by neetha Napew
But mostly, in the last of the days of light, there is ... mammoth hunting.” She paused. “Would Torka hunt mammoths in the last of the days of light?”
“Torka will not hunt mammoths in days of light or darkness.” The answer was what she wanted to hear. She lay quietly in his arms, her hand continuing to stroke him. “Navahk will be angry if Torka does not hunt. He will say that it is a bad thing for his people. Supnah will agree. He will make you hunt.”
“No matter what Torka does, or does not do, Navahk will always say that it is a bad thing for his people. Supnah will always agree. But no man will ever make Torka hunt mammoths.”
Her hand paused, lay open over his heart. She moved closer, her bare body suddenly tense against his. “Navahk has looked at me again. Always he looks at me. Awake or asleep, even now, in Torka’s arms, Lonit sees his eyes and knows that if she stays within Supnah’s band, Navahk will have this woman behind Torka’s back. Again and again he has said that this will be so, and if Torka tries to keep her, Supnah and his men will turn upon him like wolves turn upon any member of their pack who breaks favor with the head wolf! They will drive him away or kill him. And without Torka, Lonit’s spirit will not want to live!” She pressed even closer, trembling against him. “Sometimes in the dark this woman dreams of the faraway land of grass that lies between the Mountains That Walk. She dreams of game walking into the face of the rising sun. She dreams of a land that is forbidden to Supnah’s people, and she wishes that Torka would lead her there, beyond the end of the world, away from Navahk and out of a band that is not a good band for us.”
Her words startled as much as pleased him. Until this moment he had been hesitant to share his decision to leave the band with her, knowing that when the time came, she would follow him, but not without apprehension and certainly not without regret. “Lonit would leave this band?”
“Lonit would leave it.”
He moved to kiss her, in the way of the People—an exhalation of the breath of his life into her nostrils. She drew it into herself and, with open lips, returned it to him with one of her own. Her arms reached to embrace him. Her hands moved like a warm summer wind over his back. Her touch roused fire within his loins as she opened herself to him, eagerly melding the heat of her passion with his. Heat became flame.
Together they were one, burning wild like a summer grass fire until the fusion of their passions became molten, surged, and glowed, cooling at last and sweeping them away into the warm black river of exhausted sleep.
They awoke in the thin blue light of dawn and lay joined in each other’s arms at the edge of the river of sleep, listening to the sound of Summer Moon sucking at a sleeping lana’s breast and to the dry clacking of bones as Aliga, who was already up and dressed and out of the shelter, gleaned re burnable fragments from the fire circle and tossed them onto a skin in which they would be wrapped and carried to the next camp.
Torka propped himself onto an elbow and looked down at his woman lovingly. Several strands of her long hair lay across her face. He reached to draw them tenderly away. Smiling, she arrested his hand, drew it to her lips, and kissed his palm. Then, suddenly, her smile vanished, and she hurled herself upward, throwing her arms around him, holding him desperately. “Lonit is Torka’s woman. Always and forever.”
Her heart was beating like that of a terrified bird caught within a snare net. Gently he put his hands upon her shoulders and held her away from him so that he might look into her face. “Always and forever,” he said, wanting her to see the affirmation in his eyes. He drew her close, loving her more in this moment than words could ever say. “Lonit would not be afraid to walk the world alone with Torka, with only mute, mindless lana to help her with Summer Moon? To be without the protection of a band again?”
She held onto him as though he had just pulled her from an icy river and she was terrified that if she relaxed her grip, she would surely fall into it again and be drowned. “Lonit is afraid now! There is more danger to us here, within this band, than we ever faced alone upon the open tundra!”
“Lonit speaks Torka’s thoughts.” She relaxed instantly. Releasing her grip, she looked at him with hopeful incredulity. “It is so?”
“It is so. From this day Torka walks with Supnah’s people no more!”
