Beyond the Sea of Ice

by neetha Napew

  “One band,” affirmed Umak, wondering if the girl had seen his failure.

  She had not. She had eyes only for Torka as, gently, he pried her arms from about his neck. She sat very still as he carefully folded back the tattered layering of her blood-soaked sleeve. She held her arm as steady as she could. She barely winced as he examined her wounds. His brow furrowed as he saw the damage that the wolf had done to the soft skin of her inner forearm.

  “This will need sewing,” he told her, impressed by her silent endurance of pain. “Almost A Woman is brave.” He spoke the acknowledgment aloud, only half-aware of what he was saying. It was not right for a female to be so brave. Egatsop had howled like a gutted wolf during the birth of her children. The sound of a woman wailing made her man feel strong. Was this homely, round-eyed girl trying to unman him?

  Unaware of his thoughts, her heart made a little leap of happiness. Coming from his mouth, the observation was a compliment sweeter than life itself had ever been. She spoke her heart to him. “With Torka beside her, Lonit is not afraid of anything!”

  She looked so young and vulnerable and trusting that he had to turn away. He did not understand her. He did not want to understand her. A terrible sense of desolation filled him. He thought of the wolves, the giant condor, and the mammoth that had destroyed the band. He thought of all of the tundra’s hungry, stalking predators, and the vast, lonely miles that stretched out all around. He heard the wind’s soft whispering as it moved in the night. It spoke to him about the thousand ways in which a man might die and about how short the lives of a young girl and an old man would be without a hunter in his prime to protect them.

  Slowly, weighed by his thoughts, Torka rose. He had not failed to note Umak’s inability to respond quickly to the attacking wolves. Had it not been for the warning growls of the dog, the wolves would now be feasting off their bones. With infinite regret and sadness, Torka was forced to admit to himself that Umak was old. The days in which he had depended upon his grandfather for all-sustaining strength and wisdom were gone. Umak had allowed him to make a nearly fatal error in judgment when they had set up a butchering camp that two men could not possibly hope to defend. It was an error that might have cost them their lives. They had been lucky so far, but now Torka realized that if they were to survive, they would have to live differently: No longer would they be able to linger in exposed encampments, as their people had always done, while meat and skins were cured and the local game was hunted to depletion by men and boys until, at last, the band was forced to move on, following the herds in search of new hunting grounds.

  But how else could they live? The question cut deeply into his heart. He was a man of the People. Without them, how long could he hope to hunt alone, with only an old man and a girl at his side?

  He was facing eastward, into the glow of dawn. And suddenly, as he saw the shimmering silhouette of the distant mountain, he knew what he must do. Like the herds that turned eastward at the beginning of each time of the long dark, he must lead his little band into the face of the rising sun. They would go to the far mountains, where they would encamp, with high stone walls at their back to protect them from unexpected attacks by meat-eaters. They would hunt the broad sweep of the tundra as the People had always done. But they would rest where the People had never rested before.

  He stared straight ahead, letting the high, shouldering image of the mountain fill him with a renewed sense of purpose.

  “Lonit is ready.”

  The girl’s voice distracted him. He looked down to see that Umak had brought his medicine bag from the pit hut. The old man knelt beside Lonit, preparing to suture her arm. She sat very still. Very straight. Very bravely.

  “Lonit is not afraid,” she said.

  Torka looked away, back toward the dawn, into the face of the rising sun, hating the girl again, wishing that she were dead and that Egatsop were here in her place. The mountain burned gold, and the tundra rolled on forever, shivering in the cold breath of the ever-blowing wind. Somewhere, far across the miles, thunder growled out of the now-cloudless sky. Torka listened. He knew that it was not thunder. It was the distant trumpeting of a mammoth.

  He closed his eyes. Memories of the Destroyer walked within his mind. Around him, the world was silent except for the low, whispering wail of the wind. The mammoth did not roar again, but Torka thought of Nap and Alinak, of Egatsop and of little Kipu, of all whom lay dead, looking at the sky. He opened his eyes. The wind whirled around him, once again speaking to him of the thousand ways in which a man might die. The wild dog was watching him. Their eyes met. Then Torka looked away, not wanting an animal to see what he would not reveal to Umak or Lonit. Torka was afraid.

