The northers lived in a camp of some ten or twelve houses, made of wood, bone, and hide. The houses were tucked in the gap between a hill and the rounded ice wall at the end of a great spill of ice flowing down between the hills from the ice mass. The open end of the gap faced south, with the ice wall to their east. Patches of snow lay everywhere on the ground, even now, in the latter half of the eighth month. A breeze dropped on them from the north, cold even in full sun. A grumbling shallow creek emerged out of the bottom of the ice hoof to the east of their camp and ran southwest toward the great salt sea, which was just visible from camp, a long curve of blue in the distance.
They walked into camp. More giant barkless tree trunks had been used for the corner posts of their houses. As there had been no tall trees at all in the last two days of their trek north, Loon guessed these immense trunks must be driftwood cast up by the great salt sea, suggesting a land somewhere to the west that must be home to giants.
The biggest house of all was about ten strides on a side, and about three times as tall as a person. They entered it through a low cut in the loam before it, a kind of long trap you could walk down a ramp into. When they had walked through this cut and gotten under their big house, the northers took off some of their outer garments, before stepping onto a tall block of wood and pulling themselves up through a person-sized hole, onto an earthen floor cut less deeply than the trap into the ground. Half of it was planked over, and on the planks another tall block of wood gave one a step up through a hole and onto a full plank floor set about head height above the earthen floor.
The captives were urged to climb up through both holes into the house.
Up inside, the only light came from a fire and from a hole made by a hollowed branch set in the roof’s high point. The walls were covered with overlapping bare hides. The air on the lowest plank level was cool, but there was a platform above it filling over half the house, and up there was where most of the northers sat. Some children were perched even higher, on raised wooden beds that put them not far from the roof. The children were naked, and the men and women on the upper platform were dressed only in leggings that covered them from the waist to the knees. Up at their level the fire made the air not just warm but hot, and the northers’ rounded brown bodies shone with sweat. They handed around ladles of water from wooden buckets, sipping as they talked. The fire was set on a large hearthstone under the roof hole, and it proved to be made up of several big fat lamps, set around a small wood fire burning atop a bed of embers. The fire was so small that it would require constant tending, and Loon saw that the northern women were doing that. They each had different sizes and kinds of breasts, in the usual way.
He counted a score and eleven people in the dim room. Elga was not one of them; she must have been taken into a different house. There were several more houses, so if this was just one pack’s camp, it was a very big pack.
They laughed a lot as they talked to each other. To Loon and the other captives they were curt. After spending some time on the first plank floor and getting inspected by some of the men, Loon and the two other new captives were directed to return to the earthen space under the floor, where he found seven other people lying on hides, and a few frozen ducks in cedar root bags.
It was cold down there on the ground floor. There were several caribou skins covering the planked part of the floor farthest from the step-up, and the other captives lay wrapped in these hides, clumped together for warmth. None of them responded when Loon asked what was going on. He couldn’t tell if they understood him or not.
The northers above were exchanging news, it seemed, the newly arrived travelers no doubt describing the trip they had just completed. Some of them cut up a frozen caribou and handed the pieces to the cooks by the fire, and the cutters threw the caribou’s heart and lungs down to their captives, and later the intestines, scraped of their fat coating. The group below shared this food without fuss, taking a few bites and then passing the chunks along. When they were all sated there was still a good quantity of caribou organs left, neatly piled in the far corner: the least palatable bits, it was true, but they would have eaten them too, if they had still been hungry.
Loon waited until all the other captives were bundled in hides, and then went to an unused half-hide consisting of the rear legs and back of a small caribou, and rolled it around himself. He would be covered if he kept his knees tucked up. He burrowed in and tried to sleep with as little as possible of his side pressing on the hide over the ground. He needed a second hide under him, and got up to use a scrap in the corner for that purpose. The caribou meat was a cold mass in his stomach. His thoughts were as stunned as they had been on the night Elga was taken. He could not quite get a grip on what was happening. It was so bad that he could scarcely move, and even rolled in the hide and lying on the free scrap, he started shivering, more from fear than cold.
I am the third wind
I come to you
When you have nothing left
When you can’t go on
But you go on anyway
I stepped in to help him. With my help he would change over between worlds and sleep while waking, wake while sleeping, and live on in the dream world, but nowhere else. And thus endure.
Some of the other captives spoke in ways he somewhat understood. They seemed to say that the northers did not consider the captives to be people. They were just captives, kept alive to help the jende, the real people, by working for them.
So they went out by day, a pair or trio of jende men carrying spears and blades, accompanied by one or two captive men. Usually the jende led the way downstream to the sea shore, to haul back travois and sleds loaded with bags of fish, or entire frozen seals, or blocks of skin and fat cut from giant furred seals, or from beached whales. If there was soft snow on the ground, the captives were given snowshoes to wear. Their travois for hauling loads had antler blades tied to the back ends of their poles, giving them a broader surface to let them ride higher over the snow. Their sleds had runners made of whale rib bones. The jende wore backsacks tied to wooden frames, which they filled on the sea shore and carried back up to camp.
