Shaman: A Novel of the Paleolithic Era

Chapter 46

The eastern sky was red, the sky overhead was that gray that would soon reveal itself to be thin clouds or clear sky. Thorn directed them to stop in a depression in the snow that included a little wall of rock they could hide behind. There they remained until the sky was bright with the coming day, a cloudless day as it turned out, and the sun soon to crack the horizon. Thorn directed the others to stay low, while only he looked back to the north, with a patch of fur placed on his head and held out by his hands to each side, so that he would present a mere bump to anyone looking their way. He held himself motionless as he looked. Then he hissed and pulled his head down slowly.

—They’re there, he said.—They’re coming this way, with some wolves tied to ropes. They probably have our track. We’ve got to go.

—Won’t they see us?

—Yes. We’ll have to outrun them today, and lose them tonight.

He looked at each of them in turn.—We have to go fast. If we go fast all day, they can’t catch up to us. We can’t be the ones to get tired of the pace. We have to tire them. We have to be fast enough to keep a good distance, even if they charge. We have to outlast them at their charge pace, and then at whatever pace they can keep to after their charge. Understand?

—What if they let their wolves loose on us? Loon asked.

—We’ll kill the wolves and they’ll have lost their trackers. Anyway they might not be able to let those wolves off their ropes this far away from home without them running away. If we keep our distance, they can probably only use them as trackers.

Loon and Elga nodded. Click saw them and nodded too, humming and then saying,—Skai, skai, skai.

Thorn got out a bag of nuts from his pack and gave them each five.—We’ll eat on the run. Let’s go.

They took off out of their dip, running on the snowshoes toward the flat snow of the first riverbed. No cries came from behind them, but the way Thorn moved made it clear that he thought they would be seen by their pursuers. Instead of crossing the river’s ice he headed upstream on it, then picked a line and took off across the river, headed for the first rise of a ridge that ran south.

They had to show their hunters that it was not possible to catch them, neither in a rush nor over the long haul. With a woman among them it would be hard to do this, but Elga was strong. She had no problem keeping up with the men. It was harder to tell about Click, because of the way he huffed and puffed as he walked, making a song of his breathing. But the old ones were reputed to be made of harder stuff than most people, and Click certainly gave no indication of slowing down or being tired. As for Thorn, it was hard to say whether he would be able to hold this pace. For sure he was setting it now. Some old men had been cured to a kind of leathery toughness that youth could not match, and Loon would not be at all surprised to learn that Thorn was one of them.

So it could be that Loon was the slowest of their little band. It was a galling thought, and yet as they hurried along for fist after fist, it began to seem like it might be true. Badleg was never going to like a full day’s running, no matter the aid of the alder walking stick, which Loon had already named Thirdleg, hoping that the feeble joke would prong him along a little. Thirdleg would have to do its part, that was certain.

All that day they ran. At open leads of water they could safely reach, Thorn paused so they could put their faces to the water and drink, and in those moments he passed out some nuts and dried meat and honey seedcake, to eat as they started walking again. They never stopped for long, but Thorn always found something that caused them to pause briefly every fist or two. Their pace was as fast as Loon could keep to; he didn’t know if it was the same for the others or not, and he didn’t want to ask.

In the afternoon the snow softened, and they stopped to put on their snowshoes again. After that they would certainly be leaving tracks easy for their pursuers to follow. But the jende would be on broken snowshoes, which would slow them down.

Their pursuers were very seldom visible. Once they heard a distant howl, human or lupine, as if their track had been picked up after being lost. Thorn wanted to see them from time to time, to know where they were, so as they crossed the steppe he veered for low hills crowned by trees, or went to the highest parts of the drunken forests they skirted, to find places where trees had crossed in ways that gave them a blind where they could see without being seen. Three times Thorn spotted the jende party, and the third time he said,—They’re sending out a pair with the wolves to rush us.

