his mouth contorts into a scowl. He is stocky and bowlegged, and there’s something about his squared stance and clenched jaw that suggests he finds this news of your family irritating. I would guess he’s about the same age as you. He would remember your departure five years ago.

  “They came to visit us,” I say. I drag my eyes away from the boy’s face. His grimace stirs something uncomfortable in me. “They arrived just before you first camped on our shore.” I almost say more—that since you first arrived, our two clans have forged a friendship—but I know that your family is unpopular with the people you left behind, and I don’t want to start anything. Yet I can’t look at the boy. The look of haughty disdain on his face at the thought of your family offends me, though I’m not sure why.

  “So of course Shava would stay,” says Lo. “I doubt she even realizes who Chev and his sisters are. She hadn’t yet joined our clan when they left. She and her mother were still living with the Manu until just two years ago. That was when our clan stopped to visit yours, Kol. Do you remember that?”

  “I do,” I say, “but I don’t remember meeting you.”

  “No.” Lo looks out over the water for a moment. She’s thinking about that visit, and so am I. “We’d been on a long journey. We’d been searching for mammoths, but hadn’t had success. My father took only the elders when he approached your camp.”

  I remember this visit, of course, and as Lo speaks, all at once I remember the Bosha’s High Elder—Lo’s father. He’d come into our camp looking thin and tired. All the Bosha elders had looked hungry.

  “Your clan fed our elders and sent heaps of mammoth meat out to where the rest of us were camped. My father learned that the girl who cooked the mammoth—Shava—was descended from our clan. He took this as a sign from the Divine.

  “He invited Shava and her mother back into the Bosha clan. Shava had prepared the mammoth that sustained us, and he believed she would bring good fortune to our clan.” Lo pauses, then hastily adds, “I believe that, too.”

  “Let’s hope you’re reading the signs correctly,” says Orn. “I’m not sure Shava is very valuable. Or bright.”

  My hands curl into fists at my side. I may find Shava irritating, but she grew up with me and my brothers. When Pek refused to be betrothed to her, one of his reasons was that she was too much like a sister to him. She may be pushy and tactless at times, but I do not want to stand here and listen to a stranger criticize her.

  There is something about Orn—a smug sense of superiority—that I do not like. I turn away from him and Anki. I should say my good-byes to Lo and begin the trek back to my own camp.

  That’s when I spot the paddler out on the water. We all seem to notice her at the same time.

  “It’s Shava,” says Orn. “I thought you said she stayed behind.”

  We all wait, watching as Shava, with some difficulty, steers the double kayak into shore. Lo and I run into the waves to pull her in.

  “What’s going on?” Lo asks. “We hiked all the way here because you wanted to stay.”

  “I came to get my mother. After you left, so many people asked for her. She lived with the Manu so long, and they miss her. I know she would love to see them, too. I looked for you so we could take the boat together, but you and Kol were already on your way.”

  Shava stands with Lo on the opposite side of the boat. As we drag it onto shore, Lo speaks to her, but I can’t hear her over the splashing and the sea breeze. I he
ar only Shava’s reply.

  “I will. I told you that I will.” Then she hurries up onto the sand. Without saying a word to me or anyone else, she disappears up the path that I assume leads to the Bosha’s camp.

  “Don’t let Chev and his clan keep you away,” I say, once Shava’s gone. I would like to speak to Lo privately, but I’m forced to include Anki and Orn. “I want you all to feel welcome in our camp. Chev is our guest, but so is Shava. So all of you could be.” I turn to Lo. She fiddles with the pendant of bone around her throat. When I look at her she lowers her eyes. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is a deeper rift here than could ever be bridged by an invitation to a single feast. “You promised to come tonight,” I say, in a quiet voice I hope only she can hear.

  “And I will,” she says. Her voice is a low murmur, matching mine.

  She glances up and meets my gaze. At my back, the sea spray is strong, and the breeze blows cold against Lo’s face, reddening her cheeks and pinning loose strands of hair to the damp skin around her eyes. “I’ll be there tonight, but for now, I need to go. I made a promise to my father, and I need to see it through.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I hike back to camp alone, thinking of Lo the entire time, except at brief intervals, when the thought of you somehow creeps in, unbidden and unwelcome. Your face appears in my mind’s eye—the memory of your expression when you sprang from the woods while chasing the elk, landing right in front of me. I remember the sound of your voice when you first saw my wounded back, the curve of your throat above the white bone pendant that hung around your neck at dinner.

  The memory of that pendant takes on new meaning now. Do you, like Lo, wear a replica of the one you destroyed?