by neetha Napew
Beyond the pit hut, far away across the cold darkness of the Arctic winter noon, a wild dog barked, and Egatsop tensed, listening. “So it is still there. Yesterday it came close, close enough to trip the snares that we women have set for it. But it is wise and wary. It will take better bait than we have to make it abandon caution in the hope of satisfying its hunger.”
Umak drew his bed furs up about his bony shoulders. He shivered. He knew what she was going to say.
She rocked the sleeping infant. It made small, fretful me wings “It would come for you. Yes. Now, while you are still strong enough to cry. It would come for you. A good sized dog, if properly portioned and prepared, could nourish your people for many days. They would sing praises to you. Your death would serve the band. This woman would be proud.”
“Woman, you will not feed this man’s offspring to wild dogs!”
“The child is Torka’s, not yours, old man!”
“Torka will not allow it!”
“Torka is not here. And even if he were, he would know what this woman knows: He left the encampment before this newborn was old enough to be named. Without a name, it has no life spirit. It only looks alive. If the band moves on in search of new hunting grounds, this woman will need all her strength to carry her share of the traveling burden. Egatsop will not be the only woman to abandon her baby to the spirits. Do not look at me like that, old man. You know I speak wisdom. Egatsop can make more babies only if she is strong. Be glad that I am not so unfeeling as the headman’s woman. Although she said that the spirits took both the soul and the body of that little one, they did not. Teenak herself took the corpse of her newborn. Her family have been eating off it for many days.”
Umak hung his head. He, who had faced down and slain a great white bear in his youth, who had raced down and killed a steppe antelope with his bare hands in his old age, could not bear to listen to Egatsop’s words. What was wrong with him? Why did he feel such loathing and anger toward the woman? She was such a practical creature. Torka was the envy of the men of the band for having won her. She was right in everything that she had just said, right and honest and practical. And strong. Yes. Strong of mind and body. While he was old and weak and not as fit to live as the spiritless suckling whom she held to her breast. She saw his anguish and smiled. Her teeth were small and sharp and even, but it was her words that bit deep. “Go now, old man. Feed your spirit to the winter dark before Torka returns to stop you. Go. Go, and this woman vows that she will suckle this little one as long as there is milk within her breasts. Stay, and this woman vows that what she holds within her arms will be offered as bait for wild dogs. Go. End your shame. And mine. And Torka’s.”
He took no weapons. He took no food. He went out wearing only the clothes upon his back and the boots that he had neglected to remove before lying down to rest. Around himself he draped the heavy bison hide that had served him as a traveling cloak for many years. He did not wear it as protection against the cold. It was something in which to hide his shame.
Beyond the pit hut, in the pale blue light of the aurora borealis, he looked out upon a landscape that was as savage and uncompromising and beautiful as Torka’s woman.
Torka. He could only hope that he was still alive, out there somewhere with Alinak and Nap, even now enroute back to the winter camp with game for all.
But not for Umak. No. He would not eat again.
He made his way through the encampment, past the other little pit huts within which his people sheltered against the rising bite of the wind. No one was outside. He could hear their voices. The sounds of life. But he had put that behind him. The future lay here, with these little families, with Egatsop and her children, and with Torka, if he still lived. He, Umak, was the past.
He accepted the finality of that truth, wondering why it did not come easily. He had always imagined that it would. He had assumed that, if not killed on a hunt, one day he would awake and know that he was old, and after that his spirit would seek release and he would walk out upon that final trek, at peace, as had so many others before him.
But there was no sense of peace within him as he walked on, fighting against the knowledge that he did not want to die. Is this what the others had felt? Rage? Frustration? A terrible sense of betrayal? A young man’s soul trapped within an old man’s body, scratching at his gut, digging in, trying to take control of his tongue and scream: I have lived and loved and hunted and grieved with you for all of my life. I have been your spirit master. I have brought down the great white bear and taught your young men to hunt as only I, Umak, know how to hunt. In starving times, I have shared my food with you, and now can it truly be that there is none for me? Am I to be thrown away like an old bone? Can you not know that, from the marrow of my spirit, my soul cries out for life?