Once back in camp, the captives lifted their loads up onto a wooden platform which was perched on top of a thick dead tree trunk buried in the ground such that its top was well over head high. A platform had been built in a circle around the trunk just under its top, and up on that raised floor lay many twentytwenties of fish, all frozen hard as flint, and set so they formed a wall all around the outside of the platform, with a single open passage in the wall at the top of a ladder. Caribou furs protected them from the sun.
Up on the platform, which reminded Loon of his pack’s raven burial platform, he discovered that inside the wall of frozen fish were carefully arranged piles of sealskin bags, each bag made of a whole skin that had been stripped off the animal without cutting the skin much; the holes had been sewn up, and now each skin lay bulbously full of frozen fat, visible through drawstrings. One of the jende opened up the drawstring on one of these bags and scooped out some semi-solid white fat into a bucket. Loon was startled by the sight of all the bags, so startled that he briefly came out of the waking sleep he had fallen into. The food stored on this platform would feed the camp’s people for two or even three winters. He had never seen anything like it. These people were rich.
Not only that, but they kept captive wolves, as well as captive people. Loon was again startled to wakefulness when he first saw this: there at the eastern end of their camp, under the groaning ice wall, stood a roofless house of sorts, a circular wall made of a line of tall alder shoots tied together, and inside this enclosure was trapped a small pack of wolves, snarling and snapping whenever the jende opened the short door into it. But when the jende entered, the wolves shrank back and rolled on their backs and peed themselves as they stared up pleading at the northers, licking their own muzzles hungrily. The northers threw them chunks of the same offal they fed to the human captives, and the wolves eagerly snatc
hed the chunks and wolfed them down. Then they crowded around the norther men, heads low, wagging their tails, and the northers reached out and grabbed them by the ears, then tugged their heads this way and that! And the wolves only wagged their tails harder! Loon watched this agape, and marveled again when the men let the wolves out of the enclosure, and snowshoed off with a few of the wolves dashing happily around them. And when they came back to camp late that day, the wolves were still there with them, pulling chunks of wood and bloody meat over the snow, at the end of ropes tied to rope harnesses around the wolves’ forelegs, something like the harnesses people put around their waists to pull travois.
Loon could scarcely believe his eyes. These people were… he didn’t know what.
He found in the days that followed that the main thing the northers wanted from their human captives was not to carry food up from the great salt sea, which their captive wolves could do, but rather to gather firewood from the ravines to the east of their camp. So the days spent walking down to the shore and bringing back fish and seals and fat turned out to be much less frequent than long hikes to the east along the line of hills, turning up one or another of the short valleys that rose to the great ice wall. These valleys had floors filled with forests that were surprisingly thick, even though the tallest trees were no more than head high. The trees were mostly the same types as those to the south, with more birch and larch, less pine, and no oaks; but all of them small. Walking among these trees all day made Loon feel like he had entered some land on the other side of the sky where living things were smaller, turning ordinary people into giants. Maybe this was part of what had made the northers so strange.
Their jende guides or guards carried stone wedges and blades fixed sideways into branches, and they swung these bladed branches to make a first cut in trees, low to the ground, after which they inserted a stone wedge into the cut and had the captives pound the wedge with rocks, or the thick ends of stout branches, until the tree’s trunk cracked across and fell. The captives were also sent farther upstream in the steep valleys to forage for downed wood, or dead branches that could be broken off trees.
The jende made no effort to guard the captives during their forays up these little valleys; there was nowhere to escape to, except to death itself. Nevertheless, Loon found this neglect interesting enough for it to break through his waking sleep and give him something to think about from time to time. Sometimes the jende had some of their captive wolves with them on these forages; that was perhaps another reason they didn’t have to guard their human captives. But if he had Elga with him on one of these forage days, and they managed to flee, and if they had sacks with bags of fat in them, and snowshoes, why couldn’t they simply run faster than any pursuit could catch them? For he had the growing impression that he and Elga might be faster than these northers over a long run.
Although they wouldn’t be faster than the wolves. But if they could hold the wolves off with thrown rocks, drive them away, then who human could catch them? But could you throw and run successfully at the same time?
These questions poked at him, and he pretended to be as insensible as before, but it was a pretense, because he had a little itch now. He was awake again, or at least in a dream that was not so benumbed. He started looking for ways to steal things from the jende and hide them away. At first he didn’t find any, but he was looking.
One day he saw which house Elga was kept in, because they both stepped out of their houses at the same time. She didn’t see him at first, and he stared at her intently. He couldn’t tell how they were treating her. He supposed she was again the wife of some jende in that house. He assumed or hoped she was being treated as jende rather than captive, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe the northers’ wives were captives too, although they did keep a women’s house at the upper end of their valley tuck, for their monthlies he assumed. And the women in his house were cheerful and active around the fire, cooking everything they all ate. How Elga was joining that or not, he could not tell.
