—Yes. He was taken by the same northers who took his wife.
Thorn growled.—When?
—Right after they took her. I helped him track them, but their scouts took him in the dawn. I heard them coming and slipped away, but I had to stay quiet to do it.
—And then?
—They went north to their place. I followed them for a while, but then I had to go east. Now I’m on my way home, but I wanted to let you know what happened.
Thorn nodded, frowning.—Come to our camp. You’ll be our guest, and you can tell Heather.
Pippiloette nodded.
Back in camp the people gathered around the fire to listen to Pippiloette tell his tale. He stood to do it.
The youth and I tracked the northers on their way home,
Keeping our distance, unseen by them,
For two days, tracking by night and sleeping by day,
And we were faster than they were,
And on the second night we stopped in a good ridge hole,
A place I had used before, a good lookout.
But we both fell asleep, and in the dawn after first light
I woke to the knowledge that men were nearby,
And they were on us before I could wake Loon,
And as they seized him I slipped under a boulder like a marmot,
And had to stay silent so that they would not know I was there.
All my regular nooks have tucks,
And so should yours if you travel alone,
If you are a person who needs sleep, even just a fist now and then.
After that I followed them from a day’s distance,
Only spotting their scouts when they made their rearguard inspection,
Late every afternoon. The northers are not very careful that way,
Because they don’t believe any people would dare follow them,
And are only checking for lions and bears.
So I followed them north to the big river running west
At the bottom of that great plain,
I slipped through the marsh grass
And through willow brambles where I never stepped on the ground,
And yet never made a sound or caused any branch to move,
So quick and sure am I.
And I saw them on the other bank of that river,
And saw them head north from there.
A bluff standing over a bend in the river
Gave me sight of them far away,
Headed north and west to their home place.
Out that way some hills plunge into the great salt sea,
And above and behind those hills is a higher world,
A great windy ice that covers everything north of those hills,
Except for the great salt sea.
This ice is sometimes better to cross than the land under it,
Being smooth and not a place animals go,
Except for the great white bears, and they never go far from water.
Up on the white heights you can run for days without a care for danger,
Except for cracks in the ice so big they would swallow a man,
But these can be seen and avoided.
They who took Loon live at that meeting of ice and land and water,
They call themselves the jende, meaning the people,
As ignorant packs often do.
Thorn said,—Could you lead us to them?
—I can describe the way, Pippiloette said,—in a way you can’t miss. I myself have to go home now.
The people of Wolf pack talked it over. Schist and Ibex didn’t say much, but indicated that they were not interested in taking on the northers for a wife that had been the northers’ to begin with, nor for anyone who might have gotten involved with her. The younger men, Moss and Hawk and their friends, spoke with more heat, because they missed their friend, but really, they didn’t want to go either. As they urged Schist to act they tried to suggest they were the ones needed at home, to do their part in the pack’s work. There was even some truth to this.
Thorn wandered away from the fire, down to the riverside and its view of the sky to the north. It was late; Two Valleys had tipped on its side, and the Ladle was pouring its contents back onto its curving handle.
Later still Thorn returned to camp and went to Heather’s nest. He sat by her little fire and warmed his hands. All her helper girls were asleep in their caribou blankets, faces turned to the fire. Heather eventually creaked over and sat down beside him. For a long time neither of them spoke.
—I’m going to go get them, Thorn said finally.
—No.
—Yes.
Heather made a little snort.—We need you here.
—We need them too.
Heather said nothing. She was the one caring for Loon and Elga’s child.
—I’ll be fast.
Heather regarded him for a long time.—Is Pippiloette going with you?
—No.
—But you’ll need help.
—Maybe so.
Heather said nothing.
Thorn said,—Is that old one you cured still hanging around? What was his name?
—Click, Heather said.—I call him Click. It’s like the sound he makes for himself. She made a clucking sound by pulling her tongue away from the roof of her mouth.—That’s the way he says it. Yes, he’s around. Up at Hill In the Middle. He visits with me when I go there looking for hellebore.
—Will you help me find him? And ask him to come with me?
She stared at Thorn and he let her. Finally she said,—Why him?
Thorn shrugged.—He’s strong.
She kept staring at him.—And he’s the only one who will go with you.
—That too. But he’ll be good. He’s stronger than any of them.
He went to Pippiloette and said,—Tell me where they are. Show me.
They went to the sand bank by the bend in the river. Pippi scuffed smooth a patch of the sand, and first made a very clear copy of the festival meadow and its surrounding hills, piling up ridges of sand with his bunched fingers and using some pebbles to indicate peaks. He was one of the best bird’s eye makers at the eight eight, and when he had finished shaping the festival area, he continued by shaping the sand to the north of that, showing rivers crossing first steppe and then a broad valley running east to west. North of that, right against the sea’s edge, drawn with a curving line, were some low hills, and among these hills Pippi stuck a stick.
Thorn nodded. It was a long way north.
