by Jack Lasenby
While after more goats, I surprised a hind which ran on to my arrow. The venison ate well, Jak cracking bones into the night, Nip’s belly swollen like a little ball. We had meat for several days, a deerskin, and tendons enough for what I was planning.
The goatskins had dried. I sewed them tight, making the holes with a sharp bone, drawing the needles through with their fine threads of tendon. As the skins dried out even more, the thread dried, too. The stitches pulled the cuts so tight I tried one skin and found it would hold water. Now I knew we must succeed!
Across the river a stag wandered unafraid, coat turning red. Carrying his antlers high. Coming into his prime. A few heavy frosts, the annual mating would begin, and he would lose condition. We must cross the river while there was fat on the stags. The best meat to dry for winter.
We soon had twelve goatskins. Within a few days, they were sewn tight. As soon as I had my idea, I took care to skin the carcasses with the least amount of cutting, punching the skin away from the flesh, inserting my arm and punching further, until I could work off most of the skin, almost like rabbits. It meant less sewing.
The last job was the hardest. I sewed up the cuts on a goatskin, inserting and stitching a hollow stem in one leg. At first I blew too long, got dizzy, and had to lie down. Next time I had a plug ready and took my time. At last the skin stayed blown up, an awkward-looking, headless carcass. Left in the sun, it swelled hard.
I stitched and blew up all the goatskins and fastened them inside a framework of saplings, lashed together with plaited flax. We had a raft which floated high! I put Jak and Nip aboard and tried it in the shallows. Nip rolled her eyes, and whimpered, but Jak balanced and barked as if remembering our journey down the lake.
Upstream of our camp, the river swung around a sharp bend. The stretch below cut back in this side. I took the long rope I had plaited and tested my idea with a little raft of branches. When I stood out on the bend and pulled on the rope, the raft swung across the current. It worked even better once, and I pulled it back and found a branch had come loose and hung below the others. The current pressing on that branch had pushed the little raft faster towards the other side. The harder I pulled on the rope, the better it worked.
“The raft can’t get away, because of the rope,” I told Jak and Nip. “It’s got to go somewhere, so it shoots across the other side. The branch underneath makes it go even faster.”
Jak looked thoughtful. Nip looked at him and back at me.
I made a blade of flattened wood and lashed it under the goatskin raft. If it didn’t work, we would just swing into the middle of the river, and I could pull the raft back and try again. I thought of what would happen if the rope broke, and spent several days plaiting a heavier one.
As I worked, my mind filled with pictures of Lutha. Her brown knees, their rounded smoothness lifted in her canoe, her large eyes. I heard her calling me: “Idiot!” I was sure she had kissed me, that night in the dark. I wanted to see her again, convince the other women we were friendly. Getting across the river was the first step.
Early one morning I fastened the raft to the tree at the point. Jak and Nip I tied on board. My spear, bow, arrows. A rabbitskin bag with konny berries. Another with cooked meat in a pack. Everything lashed tight. I was pushing off when something whistled past my ear, hit the sapling framework and struck a goatskin. Air hissed out.
Shouts. Shove off! Grab my paddle – a looped length of sapling and a sleeve of goatskin. Men running. Jak barks. Nip yaps. Spears falling. I let the rope run out. It tightens, and I pull. The blade of wood beneath the raft drums. I throw myself face down, hang on.
Like a stone in the end of a sling, we swing towards the middle of the river. Two men out on the point. One holds the other’s legs. He throws himself towards the branch where the rope is tied. I half-kneel and fire, but the arrow falls short. The raft thumps across the waves towards the other side. My second arrow hits one man, but the other is slashing, slashing.
I hear shrieks of joy, see their prancing triumph, and what I should have noticed before. Tall nodding smoke signals of the Salt Men. The rope goes slack. Our swing across the river stops. We spin, hurtle downstream, carried like a feather on the back of that turbulent animal to where it disappears bellowing under the mountain.
Chapter 8
Nothing To Be Afraid Of
The front of the raft tilted into the black hole. I could leap for an overhanging branch, but Jak and Nip? I touched Lutha’s knife for luck. Frantic, took a turn of rope around my chest. The magnified crash of water shook my vision. A receding bulge of light, and the raft was swallowed by darkness, punching, bucking waves, bumping invisible walls.