This was the way wolves sometimes chased caribou, tiring them out with a charge until the weakest one fell behind. Their defense now had to be the same as the caribous’: stick together and stay ahead. Sometimes, Loon recalled, the lead males in the caribou herd might try to strike fear into the pursuers by turning on them. And Thorn was looking thoughtful as they hustled south through that long afternoon. At each stream crossing he took the most dangerous route, passing over exposed bare ice as near open leads as he dared, as if in hope that their pursuers might be heavier and fall through. Loon followed him over one thin brittle stretch of transparent ice, observing this, and then hustled forward to tell Thorn he was wrong if he thought he could trick the jende into making any mistakes on ice, because the jende were better on ice than anyone. Thorn growled at this, but did not try the trick again. His brow stayed deeply furrowed.

The sun finally sank into the west, and as the stars popped out they crawled into an alder brake, crawling under the weave of branches to do so. Here was where they would be vulnerable to the captive wolves, whom it seemed must have been kept on ropes, or they would have caught up.

When they were wrapped in their furs, Thorn said to Loon,—Stay here with Elga, and took Click by the arm, and the two of them headed back north with their spears.

When they reappeared, a couple of fists later, they were in a hurry to leave.

—Another all-nighter, Thorn said.—We killed one of their lead pair. The other one got away, but he doesn’t know how many of us were there. So they’ll be careful tonight. Let’s make this the night we get away.

—They can always track us, Loon said.

—Let’s see about that.

The waxing moon was one night farther east, one night fatter; by its light they walked through the increasing chill of a very cold night. In the haze of moonlight the stars were dim. The hard sparkly snow squeaked under their feet. They had reached the muskeg flats of the big valley’s drainage, and the tipping trees and icy black flat spots speckling the swamps convinced them to put their snowshoes on, to spread their weight out a little more on what looked like thin ice, maybe night ice only. If they had had ropes they would have roped together to cross land like this, but all they could do now was hope for the best. Click went after Thorn, and was substantially heavier than the rest of them, so presumably if he passed over a spot, it would hold Elga and Loon. On the other hand it was possible he would crush a spot that could only hold two crossings, and the third person then plunge through. So Loon and Elga stayed close enough to lunge to each other if they had to.

Happily the black flats proved to be frozen as solid as the white ice, and it was actually their slipperiness that made them worth avoiding. Thorn threaded between them when he could. If he crossed one, they got to feel how much better their footing was with their snowshoes on. One could even skate a little on them. Better however to stay on white snow, even if it was hard as the ice, and in some places almost as flat. The whiteness itself seemed to hold the foot.

They followed stream courses when they tended south, and skated along at a good speed. On land they were not as fast. Thorn cut a good line up the land southward. Moonlight was really the best illumination for seeing the shape of the land. Every muscle of the hills lay there under its blanket of suncupped snow, seeming to glow faintly under the luminous black sky. Through this white flesh the black rock outcroppings thrust like erect spurts, and frozen waterfalls slid down clefts like spills of spurtmilk. Male marks on female curves, the land in intercourse with itself, there in the moonlight and shadow. Always like that, from the beginning in the old time: mother and father first whole and one, split by a fight about how things should be, a fight never resolved. As they scurried under the moon, Loon remembered what he could of Thorn’s story about how the world had begun. Once in nothingness there was an egg filled by a person, and this person had all the parts and qualities of the world, and pecked out of its eggshell and poured out and became all things. The sky is the biggest piece of eggshell left behind, the sun what was left of the yolk, the earth and everything on it parts of the white of the egg. Raven pecked the white until everything was itself.

Loon knew he was forgetting most of the story. He wondered if he would ever be able to remember the stories the way Thorn could. It didn’t seem like he would. For a long time that truth had been a burden in his chest, a weight like a rock, and now he had to let it go so he could walk better. It was a problem for another time. Now whatever he could remember was enough. Now their walking was the whole story.