At sunrise Thorn rose and finished packing his sack. When it was full, and he had eaten some smoked salmon and a few handfuls of pine nuts, he went to Heather’s nest.
She was ready, her sack already on her back. Before they left she gave him a little sachet.—It doesn’t work right away. It’s fast, but not immediate.
—I’ll remember, Thorn said, putting the bag in an inner pocket of his coat.
Together they headed out of camp upstream, toward Quick Pass and Hill In the Middle. Heather led the way at speed. Where Lower’s Upper widened and its creek split to go both ways around Hill In the Middle, she stopped at a little cedar grove and whistled a rising note that ended with a triple peep-peep-peep, like a little bird.
After a time a similar whistle floated down on them from the hill. Out of the forest stepped the old one that Heather and Loon had helped when he was hurt. Thorn had visited briefly during the old one’s recuperation in Heather’s care; he had played a little exorcism tune, while pulling from the old one’s throat a mass of spit the size of a toad. So now the old one recognized him, and though it was clear he was surprised, he did not look particularly alarmed. Thorn bobbed his head in the way the old ones had, and made the little roop roop sound that the old ones used when they were trying to locate each other in the forest, sounding just like loons locating their companions when they came up from an underwater swim.
Click repeated the sound.
—A loon to find a loon, Thorn said to Heather,
who ignored him and spoke in a slow voice to Click. Click cocked his head to the side and seemed to understand her, though for the most part she used the pack’s ordinary words for things.
The old one’s face was hairy. His beard, hair, and thick eyebrows all tangled together to a mat like the winter shag of a bear. The skin of his cheeks and forehead and nose was as pale as a mushroom; his nose was big and beaky. His irises were dark brown, the whites of his eyes bloodshot. He stared with a fixity that reminded Thorn of old Pika. Around his neck hung a leather thong with three lion fangs tied to it. He was not quite as tall as Thorn; burly in the chest, short-legged, with a slight limp. His head was long, front to back; it was to a person’s head as a cave bear’s was to a forest bear’s. Under his smoky smell there was a musk like a muskrat’s. He carried a spear, and had a big hide bundle slung over his left shoulder. He wore marten and fox furs, and bearhide boots, and looked thoroughly capable, indeed almost like any other woodsman. And there were woodsmen out there who had forgotten how to talk. Still, this one was stranger than a woodsman. The old ones were old.
Now to Heather he made a little honk of assent, onk, onk, clearly a kind of yes, with a fixed look on his face that suggested he was not really sure what he was assenting to, but would find out in good time. Good-natured, perhaps; and yet one didn’t want to run into more than one of them when out alone. Somewhat like bears in that respect too. Bears were said to have been people in the old time, before Raven stuck their coats to them by mistake. Maybe the old ones were bears that hadn’t gotten the coats.
Heather spoke a mix of old one and human.—Thorn good, oop oop, go look for Loon. Then a series of clicks.
Click nodded.—Onk, he began, and then clicked away for a while.
Heather replied with more clicking sounds.
She turned to Thorn.—He’ll go with you and help. He knows you’re going north to the ice, to save Loon and the girl.
She clicked at Click, who smiled fearfully, Thorn felt, and then nodded once more.—Tank oo, he said, something he had learned when they healed him.
—No, thank you, Thorn said, and then, to Heather:—How do I say go?
—Hoosh, she said, with an outward flick of the hand.
Thorn nodded and tried it. He looked Click in the eye.—Hoosh, he said, and waved to the north, over the Hill In the Middle. Then the pack’s word for it: skai. Possibly in this way he could teach the old one some more of the pack’s tongue.—Skai, hoosh, skai.
—Onk, Click said again. Then:—Food. With a wave up Hill In the Middle.
Thorn nodded.—Good idea. Go get food.
Click looked for reassurance at Heather, who clicked to him. He slipped away into the trees.
Thorn and Heather stood there waiting for his return.
Finally Click reappeared through the trees, the bundle over his shoulder bigger than before.
Suddenly Heather clutched Thorn’s arm.—You’d better come back. We need you.
—I know. I’ll come back.
—As soon as you can.
—It’ll be two months or not at all.
They shared a glance, and Heather let go of his arm.
—Hoosh, she said to Click.—Skai. Go with Thorn, do what he says.
The two men traveled fast. It was the fourth month, and the days were now longer than the nights, and getting longer fast. Suncups dimpled the snow on south-facing slopes. In the mornings the snow was so hard that they could almost run on it, and on the north-facing slopes they could slide down on their boot bottoms.
Around the black leads of open water in the river surfaces, it was obvious that many creatures had passed by. Every track on the snow had melted out to three times its original size, so that it looked like they passed through a country of giant animals.
