Beyond the Sea of Ice

by neetha Napew

  He had spoken loudly, and in anger. The pit hut was small. His words were heard by all. Lonit looked at lana and Naknaktup with an I-told-you-so expression written across her face. Manaak made a grunt of approval. Karana looked at Torka wonderingly, recalling the way Torka had risked his life to find him in the storm; now, more than ever, he knew that Torka was unlike any man he had ever known. Umak harrumphed with pride that Egatsop had been wrong about his grandson. Torka’s innate compassion was not born out of softness; it was the foundation upon which his wisdom was building.

  “We will survive. To make new life! To hear the laughter of our children! For this, we hunt! For this, we live! For this, we will now make the songs of life in the winter dark, loud songs so that the sun may hear us in its faraway part of the world and hasten to return to its children!

  They sang, and from out of the winter dark, wild dogs sang back to them.

  “They are close,” said Torka.

  The people fell silent, listening.

  “Do you think Brother Dog is out there?” asked Karana.

  “Somewhere. Yes. If he lives,” replied Torka.

  Umak closed his eyes, turned his face upward, and breathed deeply, drawing in the sound of the dogs, sieving it for an answer to his unspoken question. His mind remained blank. Dogs sounded alike. He harrumphed, disgusted with himself. Umak is spirit master. If Aar is near, this old man should know it in his bones! But his bones knew only the cold and a deep, aching stiffness. Umak is old, he thought, then opened his eyes and glared into the darkness defiantly. “This man is not so hungry that he would hunt and eat his brother!”

  “Nor is Karana!”

  Torka eyed the old man and the boy sternly. Manaak had already slipped on his hunting coat. lana was readying her snares. Torka nodded at their intent. He told Umak and Karana that wild dogs were fair game for starving men who must think of the welfare of their pregnant women and children. “If Umak and Karana have made a spirit bond with the dog they call Aar, so be it. They will stay here and guard the women. Manaak and Torka will hunt and set snares. And if Brother Dog has found a place among the pack that howls, he had best be wise and run far, for Torka will have no second thoughts about killing him.”

  They traveled eastward under lowering clouds, following the song of the wild dogs. They picked up spoor and were heartened. They trotted on, the wind rising at their backs.

  The tundra rolled on ahead of them. Surface snow blew in the wind like transparent veils of mist. They stopped to rest and eat one wedge of fat apiece, scanning the world, making certain that they kept their bearings so they would have no difficulty returning to camp.

  Manaak thumped his chest to indicate his satisfaction with their prospects. He rose, shook his spear thrower, and said boldly: “With this we will bring home meat!

  Torka would have cursed him for his outspoken arrogance, but he had already trotted away. Torka followed.

  Hours passed. The dogs seemed to be leading them. No sooner did they reach a place from which the dogs’ song had come, than their spoor led them on again.

  “It is as though they stop and wait, calling us on, leaving sign by which we may follow,” commented Manaak thoughtfully. ‘

  “They are dogs, not men!”

  “Yet Umak calls one of them broth eh

  Torka did not appreciate Manaak’s reminder. He ignored it and went on until bison sign brought him up short. He realized with a start that he and Manaak were not the only hunters afoot. The dogs were on the trail of their own game, and it did seem as though they were going out of their way to cause the men to follow.

  “The spirits are with us!” exclaimed Manaak. “It may be so,” said Torka, wishing that Manaak would not speak so freely of things that had not yet come to pass.

  Manaak caught the undertone of censure in Torka’s tone. His impatient nature was irked by Torka’s innate caution. “Look, at your feet, bison sign everywhere! See how they have gouged through the snow with horns and hooves, have rooted with their noses to get at the grass stubble that lies beneath! A big herd! Not more than two days ahead of us! Khum! We will go back now and tell the othehs. The promise of much meat will give us the energy we need to move our encampment near to the grazing grounds of the bison. Soon we will hunt! The bison will be amazed at the poweh of our spear throwehs! We will drink their warm blood and feast upon their flesh while we laugh at our hung eh beneath the cold face of the starving moon!”