  “Now we must go from this place.”

  Torka’s announcement stunned both Umak and Lonit. They stared at him. His face was grim. His arms were folded across his chest. He had made a necklace of the paws of the wolves that had been killed, this not to honor the spirits of the beasts but to show mastery of them. They had fed upon the bodies of his people. By taking the paws, he had prevented the beasts’ life spirits from walking the spirit world. He had killed the wolves. Forever. And now their claws hung downward over his outer tunic, the paws still bleeding around the thong that pierced their flesh.

  He saw the expressions of astonishment upon Umak’s and Lonit’s faces. He knew that by asking them to abandon this camp, he was also asking them to leave behind most of the meat that they had taken. Hours of work would be wasted. The lives of the caribou that they had killed would be wasted, and this would be a grievous offense to the life spirits of the game. Yet it must be risked.

  “In a new life, men must seek new ways.” He looked directly at Umak as he quoted the old man’s words. “Umak has given new life to Torka and Lonit. Now we must walk from this camp, as Umak walked from the winter camp of the People because he knew that he could not defend the living from the beasts that would come to eat of the dead. The wolves have shown us that this camp cannot be defended.” He paused. The next words would be difficult for his listeners to digest. “We must go to the far mountain. Upon its flanks, we will make a new camp and will have the advantage over any predator that would come against us. Upon its flanks, we will have a new life. Here, in this camp, we cannot live, except in the blood of the beasts that will come to eat us.”

  Lonit flinched. Her face paled. The People had always avoided the mountains. It was well-known that the wind spirits lived there, eternally giving birth to clouds and storms. Lonit had heard their voices many times ... in terrible, deep roarings and crackings ... in desolate moanings that echoed in the canyons and wailed out onto the tundra from high, unknown vastnesses where the People had never gone-not even to follow the caribou. To venture into the high realm of the wind spirits was to risk vanishing into the eternal cold and ice of the misted heights where the wind spirits took form in the ephemeral flesh of the clouds. Huge. Churning. Shape changing. Man- and woman-eating.

  Lonit shuddered.

  Torka did not have to be told what she was thinking. He knew of the tales that were told of the wind spirits. “We will make our camp on the flank of the mountain,” he emphasized, frowning at her for her unspoken challenge of his decision. “We will not go high.”

  His words were not comforting. She was still not feeling well. To camp anywhere even near a mountain was unthinkable. She remembered a story that her mother had told:

  Long ago, in yesterdays that existed only on the far edges of the People’s group memory, a headman whose name was long forgotten led the band to make an encampment close to a high peak. Hunting was good. Many days passed. Then, in the time of the endless sun, the wind spirits grew jealous of the band’s good fortune. They caused a great mass of ice to fall from the heights of the mountain. It buried the encampment. Many died. Never again had the People risked offending the wind spirits by venturing too close to their mountains. Lonit would have liked to remind Torka of this. But surely he knew it! He was Torka. He would suggest n
othing that might prove hazardous to them. They were at risk upon the open tundra. Her recently stitched and bound arm testified to that. Still, a knot tightened in her stomach when she thought of the far mountain. She told herself that she was being foolish. They could not stay where they were. It was not safe. And they could not go back. There was nothing to go back to—no People, no camp. Only a hostile land where the caribou now grazed the greening tundra and, somewhere, the great, man killing mammoth walked. Its shadowed, bloody memory was more terrifying than any mountain.

  Lonit swallowed down her fear. If Torka’s plan was unsound, the spirit master would question it. But Umak remained silent. He did not even harrumph. The girl relaxed. If Torka and the spirit master were in agreement, everything would be all right.

  They dismantled the pit hut. Torka observed Umak as they worked. He was concerned. The incident with the wolves had changed the old man. Although the teeth of the beasts had ripped Lonit’s arm, they had given Umak a deeper wounding. He moved slowly, lethargically, favoring his bad leg. He showed no interest in the wolf that he had slain; he had killed the beast, but something in him seemed to have died with it.