The band made no move to stop him. They did not even ask him in which direction he would go. They watched as he helped his women break their encampment and ready their belongings for transport. Only Naiapi came forward to help Lonit in a poor pretense of friendliness.
Wallah, standing with her little daughter, Mahnie, puckered her lips as though she had just eaten something sour. “Look at that. Glad to get rid of the stranger’s woman, Naiapi is. Now she’ll be free to look hungry eyed at the magic man whenever his brother isn’t around!” When Mahnie grimaced and snapped her head hard to the left, Wallah’s round face blushed as red as an autumn bearberry, and she silently cursed her own thoughtlessness; two other little girls sat in the shade of her lean-to, playing with dolls made of leftover fragments of skins from her sewing bag. She had invited the girls to play with Mahnie’s dolls, and there they sat: Ketti, Stam’s little one, and Pet, daughter of Naiapi. Ketti, as bright as a polished bone bead but not nearly as pretty, had clapped a grubby little hand across her mouth to stifle her giggles. Pet, as pretty as her friend was bright, stared at Wallah with hurt puzzlement upon her face.
Wallah tittered, trying hard to sound innocent of her slur against the child’s mother. “And don’t we all cast a glance at Navahk when our men aren’t around! As handsome as the first sunrise at the end of the time of long dark is that one. Perhaps someday he will choose one of you girls to warm his bed skins, eh? What an honor that would be!”
Little Pet’s dirty face went as blank as a moss-haired doll as she threw the lichen-stuffed figure of skins onto the ground and, rising, fled to her own fire circle. “She is afraid of the magic man, Mother!” said Mahnie in the tone of an adult reprimanding a child.
“Look!” instructed Ketti, her small eyes wide as Karana burst from Supnah’s lean-to, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he strode across the encampment, Aar at his side, and paused before Torka. “There’ll be trouble now,” whispered the girl. Beside Wallah, Mahnie protectively clutched her doll to her skinny little chest.
“Karana will go with Torka!” the boy announced.
Supnah, standing with arms folded across his chest, stoically observing Torka’s preparations for departure from the band, frowned. “Karana will walk with his own people.”
“Hrmmph! Torka’s people are Karana’s people!” replied the boy coldly.
From beside Supnah, Navahk’s smile had never been broader or more malicious. “All three of them. What an impressive band!”
Torka had been tightening the thongs that held his antlered stalking cloak to his pack frame. He straightened. No wonder the magic man smiled! The look on Supnah’s face was appalling. Once again the headman was shamed before his people; his son preferred to walk off in to the unknown with a stranger rather than stay within his own band.
Torka fixed his gaze upon Karana, and as he spoke, the words half choked him. But he knew that Supnah was so engorged with jealous hatred that he might well send the boy off and then, when his anger cooled, pick up his spears and come after Torka to kill him and the boy. And then Navahk would have Lonit. So he spoke the hated words and put such strength and command in them that all who heard them winced and took an inadvertent step back from the anger he was directing toward the headman’s son. “What sort of boy is this who tells a man what to do? Has Torka asked Karana to come with him?”
Karana blinked, startled, confused, and dismayed all at once. “I—“
“No! Torka did not ask Karana! Nor would he have him! This is Karana’s band! These are Karana’s people! Torka has stayed with them long enough. It is time for him to take his women and child and walk his own way, but not with Karana!” He turned his gaze to Supnah. “Why does this boy hover in Torka�
�s shadow like a gnat on a summer day? This man has brought him to his people. Now it is time for Supnah to swat him into place so that he remembers always that he is a headman’s son who must show respect to his people and to their traditions!” Then, to the boy again: “Go! Take your place at your father’s side!”
Karana was so shocked by Torka’s hostility that he could not react to it. His hand reached to his shoulder, remembering the night on the tundra when Torka had been so angry with him that he had shoved him down. But that had been between the two of them. This was different. Now he had made a display of his anger for all to see. The boy’s face burned with shame, but only when Torka shouted “Go!” once more did Karana obey.