  Torka was so appalled by Manaak’s brazen, thoughtless boasting that he could not speak. Deep within his gut, fear churned like schooling fish. He felt nauseated as he realized that Manaak had just broken the same taboo that Nap had broken on the day that Thunder Speaker had walked into their lives to destroy their world. He had dared to name his prey before actually sighting it. And worse than that, he had vocalized his intent to laugh at the spirit of the starving moon.

  Torka was suddenly painfully aware of the wailing wind. It slapped at his back. He shivered, not against the subfreezing wind but against a greater cold as a terrible wave of premonitory dread swept through him.

  “Come,” he said. “I smell storm in this wind. We have been out from the encampment long enough.”

  For a thousand miles, the wind swept across open, treeless land, blowing ground snow before it until earth and sky were indistinguishable. Umak stood facing into the wind, relief flooding him.

  “They come! At last the hunters return to us!”

  Manaak emerged from the whiteness, so elated by his news that he embraced the old man. “Bison, Spirit Masteh! The dogs led us to them! A great herd! We will pass this storm and dream sweet dreams of meat in the winteh dark! We will move our khamp, and then we will hunt! Oh, how we will hunt!”

  He swept the old man ahead of him into the pit hut. Shaking off snow, he shared his joy with them all and tossed to lana the single hare that his snares had taken.

  “It is not much meat for now!” he declared. “But we will all eat of its flesh and cook its bones in a boiling bag over what little fat we have left for our cooking stones. Soon we will eat hump steaks, and our hands will glisten with blood and oil! Tell them, Torka! Tell them of the bison sign, and of the size of the herd that ...” His words trailed off. He squinted into the dark interior, looking from face to face. “Where is Torka? He was ahead of me when I stopped to pick up this hare. He should have been back by now.”

  Outside, the wind struck so hard at the pit hut that the entire structure shook. Lonit let out a cry of dismay and, with Umak and Karana following, went out into the storm. Frantically, she called out to Torka, but the wind took her voice and fragmented it, blowing it away across the tundra in the opposite direction. Torka would never hear it. And if he did not, he would never be able to find his way back to the encampment in the shrieking, driving whiteness of the blizzard. Never.

  “In such a storm .. . how long can a man live alone without food or shelter?”

  Manaak’s question cut Lonit to the bone as Umak drew her back into the protection of the little hut and out of the lung-searing bite of the subzero wind.

  Voices.

  From out of the roaring emptiness, from out of the boiling whiteness of the storm, Torka heard men speak. Their sharp, guttural commands drew him back into consciousness. He looked up from the bottom of the ravine into which he had fallen and saw figures trotting along the rim.

  One. Two. He counted a dozen men, furred and cowled in the dark, shaggy skins of bison, with spears in their hands and backs bent as they moved against the wind. Then they were gone, enveloped in the blowing snow. And in all the world, there was only the sound of the wind, and in the boiling whiteness nothing moved.

  Nothing.

  Except the man at the bottom of the ravine.

  Alone and disoriented, Torka shook his head to clear it, telling himself that the figures had not been real, could not have been real. They had been ghosts walking the blurred edges of his consciousness. Dreams. Nothing more than dreams.

 
; His head ached with questions. How had he come to be lying inert at the bottom of this deep, irregular crack in the surface of the earth? Where was Manaak?

  The questions brought immediate answers. He remembered that Manaak had paused to kill and string a hare that had tangled itself in one of his snare lines. It had been snowing very hard. They had been walking along the slope of a steep incline, one of many conical little hills that pocked the otherwise flat terrain like blisters. They had used them as marking points to guide them back to their encampment, but in the wind-driven snow, although the hills ranged from thirty to over a hundred feet in elevation, they had been difficult to spot. Manaak had said something about hoping that they would be able to find their way home, and Torka had replied that they would do so, provided they did not linger until the storm grew worse. So, when he had gone ahead, Manaak must have assumed that he had continued on without him. With the wind shrieking all around, neither man heard the sound of the inner core of the little hill collapsing; Torka had only known that one moment there was solid, snow-covered ground beneath his feet, and the next he was falling as that ground opened without warning. He could not have known that the hill was not a hill, or that the broad, flat, circular expanse of land over which they had been traveling was an ancient silt-filled lake. Over millennia, water that had once glistened beneath the Arctic sky had been thickened into a stew of soaked sediment that was the outfall of erosion in the distant mountains. Surrounded by permafrost, excess water froze to form hard cores of ice that slowly bulged above the surface of the ground. Except for their presence in otherwise flat terrain, they looked like any other hills, but warm summers transformed the texture of their frozen centers, and cold winters redefined them until pressure and expansion rent them with fissures and filled them with air pockets. Torka’s weight had been enough to cause one of these rifts to open; the resultant crack in the side of the hill had opened beneath him and caused his fall into the now open air pocket beneath.

