Ivory and Bone

by Julie Eshbaugh

  But it’s too late.

  They both jerk, snapping to the side, then righting, almost catching themselves upright, but then tilting, slipping, their arms still entwined, both of them moving as one, plunging into the ravine.

  My feet are on the rock, and then they are in the air. Cold burns through me, right to my bones, as I plunge into the water.

  White foam rolls around my shoulders, crashing over my head. I dive under, into the current, eyes open, and there, carried along like a leaf on the wind, I see them.

  Mya’s arm is extended, her hand clasped to Lo’s belt, tethering them together. They move as one body, feet kicking wildly, transforming the water into a cloud of tiny bubbles that float toward the surface, blocking my view. As bubbles rise, burst, and dissolve away, an agonizing weight presses down on my chest—I need to breathe.

  I break the surface and the sun warms my face. My mouth opens and gulps in air. I reorient myself. Downstream I spot Mya, clinging with one arm to a high rock along the side, her fingers bleached white with cold, clawing at the jagged edge. Behind her, the other hand clutches Lo’s hood, Lo’s face bobbing up and down on the surface of the current—one moment above, one moment below.

  Mya coughs, clutches at the rock, and screams.

  Her voice, a sharp snap, echoes like a thunderclap through the ravine. Her grip on Lo’s hood has given out. Lo floats away from her, disappearing back under the foam.

  I fight against every impulse within me, willing my fingers to peel away from the rock.

  The current carries me past Mya, the stream rolling downhill. I follow Lo, kicking hard, trying to pull within reach of her. For Mya, I tell myself. For Mya. Lo tumbles in the churning current, her movements in sync with the water’s movements, her blood tinting the stream pink.

  Watching her body rise and fall, with no tension or effort left in her limbs, I know that her Spirit has left her. I know that I have failed. She is carried away now on another kind of stream, to rejoin the spirit of the Divine.

  Eventually, we reach the place where the ravine widens, the sharply angled cliffs crumbling into a mass of boulders that tumble to the floor of the valley below. The stream splits, and Lo’s body catches on a rock. Here the water turns suddenly shallow and the current calm, and I clamber up onto rocks beside her. I bend, wrap an arm around her waist, slippery with blood, and lift her from the water.

  I don’t hear her approach, but all at once, Mya appears beside me. She crouches, and with fingers white as ice, she turns Lo’s head and brushes her hair aside, revealing the bloodless, blue lips and wide, white eyes of a drowned girl.

  Beyond us, the water drops over a jumble of sharply angled rocks, dividing into three wispy waterfalls that spill to the valley floor below, pooling and rippling into creeks that disappear into the distant tree line.

  Mya stays silent, but I notice the sound of my own breath. It rushes fast and desperate in and out of my lungs, reminding me I’m alive.

  THIRTY-ONE

  By the time the sun is fully up the next day, I am already on the sea in my kayak, far north of Mya’s camp. I stole out of the hut I slept in, shrouded in the stillness of the pale morning, anxious to leave without being seen—without having to apologize for my hasty departure.

  It’s not that I wasn’t well cared for. Yano and Ela warmed me up and cleaned and treated my wounds, including an ankle I’d sprained on one of my trips into the ravine—now tucked inside the kayak, unnecessarily splinted and wrapped—and a deep cut on my forearm, the cause of which I could no longer remember.

  Like many days following a storm, today the sea is still and smooth. As I stab my paddle into the placid water, I remember Yano’s grave expression, his usually bright eyes shadowed with concern, as he asked me how it could be that I didn’t remember the cause of a wound so deep.

  “I fell too many times. Any number of falls could’ve given me a wound like this.”

  “It was in the stream,” Mya offered. “I saw it. Your arm tore across a jagged rock when you tried to save Lo.”

  When you tried to save Lo. I remember these words of Mya’s so clearly, because they were the last words she said to me. Once we returned to the Olen camp—once our wounds had been bandaged and she had offered this explanation for my cut—Mya withdrew to her hut and stayed there. Ela carried food in, but brought nothing back out. No message for me. No explanation for her silence.

