Isi pondered the wheeling birds. When I get to Etah, I will ask the sorcerer what this means.
He whipped the dogs back to their task and the sledge moved forward again.
His full name was Isigippoq, but everyone called him Isi—the eye. Villagers bragged that he could see a bear’s black eye a mile away in thick snow fog, but he was not so boastful. Half a mile, maybe. Some thought he was an angakkoq because of his eyes, but he was no sorcerer. Sorcerers controlled their magic; Isi did not know how his vision worked, except that it seemed sometimes to pull distant objects toward him and render them as clear as if they were close enough to touch. But he didn’t need any special sight to observe these serfaq, or any special knowledge to know that they should not have flown back so early in the year.
Yes, old Anoraa will know what this means.
Isi gloried in the cold spring day as he sledged over the ice pack with the casual familiarity of having done it a dozen times before. The sun, slanting in over his shoulders, cast the ice in distinct patterns that he read and understood at a glance. The ridges and icy terrain reformed year after year and, scoured in distinct patterns by wind off the ice cap, presented ever-new and ever-changing pathways. But the mountain that held back the ice cap did not change, and Isi knew every peak and promontory and could pinpoint his location from any of them.
This trip, however, was no simple hunting expedition, no family migration. Ukutseq, the head man of Siorapaluk, had sent Isi out alone to deliver the newly made amulet to Etah’s sorcerer. Isi had not seen the amulet; he knew not what power it held or even if it was bone or stone. It lay hidden inside a soft leather pouch half the size of his head, sewn from the skin of a single hare. Elaborate seal’s-blood designs decorated the pouch, which was heavier than a fox and crinkled from the grass cushion that protected its cargo.
He was now three days out of the village, having stayed last night at the tiny camp of Neqi. It would take him two more days to reach Etah. After he delivered the mysterious bundle, he thought he might stay a week or two to hunt. Even if he stayed three weeks, he should still be able to journey back south to the pretty little sandy beach that was Siorapaluk before the sea ice started to thin out. That was when the first serfaq should have returned—not in the thousands or even the hundreds, but perhaps by the score as their pathfinders made their way back to the brightening world.
In the cliffs to his right, the serfaq struggled over the few clear nesting spots, but they seemed not to know what they were doing. And—
A figure stood at the top of the cliff: a woman, by the cut of her anorak. She pulled back her hood, and her long, dark, stringy hair flailed in the breeze.
The breeze stank.
Not the usual stink that Isi got behind the dogs—their dung and piss in bits and droplets in his face as they ran in front of the sledge—but a rotten stench, worse than the opened stomach of a narwhal. The smell dripped from the air like blubber dripping as it rendered, and he knew who the woman was.
Mother? Not possible….
Isi reached up with his left hand to his own amulet—a walrus tusk hung on a leather cord—and called the animal’s strength into him.
The wind changed subtly—a faint brush along his eyebrows and lashes, a droop in the woman’s wild hair—and all the squawking serfaq went silent. Even the dogs hushed and slowed to a trot, and Isi did not bother to whip them. He checked his harpoon and his sharp iron savik as he studied the snowpack, especially the thick ice to the west. No bears, for which he was grateful; the abundance of seal this year meant there had been more bears than usual. No hunters, no other activity at all. He looked back up the cliff—
—and the woman was gone.
Isi dragged his right foot and brought the sledge to a stop. One of the dogs whimpered, and they all cowered onto the snow, but other than the traces creaking and the runners grinding a little as the sledge settled on the snow top, everything was silent as death. Even the birds had landed, anywhere they could, and the sky was darkening as if a storm was coming—but the only clouds were tight on the western horizon and blurred the distinction between ice and sky.
The sun. … Something was happening to the sun. The moon slid over its face, and the day darkened.
Seqineq pulavoq.
Isi didn’t often concern himself with the moon. Aningaaq’s phases and its coming and going were of interest primarily to the head man Ukutseq, who timed the hunts by its cycles and through the long dark counted how long until the sun would rise again. But now Isi watched, fascinated, the dogs' leather traces still held tight in his right hand but almost forgotten.