Strangely, even while walking at great speed by night, there was still time to think about other things. None of the thoughts seemed to matter very much, and yet they still flitted through his mind, like ghosts he was shedding as he conjured them up, because now they meant nothing. Nothing mattered but their walk, so really it was a question of whether his chittering thoughts helped him to deal with Badleg or not. Sometimes they did, being distractions, like squirrels on a branch overhead. Other times it felt like he had to devote every part of his attention to landing properly on his left foot and getting across its stride with the least amount of weight possible put on it, and quickly getting back onto Goodleg, so foursquare and reliable. If Goodleg were ever to give under these strains he was putting on it… that was a very sharp fear. But for now Goodleg kept on coming through for him, solid and painless. He could rely on Goodleg, push him a little. Then, deep in the rhythms of that altered walking, if his mind did drift to things not present, to other worries, to spin like a firestick, maybe that was all right, even a good thing. Part of the ability to ignore the repeated jab of Badleg’s squeaking.

As they continued Loon felt more and more tired. At moonset Thorn stopped at a lead to drink and eat some honey seedcake. After that they hiked on under the stars, pricking out everywhere in the darkening black. It got harder to see. They had to pay more attention to the snow, really look at it, and even when they did it was sometimes not possible to see how it tilted or how slippery it might be. You had to feel the land with your feet.

After a long period of walking blind like this, in the after part of the night when it fell deepest into its icy chill, Loon felt that his second wind had slipped into him when he hadn’t noticed. He was stronger now, lighter, tougher; he could go on, and it even felt like he could go on forever, or at least as long as needed. Hike on with these three companions for the rest of his life, and yet never tire. That was how it felt sometimes, when the second wind came on you and someone would say, Let’s hike all day and then talk it over.

That was a good feeling. He almost always felt the arrival of the second wind in him with immense gratitude, welcoming it with a little hop and song, and never more than now. It was so good to feel the absence of the light-headedness and weakness, feel their replacement by a deep strength.

So he swung into his pacing, poled hard with Thirdleg; he took over Elga’s spot, and then passed Click with a brief hello, and a tilt of the head that indicated his hope that Click would drop back and follow Elga, just to be sure of her. Click rooped his assent to something, anyway, and Loon caught up with Thorn.

Together they came on a river’s bend like the big loops in the Urdecha.

As they walked on the frozen stream Thorn said,—We’re almost to the big river crossing this valley. I hope the ice there isn’t already broken up. It seems like it’s almost time. Even these side streams are getting thin. It’s eighth day of the sixth month. The rivers down south are broken up by now. These must be close.

—Should we be walking on them then?

—We have to cross them! And I want to know how they are. If we could get across the big one, and then it broke up… He hiked on a little faster.

Loon let Thorn get his lead, followed. Thorn was on the hunt now, and Loon wanted to leave him to it, as well as nurse his second wind, pace it to serve the long haul. Behind him he saw that Click was just behind Elga, and they were close behind. Elga looked intent, downward, inward: some creature of the night, serious about being out there, even less inclined to talk than usual. At one brief stop she looked at Loon and it was as if she were looking right through him. She had not expected to get to try this escape, he saw; it had surprised her to get this chance, so that she reminded him of the jende when they had gotten off the ice raft. She had not expected to live. Now she would escape or die.

Soon after sunrise, in the raw yellows of morning, the stream they had been descending for the past few fists widened, and they were crossing a frozen pool or flood meadow, near their stream’s confluence with the big river. Thorn turned and trudged up to the top of a little prominence overlooking things, and while following him Loon realized how tired his legs had become; even a slight tilt uphill was close to devastating. And as soon as they crossed this river, it would all be uphill.

From the knob they could see up and down a broad sweep of the big river. Its surface was still white, yes, but a great number of giant white plates stuck up into the air, very striking to the eye. And the ice was speaking. Low long booms filled the air, like thunder from below the river, muffled as it came up through the ice. Sharp cracks punctuated these booms, also long sizzling sounds, zinging away from them. The river groaned when the zinging sounds ran through it. Oh yes: this ice was going to break up soon. All these booms and zings and cracks were announcing it, and rather emphatically at that. Even though nothing moved.

Thorn looked back to the north, pointed: a gyre of crows wheeled over something near the horizon in that direction.

—Let’s cross now, Thorn said.—No time to rest. Let’s cross and get up on a hill on the other side, then see what we can see.

