After two days up the bare valley, they crossed a pass and found another valley that led downhill in the same northerly direction, and two days farther along, this valley debouched onto a broad plain tilted east to west, just as Pippi’s map said there would be. The plain was covered with muskeg and head-high forest, mostly larch and alder swamps, and cedar brakes. It was not easy country to cross, and inevitably they found themselves following animal trails, marked on the land by all the animals who had crossed the plain looking for the easiest way.
—When the way is hard the trail comes clear, Thorn announced to the world every time he ran into one of these animal trails. The trails came and went with baffling frequency. Often they found one only after thrashing through brush for a fist or longer, so they were very welcome, even if they were only deer trails, sure to disappear soon. Each time, Thorn would repeat the old saying, which Pika had repeated often.
—Way har, trail clar, Click said once when he was leading and came on a trail.
—Yes, very good, Thorn said.—Thank you.
—Tank oo.
On the second afternoon crossing the plain they came to its river, now a flat white walkway. Thorn had never seen a river so wide, and was grateful they could walk across it. If the people of this pays managed to rope a raft between riverbanks as far apart as these were, it would be a real accomplishment.
They walked on, north from the frozen river. Thorn often consulted his birch bark map, though it was of little use; in the part indicating this region it was almost bare of features, and he could not recall Pippiloette talking about how many days’ walk it took to get from the big river to the ice people’s hills.
They found out by walking: three days. At the end of the third day, low hills rose over the northern horizon of the snow-blanketed steppe. The next day the foot of the hills hove over the horizon. Then the tops of the hills separated into two lines, the lower one dark and bumpy, the higher one straight and white. Those hills were overtopped by ice from the north, just as Pippiloette had described. They were getting close.
Thorn turned to the northeast then, and in an alder brake made a little shelter for them to hide in. He started a fire and made it as small as possible, fanned what little smoke was rising from it to disperse it. After they had eaten he let the fire die down, and they lay through the night by the cooling bed of embers. In the morning, when the snow was hard, they walked fast north, right into the hills.
The little ravines between these hills were all filled with boot tracks and footprints, and even wide trails beaten into the old snow. And the little trees in the ravines, and on their walls, were often chopped off. They were near someone’s camp, no doubt about it.
Thorn said to Click,—These are the people who have taken Loon and Elga. We have to come on them without letting them see us. I want to watch them for a while to see how they live. Then we will raid them and take Loon and Elga back.
—Roop, Click said.
The hunger months passed without hunger. Loon feasted on the jende’s scraps and watched them eat luxuriously as they cheered on summer, which they clearly wanted, though they did not need it like the Wolf pack did, backwards though that seemed. Maybe that was why they lived here. Freeze for ten months of the year, and in the other two months drown in mud and mosquitoes; but always enough to eat, and more than enough. This might also explain all their food prohibitions, so many more than Wolf pack’s: they had enough food to be picky about it. Their women were not to eat many things, some only when pregnant, others all the time: otter, lion, mammoth, musk ox; in short, the women said with certain looks, all the best meats. Young people were not to eat the parts of animals that looked like humans in their old age, such as sagging elg jowls or rhino lips. Never eat marmot meat, never hunt the unspeakable one. Don’t drink too much water or it will make you slow. On and on it went, far beyond Loon’s understanding. Eating only the least-favored foods dulled him to the distinctions they were making on the higher platforms of the shelter, up there in the warmth. They kept the captives cold to keep them stupid, he realized one dismal night when Badleg was throbbing more than usual.
One time near dusk Loon was sent back out to get more frozen fish from the platform. He was allowed to go by himself now, because there was no reason not to. He wasn’t going anywhere. He knew the jende had seen this in him, and it gave him a little pleasure to contemplate it as an artifact, like one of his carved sticks, or the wall paintings back home, still so clear in his eye if he thought about them. Sometimes he thought about them on purpose, to get away from the jende at moments when they might be inspecting him. Red bear, black bison.
And so when they sent him out alone to fetch something, or take a meal’s refuse out to the midden down the hill, in a snow mound that in summer would melt, carrying all the refuse into the river and out to the great salt sea, he continued to try to take something useful from the house and hide it in his marmot tuck in the boulder field under the hill east of camp. There were twentytwenty boulders at the foot of this hill, and the biggest had rolled farthest. In this great shatter no one would find his tuck.
His runs to his boulder and stashing of stolen things, followed by his return to camp, not to mention the completion of whatever chore he had been sent out to do, all happened so fast, with his heart beating so hard, that only in these moments was he awake as of old. These times felt so rushed and strange that leaving the house became like jumping into a dream.
Then back into the warmth of the big house, breathing slowly and with care, each breath crafted to show a calm spirit. And in fact the breathing helped make it so. Asleep on his feet, just another cold captive.
One time he was sent out with the night bucket to empty it down at the shitting field, another snow-covered space that would melt out of their world come the thaw, and he saw Elga coming back from the same destination, an empty bucket in her hand.
They stopped in their tracks, looked around. They were alone. Loon approached her, his free hand extended.
—We can’t let them see that I know you, Elga reminded him sharply.—They’ll kill you.