Gloom settled over him, but he was more interested in the ridges—mountains?—he saw on the backlit edge of the moon. Its face was blank as it moved over the sun, and yet it wasn’t…. His vision pulled Aningaaq toward him until Isi saw faint blue-white blemishes, like pores or wounds. The deeper dark areas that he thought of as the moon’s birthmarks stood out the way a raven stood out against the night sky.
Then the sun was a thin ring, and the day was cold and the wind even fouler than before.
And then Aningaaq moved on, uncovering Seqineq’s face. The day brightened, slowly.
Isi blinked. His eyes hurt from the fetid wind, so he held them closed. The afterimage of the hidden-and-reappearing sun played on the insides of his eyelids. Gradually, the birds raised their voices, but they were muted, as if half of them had disappeared. His lead dog barked, followed by another, and then they growled and grew silent again.
When he opened his eyes, the woman sat on the sledge.
Her figure was indistinct—no, everything was indistinct. He looked at the mountain, his hands, the dogs, and everything looked as if he saw it through a thick sheet of glacial ice. He stooped down, dug up a handful of snow, and held it to his eyes. It did not help.
The woman laughed at him, and her breath was more horrible than the wind. Her breath was the foul wind, rotten beyond comprehension. The dogs whimpered and the birds began flying away south, back where they should have stayed.
If he did not look straight at her, he saw her more clearly—and wished he didn’t. What little hair she had was long, matted together, and as ragged as her torn and filthy clothes. The skin on her fingers clung to the bones, but looked thin, dry, and cracked into strips like the dog’s traces. Her eyes glazed over with milky white film. Her face was dark brown, in places almost black with frostbite, and sunken into hollows around her jaw and temples. The few teeth in her foul mouth were ground down, as all women’s teeth got from chewing fox and rabbit hides to soften them, but the stumps were black with rot. And the smell radiated from her, the odor of decay and death.
In all that, she was unmistakably his anaana.
But she could not be. Three years earlier his mother had graciously fallen off the sledge during a trip from Siorapaluk to Savigssivik. An ancient and bitter woman, she had terrorized their village for so long that no one had mourned her—neither neighbors nor family. They simply thanked her for removing her burdensome hostility from their lives, and tried to forget her.
Isi guessed her spirit was angry enough that even the animals avoided her; otherwise, she would have been eaten by now, her bones scoured by the winds off the ice cap. She might be disappointed that none of the village newborns had been given her name, so her spirit could live again in them, but who wanted to put up with another Alianakuluk, another “little misfortune”?
Nothing to do but ask, so he did. “Why are you here, arnaqquassaaq?”
If she was offended at being called a hag, she did not show it. Isi looked at her without looking, turning his head slightly to catch her from each side of his blurred central vision, but she barely moved. She chuckled, low and rotten.
Isi said, louder, “Why are you here, anaana?”
She focused her dead eyes on him. Her ulcerous tongue wetted her lips, and in a voice like the slow scraping of a dull savik over driftwood she said, “To sit with you while you die.”
“I’m not dying,” he said.
“You’re always dying. Everything is always dying.” She took a slow breath with a sound like sucking marrow from a bone. “‘You live, you suffer, and you die,’” she quoted.
It was a truth Isi’s father had taught him, as all fathers taught their sons. But Isi did not relent. “The first part of that is, ‘You live,’” he said. “And I am still alive.”
“Even so. But you are not Isigippoq anymore, are you? What will you do now, Isiluppoq?”
Isi turned away, looking askance at everything and seeing none of it clearly. She was right: his fine eyes were ruined. The dogs were dark shapes on the snow, still whimpering, and the few auks still flying nearby may as well have been drifting pieces of soot.
His undead mother laughed. “If you return to Siorapaluk, they will turn you out. Try your luck at Qaanaaq or Qeqertaq, the same. If you make it down to Uummannaq, they will chase you over the bay to Pituffik.”