Ahead of him, the figure of a female emerged from the last pit hut of the encampment. It was Lonit. He knew her at once, despite her heavy garments; for although she was not much more than a child, she was already taller than any woman of the band and as strong and gangly as a colt born to the wild horses that ranged the summer tundra.
She had come out of her family’s shelter to secure one of the lashing thongs that laced the hide roof cover tautly over the arching mammoth rib bones of the roof frame. When she saw Umak, she paused, instinctively knowing his intent.
With the wind rising around them, the old man felt her eyes upon him, those unusual eyes that were as softly brown and deeply lidded as an antelope’s, almost totally devoid of the elongated fold of eyelid tissue that was considered to be a mark of beauty among the women and girls of the band. He knew that the skin around one of those strange eyes was black and blue from her father’s latest beating. It was a wonder how the girl had lived to grow up. Since the death of her mother, she had become the focus of her family’s abuse. No doubt it had something to do with her odd appearance. Many said that her father, Kiuk, should never have allowed such an ugly girl to live in the first place; but Kiuk was a fine hunter, an asset to the band, and what he did with his women was his concern. Still, Umak had always felt pity toward the girl. She was a strong, stalwart, uncomplaining child who, for reasons he could never understand, went out of her way to be kind to the very young and the very old. For a moment he was certain that she was going to speak his name, to call him away from his purpose. If she did, she would shatter his resolve and ruin this last act of dignity, thus shaming him forever. But the girl stood motionless in the wind, and the moment passed, and Umak walked past her in silence, committing himself to the final trek. Death awaited him. He would seek it now. For the good of all.
“Where is Umak?” Little Kipu awoke, looking for his great-grandfather. The old man had promised to help him perfect his skill at bone toss; it was a game that grown men played with sticks whittled out of leftover bone fragments for which the women had no use. In all of the band, no man was better at bone toss than Umak.
The little boy frowned. He missed his father. Torka had been gone so long on the hunt. Kipu sat up and rubbed his eyes. His mother had an odd look on her face. Expressionless. As flat as a much-used cooking rock. And as smooth, with all detail worn away after years of marrow bones being rubbed and splintered on their surface. Cooking rocks were pretty things. Glossy. They looked strong, as though they could last forever, but stress them too much or put them too close to the fire, and they would crack. Kipu thought about that as he looked at his mother.
“When will Torka return?”
“Soon,” she replied with absolute certainty.
Kipu’s frown deepened. She sounded certain only because she was not. He had come to know that it was her way when she was afraid. His dark eyes took in the equally dark interior of the pit hut; there was not even enough fat left to burn in the hollow stones that served as lamps. How he wished that winter would end! How he longed for summer!
“Umak has promised to teach me to chase down a steppe antelope,” he confided. “When the time of the long dark is over, Umak has said that Kip
u will be old enough to begin to learn to hunt like a man.”
“Umak has gone to set his spirit free upon the wind.”
Kipu cocked his head. “When will he come back?”
“He will not come back.”
The child stared. He was five, but he had been born and raised among the nomads of the tundra. Far beyond the pit hut, a wild dog howled, and Kipu listened, understanding what his great-grandfather had gone to do, and why. Tears stung the back of his eyes. He adored his great-grandfather. He would miss him more than he had words to say. But he would not cry for him. He was Torka’s son and of Umak’s line. He would have thrust his hand into the fire pit before he would allow himself to cry.
Egatsop watched him, waiting to see tears, a display of weakness; she was relieved when the child sat dry-eyed, stoically staring straight ahead, saying nothing. She knew what the moment was costing him. Against her breast, the infant stirred, and although Umak would have found it impossible to believe, she fought down a wave of tenderness for it that came close to overwhelming her. If she were to be forced to expose this baby, she dared not let herself care for it, lest grief weaken her and make her unable to give her full attention to Kipu and Torka. Torka! She almost called his name aloud with longing. Where was her man? Why had he not returned to her?