—I know. I’m still looking for our moment. Be ready.
—We’ll need snowshoes, she said.
Loon felt his chest expand with a huge in-breath.—So you want to go?
—Yes! she said fiercely. He saw it was true and his throat clamped.
—No more now, she said.—They’ll come looking for me soon. I’m only supposed to go out with others.
Loon nodded.—Be ready. And with a light touch to the arm he passed her and went down to the shitting ground.
Late spring: snow still covered the world, but it was melting everywhere, suncupped everywhere. On some south-facing slopes the suncups were waist deep. In the mornings, when they were frozen hard, it was like walking across upturned blades of rock, and seemed dangerous. Later in the day one could step on the blade edge of a suncup and smash it down just right for walking on it. Later still the snow became so soft and sloppy that it disintegrated underfoot in ways that skidded the walker this way or that, mostly crashing down into the holes of suncups, where sometimes step-throughs took you down right to the hip. Badleg took some horrible blows that way. It was remarkable how in just a fist or two the snow could go from a white rock to a watery mush. After dark it hardened back up fairly quickly also. It was not as fast as air, but fast.
All this time the jende had their platforms of frozen fish and sealskin bags. They had so much fat that they could use it as firewood. And the days were getting longer. Soon the break-up would come, and the earth reappear from under the snows. Summer would be on them.
One night the wind came strong from the west, and in the morning it was blowing so hard that the roar of it was loud even in the big house. Outside the entry tunnel, even the old spring snow was flying east over the ground. They had to block off the entryway to keep air from flying up into the house and blowing it apart like a popped seaweed bladder. Loon went outside with the men dealing
with that, and as they put together a door of poles and hides to cover the entryway they were frequently knocked over by strong gusts, after which the wind sometimes had them sliding like seals over ice. They all laughed, shocked to feel just how strong the wind could be.
Later in the day, when the wind had died down a bit, the same men went back out to see if everything was all right around the camp, and also just to be out in such an extraordinary blow. After making sure camp was secure, they pushed down into the wind to the edge of the great salt sea. The sea ice was gone without a trace; they watched wild broken white waves roar in and surge in a boil up onto the snowy strand, there to launch foam streamers that rolled inland until they snagged on rocks or tufts of grass and were blown to nothingness. All of that was astonishingly loud; they could barely hear each other even when shouting in each other’s faces. Some gusts were so strong that they had to sit down with their backs to the wind, and even then were scooted over the sand by the heaviest buffets. They couldn’t stop laughing.
In the midst of this, one pointed out at something in the waves, and some of the others stood and leaned into the wind to look, their arms outstretched like birds gliding, or holding their parkas onto their heads. Out in the broken waves floated one of the gigantic tree trunks they used as house posts and markers by the shore. Some of their older standing posts had fallen down in this day’s wind, but most withstood it as they had so many previous gales, and held their position without even quivering.
Now a new log was floating in sideways on the white-capped rollers, then crashing onto the beach, where it was nudged and sloshed farther with every big surge, until it lay there like the dead body it was, corpse of a tree bigger than any Loon had ever seen. He wondered what kind of land could be on the far side of the great salt sea, to grow such trees.
Later, when the wind had died, all the jende men and many of the women went out and grabbed ropes they had tied to the new driftwood log, and together they pulled it onto a collection of smoothed branches placed crossways. They pulled the log easier over these branches, and picked up the branches from behind it when they emerged, and moved them to the front. This reduced the pull needed to move it by a great deal. They hauled the log to the line of standing trunks at the back of the strand, and after digging a hole, hauled the broken end into it, and when it tipped in, pulled on the root end with ropes until the log was standing upright among the rest of them at the back at the beach, there to defy the west wind until it too fell down, or was hauled off for use in camp.
One night when the jende were boiling fish in buckets using rocks heated in the fire, and the upper levels of the house were at their hottest, two figures draped in furs leaped up out of the cold trap and stuck people with spears and threw fat on the fire, causing it to splash blazing all over the room. In the screaming and smoke and confusion one of the invaders took up the bucket of boiling water and threw it in all their faces and then onto the blazing fat fire, after which fire ran everywhere. Like otters in a beaver’s house the invaders stuck anyone they passed while dropping back to the ground floor. One of them grabbed Loon by the arm; only then did he see it was Thorn. Beside him the old one Heather had nursed to health was shrieking like a lynx, teeth bared; the inhuman howl cut through the jende’s screams and made the assault even more stunning.
Loon snatched his boots as Thorn hauled him down into the cold trap. They ran out the entry tunnel and Thorn tossed a burning brand back onto an opened bag of fat he had spilled behind him. Soon the whole entryway blazed.
—I’ll get snowshoes for all of us, Loon said.
—Good, Thorn said.—Take Click and get them while I get Elga.
—She’s in the women’s house.
—I know! Get what you have and follow Click, he knows where we’re to meet. I’m going to make it so all the men here are putting out fires for a while.
—They’ve got wolves! They’ll set their wolves on us.
—I know! In fact the captive wolves were now howling.—Fuck the wolves, they can’t stop us.