Where the dogs are tied up, indeed.
He knew what she said was true: if he could not hunt anymore, every village would shun him. But Isi would not easily accept that fate. He must be able to do something.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you could set your face toward Savigssivik, and you can fall off the sledge on your way.”
Yes, the crone would be pleased to see him do so, but he would not follow her example. Not yet. No—there was one thing at least he could do, and that was to finish the task Ukutseq had set him. He would continue north to Etah, find the angakkoq, and deliver the amulet. After that, who could say?
“Shut up, dead woman,” he said. “I am not going back to Siorapaluk.”
Her leathery eyelids narrowed over her dead white eyes. She bared her rotten teeth and growled, deeper and longer than a bear.
“Fall off the sledge again, old hag,” Isi said. He snapped his whip over the dogs’ heads, ordered them up and forward again.
His mother—the grotesque corpse of his mother—stepped lightly from the sledge and stood to the side as he passed her. Isi did not look back. Within two lengths of the dogs’ traces the air cleared, as if he came out of a fogbank of decay. Isi breathed deep the sweet, clean air.
Then he choked as the foulness returned, and her voice sounded so close she might be sitting on his shoulder.
“Keep a close watch, oh Isi. You might see your death coming.”
* * *
It was going to take longer than two more days to get to Etah.
Isi trusted his dogs. He cracked the whip, and they did not disappoint him. But he did not trust himself.
As they detoured around icebergs frozen in the pack and crevasses formed in the frozen sea, he constantly feared losing his way. He could no longer see the mountain features that had so reliably guided him in years past. He marked the angle of the sun as much by its warmth as by sighting it, and often by the shadows he sensed more than saw from the corners of his eyes. But in front of him he saw little of value or of note. It was as if he lay under the water, looking at images moving above the surface.
He gauged his speed by the feel of the sledge and the motion of the sun. Just before the sun set, as its light diffused through the clouds and made his task all the harder, the dogs stopped at the edge of another crevasse. Isi walked along it, to the right, toward the land and the mountain and the great ice, measuring its width and testing the strength of the edges with the shaft of his harpoon. It took him longer than ever to find a passage. He tried to force all his anger into his muscles as he pushed the sledge to the narrowest spot and bridged the crevasse with it. He tested its stability and then stood on it while he tossed the dogs across, one by one. Again on his way in the twilight, he drove the pack east to find a place to camp. The dogs barked their encouragement to one another; they knew the long day was coming to an end, and there would be meat and rest for them.
Isi found a suitable place near but not under the mountain, lest an unstable piece of ice fall on his tent or on the dogs. He staked the dogs away from the sledge; by feel he cut hunks of walrus and gave them out according to the pack hierarchy. He ate some himself as he worked, sucking on the frozen meat until it softened enough to chew.
He pitched the tent over the sledge as much by feel as by his damaged sight; it took far longer than it should have. He started a piece of peat burning for warmth and finally tumbled, exhausted, onto the skin-covered sledge. It creaked under him. Outside the tent one of the dogs growled in its sleep, but the only other sound was the steady breeze off the ice cap.
He might have slept, but wasn’t sure: one moment he noticed his fatigue and the breeze, the next he noticed the stink.
“You’ll never make it,” said his mother-who-refused-to-die.
“Shut up, old woman. Dead woman.”
He hated the rattling sound of her laugh almost as much as the hollow scrape of her speech. “If I am dead, and you are talking with me, does that mean you are dead, too?”
“No,” he said. He drew his savik slowly from its sheath. “By the bear in the sky and his brother on the ice, I live.”
“We shall see,” she said.
He stabbed at where the voice came from, but his savik cut only the foul air. Her laughter rose to a crescendo and then faded, replaced by wind and more wind.
The tent shuddered. Frozen pellets driven off the ice cap struck it with magnificent force and turned the skin sides into drums. The rhythm beat into Isi’s ears, and his heart raced to catch up with it. The flap blew open and storm-driven snow flew inside.
