by neetha Napew
“Hmmph!” The exhalation was so loud and vehement that both man and dog were startled by it.
The dog was on its feet, growling. The two castaways stared at one another, and taking in the bone-thin animal, noting its flesh-colored, scarred nose and wound-scabbed ears, Umak suddenly became angry.
“This old man has not lived this long to be eaten by dogs! Umak deserves a better death than this!” With these words, he snapped to his feet, raised his arms, and charged, howling, straight at the dog.
Terrified, the animal wheeled and, without taking the time to bark or yip, ran into the night, across the snowy tundra, vanishing as completely as though it had never been there at all.
For a long while the old man stood looking after it. He wondered if it had been a creature of flesh or spirit. Its tracks gave him his answer. It had been real enough. And in all likelihood, all too soon, it would be back. In the meantime, it was possibly headed back for the winter camp. Umak thought of Egatsop and her promise not to abandon her newborn to the storms. He thought of the other women who had. He wondered if the wild dog had been surviving off the flesh of those infants whose mothers had not been as practical as the headman’s woman, who had fed her family from the corpse of her newborn. His hands flexed. He wished that he had killed the dog. He wished that he had brought his spears with him, or at least one of his daggers. His long mouth twisted down into a scowl. If the dog came back, he would kill it with his bare hands. It would be his last brave deed. Perhaps then Death would not be bored by his stories and would decide to come to him in a more honorable manner than through the jaws of an emaciated cur.
But the dog did not return. Strangely, Umak found himself missing it. What would come for him now? He shrugged. Whatever it was, he would face it, even if it came as he suspected it must—in stealth, sneaking up on him while he slept.
He went back to the summit of the little hill and seated himself. The wind was dying. Snow had ceased to fall. He could see stars where, only moments ago, clouds had covered the darkness. It was very cold as, once again, he began his life song. He would slowly freeze, and his spirit would ease away from the casing of bones and skin that had held it captive since his birth. It would not be such a bad death. He could feel sleepiness growing within him as he sang. But he was warm and comfortable within his heavy garments and the encircling windbreak of his bison-skin robe. It occurred to him that, in these same clothes and robe, he had weathered many a winter gale upon the open tundra. He was not likely to freeze to death in them now.
So, without ceremony, he cast them away. The wind cut through his undergarments. It bit at his skin as deeply as any wild dog could have done. When he breathed, the cold seared his lungs, and he thought: This old man shall die now. In his sleep, Death shall come.
He sat down. He waited for Death. Time passed slowly. It was too cold to chant. Too cold to sleep. He thought that he might make the time pass more quickly if he did a spirit dance. Movement would promote circulation; he would feel warmer until, at last, Death came for him and he collapsed. He tried it for a while, but his knee ached, and he felt foolish dancing when there was no one to watch. He hunkered down upon the little hill, beneath the savage sweep of the Arctic sky, and stoically waited for the end to come.
It did not. He shivered. His extremities went numb. His penis shriveled, and his testes retreated upward against that warm hollow from which they had descended when he was a boy. He thought of his boyhood. It did not seem so long ago. Memories came. Yesterday was closer than tomorrow.
Time continued to pass. Umak did not die. He sat and at length conceded that it was not possible for one who had spent his entire life fighting the cold to succumb passively to it—especially when the warm garments were close at hand. He stared at them and rationalized: This old man is too cold to sleep. In sleep, death will come. Umak will put on the robe. He will freeze .. . but slowly.
He made a tent of the robe. Without his caribou-skin tunic and vest of fox tails without his outer trousers and leggings, he was still cold; but he had put on his boots and gloves. Within the windbreak of the old robe, the cold’s bite was lessened, and he slept, albeit fitfully. Now and again he awoke, expecting to be dead, but he was still alive. He grumbled, vexed, and slept again. Sometime before dawn, he felt Death come close. It called his name, and only the growling of a dog roused him before he answered and allowed his spirit to follow.