  “When you tried to save Lo” is the only explanation I have.

  Does Mya blame me for failing to save Lo, for letting Lo die? Is that her reason for avoiding me? Or does she worry what horrors will come back to her, the next time she sees my face? Will she see Lo’s lifeless body as I pulled her from the stream?

  Whatever her reasons, it was clear she didn’t want to see me. So I decided to leave quietly.

  The last thing I want right now is a confrontation.

  The sun hangs high overhead, dipping only slightly to the west, when I drag my kayak up onto my own clan’s beach. My aunt Ama and two of her boys are far out in the bay, fishing. They don’t see me, but the sight of them out in their boats comforts me with its normalcy.

  Pulling the kayak into the tall grass, I notice the thick, slightly sweet smell of burned fur mixing with the salt in the air. Hides are spread across the beach—hides with charred and singed edges. These must have been pulled down from damaged huts and judged to be salvageable. They are damp, bleeding dark puddles of water into the sand around them. I imagine they were washed in the sea and spread out to dry in the sun.

  A tight knot forms in my stomach. I’d hoped that I could come home, really come home—that I could silence the echoes of the horrors of the last few days. But as I hike up the trail, I realize my home is no longer the safe refuge I remember.

  The huts stand like half-dressed skeletons against the bright blue sky. Some are stripped of hides completely, leaving only the frame of bare mammoth bones hunched over like bending backs. Others have holes ripped open, gaping like fresh wounds—a gap in a wall or a roof torn away. I find my mother and father with several other elders in the gathering place, studying hides scattered on the ground, deciding which should be used and which should be rejected. I notice a pile of sealskin pelts beneath my mother’s hands. These are her own, tanned for her as a gift from Pek. Her plan was to stitch them together, to make a luxurious blanket for her bed.

  She looks up, her eyes hazy with thought, but when she sees me the haze clears and she jumps to her feet. Then she’s hugging me, kissing my cheek, while at the same time repeating my name over and over, scolding me for leaving without letting anyone know.

  “Pek knew,” I say.

  “Pek doesn’t count. You need to tell someone with sense.”

  My father comes up and lays a hand on my shoulder. Turning toward him, I catch a glimpse of something in his eyes, something I’ve rarely seen there—the fading shadow of fear. His hand clamps down tight and the shadow fades, so swiftly it’s almost easy to believe it was never there at all, but his other hand clasps me on the opposite shoulder and I am sure.

  What had they thought when Pek told them I had headed south, alone in a small boat in that storm? All at once it rushes back to me—my confusion on the water, my soaked and freezing clothes, how close I was to death when Mya found me.

  Tears spring to my eyes. I draw my father into an awkward embrace to hide my face from him.

  “I want to help,” I say when I feel collected enough to speak. “With the huts. I want to help—”

  “You need to rest,” my mother says, not letting me get the words out. “Look at your ankle. This wound on your arm. What happened to you? What happened . . .” She trails off. Is she afraid to know the answer?

  “Chev was injured,” I say. I know I need to tell them everything, but I also know I don’t have the strength or the will to tell them everything now. “He survived. He’s healing. But Lo . . .” I look down, draw in a deep breath, then look back at their expectant faces. The words stick i
n the back of my throat. I have to spit them through my lips. “Lo died. It was an accident. She drowned.”

  The light in my mother’s eyes dims. She shoots a fleeting glance at my father. “And the others? From the Olen?” She doesn’t have to ask—I know what’s on her mind. Lo’s goal was to kill Chev’s whole family. She wants to know if she had any success before she died.

  “There were many injuries,” I say, remembering the horror of the scene under the canopy, “but everyone from the Olen clan survived.”

  My mother’s eyes brighten, and the tension at the corners of her mouth softens. “Pek will be so relieved to know Seeri is all right.”

  I learn that both Pek and Kesh are in our family’s hut. Urar has dressed their wounds with cool wraps and offered up countless prayers and chants, but their burns are extensive and healing will be slow. “Seeing you safe will help their pain,” my mother says. Her words send a shiver of dread through me, and I hurry to find them.