I stuck the paddle above my head. It jolted, jarred my hands. The cascade of water roared out any sound. My fingers crept up the shaft to a jagged stump. The deerskin blade smashed off. I flattened myself on top of Jak and Nip.
Nip struggled. She could not hear, but it comforted me to shout her name. Shaken, deafened, we plummeted down the dark plunge. Rocks somewhere just above our heads.
Though full of flying water the air was fresh. Just as I thought that, I found myself gasping. Nip struggling, Jak scrabbling beneath me. No air. Just heat and its reek – the taste of burning iron. Searing. Out of dark into dark, a waterfall of fire tumbling beside us. My face burning. A great surge of steam as the torrent of red crumbled down, struck our river. Buried somewhere in its rumble, a giant shout. Animal bellow. In its terrifying bray, I heard the sound of loneliness. Time stopped. The red light flickered again: another glimpse of licking waves. Then darkness returned, a bruise of reddish-black vanishing behind.
Air – cold, delicious – filling my chest, cleansing my skin of the clammy stench of heat. The dogs panted. I sucked in air, feeling the skin of my face cool. And we left the water. Flew. No smash, smack, buffet of waves. The river must have taken a sudden drop over a ledge. There was no time to wonder about the waterfall of fire, the vast animal bellow, its stink. We crashed on the water again. Several more drops like that. Each time I was afraid we might land upside-down.
One thump so hard, it must have been a rock hitting the bottom of our blown-up goatskins. If they tore, we would sink. And what then?
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was aware of enjoying myself. As if I saw light at a distance. The raft worked. We had escaped the Salt Men, were travelling – flying – through the burning belly of Grave Mountain. But what was the animal that bellowed and brayed, that stunk of decay? And how long had we been travelling? Buried in darkness, I hung on.
A grinding crash to our right. I sensed the raft spinning end for end. When I felt for the heavy rope, there was only a short piece dragging behind. I thought of Taur. If there was nothing else he could do, he used to laugh. I looked ahead at the darkness, patted Nip, and laughed. Felt the sound leaving my mouth, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” but could not hear it through the rumble and crash. It made me feel better.
There was a light dancing, not the light I had seen in my mind. Not the red of firelight. Dancing. Rising. Falling. Now above, now below. Left. Right. Growing. Looming, dragging over us a wing of white light. An even greater roar. Spray driving like hail. White spray. Toss and confusion of light and white water. We tipped and flew through thunder, dazzled, unable to see for the light. Crash!
Howl from Jak. Yelp from Nip. The air knocks out of my lungs as we smash on something hard far below. A drifting sensation. Turning slowly. Gasping, I ache as if kicked all over. Bright light hurts my eyes. I close them – dazzled. After the long tunnel through darkness, everything is white.
My hand touched Lutha’s knife. The raft turned slowly on a great pool, only half-afloat. Sapling framework sprung. Smashed. Bindings rubbed through, just holding.
Pummelled sore, I could not move. Jak and Nip whining, struggling to crawl from beneath me. Still getting my breath, I could not answer. I would soon throw off my rope, undo theirs but, for the moment, I just wanted to lie. To enjoy being alive.
The crisp air, its sharp tang! Bright. My eyes hurt. I remembered the killing rager that had gone mad, burned up the trees, and scorched rivers dry. Were we back in the land of the maniac sun?
I shaded my eyes, looked up the white scrawl of water to the tunnel’s oval mouth, at the mountain through which we had travelled like flying through solid stone. Something odd about the light. I undid the rope, levered myself up. Jak and Nip wriggling.
We were surrounded by mountains, piled ranges, ridges heaped. Spurs serried like backbones of fish. The gaps of valleys south and east. All painted white. It was not the insane sun of the north that blinded me: snow covered everything, reflecting light off cliff, bluff, and buttress. Dazzling. The only thing dark, a hard-bulged wall of black cloud above the mountains.
“The mountain that ate the sun.” Jak and Nip whined as I freed them. “What Lutha called the Land of the White Bear. But it couldn’t have been a bear, that bellow.”