So they took off across the river. They walked with sliding gentle steps. Crossing lanes of black ice, they saw bubbles trapped below the glistening surface, and below the bubbles caught glimpses of the watery depths, slight suggestions of green grass flexing in the current, perhaps the flicker of a trout. Downstream the cracks and zinging noises were louder than ever, and Loon’s breath caught in his throat; this was how break-ups announced themselves, the noise moving upstream well ahead of the break-up itself.

Thorn just put his head down and walked faster. They were still in their snowshoes, and sometimes they walked across black slicks that looked wet, they had frozen so smoothly. The older white ice was much more nobbled. They shuffled and skidded as fast as they could, arms pumping. Loon used Thirdleg to push himself along. The other three stayed as close to Thorn as seemed safe, each a few body lengths behind the one before, Loon bringing up the rear, determined to keep a good distance from Elga but not to drop back too far.

It took a long time to cross the river, it was so wide. When they reached the far bank they were all winded; they had been hurrying for their lives, and now they felt it. After a moment to catch their breath, to slow down the beating of their hearts, Thorn led them to another little headland point, just a man’s height doubled above the stream.

Up there they dropped their sacks and pulled out their leather patches, and untied their feet out of their snowshoes and sat on the patches set on the snowshoes. They were still breathing hard. Thorn made them drink from his water bag, and they all fumbled in their sacks and ate nuts, and dried meat, and seedcakes. They saw they did not have much food, although Thorn had a few bags of oil; but that would have to be a problem for later. For now they were famished, and would have to eat a lot to go on at anything like the pace they had been setting. So they ate.

Nothing they could see to the north was moving, except for a pack of otters, frolicking upstream on the far bank as if nothing special was happening that day, as if the river weren’t about to break up right under them. Thorn scowled to see that, and after a while he stood, and performed a little dance while singing the break-up song:

The river was alive, they could hear it throbbing. Under its white blanket of snow, under the bare ice shelving over it, it pushed up, it surged with the spring melt. They could see snow and ice shifting in places, and sudden bucklings where ice tipped up blinking in the sun, or lines of new plates cracked upright as if stitched by invisible sinews. Water sheeted out of these seams, bluing the ice downstream into little skyblinks.

Thorn sang hoarsely, danced without moving his feet, suggesting the dance without actually doing it. Speaking to the sky. The river boomed back. It was loud both upstream and down. But the break-up didn’t come.

They all knew that ice in this condition would sometimes hang on for days, holding on for fist after fist, day after day, until the break-up finally happened and it all rushed downstream on a violent spate of black water. It was the river’s summer orgasm, a spurt glorious to see. Never before had they cared exactly when it happened. Now, watching it hold despite all, they were in an agony of suspense. Possibly with a river this big, despite all its crashing and snapping, it would take a long time. And now, across the river, far to the northwest, Loon saw dots moving. He pointed them out.

Thorn stopped his dance.—Come on, he said grimly.—Fuck the gods. We have to go.

Loon groaned like the river. He stood and tested Badleg. Still bad. He put his sack on his shoulders, which were sore where the straps ran.

Off they went.

Chapter 47

Now their run took them uphill, into the afternoon sun. The glare of the sun’s blaze off the wet snow ahead made Loon squint until his eyes were almost closed. It felt like his whole body was squinting, and he had to push forward into the blast of light.

But they kept their pace. Loon found his way back into his second wind, uphill or not. Badleg felt much better going uphill. Loon put his snowshoes right in the tracks left by Click and Thorn; Click almost always stepped in Thorn’s tracks, so that it almost looked like a single person’s track. When the two sets of tracks separated, Loon began to follow Click’s, as having harder snow at their bottoms; then also, as he began to see why Click had deviated from Thorn’s tracks, consistently keeping to a higher line, he chose that way to smooth his own ascent. It occurred to Loon at one point that he could understand more of Click’s thinking by looking at his tracks in the snow than he ever had by talking with him.

Elga stayed close on his heels. She looked thirsty, and hiked head down, eyes almost shut, fitting her snowshoes carefully into the tracks before her.