  When I duck under the charred pelt that forms the door I find Urar sitting on the floor, chanting softly, his voice barely above a whisper. My brothers Pek and Kesh are both in bed, both apparently sleeping. A tangle of scents hangs in the room—the sweetness of mead mixing with a heavy, darker odor, like mud from the bottom of a pond. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I couldn’t hear you from outside.”

  Urar flinches at the intrusion, but then a small sound, not more than a gasp, escapes his lips and he gets to his feet. He holds me at arm’s length; his brow, wet with sweat, furrows as he squints through the dim light at the long cut that runs along my forearm. “Rest,” he says. “That is first. Later, when you wake, I will treat that with oil and herbs.”

  “Yes,” I say. He hesitates, perhaps waiting for me to follow his direction and lie on my bed, but I stand still, nodding in agreement, not wanting to hobble and let him see that my ankle is splinted. Finally, he nods in reply and squeezes my hands. With a hint of a smile—something quite rare from Urar—he ducks out through the door.

  I collapse onto my bed, but it’s not the bed I had before the fire. The thick stack of pelts and hides I’ve always slept between has been thinned considerably, as have the other stacks of pelts that form the beds around the room. Patches of dirt, once hidden completely by soft rugs, peek through the hides that remain on the floor, scattered about in an artful effort to cover as much of the ground as possible.

  How many pelts were destroyed in the fire? The hides and furs that filled this hut were the reward of many lives spent hunting—my life, my parents’ lives, my grandparents’ lives. How long will it take to rebuild what was destroyed?

  Stretching out, I unwrap my ankle and discard the unnecessary splint. Restlessness grips me. I’m up on my feet, pacing, trying to get used to the changes in the hut, to the overwhelming strangeness I feel in this place where I once felt at home.

  Home . . . it’s a word I don’t understand anymore. I don’t feel right in this hut. It floods me with longing for a time that will never come back. A time when I still felt trust—trust in neighboring clans, trust even in strangers.

  My brothers sleep on, their breaths coming in even rhythms almost in time with each other, filling me with the creeping sense that the air in the room is being devoured. I’m forced to leave this strange hut and head out into the strange sunlight. Nothing feels right. Nothing feels familiar. I can’t imagine that it ever will again.

  Like the morning of the day I met Mya, I’m driven by a desire to get away, a need to escape the confines of camp and be alone for a while. I think first of the meadow, but then reconsider, knowing the meadow would be the first place Pek or anyone else would look for me. Instead, I decide to head for the trail that leads over the hills to the western side of the bay. I know that near the summit that path divides—a seldom-used, nearly forgotten trail splits off and descends north and east to the far edge of the meadow. It will be a longer trek, giving me more time alone.

  I start up the trail from its mouth near the beach. Even the slant of light seems strange. Unfamiliar songs of unfamiliar birds fill the air.

  I climb quickly, not pausing until I reach the summit. A breeze stirs the lower branches of the trees with a whisper, like ghosts shuffling by, and I shudder. After a bit of searching, I locate the overgrown path that winds east toward the meadow. At the first switchback, a gap in the trees opens on a wide view to the northwest, and I stop.

  Looking out, I can see to the horizon, a line so flat it could be water, though the ground is the golden yellow and green of the grasslands. I look as far out as I can, as if I can look back into the past, back to the day a family left their camp on a gathering trip, and a girl became lost.

  My eyes search the land in front of me as if I might see that day—as if that day were a bend in a river that flows from the past to the place I stand right now.

  But that day is not a place where the river bends, I realize. It’s the place where the river splits. On that day the Divine dropped a stone in the river, diverting it into two streams. One clan continued west. Another clan turned south. Separate courses, both leading toward death.

  The death of Mya’s father, Mya’s mother, Mya’s betrothed.

  The death of Lo’s father.

  The death of Lo.

  Wind blows across the peak from the bay and the scent of seawater brings me back to the present.