The first part of their trip simply repeated their caribou trek, so Thorn walked and slid as hard as he could all day long, and on the nights around the full moon, continued on till midnight. The snow-blanketed hills glowed in the moonlight such that one could see almost as if by day, though moonlight drained the colors away. But one did not need color to walk. Several times during their night hikes they saw big cats, and when they were trailed one night by a big cat with tufted ears, Thorn shouted at it once to let it know it was being watched. The old one’s presence seemed to keep the cat and indeed all animals at a greater distance than they would have kept from Thorn by himself. It might just have been that there were two of them.
Thorn watched Click when he took the lead, watched the way he hiked and how he looked around. Click crossed ground fast, and yet did not appear to be pushing himself very hard. His feet never stumbled, and his boots looked as good as anyone’s, their sinew stitching covered with some kind of gum. He hummed a little to himself as he walked, and made little clicking noises, so that he sounded somewhat like a cicada or grasshopper.
When Thorn made a little fire after they stopped, at the coldest part of the night, Click sat close by it, arms out to gather in its warmth, and always mewing and clucking. He had things to say to himself. Thorn sat looking at the flames, listening. From time to time the old one would make a quick double click to get Thorn’s attention, then point to things and make the same sound. Thorn would say the name of the thing, and Click would open his mouth and twist his lips, tilt his head, as if on the edge of repeating the word; and yet in the end would not.—Roop, he would say instead. It was almost precisely the loon’s little hello on surfacing in a bay, alerting companions. Thorn could only shake his head in reply, and either repeat the word requested, or say roop himself, or remain silently watching the fire. Thorn spoke, the old one spoke, but they did not share a language. One night Thorn played his flute, and the old one whistled the tunes after him, and then continued as Thorn began again, but offset, and so making a round. That was the best conversation they had.
Click always fell asleep while their fire was still burning, so Thorn would dry anything of his own that might have gotten wet during the day’s walk, then look into the fire until gray films fluttered over the orange glow of remaining embers, and then lie back in his furs and watch the stars wheel the rest of the way to morning. When he got sleepy he would play a little night song on his flute, and when this roused Click, Thorn would mime keeping an eye out, and Click would click twice, and Thorn would fall asleep almost between the first click and the second, and wake only when the sun cracked the eastern horizon.
Once Click woke him with a very light tap from the base of his spear, and when Thorn sat up, gestured at him to stay still, then slumped forward and mimed a stalking cat to perfection. Thorn picked up his own spear and spear thrower and readied to throw, then rose to his feet, listening all the while. He never heard or saw the beast, and after a while Click wiped his pale face with his pale hand and gave Thorn a look that was perhaps meant to express relief, although his great brow with its perpetual frown was not well suited to doing that. They sat back down to pack their things and drink from their bags of water, and press on.
Out on the broad open land of the steppe it was possible to lope along and really cross ground. They both used their spears to push themselves along at a pace just short of a run, and so they made much faster time than the whole Wolf pack could ever have achieved. The important thing was to stay on the great rock plates of the plain, which in places lay one after another, only slightly broken by flat-bottomed muskeg channels. In the mornings it was easy, because they could walk over even these channels, the snow in them was so hard; after midday it softened, and step-throughs became more frequent. Click was so heavy he plunged thigh deep where Thorn would scarcely sink to his ankles. Under some snow patches it was possible there were hidden melt ponds, so in the afternoons it was best to stay on the rock slabs. Click called these slabs burren, it seemed, humming the word as they hurried over it:—Burren, burren, burren, burren.
North, then, at speed, and with the sun at their backs. They were a fast team. On the fifth day they came to the festival grounds, looking ve
ry strange under the snow, but it was definitely the place, all shrouded in suncupped white. By now all their journey’s habits were set, and they seldom bothered to try to speak to each other, as there was no need.
Thorn had occasionally consulted a piece of birch bark he had brought with him, on which he had drawn a version of Pippiloette’s bird’s eye view. Now they were moving into what for Thorn was new land, and the bark drawing thus became their only guide.
The river Pippiloette had indicated as the way to head north beyond the festival grounds was still frozen hard, and they could hurry down its discolored snow surface, poking ahead of them with their spears as they walked. This far north it was still cold even at midday, and the ice on the river still thick and strong. What few leads they passed they welcomed as chances to drink, for in such a land of snow and ice, water itself was scarce. And they were still far south of their destination.
The best response to the growing cold of the days was to hike hard, and they did that, and then huddled around little fires if they could find the wood, or over Thorn’s fat lamp if they couldn’t. Twice they passed tributaries of their river that were almost as big as it was.
On the third day north of the festival grounds, there came a moment of choice for Thorn. Almost any north-trending valley they now came to might be the one Pippiloette had indicated they should take, as far as Thorn could tell by his birch bark sketch. So with nothing to distinguish them, he took the first big one they came to.
This valley resembled the land surrounding the ice caps west of the Urdecha. There were fewer trees, and they were stunted and gnarled. People had used them; they had few dead branches, and many had been chopped down waist high, and had regrown above the cuts. Thorn and Click had to burn fat and dung on more and more nights, unable to find enough wood for their fires.