The wild dog was back, standing very close. It must have been watching him for hours, waiting for Death to come before it made its move. Umak cursed it. He spoke to it aloud.
“Stupid beast! This old man was about to enter the spirit world! Could you not wait! Umak has been trying to die! Were it not for you, my spirit would be free and you would be feasting off my useless bones! But those bones are not useless now! And you will not eat this old man while he is still alive!”
The dog listened. Its head was down, its ears and lips back. Its growl was deep and full of threat.
Umak growled back at it. “Aar ... go away! If you come too close, this old man shall eat youl”
The dog did not move. Its growl continued. A single thrum of threat, as cold and full of menace as a rising wind out of the north.
Umak was not intimidated. The dog was large, but it was also young and thin and probably as weak as the starving man whom it had singled out to be its next meal. Experience told Umak that he could brazen out the dog’s threat. He rose, then pulled the bison-skin robe about him so that he looked twice his size. He growled at the dog again and, in doing so, gave the creature a name. “Aar ...” snarled the old man.
And the dog answered, but did not back away. “Aarrr ...”
“Hmmph!” said Umak, annoyed with the situation. As long as the dog stayed, his body would not allow his spirit to leave it. He bent and reached for a stone to hurl at the animal. His aim was good; the dog yipped and ran. But the action made the old man pant. He was weak. He was dying. And suddenly he was frightened because he knew that he did not want to die.
He retrieved his clothes, put them on, and began to walk. He did not know where he was going. He only knew that he would walk until he dropped. And then the dog, which Umak knew was following, would attack. The dog, being young, would outlast an old man. It would be the death that he had called for. The death that Umak no longer wanted.
The old man and the dog saw the abandoned wolf-kill at the same time. They made for it, and Umak’s hunger renewed his strength as fully as it made him bold. He moved like a youth, shouting and waving and forcing the dog to back away in confusion. The animal stood cowed as the old man fell upon the mutilated steppe antelope, snarling and sobbing with relief as he tasted the sweet blood of life and knew just how much he did not want to die.
He ate and ate and did not know when the dog joined him. Somewhere halfway through a haunch, he looked up to see the dog eating across the carcass from him. Their eyes met. The dog paused; its manner was submissive. Umak went on eating. Strangely, the old man felt no desire to drive the dog away. The raw, near-frozen meat was restoring his energy, and he knew that were it not for the dog, he would be dead, back upon the hillock, and the dog would be feasting off his flesh rather than the flesh of the prey they now shared. As he continued eating, he wondered if, perhaps, the spirits had not sent this half-grown, half-starved dog to tell him that they did not want Umak’s death. But why?
He pulled back from the carcass, his appetite, if not his questions, sated. He watched the dog. It occurred to him that he was strong enough now to stone the beast successfully. And now was the time to kill it, while its guard was down. He could live off its carcass for many days. He could even take it back to the band. There he could flaunt his prowess with it. He could show Egatsop how thoroughly she had misjudged him. Egatsop. He remembered her readiness to use her own child as bait with which to snare the dog. Loathing of the woman made him frown. No, he thought, watching the dog, you will not go into that one’s belly. The band has cast away this old man. But you h
ave given bach to Umak the spirit to live. Now that we have eaten of the same prey, we are of one flesh, Brother Dog. And Umak, he will not eat of the flesh of his brother.
He rose, then stood looking down at the dog. Sensing his stare, the dog looked up, studied him out of its blue, black masked eyes. The animal sensed a change in the man. There was renewed strength and purpose in his stance and a strange, undeniable power shining in his black, slitted eyes. The threat had gone out of him. The man had allowed the dog to share in “his” kill. In the unspoken, instinctive language of all animals that run in packs, this sharing was a statement of acceptance into the pack. Those that ate of the same kill were forever bonded by the mutually ingested life-giving blood of that kill. Predator and prey might never eat together. The dog understood this. He sensed that the man understood it, too. Visibly, the dog relaxed. He turned his eyes away from the man and set to eating his fill. The man would not harm him. He would not harm the man. A covenant had been made between them. They were of one pack now.