Thorn headed for a black hill that popped over the white horizon. As they closed on it, moving more slowly as the snow softened, they could see it was the start of a line of hills that ran south, forming the western ridge of a valley which seemed to be the valley Loon and Elga had come down when the jende had taken them north. It was hard to be sure.

Thorn wanted to run this ridge, so they would stop leaving tracks in the snow. As they got farther south there would be even more snow-free ground, he said, and with luck they would be able to get off the ridge somewhere without leaving any sign, and then keep going tracklessly from there. Loon and Elga nodded and put their heads down again, followed Thorn and Click toward the bare hill.

When they got to the hill’s first rise of rock out of snow, however, it became obvious that the ridge was not going to be as easy to hike on as the snowy plain had been. Even getting onto the ridge in the first place involved kicking steps up steep snow to where it met a ramp of rock that would get them on the ridge. Any extra effort now was difficult to give, and Loon could feel cramps sparking in his calves. But it was crucial to get off the snow, so they grunted and hissed and clicked through the necessary steps. The snow next to the rock was especially rotten; one had to be careful not to crash down into a covered gap. Sometimes one step was all it would take. Eyes burning with sweat, Loon struggled to move up in the slush, which pulsed blackly at the edges of its whiteness.

Finally they stood panting and sweating on the edge of the ridge, with an upward walk ahead, and a prospect behind them that extended all the way back to the big river. Lots of snow back that way, but ahead of them, to the south, there was a lot of black patching the suncupped white. Ah yes: they were almost to the steppes, to the edge of the land they knew, where they could run the ridge trails, and melt into the canyon forests with all the rest of their animal brothers and sisters. They sat down and took off their snowshoes, tying them to the backs of their backsacks.

But Click pointed: there the ice men were, little black dots crossing the snowy plain, having crossed the big river. From here the river was still white and noiseless, although as far west as they could see, it was black. But the jende had gotten across, and were still following them. One thing Thorn pointed out was interesting: the captive wolves seemed to be gone. Either they had been taken back, or they had escaped. Thorn liked that thought. But it was also obvious, watching the little black dots, that the jende were the wolves now, or the hyenas, or ravens, or people; they were any of the hunters who followed prey until it was exhausted, then moved in for the kill. Ravens even led wolves or humans to injured animals they had spotted from the air, to be able to scavenge what was left after the hunters killed and ate it.

Loon had never been hunted in this manner. Possibly none of them had been; although when he saw Click’s face looking back at the jende, he saw that the old one had lived this before, and was not surprised. Click hummed something short to himself, regarded Thorn and Elga and Loon curiously. He made a gesture with his head: time to go?

Thorn continued to stare at the dots, shading his eyes with a hand. Finally he heaved a big breath in and out.

—Let’s see what this ridge can do for us. They have to be getting tired too. If they come up the ridge and don’t see us, never see us again, with no tracks to follow, they won’t know where we got off the ridge. They’ll give up.

Click mimed eating, inspected his empty hand.

—I know, Thorn said to him.—Second wind.

—I’ve already had my second wind, Loon said.

Thorn regarded him.—Third wind then. Sometimes it has to happen. And this is one of those times.

He smiled a tight little smile.—This is what we live for! Days like this! So come on.

Chapter 48

The broad edge of the ridge of hills was indeed harder in some ways to hike on than the snow had been, but it was good to be off snow too, to have secure footing again. There were still snow patches on the ridge, and big slopes of it below them to right and left, but they tried to avoid them all, wending their way from rock to rock.

The ridge went up and down in the usual way, but always a bit more up than down. Sometimes the ridge edge itself narrowed. Mostly it was a broad broken path of black lichenous rock, twenty paces wide or more, but in places it narrowed to a blade of an edge no wider than their feet, with steep drops to both sides. Loon got down on his hands and knees and crawled along these parts, as he didn’t trust Badleg to hold him. Sometimes the other three crawled too.