Below, the river disappeared between white walls capped with snow cornices. I shoved at the water with the stump of the paddle. We grounded and stepped on to snow. I dragged out the raft.
Some of the goatskins were ripped flaps. Some gushed water. On several, the hairs curled and blackened, brushed off as I touched them. Scorched by that fiery spectre in the mountain’s belly. Every stick of the raft, every length of lashing would be precious. We had my goatskin pack. The deerskin I tied over my shoulders, belted around my waist.
I cut squares of goatskin, stood on them like diamond shapes. The back flaps folded up the calves of my legs. The side flaps over my feet, left, right. The front flaps back over my toes and up my ankles. I gathered and lashed them around my legs. Stamped around, feet stinging, laughing at Jak and Nip.
I had my heavy spear, the raft’s sapling framework. The end of the rope the Salt Men had slashed through. We had lost the bundle of rabbit skins, the snares, bow and arrows. We had lost the string of dried meat, and the fire drill. My pack still held some short lengths of cord, the bone and wooden needles, spare tendons for thread, my old woollen cap, and I had Lutha’s knife.
Taur would have carried everything on his huge shoulders, but I couldn’t, not even with the help of the dogs. I drove the ends of the longer saplings into the snow, and tied the ripped, wet goatskins high out of reach of any wandering animal, though what could there be in this world of snow and ice? I let the air out of the rest of the skins, stuffed them in my pack. We must find shelter before it became dark, and we froze.
The goatskin foot wrappings slipped in the snow. My toes couldn’t grip. I used my spear as a staff, worked up the slope to the foot of the spur. It took so long, I began to wonder if we would reach the shoulder before dark, but the light did not grow shadowy. If anything, it seemed even brighter. Heads down, the dogs followed, Nip whining. Hungry. Jak’s belly sucked in. We rounded the shoulder of the spur.
Ahead a piled outcrop where the spur joined another and climbed for the ridge above. We were halfway to the rocks when something moved. At first I thought a snow slope had slipped. Against all that other white, though, I could not be sure.
Nip sat in the snow, misery on her face, lowered ears, dropped tail. Her wet red coat looked black. She had been terrified on the raft. Cold and starving in a strange white world, she lifted her little snout and complained.
Why is another’s unhappiness funny? Taur used to laugh when I complained. I turned back, laughing, scooped up Nip and dropped her in a fold of the deerskin against my chest. A moment before, I had been exhausted, weak. Now I struggled on, leaning on my spear, but knowing I could make the jumble of rocks. Jak took the lead, sniffing at the snow, sneezing, shaking his head.
One of the rocks leaned far enough for a roof. We would stack smaller rocks up either side. Wall off the front. I was busy planning when Jak growled. The tracks were even bigger than the clumsy pug-marks my feet left in their goatskin wrappings. Jak growled again, and I quietened him.
“There’s something alive here, after all. Maybe what I thought I saw moving was an animal. But it was white.” Jak stood very still, staring.
Rounding the shoulder of the next spur, something moved like a slant of water and was gone. But the distance across the gully was so great, the animal must have run at enormous speed. And for me to see it at that distance, it must be huge!
I did not say that aloud, did not want to scare Jak and Nip. It had looked the shape of a man, a man covered in white, but as big – as if the hillside moved. Jak looked at me. He could tell there was something wrong.
“We’ll camp here.” My voice shook as I put Nip beneath the overhang. Jak snuffed the air, growled, pawed the tracks.
I drove my spear into the snow and tried to sound confident. “We’ll build a wall with these rocks and eat some snow. That’ll fill our bellies.” The words sounded very small as I said them. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Chapter 9
Strange Shelter
The rocks would not shift, frozen into the ground. I thought of the time Taur was unconscious on the island of ice and I made a rough shelter of snow like the ones in Hagar’s story. With Lutha’s knife, I started cutting bricks of snow out of the drift under the overhanging rock. Stacked, they froze to each other, and my wall lifted to meet the rock roof. Wedge-shaped bricks along the top. I jammed holes with handfuls of snow.
Nip came galloping down the slope, eyes wide open, yelping as Jak chased her. Skidded on her rump, legs stuck out in front. She looked so silly, I dropped the knife and laughed. Jak pulled himself up, tried to look as if he wasn’t chasing her, a guilty grin on his face.