  I hurry downhill, and when I reach the meadow—the first place that truly feels like home—I drop down onto my back. Though I felt only restlessness in the hut, now I feel nothing but exhaustion. The hike brought back fatigue to every sore muscle in my body. Warmth surrounds me. A whisper in the grass quiets my thrumming thoughts: shhhhh . . . shhhhhh.

  Sleep swoops down on me with wide-stretched arms, wrapping me in an embrace, pulling me up, and carrying me away before I have a chance to resist.

  I wake with a start, as if summoned by a voice. I sit up, noticing the sun far off in the west. It’s almost time for the evening meal.

  What questions will I be asked tonight? I expect I will have to tell about the attack on Chev, my fight with the boy, the death of Lo.

  How will my mother react when she hears that I may have killed Orn? That I let Lo die?

  These questions darken my thoughts as I climb the trail back toward my camp, which suddenly seems so far away. I think of Manu, lost, far from family and clan.

  When I reach the summit, my steps quicken. I’m propelled forward by the knowledge that around the next bend, the trail turns toward home.

  I reach the overlook and sweep my gaze over the familiar scene in front of me—the sea to my right, the sloping plains to my left, and the eastern mountains in the far distance. And directly below me, a view of my own clan’s camp.

  Even run-down and blighted by half-stripped huts, this is the place of the people I love.

  But as I look down on the camp, confusion rises in me, and I have to question what I see. How could this be the same camp I stepped away from earlier today?

  Every hut is complete; every structure neatly covered in smooth, fine pelts. Sun glints off the roof of the kitchen, newly covered in a dark hide of glossy bearskin. And draped across the doorway of my family’s hut hangs something new—pelts stitched to create a sort of banner of contrasting colors, pieced together in an intricate design—a field of dark fur as a background, dotted with lighter pieces to suggest stars in a night sky.

  I’ve seen pelts stitched in patterns like this only once before, in Mya’s hut. This, all this, I think, my eyes moving from one repaired hut to another, could have come only from the south, from Mya and her people.

  I tear my eyes from the view and race farther down the trail, wondering if I will find Mya herself in my camp. But as the trail draws close to the bottom of the hill, I catch a glimpse out over the bay.

  Boats.

  Three intricately carved canoes float just a short distance from shore. Two rowers sit in each one, as if waiting to push out. And in two of the three canoes, a body lies
between the seated oarsmen. The canoe closest to shore bears the body of a young girl, lying as if asleep, covered all over in red ocher—the color of blood, the color of the dead.

  This is Lo, making her final journey home.

  The second canoe is farther out in the bay. Bright red ocher covers the length of the body that lies in the hull, standing out against the gray water, but it floats too far away for me to see the person’s face.

  It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to see his face to know that it’s Orn, the boy I let fall from the cliff, the boy Chev called Dora’s son. I had been afraid to look down, to know if he had lived or died.

  But now I know. Now I know he is dead.

  I hear voices coming from the beach, though my view is obscured by the trees. A man speaks in a steady, commanding voice. Chev. He is answered by the voices of my father and mother. They are thanking him for the gift of the pelts. They wish him blessings as he heads across the bay. “As you return the dead to the Bosha,” says my mother, “may the Divine protect you.”

  Her words ring in my ears as I descend the remainder of the trail to the beach. I wonder what will happen to Chev when he arrives on the Bosha’s shore. What if some of the Bosha still hope to kill him? What if their elders are not able to intervene? Is he brave to come and face them, or is he reckless?

  I reach the beach as Chev is saying his final good-bye to my parents. I step clear of the last of the trees and the three of them come into view.

  Only then do I see that there are not three people on the beach, but four. Chev is not facing the Bosha alone. He is taking the girl who stands beside him, dressed in an ill-fitting parka.

  Mya.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Mya’s eyes meet mine.

  When I left her camp early this morning, hadn’t I worried that when she next saw me, she would be transported to the moment of Lo’s death? Hadn’t I worried that I would be, too? But instead of that awful moment by the stream, I’m carried to the ledge outside the mouth of the cave.