  Torka cut the paws from Umak’s wolf. He strung them upon a length of thong. He went to his grandfather and hung them around the old man’s neck.

  “For Kipu. For Egatsop. For the People who lie looking at the sky. This wolf runs no more, in this world or the next, because Umak has killed him. Forever.”

  Torka’s statement had been meant to bolster the old man’s wounded spirit, but it did not succeed. Umak accepted the necklace without so much as a grunt or a nod. He knew that his performance against the wolves had been less than adequate, and he knew that Torka knew it. No words could stanch the inner bleeding that was slowly draining the old man of the last vestiges of his pride.

  Now, as Torka watched his grandfather listlessly assembling his traveling pack, Umak seemed to be shrinking before his eyes—aging, growing weaker. Soon he would dry up and disappear altogether. Without a sense of self-esteem, even a young man could lose the will to live, and even the bravest man could become useless on the hunt. For a nomad of the tundra, death must soon follow the ultimate degradation of being proved worthless before one’s peers. Torka felt sick with frustration. To live in a world without Umak would be to live in a world eternally deprived of light. He could not bear to think of it; he had lost too much already. Umak had saved his life. And Lonit’s. Umak had brought them out of the winter camp, away from certain death, to a new life. Torka would not stand by and watch him slowly waste away. He knew that he must counter his grandfather’s will to die, even if it meant trying to shame him back into a sense of pride.

  He walked slowly to where the old man crouched beside Lonit. They sorted through their things, readying to roll them into their pack skins. “Hmmph!” said Torka as nastily as he could. “Umak works with the speed of an old woman! Look, even a girl with one arm in a sling works more quickly than Umak!”

  Lonit looked up at Torka, her mouth agape.

  Umak froze. Never had his grandson spoken to him with such open contempt. He took the words as truth. He let them settle. “Umak is old,” he said.

  “It must be so,” agreed Torka disdainfully. “Look at Umak! No doubt he will now ask Torka to carry the bulk of the girl’s load plus some of his own because Umak is old and the girl is injured. Hmmph! Or will he put his old man’s spirit into Brother Dog so that even a beast will be burdened by the weight of one old man?”

  This was too much. Umak reacted as though stung. He was on his feet with the speed and agility of a man half his years. “No man ... no girl .. . not even Brother Dog will carry Umak’s weight! This old man has come this far without assistance! This old man has carried Torka when Torka had not even the strength of a spiritless suckling to lift his own weight off the ground!”

  Relief flooded through Torka. It warmed him. It almost made him smile. Insult was a venom with healing power. It had put the fire of life back into Umak’s eyes. Lonit stared from one man to the other, not understanding. She was horrified to think that she might be the cause of enmity between them. “Lonit will carry her own load! Lonit is strong! Lonit needs no help!”

  Torka measured her with withering reproof. “Almost A Woman has an arm with many stitches in it. Almost A Woman will not carry a full load. She will need Torka and Umak to help her. But Umak says that he is old. Perhaps he would prefer to stay in this place. Perhaps he would find it easier to give his life spirit to the wind than to go with Torka and Lonit. Perhaps our life spirits will soon join his because without Umak, our loads will be great and our weariness will slow our steps. Perhaps when next wolves come to feed upon us, they will not go hungry from our camp. They will howl their praises of one old man who was too weak to continue!” Umak’s eyes bulged. His mouth arched downward above the out thrust jab of his chin. “Hrrmph! This old man will show the suckling Torka what he can carry! This old man will see who can walk farthest before growing too weak to continue on!”

  Lonit looked at Umak, then at Torka. Suddenly she understood. Umak seemed reborn! She knew what Torka had done. She smiled. She would walk to the mountain with confidence now. She would not be afraid, knowing that she would walk in the company of two spirit masters.

  They moved on. The hills were behind them now, extending along the western horizon like the mounded forms of Sleeping, white-crested animals. Behind those hills, the land of their ancestors lay cold and bleak, icebound save for the east-facing valleys and narrow, tundral plains from which the People had been eking a tenuous existence for countless generations.