Happily the ridge widened as it got higher, and side ridges began to branch down to both east and west, containing steep little kolby canyons that they looked down into as they passed; these were still snow-choked. Thorn wanted to drop into one of them, if it was possible to stay on dry land or gritrime once down, but none of the canyons offered that. They did have trees, however. The avalanche gullies were snowy chutes, but otherwise the canyon sides were getting more and more forested. Under the trees the ground was still snowy, but the creeks were often open black water. Ground in the sun all day was often free of snow, the black ground steaming between the rocks. The steep slopes to each side steamed to a palpable mist as they hiked the ridge looking for a good way down.

Then Click whistled sharply, pointed behind them. They turned and saw that the black dots pursuing them were on their ridge, still well behind, but on the ridge. Thorn cursed them:

and so on as he led them at speed to the next high point on the ridge, where they could drop again and get out of sight. He could spout curses all day without ever repeating himself, as Loon well knew.

Over the knob, out of sight of the ice men, Thorn stopped to look down a steep headwall into a canyon to the west. The steep slide down looked like it was snow-free ground all the way, although there was a section so steep that they couldn’t see it from above, which was never good. Below that drop, trees furred the cleft of the canyon, which curved down and to the south.

Thorn said,—Let’s get down this while they can’t see us. This looks like it will go.

The other three were willing. The steep section would hopefully be snow-free. It seemed worth trying. It would not do to stay on the ridge; it was beginning to look like the ice men might be faster than they were. And they couldn’t go any faster.

So they started the descent off the ridge. As they dropped, it occurred to Loon that another good thing about this canyon was that it was short, and debouched into a valley trending south, so that they would be able to continue more or less toward home.

As it turned out, the part of the slope that had been invisible from above was a steep field still covered by old snow, suncupped heavily in lines that left many long vertical troughs. The whole slope gleamed with waterdrops, it was so wet and soft in the afternoon sun.

Thorn hesitated at the top of this slope for a time. He edged down, stomped on the highest snow: he stepped right through to the rock below. Soft snow indeed. He got out of the hole by hauling himself back onto the rock, thought about it a while, then sat with a grunt on angled rock and took the snowshoes off the back of his sack, then began to tie them back on his feet.

—We have to get down this, he said.—We’ll leave tracks, if they come to this spot and take a look, but after that we won’t. He gestured briefly downcanyon.

So they sat beside him and tied their snowshoe bindings onto their boots, lashing them down hard. They stood again. Loon bent his knees and felt little crampy pings sparking in his thigh muscles. It was going to be a tough descent.

Loon went last again, and did his best to step down into the snowshoe prints of the other three. They were mostly one set of tracks that all three of his companions had used, sloppily laid over each other, and very deep. Some were thigh deep, and some of these burst under Loon toward their downhill side, forcing him to stop himself from a further slide with an abrupt shift of weight onto his uphill leg. That was Goodleg, thankfully. Actually it would have been better to have Goodleg on the downhill side of him, but the slope was angled such that there was no choice but to traverse to the right as one looked down. Occasionally Thorn had tried to turn left, to carve a little switchback into the slope, but quickly the slope forced him to turn and head down to the right again.

This meant Badleg had to take Loon’s weight on the downhill side, and do the real work. Every lead step down had to be made by Badleg; there was no other way, the land itself forced it. As he continued, step after step, the down step on Badleg began to hurt from the ankle up to the hip, stabbing him so that he wobbled, and could not trust the leg not to give under him. But there was no choice: he had to extend down on it straight-legged, stepping into the uncertain support of the deep smeared snowshoe hole the other three had left for him. He dropped into that pain, put his weight on it and ignored the agonizing little crunch inside his ankle, did his best to quickly move Goodleg down into its higher hole, then use it to lift his weight off his left side. Then he held steady for a moment on Goodleg, taking a few breaths, before committing to the biting pain of the next step down. When the lower snowshoe holes burst under his weight he had to ride down the collapsing snow until enough of it gathered to stop his slide; after that, hopefully the higher line of tracks had not become too high for him to step up into, or he would have to kick an in-between step. When getting back up like this he had to stick Thirdleg into the snow as high as he could reach, to help pull himself up.

He kept on, step after plunging step, the pain from Badleg shooting right up through his pizzle to his gut. The traverse down to the forest by the creekbed was less than halfway done.

