They all knew that ice in this condition would sometimes hang on for days, holding on for fist after fist, day after day, until the break-up finally happened and it all rushed downstream on a violent spate of black water. It was the river’s summer orgasm, a spurt glorious to see. Never before had they cared exactly when it happened. Now, watching it hold despite all, they were in an agony of suspense. Possibly with a river this big, despite all its crashing and snapping, it would take a long time. And now, across the river, far to the northwest, Loon saw dots moving. He pointed them out.
Thorn stopped his dance.—Come on, he said grimly.—Fuck the gods. We have to go.
Loon groaned like the river. He stood and tested Badleg. Still bad. He put his sack on his shoulders, which were sore where the straps ran.
Off they went.
Now their run took them uphill, into the afternoon sun. The glare of the sun’s blaze off the wet snow ahead made Loon squint until his eyes were almost closed. It felt like his whole body was squinting, and he had to push forward into the blast of light.
But they kept their pace. Loon found his way back into his second wind, uphill or not. Badleg felt much better going uphill. Loon put his snowshoes right in the tracks left by Click and Thorn; Click almost always stepped in Thorn’s tracks, so that it almost looked like a single person’s track. When the two sets of tracks separated, Loon began to follow Click’s, as having harder snow at their bottoms; then also, as he began to see why Click had deviated from Thorn’s tracks, consistently keeping to a higher line, he chose that way to smooth his own ascent. It occurred to Loon at one point that he could understand more of Click’s thinking by looking at his tracks in the snow than he ever had by talking with him.
Elga stayed close on his heels. She looked thirsty, and hiked head down, eyes almost shut, fitting her snowshoes carefully into the tracks before her.
Thorn headed for a black hill that popped over the white horizon. As they closed on it, moving more slowly as the snow softened, they could see it was the start of a line of hills that ran south, forming the western ridge of a valley which seemed to be the valley Loon and Elga had come down when the jende had taken them north. It was hard to be sure.
Thorn wanted to run this ridge, so they would stop leaving tracks in the snow. As they got farther south there would be even more snow-free ground, he said, and with luck they would be able to get off the ridge somewhere without leaving any sign, and then keep going tracklessly from there. Loon and Elga nodded and put their heads down again, followed Thorn and Click toward the bare hill.
When they got to the hill’s first rise of rock out of snow, however, it became obvious that the ridge was not going to be as easy to hike on as the snowy plain had been. Even getting onto the ridge in the first place involved kicking steps up steep snow to where it met a ramp of rock that would get them on the ridge. Any extra effort now was difficult to give, and Loon could feel cramps sparking in his calves. But it was crucial to get off the snow, so they grunted and hissed and clicked through the necessary steps. The snow next to the rock was especially rotten; one had to be careful not to crash down into a covered gap. Sometimes one step was all it would take. Eyes burning with sweat, Loon struggled to move up in the slush, which pulsed blackly at the edges of its whiteness.
Finally they stood panting and sweating on the edge of the ridge, with an upward walk ahead, and a prospect behind them that extended all the way back to the big river. Lots of snow back that way, but ahead of them, to the south, there was a lot of black patching the suncupped white. Ah yes: they were almost to the steppes, to the edge of the land they knew, where they could run the ridge trails, and melt into the canyon forests with all the rest of their animal brothers and sisters. They sat down and took off their snowshoes, tying them to the backs of their backsacks.
But Click pointed: there the ice men were, little black dots crossing the snowy plain, having crossed the big river. From here the river was still white and noiseless, although as far west as they could see, it was black. But the jende had gotten across, and were still following them. One thing Thorn pointed out was interesting: the captive wolves seemed to be gone. Either they had been taken back, or they had escaped. Thorn liked that thought. But it was also obvious, watching the little black dots, that the jende were the wolves now, or the hyenas, or ravens, or people; they were any of the hunters who followed prey until it was exhausted, then moved in for the kill. Ravens even led wolves or humans to injured animals they had spotted from the air, to be able to scavenge what was left after the hunters killed and ate it.