Umak and the dog stayed beside the carcass of the steppe antelope until they had eaten it all. It had been a fresh kill, only partially consumed by the wolves who had taken it, and it was not until Umak sat cracking the last of the bones and sucking the marrow from them that he began to wonder why wolves would abandon so much meat.
To Umak the question was sobering, for wolves were as frugal as men, carrying away and caching what they could not eat on the spot; and these were starving times for hunters, be they men or beasts.
The tenuous morning of the Arctic spring passed into dusk. It was night again. The old man huddled in his tentlike robe of bison hide and slept, with the wild dog close, but not too near. They were no longer adversaries, these two, but they were not yet friends. The night passed. Then it was dawn again. Umak awoke and smiled because he was alive, and he was glad, although he was not quite sure why.
He walked on. The dog followed. When he stopped, the dog stopped. When he went on again, the dog was still with him. In the fragile light of the Arctic morning, they picked up the trail that Nap and Alinak and Torka had taken out of the winter encampment many days ago. Umak paused, wondering if they had yet returned to the band. With Torka as a part of their team, Umak had little doubt that they had. His grandson was a hunter of extraordinary skill, a man of profound instincts. Torka would be a spirit master someday, when Umak had taught him all that there was to know.
The old man ground his teeth. He remembered that he had been cast out, and that he would teach Torka no more. Whatever his grandson had learned, that would be all of it. They would never meet again.
There was such pain in that thought that the old man wished that he had died, for surely to be alone upon the tundra, cast out of the band, never to see his loved ones again, that was death.
The dog’s sudden excitement put an end to Umak’s black reverie. Up ahead, another set of tracks crossed those of Umak’s kinsmen. The dog circled and sniffed, and the old man went to investigate.
Mammoth.
He knew better than to speak the word aloud lest he call down the spirit of the game without the proper ceremony; but it was mammoth, all right. A single mammoth, and from the size of its footprints, it was the biggest mammoth that Umak had ever seen.
He checked the tracks. Touched them. Smelled them. They crossed and recrossed the hunters’ trail in several places-often enough to suggest to Umak that the mammoth was following the route that the men had taken when they had come out from the encampment.
Strange behavior, thought the old man. Mammoths usually traveled in small, close-knit family groups near to the scrub forests by the base of the distant mountains, with the cows and calves clustering together, while their bulls ranged alone or in pairs, shadowing the herd only in mating season. They avoided Man.
The tracks of the solitary giant informed Umak that they belonged to a big male. He knelt, one hand splayed across the width of the enormous footprint. Memories stirred of tales heard in times long gone by, of a legend whispered by the old men when he was a little boy. Of Thunder Speaker. Of World Shaker. Of One Who Parts the Clouds. Of a mammoth that men called the Destroyer, for where it walked no man might follow, and all who fell beneath its shadow died.
He shrugged off the memories. He smiled at his own foolishness. The beast of his boyhood recollection was only a fable. Mammoths were shy, evasive creatures. If this old male was heading in the direction of the encampment of the band, then his people’s days of starvation were at an end at last. The hunters who went out from the camp each day would see it; they would feel the shock of its footfall quivering in the permafrost. Although they were near starvation, their need would make them strong. They would gather their weapons and their wits, and with their combined strength, they would kill the beast.
He rose, happy for his people and sorry that he had listened to Egatsop and chosen to die. It had been years since he had hunted mammoth. His experience would be valuable to the band. But he could not go back; once the decision to walk with Death was made, it was irrevocable. To return after having called to Death might cause Death to follow and eat of the life spirits of the entire band.
He drew in a little breath. Too bad. He would like to help, to tell them that a mammoth the size of a walking mountain was coming toward them.
“Hmmph,” he said aloud, not realizing that he was talking to the dog. “They will not need this old man. A mammoth as big as a mountain will also be as old as a mountain. Perhaps, like Umak, it wanders alone, waiting to die. It will be weak. It will be easy to kill.”