Isi crept outside, into the stinging twilight. The wind smelled like a butchered walrus’s guts; the ice that blew into his mouth tasted charnel. It had to be the old woman’s doing.
Low to the ground, he worked his way around the tent, checking its moorings. He listened for the dogs but heard neither barks nor whimpers; they should all be safe under protective blankets of snow by now. By the time he reached the flap again, ice coated his eyebrows and mustache, and his hood was frozen to his ears. He slipped inside and fought to tie the flap shut.
Before he could get it tied, the dogs started barking. The sound barely penetrated the wind, which stung Isi again when he stepped outside.
A tremendous growl answered the dogs, and even with his broken eyes Isi saw the great bear—so white it nearly glowed in the storm—rear up on its hind legs as the lead dog sprang at it. The bear batted the dog away as easily as Isi might smack his own head, and charged at the tent. The other dogs broke loose from their stakes and leapt at the bear—from its right, as their instinct taught them—but this bear hit them as easily with its right paw as with its left.
Isi knew that was wrong, too, but his knowledge didn’t matter: his remaining dogs, all four of them, were flung aside one by one by this colossal ambidextrous bear.
He dove into the tent to retrieve his harpoon.
As his fingers closed around the shaft, the tent ripped open with a sound like drops of fat sizzling as they fall into a fire. The bear lunged past the torn skins and landed on the side of the sledge. The sledge cracked and skittered sideways, spilling Isi’s belongings and tangling in the tent.
Isi jabbed at the beast with his harpoon. The bear slapped the weapon away with its left paw, then swept Isi’s chest with its right. Isi gasped as its claws tore through his thick jacket and ripped into his muscles. The claws caught the thong holding his amulet; it snapped as easily as breaking a bird’s breastbone and flung Isi’s walrus tusk out into the storm and ice.
Isi backed up a step and tried to raise his harpoon, but he slipped to one knee, suddenly weak. The harpoon felt heavy and started to fall from his grip. Without his amulet, he no longer had the walrus’s strength.
The bear rose up to its full height and bellowed foul breath into the storm.
Isi looked at it askance and saw, at the clear edge of his vision, not the huge bear, but his mother’s shriveled form. His thoughts jerked forward in short bursts, as a child chases after a fleeing hare. How could
his mother transform into a bear, unless she had learned some sorcery? Could her dead self have become an angakkoq? More likely she was an ilissitoq—she had been awful enough in life to be an evil spirit in death. But if she was a full angakkoq, the only wound that would kill her would be to her throat.
Isi gripped the harpoon and readied for the false creature’s attack. But its triumphant roar became a scream of pain as Isi’s lead dog jumped from beside the tangled tent and bit the bear’s flank. The dog struck and dropped away, unsteady and favoring one front paw, then sprang again at the bear’s back. The bear spun toward this new attacker.
Isi charged. His feet moved sluggishly, as if his boots were blocks of ice, but he closed the distance and struck just under the beast’s ribcage. The bear’s right paw swung back and caught Isi a glancing blow that knocked him off his feet. He landed hard beside the sledge.
Isi drew a sharp, painful breath as he watched the bear finally strike the dog a horrible blow that stove in its side. Isi felt his chest where the bear’s claws had torn him and wished for his walrus amulet to strengthen him—and remembered the amulet meant for the angakkoq of Etah.
He dug through the skins and goods around him as the snarling bear approached, and came up with the leather amulet bag. He gasped as he picked it up, not from the pain that wrenched his smashed side but from surprise. Three or four of the stitches on the amulet bag had popped, either from the bear jumping on the sledge or Isi pulling too roughly at the pouch, and some of the cushioning grass poked through. But with the grass came light—glowing white, whiter than the brightest snowbank under the harshest summer sun.
Power flowed into Isi. He surged to his feet, the bag heavy in his left hand, his savik in his right. He held the glowing opening in the bag toward the awful bear and the creature stopped, growled loudly, and shuffled its feet as if unsure whether to advance or retreat. Its black eye clouded over with the same milky glow Isi had seen in his mother’s corpse-eyes.
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