As I started on the front of the shelter, Jak barked.
“All right. You can play. I’ve got to get this built before dark.”
A different bark. Urgent. Nip screamed. “Don’t hurt her,” I said over my shoulder. “She’s only little, you know.” I cut another brick, and Jak’s barking became a torrent.
I turned to growl. A wall of white fur leaned above me. So close I could hear the hairs on its neck rustle, a great white bear bent down its head, broad as a shovel, black-eyes staring, sniffing, muttering. And Jak leapt and bit it from behind.
An astounded grunt. The bear jerks round. One paw swings a white flash. A scream from Jak. In the same moment I tear the spear from the snow, thrust it into the broad belly. It slides and stubs on bone. I shove hard, feel something open so the spear goes in a little further, jams. Fling myself straight up the side of the overhang: scrabbling, clawing, clutching.
Terror forces me up the bare rock, iced over. I slip, nails scoring, screeching on ice. Drop on something that moves, soft. Kick myself off that squirming mound. Fly and fall headfirst into snow several steps away. Splutter up, shaking, brushing snow from face, mouth. Snorting it out of my nostrils. Picking it out of eyes, ears. Staring around. Frantic!
Jak hunched, gut drawn up, bleeding from his side. Past him, the bear, all snarling head, glinted black eyes, stub ears, flashing teeth. Its great front paws lunge. Swish! – whistle of iron claws. But its lower half is still. The back legs only jig and loll with the movements of its shoulders. Snapped off, the the spear shaft sticks out of the bear’s belly, dark blood oozing. The bear moans, worries the shredded stump with huge teeth.
Lutha’s knife still lies where I dropped it, by the bear’s crippled hind paws. Reach with the broken spear shaft. Tap the knife spinning across the snow. No time yet to help Jak. The bear heaves up chest and shoulders, great head. Stares. Eyes flat with hate, it gazes through my eyes into my mind, stares so like a man begging, hating but begging.
I want to look away. Anything but return that stare. “It doesn’t look like a dog’s head,” I say aloud. “Not close up.”
Certainly it looked nothing like a man’s. More like a huge snake’s head with a broad, toothed mouth. The white monster would have killed me, but for the chance of my spear breaking its back. And I feel a strength. Hear Taur’s laugh. I hear Lutha’s voice. “Idiot!” she says. “Keep starin
g. Save the dogs!” And I sense Hagar near, her dark-robed presence. I stare, and the bear’s gaze weakens. Its head turns. I know what must be done.
I sharpen the broken end of the spear shaft. Climb behind the bear. Jak still barking, though his voice is weakening. He manages a step forward, attracts the bear’s gaze as I climb. It leans forward like a man lifting himself on his elbows, raises one paw to clout him. Jak barks just out of reach. Blood dapples snow below his ripped belly. Above the bear, I look down on its stretched neck. The spot I know behind a deer’s head, where the neck-bones open when the head is bent down. Jak moves. The bear groans menace. Stretches, sways its head lower. I feel for that spot with the shortened spear and shove, all my weight upon it. Slip and fall forward, legs astride the shaggy shoulders. The sharpened shaft grates.
A sudden terrible shiver. I am going into the dark. Waking. Rising to the light. Everything takes such a long time. And suddenly I know where I am. What I must do. Jak needs help!
The dead bear had rolled on me. It took so long to dig my way out. Jak scrabbled weak. “I’ll get myself out. You just rest till I can have a look at you.”
I flung snow aside. Reek of hot blood, hairs printed coarse on my face. The smothering bulk settled till I thought it might sink me further into the snow, roll, crush, suffocate.
I dug a narrower tunnel, dragged out my right arm, my left, eased my head, one shoulder, then the other, wriggled, pulled up both knees, stamped a solid platform of snow, and pushed myself out. The bear sank deeper into the cavity I had left. Air whistled out of its chest. And a tiny whimper filled the air.
Nip scrabbled whining from beneath the bear’s other side, where she had been half-buried. She howled as I picked her up, felt her legs, ribs. Dropped her in the snow. Jak?