For three days Torka led his little band north, then east, toward the Mountains That Walk, avoiding the barrens through which they had come with Supnah. With Sister Dog and the pups at her heels, Aliga walked with them, for although Torka had given her the opportunity to stay, without a man to hunt for her, she would surely have starved in the lean, dark days of winter.
It rained on the fourth day and again on the fifth. The rain beat in Torka’s heart. He missed Karana and brooded over the way they had been forced to part. Perhaps when the boy became a man, he would understand that Torka had acted for the good of all.
In a sodden camp, while Aliga, lana, and the baby slept, Torka listened to dire wolves howling in the distant hills and briefly wondered if he had done the right thing.
“Those wolves,” said Lonit, “are more constant and trustworthy companions than the ones we left behind who walked upright on two legs.”
“And Karana?” She heard the longing in his voice and shared it. “He will live in this woman’s heart forever.”
Restless, he stood in the rain, looking eastward, thinking: If Karana truly has the gift of Seeing, see now into this man’s heart. Know to what land Torka would lead his people and come to us there. Come to the river of grass that runs between the Mountains That Walk. Come to the end of the world to be a son to this man again.
“Come.” Lonit’s whisper startled him. Her hand rested gently on his forearm, drawing him back into the shelter of the lean-to. “This woman and this man will make a new son.”
And so they traveled for many days under clearing skies, with Aliga seining for fish in rain-swollen creeks and Lonit hunting beside Torka with her four-thonged bola of braided sinew, with weights contrived of the strange shells of stone that they had gathered in a far land.
The tundra was adorned with summer color by the time they reached their destination and made camp amid mountain avens, heather, and flame weed in the high, bony foothills that Torka remembered. Night was little more than twilight now. Mammoths called to one another within deep, ice-gouged canyons. And into one such cleft in the bare bones of Mother Below, Torka led his women through familiar corridors of stone, higher and higher, until, at last, with the dogs panting at their side, they reached the crest of a wide, black ridge and looked down at the end of the world, at the Corridor of Storms, at the river of grass that ran toward the face of the rising sun for thousands of miles between the soaring, glistening blue walls of mountains that towered two miles high.
These were the Mountains That Walk. This was the end of the world. And as Torka led his people into it, the dogs ran forward, alerted to the barking of one of their own kind, and Torka paused to see a small, fur-clad figure walking toward him with a spear in his hand.
It was Karana.
He was smiling. “What took you so long?” he asked. “This boy and his Brother Dog have been waiting many days to be reunited with their father.”
PART II.
CHILD OF MIST,
MOUNTAIN OF FIRE
They ran together against the wind, into the high, tangled refuge of the glacier-ridden mountains where they had always found safety from the beasts before. But there would be no safety for them now. They were alone, a mother and a child, and although they were well into the mountains, the beasts were still following, matching them step for step, climbing out of the tundral lowlands like a howling, yipping pack of blood-maddened dire wolves.
The mother stumbled. She gasped against the pain of a wound that she had managed to conceal from the child until now. Blood bubbled at the back of her throat. Welling from her thorax, it filled her mouth and seeped in rivulets from the corners of her lips.
The child smelled the hot redness of it. It stared, startled, its gray eyes wide with disbelief. Bending close, it mewed with concern and tenderly reached to wipe the blood away.
The mother stayed the gentle, caring hand. There was no time for tenderness. The beasts were closing on them. She forced herself to rise, spat out a mouthful of blood, and pulled her child on.
And on. Higher into the mountains, deeper into the familiar labyrinthine canyons that cleft the sprawling, glacier straddled range. The air was cold. Gray and bitter with the scent of ice and shadows, it was nonetheless sweet to the mother’s pain-ravaged senses, for it was the smell of home. Now she took comfort in the knowledge that the way she had chosen was proving too difficult for the beasts. The distance between prey and predators was increasing. As she had hoped, the beasts, being creatures of the open tundra, were intimidated by the soaring walls of stone and ice across which she led her child with the sure, fleet-footed abandon of a mountain ewe.