He ran off toward the women’s house, and Loon led the old one up into the boulder field, found his hole and slipped down into it, handing out the sacks to Click as fast as he could. The opening was smaller than ever as he tried to hurry in the dark, and he didn’t feel he was moving as well as he should have, given how often he had told himself the story of this event. After the first shock it had struck him as something he recognized, so now it was happening as in certain dreams, wherein he watched himself act from above or behind.
They ran back down to the jende’s camp, and Loon watched himself go to the shelter next to the big house where they kept their outside things and grab four pairs of snowshoes and give them to Click, then take up a stone wedge blade and smash it down on the front curve of all the rest of their snowshoes, breaking each cleanly lengthwise. He was startled to watch himself do this, as he had never thought to do it. But it was a good plan, and he smashed the bent spruce frames as if cracking the jende’s skulls. When he was done the old one clicked rapidly and led Loon downstream to a little brake of alder. Thorn was there with Elga; she was draped in a fur cape, but other than that wore only the leggings the jende wore in their houses. The four of them stood there staring at each other, eyes wide. The night was old, the half moon would be setting soon.
—She needs clothes! Loon said.
Thorn said,—We’ll make them out of her cape. For now it will have to do.
—I’ll be fine, Elga said, and took one of the sacks Loon had hidden. She was wearing soft boots.—Let’s hurry, they’ll cut their way out of those houses.
They stuffed two backsacks with what Loon had taken, and Loon put his own boots on, and stuck his arms through the straps of one of the sacks. Elga took the other one. Thorn tied the stolen snowshoes onto Loon’s pack and the old one’s, and then they were off through the night, headed south.
They walked over the frozen snow as fast as they could without actually breaking into a run. When the moon set they had to slow a little, but under the stars the suncupped snow still glowed enough to see it pretty well, and they hurried on at almost full speed. All that night they continued in silence, except for the times when Thorn yelped,—Skai! and they would go hard, running in a kind of wolf lope until one of them would slow down, and then they would all stop running and walk hard again. Across one long descending slope the snow had melted and refrozen so many times that the suncups were flattened out, the hard snow left as slippery as ice. There they stopped to put on the snowshoes Loon had taken. Loon showed Thorn and Click how to tie their boots to the foot platforms. Elga tied hers on, and Loon saw that the snowshoes would give her soft boots some needed support.
Thorn set a pace that the rest of them had to work to keep up with. It got colder as dawn neared, but aside from their noses and ears Loon was warm all through his body, even in his toes and fingers. This could only happen when throwing oneself forward, even breaking into a little run from time to time on level ground or on downhills. Thorn always urged them on by example, and with an occasional look back; to Loon his face was like a slap from a dream, a vision of Otter Man, implacable and intent after killing the beavers in their den and taking one of their women away. The sight sparked Loon, and his body flew after the others without awareness of the effort. It was like a dream and yet he had never been more awake, not ever in his life.
Coming back into himself a little as dawn grayed the eastern sky, he could not help noticing that Badleg had not had a walk this rigorous in many a moon, and was speaking up to voice its protest. He needed a stick, and the first time they passed a lead in a streambed, curving swiftly at a kink in a little gorge, he took a hand blade from his sack and hacked an alder branch that was a bit too short, but otherwise sturdy, and after that used it to lighten all the impacts on Badleg. Being three-legged in such a manner was not as easy as simply walking, but it was worth the extra effort.
When the whole sky lightened to gray, Thorn redoubled his efforts.?
??We have to be out of their sight all day today. I don’t know how much of a lead we got on them, but they’ll be fast.
Loon and Elga could only nod at that. Click threw himself onward with a heavy long tread, puffing hard at every exhale, although it also seemed he would be able to carry on like that for a long time. Loon realized he didn’t know much about the old ones’ abilities. Of course his encounter with them during his wander remained firmly in mind, indeed just the thought of the memory was enough to put an extra thrust in his walking. He had escaped old ones, but he didn’t know what that meant about them. He realized that of all the kinds of animals in the world, this one hurrying beside them was the one he knew least. Of course they were the ones who hid most carefully from people, so maybe it was just that: they didn’t want people to know them.
The jende, however, Loon knew. They were very fast over snow when they wanted to be. Of course every pack’s hunters were fast and could go long; that was part of being a hunter. But the jende, with all their summer treks, and quarrels with their norther neighbors, were both fast and used to the snow. Snow was their home ground, and so anywhere there was snow they were on home ground, and would be faster over it than people from elsewhere. Or so Loon feared.
And they had wolves to set on their prey.
HUNTED
The eastern sky was red, the sky overhead was that gray that would soon reveal itself to be thin clouds or clear sky. Thorn directed them to stop in a depression in the snow that included a little wall of rock they could hide behind. There they remained until the sky was bright with the coming day, a cloudless day as it turned out, and the sun soon to crack the horizon. Thorn directed the others to stay low, while only he looked back to the north, with a patch of fur placed on his head and held out by his hands to each side, so that he would present a mere bump to anyone looking their way. He held himself motionless as he looked. Then he hissed and pulled his head down slowly.