Loon had never been hunted in this manner. Possibly none of them had been; although when he saw Click’s face looking back at the jende, he saw that the old one had lived this before, and was not surprised. Click hummed something short to himself, regarded Thorn and Elga and Loon curiously. He made a gesture with his head: time to go?
Thorn continued to stare at the dots, shading his eyes with a hand. Finally he heaved a big breath in and out.
—Let’s see what this ridge can do for us. They have to be getting tired too. If they come up the ridge and don’t see us, never see us again, with no tracks to follow, they won’t know where we got off the ridge. They’ll give up.
Click mimed eating, inspected his empty hand.
—I know, Thorn said to him.—Second wind.
—I’ve already had my second wind, Loon said.
Thorn regarded him.—Third wind then. Sometimes it has to happen. And this is one of those times.
He smiled a tight little smile.—This is what we live for! Days like this! So come on.
The broad edge of the ridge of hills was indeed harder in some ways to hike on than the snow had been, but it was good to be off snow too, to have secure footing again. There were still snow patches on the ridge, and big slopes of it below them to right and left, but they tried to avoid them all, wending their way from rock to rock.
The ridge went up and down in the usual way, but always a bit more up than down. Sometimes the ridge edge itself narrowed. Mostly it was a broad broken path of black lichenous rock, twenty paces wide or more, but in places it narrowed to a blade of an edge no wider than their feet, with steep drops to both sides. Loon got down on his hands and knees and crawled along these parts, as he didn’t trust Badleg to hold him. Sometimes the other three crawled too.
Happily the ridge widened as it got higher, and side ridges began to branch down to both east and west, containing steep little kolby canyons that they looked down into as they passed; these were still snow-choked. Thorn wanted to drop into one of them, if it was possible to stay on dry land or gritrime once down, but none of the canyons offered that. They did have trees, however. The avalanche gullies were snowy chutes, but otherwise the canyon sides were getting more and more forested. Under the trees the ground was still snowy, but the creeks were often open black water. Ground in the sun all day was often free of snow, the black ground steaming between the rocks. The steep slopes to each side steamed to a palpable mist as they hiked the ridge looking for a good way down.
Then Click whistled sharply, pointed behind them. They turned and saw that the black dots pursuing them were on their ridge, still well behind, but on the ridge. Thorn cursed them:
May you trip and fall,
Cramp all over,
Shit your guts out,
Turn an ankle and stab yourself
With your own spear in your belly button,
May a lion ambush you,
Lightning blast you to a burnt cinder,
Avalanche bury you three trees deep,
May you lie with the most beautiful woman ever
And have your prong pizzle out and swing there
Like the guts of a speared unspeakable,
and so on as he led them at speed to the next high point on the ridge, where they could drop again and get out of sight. He could spout curses all day without ever repeating himself, as Loon well knew.
Over the knob, out of sight
of the ice men, Thorn stopped to look down a steep headwall into a canyon to the west. The steep slide down looked like it was snow-free ground all the way, although there was a section so steep that they couldn’t see it from above, which was never good. Below that drop, trees furred the cleft of the canyon, which curved down and to the south.
Thorn said,—Let’s get down this while they can’t see us. This looks like it will go.
The other three were willing. The steep section would hopefully be snow-free. It seemed worth trying. It would not do to stay on the ridge; it was beginning to look like the ice men might be faster than they were. And they couldn’t go any faster.
So they started the descent off the ridge. As they dropped, it occurred to Loon that another good thing about this canyon was that it was short, and debouched into a valley trending south, so that they would be able to continue more or less toward home.
As it turned out, the part of the slope that had been invisible from above was a steep field still covered by old snow, suncupped heavily in lines that left many long vertical troughs. The whole slope gleamed with waterdrops, it was so wet and soft in the afternoon sun.