  It had happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that he had had no time to react before his head hit the side of the ravine. He had no idea how long he had lain unconscious, but the storm had blown itself into monstrous proportions. The ravine provided a natural refuge. He knew that he dared not try to get back to the encampment until the wind dropped and the snowfall lessened. As he stripped off his outer coat and stretched it across the top of the narrow fissure to serve as a roof that would keep the weather out and his body heat in, he could only hope that Manaak had found his way back to the encampment or had found shelter against the elements. Meanwhile, in his many-layered garments, he locked his gloved hands beneath his armpits and wished that his snares had entrapped a hare, as Manaak’s had done. Salivating, he tried not to think of food. He thought instead of oil lamps and glowing fires of sods, and tried to will himself warm.

  His head began to ache dully again. He closed his eyes and slept until, out of the howling whiteness of the storm, the Destroyer walked within his dreams. He saw it clearly, a moving mountain half-invisible within the blowing snow as it moved inexorably toward the encampment of his people.

  He awoke with a start. As on that terrible dawn of long ago, all of his senses screamed: Danger! He listened. Had he heard the trumpeting of the great mammoth? No. There was only the sound of the wind wailing, screaming, and moaning—a sound to put demons into the mind of any man. But that demon was far away. Best to forget it, to sleep, to preserve all energy for the maintenance of precious body heat. Above the narrow cleft of the ravine, the air became colder as the wind continued to rise. The storm would rage for hours. Nothing would be moving within it.

  Nothing.

  Fleetingly, he thought about the conjured images of ghostly men that had first awakened him. Briefly, he half remembered something that Karana had said, had feared so long ago.

  The Ghost Band.

  What had the boy said of it? They come in the time of light, to steal women and boys, then to vanish as though they had never come at all, leaving burning encampments and the bodies of the dead and dying as the only proof that they existed at all.

  He told himself that he was being as fearful and overly imaginative as Karana. This was not the time of light. It was the worst winter storm he had seen in many moons. Nothing would be afoot in such a storm. Nothing.

  Except ghosts. Except spirits.

  “No!” he spoke the admonition aloud, and although the wind drowned his voice, the mere exhalation of a human sound was comforting.

  He forced his thoughts to drift. At length he slept lightly, one hand curled around the haft of his bludgeon, the other on the one spear that had not broken in his fall.

  Within the encampment, Naknaktup awoke. The storm had lessened. Her people slept—deep, troubled sleep—but Naknaktup was not troubled. The storm would end. Torka would return. If Umak believed this, Naknaktup was certain that it would be so. Her confidence in her spirit master was complete. He who was old had put the spirit of new life into one who was old enough to have begun to suspect herself barren. Truly, Umak was a maker of miracles. And the weight of the miracle that he had implanted within her womb was now pressing against her innards. She sighed against her need to relieve herself as she rose, drew one of her sleeping skins around her shoulders, and went out.

  The wind had dropped considerably, but it was still snowing and bitterly cold. Naknaktup was glad that her baby would not be born until the full return of the time of light. She smiled as she waded through the snow, daydreaming about wanner days and the sweet smell of her infant, how it would be to cuddle it and suckle it, and She stopped. Shadows were moving in the snow. Dark, hairy shadows, as though bison stood erect on their hind limbs and stalked prey in the guise of men. She counted the shadows. One .. . two .. . many. And all carried their weapons in such a way that Naknaktup immediately sensed danger.