Blood. And pain. Torka awoke to these two realities and lay dazed, in agony and confusion. Where was he? Why was he alone? He remembered watching the sunrise, and now it was dark. And cold. The wind was a constant slur of sound coming to him from across the tundra. He listened. For a long while, that was all that he could do. It hurt to move, to think; even breathing was painful. He sucked in shallow little takes of air, as carefully as he would have sipped at liquid if anyone had brought him something to drink.
Thirsty. In a black, aching limbo, his thirst was suddenly more intense than his pain. He lay with his face down, his cheek half-frozen into the earth. His mouth was open. He could taste the tundra. It was salty, and sweet, as though the skin of the permafrost were the flesh of a living being that had been flayed alive and now bled into his mouth.
Blood. Somehow reality was linked to that. And to his pain. And to the fact that he was alone. Through blood-caked lashes, he looked out across the miles, and suddenly it all came back to him.
The mammoth.
The deaths of Alinak and Nap.
And his own death. He remembered his raging charge. With his spear raised, he had run to meet the mammoth head-on. As it had lowered its head, he had leaped forward onto one of its tusks. As it had thrown up its head to dislodge him, he had hurled himself against the beast’s vast shoulder. With one hand curled into its hair, he had held on and stabbed and stabbed until, at last, the monster had pitched him off. He had been hurled up and away as though he were a stone being loosed from a mighty sling. And when he had hit the ground, he had known that he was dead.
But, incredibly, he was alive. He was in too much pain not to be alive. His instincts told him that the mammoth was gone. Why? Why had it not finished him as it had finished Alinak and Nap?
The answer came as he tried to rise, and levering upward with his hands, gasping against the pain of several broken ribs, he looked down at the ground beneath him. What he had tasted had been the flesh of a living being that had been flayed alive. It was the bloodied mass of what was left of Nap. The slowly ebbing warmth of his flattened, mangled corpse had kept the unconscious Torka from freezing to death; the smell of Nap’s blood on Torka’s body had caused the mammoth to assume that Torka, whose body it had inadvertently thrown atop Nap’s” was also dead. Its rage sated, its thick, hairy hide barely pierced by Torka’s stabbings, it had gone on its way.
With the bloodied gore of Nap’s exposed entrails upon his gloved hands, Torka rose and turned away, retching, nearly fainting from pain. Twice in one day, Nap had saved his life—once when Nap was alive, and once when he was dead. When Torka returned to the winter camp, he would make chants of honor to his name. Nap’s woman would be proud in her grief;
Torka would see to that, he returned to the winter camp. The wind was rising. A thin veil of high clouds obscured the light of the aurora borealis. It was a dark, cold world across which Torka began to make his way toward home.
Hours passed. The miles slipped away. He was weak, in pain, and several times he had to stop to rest. A thin, dry snow began to fall at about the same time that he first crossed the mammoth’s tracks. Tramping on, he knew that it was moving ahead of him, following the route that he and Alinak and Nap had taken outward days ago from the winter camp.
Half sobbing, fighting against the pain and weakness that threatened to overwhelm him, Torka hurried on. He knew what was in the mammoth’s mind. Poor, foolish Nap had been right. It was a crooked spirit, and its rage was not spent. It was on the scent of Man. It would stay on that scent until it reached the encampment of Torka’s people. Once there, it would kill them all. Uinak walked alone within the night. He tried not to wonder about how long he had been walking or how far from the encampment he had come; these things should no longer concern him. Yet he knew exactly and could have found his way back to the camp blindfolded and in a snowstorm. His knee ached, but not nearly so badly as he had expected it would; perhaps it was nearly healed after all?
No matter. It is the time of death, not of life and healing. For Umak these things will be no more.
Still, he walked on and wondered at his own stamina, for although he was ancient and starving, he was not tired. He walked in the slow, measured, steady manner of one who moves as easily as he breathes—in the gait of a nomad whose feet have taken him across the world beneath the broad and savage Arctic sky.