Thorn hesitated at the top of this slope for a time. He edged down, stomped on the highest snow: he stepped right through to the rock below. Soft snow indeed. He got out of the hole by hauling himself back onto the rock, thought about it a while, then sat with a grunt on angled rock and took the snowshoes off the back of his sack, then began to tie them back on his feet.
—We have to get down this, he said.—We’ll leave tracks, if they come to this spot and take a look, but after that we won’t. He gestured briefly downcanyon.
So they sat beside him and tied their snowshoe bindings onto their boots, lashing them down hard. They stood again. Loon bent his knees and felt little crampy pings sparking in his thigh muscles. It was going to be a tough descent.
Loon went last again, and did his best to step down into the snowshoe prints of the other three. They were mostly one set of tracks that all three of his companions had used, sloppily laid over each other, and very deep. Some were thigh deep, and some of these burst under Loon toward their downhill side, forcing him to stop himself from a further slide with an abrupt shift of weight onto his uphill leg. That was Goodleg, thankfully. Actually it would have been better to have Goodleg on the downhill side of him, but the slope was angled such that there was no choice but to traverse to the right as one looked down. Occasionally Thorn had tried to turn left, to carve a little switchback into the slope, but quickly the slope forced him to turn and head down to the right again.
This meant Badleg had to take Loon’s weight on the downhill side, and do the real work. Every lead step down had to be made by Badleg; there was no other way, the land itself forced it. As he continued, step after step, the down step on Badleg began to hurt from the ankle up to the hip, stabbing him so that he wobbled, and could not trust the leg not to give under him. But there was no choice: he had to extend down on it straight-legged, stepping into the uncertain support of the deep smeared snowshoe hole the other three had left for him. He dropped into that pain, put his weight on it and ignored the agonizing little crunch inside his ankle, did his best to quickly move Goodleg down into its higher hole, then use it to lift his weight off his left side. Then he held steady for a moment on Goodleg, taking a few breaths, before committing to the biting pain of the next step down. When the lower snowshoe holes burst under his weight he had to ride down the collapsing snow until enough of it gathered to stop his slide; after that, hopefully the higher line of tracks had not become too high for him to step up into, or he would have to kick an in-between step. When getting back up like this he had to stick Thirdleg into the snow as high as he could reach, to help pull himself up.
He kept on, step after plunging step, the pain from Badleg shooting right up through his pizzle to his gut. The traverse down to the forest by the creekbed was less than halfway done.
Loon began to examine the slope below them during his frequent pauses, wondering if it would be possible to sit down on the snow and slide down one of the vertical gullies of linked suncups. The problem with that was there were big rocks at the foot of the slope, the usual spall of boulders big enough to tumble that far down. The snow was so soft now, just possibly he could dig in with his pole and his snowshoes as he slid down. But it was too steep to try it and see. He might slide too fast to stop, right down onto the rocks. Even if he managed to stop himself in the snow above the rocks, he would then be in a hummocky mare’s nest of bumps and hollows and big boulders. Getting through that mess, or traversing above it, would be just as hard as what he was doing now, maybe harder. And he couldn’t safely slide down there anyway!
He had to stick each left step as well as he could. Step down directly in the hole, then bear down on the pain, make that footing hold if he could; then a quick recovery step onto the right leg, doing everything he could on that side to take all his weight. Step after step, with the penalty for soft snow or a misstep an extra stab.
He was sweating profusely with the effort and pain. He paused from time to time to scoop some of the wettest snow into his mouth, chilling his teeth and the roof of his mouth, briefly wetting the parched dryness rasping in his mouth and throat. He could feel that he was considerably water-short by now, and knew that was part of what was making his legs crampy. When they reached their next source of water he was going to drink till his belly was round. Another six steps, another rest. The suncupped slope blazed. Sweat burned in his eyes, the light burst blackly off the snow; he could hardly see, but there was nothing to see anyway except the snow under him, so it didn’t matter. There was nothing now but snow mashed by the double line of snowshoe prints pulsing under him, coated or filled by blackness. The blackness was strange, because the snow was as white as could be, and yet stuffed with blackness. Watery granules of white in black. Blind though he was, he could still see if the next smush of snow was going to hold him or not. That was all the sight he needed.