At last, light-headed from pain, exhaustion, and loss of blood, she paused and looked back from the spine of a bare, precipitous ridge. Beneath wide, prominent brows, her pale eyes squinted against the sun’s glare. Although each ragged suck of breath seared her senses, her mouth curved into a smile of satisfaction. She could see no sign of the beasts. Far below, the vast, rolling tundral hills lay awash in the green gold glow of spring. Suspended between the earth and the savage blue of the cloudless Arctic sky, a tera torn shrieked as it spread its huge, condor like wings and rode the wind into infinity.
Upon the heights the wind was a constant tide sweeping across the mountains from the north. The mother breathed in, tensing against pain as she held the wind captive, then released it slowly through her nostrils and analyzed every cold, invisible fiber of it. If the beasts were still close enough to pose a threat, the wind would tell her; she would smell the warm, ochre odor of their soft, oiled flesh. Her belly would turn, as it always did, at their rank brown stink.
Beside her the child sighed with exhaustion and leaned into her powerfully muscled, gray-furred limb. A strange, bewildering weariness was filling. her Her heart was beating erratically as, with her free hand, she stroked the head of her little one, soothing it. The wind bore no discernible scent or sound of the beasts; her touch conveyed this to the child. It relaxed at her side, comforted by the knowledge that, somewhere at the base of the ridge, the beasts had abandoned the chase. Mother and child were alone upon the mountain now, safe from prey that had unexpectedly become predacious and nearly home from a hunt that had gone so terribly, unpredictably wrong.
She shivered. Her memories were misted now, bitter, recalling a time when the child was but an infant .. . when she had first learned what the beasts and their flying sticks could do. Visions filled her head.. .. Howling beasts driving her family ahead of them into a dead-end canyon with cold stone walls through which they could not flee .. . flying sticks and yipping beasts and crying babies and blood .. . being pushed hard against the wall as the dead fell against her and the dying screamed .. . her mate somehow pulling her and the child away from the carnage, through a narrow fissure in the stone that scraped their bodies raw as they forced their way through it and into the dark heart of the mountain.
The sound of death had followed them as they went on until the mountain turned to ice beneath their probing feet. Suddenly the ice gave way, and they fell into rushing water so cold that it was fire against their scraped and bleeding skin. She had held onto the child, and her mate had held onto her, and together they were swept away through underground corridors of absolute blackness, into the roaring channels of a river that ran
beneath the glacier.
Gradually the world had turned gray, then blue as the river carried them into the light of day to a strange land, far away to new hunting grounds. To a new range of mountains where, after many days of sun and many nights of endless dark, her mate died and their child grew strong.
They wintered with bears and voles and marmots in the deep, sheltering, wind-protected canyons of the mountain, sleeping away the time of the long dark, dreaming of the return of the great herds upon which they would feed through the days of endless sun.
But with the herds came the beasts with their flying sticks. In the skins of the animals that they killed and ate, the beasts hunted in packs like dogs and wolves. The mother and child had watched them from the heights, curious and amazed as they surrounded entire herds of musk oxen and killed them to the last calf. Working together, they drove bawling, panicked herds of bison and caribou over obstacles of their own devising and then slaughtered every animal that fell to injury. Like lions, they dragged their prey away from the killing site; unlike lions, they fed upon only a portion of what they killed and left the rest for scavengers.
And so it was that she and the child, along with wolves, wild dogs, leaping cats, and foxes, began to follow the beasts across the summer tundra to feed upon their leavings. And when they were careless or abandoned their weak and young to die, she fed upon them, as her kind had always done; only now their meat was the sweetest meat of all to her, and when she ate of it, she remembered the way her band had died and how she had been warned long ago that wherever her kind lived, the beast would either run from them or seek them out and kill them with their flying sticks.. ..