The dog looked at him. And clearly, as though the animal spoke the words, Umak understood its thoughts and was rebuked. Had he not come to know from personal experience that not everything that is old is necessarily weak ... or easy to kill?
Night came down, and its wind was bitterly cold. The old man sat in his contrived tent of bison hide and conjured past hunts and glorious battles waged against big game. He chanted. The wind took his words and blew them away across the tundra.
The dog listened. He lay nearby but not too close, curled against the wind, nose tucked beneath his tail, dreaming his own dreams, twitching against memories of his own past battles.
Not far away, Umak’s chanting rode upon the wind, and Torka heard it, disbelieving. He tried to rise and cried out as he fell again, half-conscious, where he had collapsed hours ago.
The wild dog heard his cry. Its head went up as every hair along its back bristled. Umak heard it, too, but it had come and gone so quickly that he could not identify it.
He stopped his chanting. Had he heard the cry of prey or predator? Unable to answer that question, all recollections of his youth vanished, leaving him an old man again, alone and unarmed and waiting to die upon the dark and savage tundra. Perhaps he had heard the voice of Death?
He rose. His head went up. His chin jerked outward defiantly. He was Umak! He would not be afraid. Yet, despite his best efforts, his hands flexed as he longed to hold his weapons. There was an acidic dryness at the back of his throat that tasted too much like fear. He was afraid. He was old and weak and alone, but he did not want to die. Death should have come when he had first summoned it; he had wanted it then. But no more. The drive to live was strong in him now. His eyes squinted resolutely into the wind. His chin went down. Umak is still the spirit master that he once was, then what he has called he can also send away.
He began to chant again. A new song. A loud song. Noise always sent the spirits of fear scattering out of a man’s belly. Perhaps it would send Death fleeing as well. But Umak’s song scattered out upon the tundral wind and reached Torka instead, into his ebbing consciousness. It roused the dying embers of the young hunters life spirit and brought it up through pain and desolation into a new hope.
“Umak?” Yes! He would know that beloved voice in the darkest night, in the whitest storm, in the fiercest gale. “Umak!” He hurled the name against the wind.
Umak heard it.
With the dog t
rotting on ahead of him, the old man soon found his grandson and knelt to cradle Torka in his arms, listening to his tale of bloody terror.
“Umak .. . father of my father .. . you must warn the people .. . you must .. . get back to them in time....” Torka’s words bled out of him as he fought to hold on to consciousness and lost. The old man held him close. There, beneath the winter dark, Umak knew at last why Death had not come to take the spirit of one old man—it had been feeding off younger, weaker life spirits. And now, with Torka severely wounded, Umak understood that in the guise of Thunder Speaker, of World Shaker, of a giant woolly mammoth whom men called the Destroyer, Death, the ultimate predator, was moving toward the winter encampment of his people.
Only one old man was left to stop it.
“And this old man will try!” Across the long miles, across what was left of the long night, Umak jogged toward, home with an unconscious Torka upon his back and the wild dog loping at his side. Dawn had not yet bloomed upon the horizon when he paused, gagging on fatigue, forcing himself to suck in deep breaths of the darkness as though it were a food that might nourish him.
It did not. He stood bent forward, with Torka deadweight across his shoulders as wolves howled in the distance and, deep inside him, the voice of exhaustion counseled: Old man, it is not far now. Only a few miles. But your knee aches, and your body fails you. You will never make it—not with Torka on your back.
Truth, or temptation to expediency? He could not tell which. He only knew that he would not abandon his grandson, not as long as there was a breath of life left in either of them.
He felt the eyes of the wild dog watching him, measuring him, and he thought of the censure of Egatsop, Torka’s woman. Weakness. Yes. She would have called it that. He knew that he must get back to the encampment of his people as quickly as he could. He knew that he should leave Torka behind. If Torka were able, he would insist upon it.