Then the snow under Badleg gave way as he stepped down, and he slipped and instantly was sliding on his side down the snowy slope, scraping down so quickly that he couldn’t stop himself with the edges of the snowshoes, couldn’t stick Thirdleg in. He could only try to ride the snowshoes down sideways, try to keep from going any faster. He was headed for a shallow hollow, and he saw it was the best chance he was going to get to stop himself before he ran into the boulders at the bottom, so he tensed himself, waited, and then in the hollow dug in with snowshoes and elbows and Thirdleg, and came to a crunching stop.
He sat there in the snow, gasping for breath, burning with scrapes and cold, sweat pouring down his face. Above him on the slope he could see the mark of his slide, a sloppy trough running straight down to him. Cold and hot, sweaty and trembling, he pushed himself to his feet, using Thirdleg as a support. When he was standing he could see that a gentle traverse would lead him above the boulders to where he could meet up with Thorn and Click and Elga. Elga was calling his name; it came to him that she had been calling him for some time. He waved Thirdleg at them briefly, slowly stomped his way over to them. It was easier than traversing down the slope had been, but Badleg hurt almost too much for him to step on it at all.
When he met them, at the bottom of the slope among the trees at the top of the canyon floor, he collapsed and could not immediately go on.
Thorn stared at Loon as he helped get his snowshoes off his feet. When they had done that he said,—Rest it for a while, but then we have to go.
While Loon rested, Thorn wandered around in the grove filling the head of the canyon, looking among the humps of snow for a spring. As in a lot of kolby canyons, there was indeed a spring near the headwall, although at this time of year the black crease of open water lay at the bottom of a hole in the snow. Thorn had to use all their walking poles to support himself as he knelt, then sprawled, then reached down with his dovekie bag to scoop up some water. When he had a full bag he heaved himself up with
a little prayer, uttered like a curse:—Let me up Mother Earth!
He shared the water with Loon and the others. Elga sat on her fur patch, which she had draped over a fallen log. She drank as deeply as Loon did. He was glad to see that she looked much the same as she had in the northern camp, except her eyes were more bloodshot. Now she had her sack on the front of her snowshoes and was rooting through it for a few small handfuls of nuts. She offered some to Loon, but he had to shake his head; he felt sick to his stomach, and could not have forced anything down.—Later, he promised.
Click was sitting on a snowy log and chomping steadily at a length of dried meat, taking it in chunk by chunk until all of it was gone. He drank a few swallows from Thorn’s bag and gave it back.—Tank oo, he said absently, the way Heather would have. He did not appear to be entirely there with them.
Thorn was completely there, his sunburned red eyes fixed on Loon.—Are you ready? Can you go?
—Let’s see, Loon said, and surged to his feet. He swayed and caught himself on Thirdleg.
—You need two good poles, Thorn said.—Wait there. He took another tour of the copse of trees, returned with a stout branch well over waist high, with a bend at the top end that could be clasped in the hand.—A good walking stick. Put both points down for your left foot, and push up over it. I had to hike for a week with a broken leg, once when I was your age, and after I got used to pushing down on the sticks, it went pretty well.
Loon tried it.—All right, he said. He waited until the others had started, and then followed Elga close.
But it wasn’t all right. With the poles he could take a lot of pressure off his left leg, it was true. But they were moving down this new canyon, and there was a lot of back-and-forthing to be done to get between knots of trees, where sometimes they had to slide down little drops in the snow. The other three glissaded down these, and Loon tried to follow them with one-footed glissades, and succeeded sometimes, but more often fell. And getting back on his feet hurt Badleg no matter what he did. He was panting and sweating with the pain of it.