  Ahead the land rolled eastward toward the distant mountain. To the north and south the tundra stretched for a thousand miles before vanishing into the ice-choked depths of waters that would someday be called the Chukchi and Bering Seas.

  Torka led the way. Umak followed behind Lonit. The dog trotted at his side across the broad, taut flexings of the greening land. With the coming of spring, the daytime temperature climbed to just above freezing. The world filled with the sound of the awakening land as snowbanks began to melt and glacial runoff poured out of distant mountains to transform the tundra. In a few hours it would all freeze again, but as the travelers walked across the open, wind-driven miles, streams and rivulets were everywhere. Lakes and ponds, thick with ice-sludge but no longer totally frozen, glistened in the slanting light of the sun.

  They were not aware of when the lay of the land began to change. It led them subtly downward over shouldering humps of low hills that were thick with unfamiliar wormwood and sage like scrub. The inclination was so illusory that they were unaware of it until their shins began to ache from the unrelieved stress.

  The dog stopped first, head up, tail curled, nostrils working to sieve the wind. There was something different about it. Torka noticed it, too, as did Umak. They stopped. The girl paused beside them. Her arm ached within the sling made of strips of caribou hide. Her load was lighter by half since Umak and Torka had insisted upon dividing much of it between them. Still, it was a heavy burden; its weight intensified the dull, deep cramps that refused to leave her lower belly. Readjusting her pack frame, she wished that the cramps would go away. She hoped they did not mean her slow but imminent death. She felt miserable as she leaned forward, hefting her pack higher onto her back. As she did so, she looked down, her attention suddenly drawn to a scattering of stones that lay at her feet.

  Her first thought was that, at last, she had found the perfect weights for her stone hurler; for they were all of similar size, approximately that of the eyeball of a large caribou. Then, as she bent to pick up one of the stones, she frowned, puzzled. Its sleek, spiraling configurations were so beautiful that she caught her breath. It was like no stone that she had ever seen.

  It was not a stone.

  It was a shell—or had been, untold millennia ago. Now it was a fossil. It was heavy in the girl’s hand. She stared at it, not understanding how a shell could be made of rock, or how
a rock could be shaped like a shell. Her frown deepened.

  There was no way Lonit could know that the object in her hand had once lain at the bottom of a wide, shallow strait of water. She could not know that the climate of the world had changed, that when glaciers lay upon the earth, they held much of the world’s moisture captive, and as they grew, oceans shrank .. . seas atrophied ... a strait rapidly became a scattering of saltwater lakes and ponds trapped within the low-lying depressions of its exposed sea bed. Gradually such drying bodies of water thickened with the detritus of a dying age, suffocating all living things that had not managed to swim or crawl to deeper, life-sustaining waters. With the passing of years, a strait could completely disappear. And shells such as the one that Lonit held in her hand could be buried in the sediment of centuries, transformed into stone by time and the inexorable processes of fossilization.

  Now, brought to the surface by the pawing hooves of migrating caribou, the shell spoke to Lonit of another epoch, of another world; but it spoke in a language that the girl could not understand.

  Where once the blue, shining waters of the Bering Strait had stretched beneath the Arctic sky from the coast of Siberia to the shores of Alaska, now the skin of the continental shelf lay bared beneath Lonit’s feet.

  It was the fragrance of that skin that had brought Torka, Umak, and the dog to pause. The layering of soil that lay upon the permafrost was thicker, redolent of the vaguely astringent stink of primordial ooze, of the thousand unnamed species of marine flora and fauna that had lived and died and decomposed to form the flesh of this land. It spoke of ancient seas, and of warmer skies in which a more beneficent sun rose and set over a less hostile world. Through their highly developed sense of smell, the hunters knew that the tundral plain that lay ahead of them was different from any land across which they had ever walked, but Torka and Umak could not describe the difference. They were men of the Age of Ice. They had never seen a sea or an ocean, nor could they imagine a gentler world or a wind that blew beneath a benevolent sun.