He looked up. The sky was filled with clouds. Hard pellets of snow no larger than dust particles stung against his face. He found himself gauging the weather. There would be no storm, but the wind was rising. In a few hours the snow would stop, the sky would be swept clear, and a deep cold would settle upon the tundra. It would be dangerous to anyone not sheltered against it.
Umak harrumphed to himself. Ahead lay the gentle rise of a tundral hillock. It was a scabby, wind-scoured mound, but it would offer a pleasant view across the tundra to a man who sat upon its summit, exposing himself to the wind, waiting to die.
This Umak did. And the wind came, speaking to him of many things: of past hunts and of wives who had shared his pride, of long-dead children, of ... everything but how to die. He was not even cold. It occurred to him that he could strip naked. That would certainly hurry the process, but he could find nothing dignified in the thought of shivering himself into death with his old bones showing under his skin, and all of the spirits seeing that, beneath his clothes, Umak was not the man he once was.
Again he harrumphed. He gathered up his composure and began to chant, to make his life song. The wind would take it to the spirit world. Death would hear it and know that it was time to come. Umak might no longer be able to call down the spirits of the game. But what sort of spirit master would he be if he could not call down the spirit of his own death? He sang and sang. It was an atonal rhythm, a chanting meld of word and vibrations of his throat. He tried to match its resonance to the wind, but could not quite get it right. The chant went on. He ran out of words. Now the song was only sound. It bored him. Perhaps it was boring Death as well? The thought piqued him. He was Umak! What hunter could boast of more daring deeds than he? Death should be impressed. But even the Arctic’s greatest spirit master could only fill a life song with so many stories. How many great bears could a man challenge in one lifetime, or saber-toothed cats, or stampeding herds of giant bison? He was, after all, only a man, despite his extraordinary prowess. What did Death want of him? He could not very well make up stories to extend his life song; that was a taboo that no man would break lest his life spirit be thrown away upon the winds. He thought about it for a while and decided that perhaps Death liked his tales so much that Umak was being urged to repeat them.
Umak did this, several times. Bu
t his stories did not summon Death. They summoned a wild dog instead. It was the same animal that had been lurking around the peripheries of the winter encampment for the last few days. Umak was not surprised to see it now. The dog had been wise enough to avoid the snares that Egatsop and the other women had set for it; no doubt, seeing a lone hunter wandering out of the encampment, the dog had decided to trail him as potential prey.
It was very close to the old man now, a large, wolfish animal with a mask of dark pelage surrounding its light blue eyes. It moved into the wind so that its prey would not pick up its scent. But Umak knew that it was there. Although he did not move but sat cross-legged, hands resting open upon his knees, head upturned to the great, cloud-filled vault of the sky, he knew. And smiled.
You will not sneak up on this old man, Brother Dog. Before you make prey of Umak, he shall break your bones and suck the marrow from them to keep the fire of his own life alive.
He did not speak aloud. Yet somehow the dog understood that it had been threatened. It paused, head down, tail tucked, watching, waiting for the unmoving figure to show the first sign of vulnerability.
Umak was not about to oblige it. He remained as he was. From the corners of his eyes, he saw the dog fold its rear limbs into a seated position. Despite its size, the animal’s disproportionately long limbs and gangling carriage betrayed its youth. It was an adolescent, a young male on its own, perhaps driven out of its pack after unwisely and unsuccessfully challenging the dominant male of the group. Umak did not know very much about dogs. He assumed them to be much like the more commonly seen wolves: social animals, pack hunters, dependent upon the group for survival. A disturbing feeling of empathy with the dog made Umak painfully aware of his own situation. Young or old, man or beast, neither could long hope to survive alone.
Not that Umak intended to survive. No. He was resolved to die. Now, for the first time, he moved, just enough so that he could eye the wild dog over one shoulder. Perhaps this was the way the spirits intended to answer his life song? He had called for death. Perhaps this masked, blue-eyed wild dog was his deliverer?