  They came out of the wind, leering at the startled woman who stood with her graying hair whipping in the wind. Visions of light and warmth and of suckling babes vanished as Naknaktup managed to cry out an undefined warning just as a spear struck her breast and pierced her heart.

  Inside the pit hut, the others were instantly alerted by her dying scream. Assuming that a predator had attacked her, Umak and Manaak grabbed their spears, glad that the weather had caused them to store them inside instead of outside, as they usually did. They shouted at Karana and told him to stay out of the way. lana clutched her baby close, and Lonit wished that she still had her bola so that she might be of help.

  Younger and faster, Manaak pushed Umak aside so that he would be the first one to leave the pit hut.

  “Umak is spirit mast eh Manaak is hunt eh Let him walk before you!”

  “Hmmph! Naknaktup is Umak’s woman!”

  Manaak would not yield. He wanted to be the first man out, the first to face wolf or bear, lion or mammoth. Mammoth! How he hoped it was the great ghost. His lust to kill outweighed his common sense, eclipsed the small voice that shouted at the back of his brain: If it is Big Spirit, we will all die.

  He came out of the pit hut breathing hard, prepared to face Big Spirit but totally unprepared to face hostile, predatory strangers of his own species. For one fatal moment he stared at them, his spear poised in his hand. It was his last moment. Two spears found him. One drove straight through his neck. The other entered through his belly and drove its barbed nephrite head through his lower back, severing his spine. Disbelieving, he suffocated on his own blood as his knees buckled and he dropped to the snow. The last thing he heard was Umak shouting his name as the old man came bursting out of the pit hut from behind him.

  Umak never saw the blow that felled him. He came up out of the shelter, leaping at his attacker. He had seen Manaak fall, and he had seen what had dropped him. Old he was, and no longer as strong as he had been in his youth, but in this moment, he knew that his woman was dead, and his unborn child. His rage made him young. His rage made him powerful.

  But youth and power were nothing to the shadowed form who stood
behind him, to one side of the entrance to the pit hut. The man swung downward with the heft of his spear, to send Umak sprawling.

  It was silence, not sound, that woke Torka. The wind had stopped. Eager to return to the encampment, he shook snow from his outer coat, donned it, took up his one good spear, and with his bludgeon at his belt, climbed out of the ravine. In the thin, transient light of day, the world was white the land, the sky. were snow white, cloud white He squinted against the glare. Soon it would fade. If he was going to find his way back to the encampment before dark, he would have to hurry.

  When the depth of the snow allowed, he moved at a lope, his muscles

  gradually relaxing as movement warmed them. Experience enabled him to

  find his bearings with little trouble. Now and then he paused, noting

  landmarks that would have been unrecognizable to all but the most

  seasoned tracker; softened by the over layering of snow, everything

  looked different. But he was Torka. The blood of many generations of

  spirit masters flowed within him, and Umak had taught him well

  He went on and did not look back. Soon a dark, uneven stain of smoke became visible on the horizon, pinpointing the exact location of the encampment. So they had built a signal fire to guide him home. He was glad. It would make the way easier, although he wondered what they had found to burn that would yield so much smoke. He quickened his step, thinking of the warmth of the pit hut, hoping that Manaak would be there to greet him, and longing for the soft arms of his woman.

  Lonit! He almost cried her name aloud as he imagined her dimpled smile. As he crested the top of a low, rolling slope, his thoughts veered sharply, and the brightness went out of the day. He did not slow his pace as he looked back over his shoulder.

  From the way their tongues lolled from their mouths, the pack of dogs must have been following him for some time. Instinct told him to keep on running. Wisdom forced him to stop and face them. On the top of the slope, high ground granted him an advantage. He could never outrun them. But he could kill a few and, after he had put the rest to flight, take his kills back to the encampment. The dogs would not make good meat; they were far too lean. His little band, however, was in a state of near starvation and would rejoice no matter what he brought them. And if he skinned it first and ate its blue eyes before returning to the pit hut, they would never know that they fed upon the flesh of Brother Dog.