Now that he had an itch to know things, it was quite an itch; but it could not be shown.
There was a young man among the captives who spoke like Loon, and who also understood the jende. As they ate at night in the cold trap, he told Loon that he was a member of the eagle clan. None of the jende were eagles, he said; they didn’t even have clans.
This youth didn’t know how long he had been a captive in the house. Many months, he said, as if it had been more than anyone could count.
While Loon was outside gathering wood, he looked around and told himself stories about how he and Elga would make their escape. All the stories had obvious problems in terms of their actual performance. On some of his days out he would be free to run away for a fist or two, but the jende would soon know he had gone, and set their captive wolves after him, perhaps. Also, during the days he didn’t know where Elga was. During the nights he knew which house she was in, but then he too was in a house, under the eye of the jende.
When mornings were orange, they too said a storm was on its way. During stormy days they stayed inside and sat around cooking, eating, making things, sleeping, or telling stories. The jende men quickly grew impatient at staying in. Once they drove Loon out of the house wearing only his leggings, and instructed him to run around the shelter while they threw snowballs at him, shouting happily at the storm to go away. The next day it did. This was the only time they performed anything like a shaman’s ceremonies, and really it was more like a joke. Afterward they fed him a chunk of cedar salmon and a roast caribou shank.
In new snow they wore snowshoes. These were bigger and better than the ones the Wolf pack had, made of single long spruce branches bent in a full curve to a point behind the heel, and the ends lashed together. Across the widest part of the bend, two hard sticks had been lashed. An open weave of leather strips was tied to the outer frame, making the surface that rode on the snow. Leather straps were tied to the cross stick and used to tie their boots to the forward cross stick. The snowshoes were light and strong, and floated a walker over all but the softest snow. They were better on flats than on traverses. As when on the cruder snowshoes the Wolf pack used at home, while descending a snowy slope one could slide down on one foot until enough snow piled up under that snowshoe to bring it to a halt, and just before that happened one shifted to the other foot, thus glissading down the slope in long slow steps. In the steep ravines these dreamy glissades added to Loon’s sense of being a giant on the land.
Put your head down and get through the days. Eat as much as you can stand to. It was hard to eat, there was a permanent clutch in his belly, though sometimes he also felt a raging hunger. He couldn’t tell hunger from nausea, and so ended up getting very cold at night, even to the point of shivering from time to time. No one can shiver for long.
Day followed day. The winter solstice came and went. Around that day, the jende men let one of their captive wolves out of their enclosure and surrounded him and abruptly clubbed him to death, and then skinned the body and ate it, giving one bite to every jende person. Seeing this made the captive humans very quiet, that night in the cold trap.
In the depth of that winter Loon learned the surrounding countryside well, especially the ravines to the east, and the land falling south and west to the great salt sea. On that broad riven slope the jende trapped beaver and marten and fox, and the other furry small people of the marshes and waterways now lying under their thick blanket of snow.
As the winter got colder and colder, despite the lengthening days, they spent more time in the house, and Loon learned more of what could be learned in there. He saw which men were the leaders of this big pack, and which women, and how the group split into its clans, or whatever they had that was like clans. The women ran the house’s affairs in a way recognizable from his own pack. Elga still went to the women’s shelter during the new moon, as she had at home. That was something to know. On the days when he glimpsed her going there he felt a prick of hope, as if one piece of a riddle had bee
n answered. Anytime he spotted her it was hard not to startle and look away. He still wasn’t sure whether the jende knew of his connection to her or not.
Later in the winter some of the jende men walked out onto the sea ice to hunt seals at their breathing holes. The great salt sea was frozen to an immense distance offshore, even reaching to a few low rocky islands poking over the horizon from the land. So out they went on it, and on certain days Loon was required to follow them, his heart as cold as his feet.
The jende men walked straight to spots where they expected to find seal holes, and there they waited, hiding behind low snow walls they built, to spear seals who came out unsuspecting. They tied leather lines to their javelins so the speared seals couldn’t swim off to die. Some of those killed were pregnant, and the unborn seals were a favorite delicacy back in camp.
Loon’s task was to haul the sled carrying the kill, which was heavy, and seemed to him therefore to have the most chance of breaking through the ice and pulling him down with it into the great salt sea. But he kept his eyes down and followed.
Big cracks in the ice had sometimes refrozen clear, so that he could look down right to the bottom. Once he saw yellow sand down there, covered by purple starfish like big flowers. On this clear ice the jende speared ahead of themselves frequently to test the ice’s solidity. Once, stopping briefly to look down at the purple starfish, the jende called Elhu said,—Too bad! in the particular way the jende had when they were laughing at bad luck. He added something to the effect that the starfish would be prized for something, making a scratching motion as he said it.