Loon began to examine the slope below them during his frequent pauses, wondering if it would be possible to sit down on the snow and slide down one of the vertical gullies of linked suncups. The problem with that was there were big rocks at the foot of the slope, the usual spall of boulders big enough to tumble that far down. The snow was so soft now, just possibly he could dig in with his pole and his snowshoes as he slid down. But it was too steep to try it and see. He might slide too fast to stop, right down onto the rocks. Even if he managed to stop himself in the snow above the rocks, he would then be in a hummocky mare’s nest of bumps and hollows and big boulders. Getting through that mess, or traversing above it, would be just as hard as what he was doing now, maybe harder. And he couldn’t safely slide down there anyway!

He had to stick each left step as well as he could. Step down directly in the hole, then bear down on the pain, make that footing hold if he could; then a quick recovery step onto the right leg, doing everything he could on that side to take all his weight. Step after step, with the penalty for soft snow or a misstep an extra stab.

He was sweating profusely with the effort and pain. He paused from time to time to scoop some of the wettest snow into his mouth, chilling his teeth and the roof of his mouth, briefly wetting the parched dryness rasping in his mouth and throat. He could feel that he was considerably water-short by now, and knew that was part of what was making his legs crampy. When they reached their next source of water he was going to drink till his belly was round. Another six steps, another rest. The suncupped slope blazed. Sweat burned in his eyes, the light burst blackly off the snow; he could hardly see, but there was nothing to see anyway except the snow under him, so it didn’t matter. There was nothing now but snow mashed by the double line of snowshoe prints pulsing under him, coated or filled by blackness. The blackness was strange, because the snow was as white as could be, and yet stuffed with blackness. Watery granules of white in black. Blind though he was, he could still see if the next smush of snow was going to hold him or not. That was all the sight he needed.

Then the snow under Badleg gave way as he stepped down, and he slipped and instantly was sliding on his side down the snowy slope, scraping down so quickly that he couldn’t stop himself with the edges of the snowshoes, couldn’t stick Thirdleg in. He could only try to ride the snowshoes down sideways, try to keep from going any faster. He was headed for a shallow hollow, and he saw it was the best chance he was going to get to stop himself before he ran into the boulders at the bottom, so he tensed himself, waited, and then in the hollow dug in with snowshoes and elbows and Thirdleg, and came to a crunching stop.

He sat there in the snow, gasping for breath, burning with scrapes and cold, sweat pouring down his face. Above him on the slope he could see the mark of his slide, a sloppy trough running straight down to him. Cold and hot, sweaty and trembling, he pushed himself to his feet, using Thirdleg as a support. When he was standing he could see that a gentle traverse would lead him above the boulders to where he could meet up with Thorn and Click and Elga. Elga was calling his name; it came to him that she had been calling him for some time. He waved Thirdleg at them briefly, slowly stomped his way over to them. It was easier than traversing down the slope had been, but Badleg hurt almost too much for him to step on it at all.

When he met them, at the bottom of the slope among the trees at the top of the canyon floor, he collapsed and could not immediately go on.

Chapter 49

Thorn stared at Loon as he helped get his snowshoes off his feet. When they had done that he said,—Rest it for a while, but then we have to go.

While Loon rested, Thorn wandered around in the grove filling the head of the canyon, looking among the humps of snow for a spring. As in a lot of kolby canyons, there was indeed a spring near the headwall, although at this time of year the black crease of open water lay at the bottom of a hole in the snow. Thorn had to use all their walking poles to support himself as he knelt, then sprawled, then reached down with his dovekie bag to scoop up some water. When he had a full bag he heaved himself up with a little prayer, uttered like a curse:—Let me up Mother Earth!

He shared the water with Loon and the others. Elga sat on her fur patch, which she had draped over a fallen log. She drank as deeply as Loon did. He was glad to see that she looked much the same as she had in the northern camp, except her eyes were more bloodshot. Now she had her sack on the front of her snowshoes and was rooting through it for a few small handfuls of nuts. She offered some to Loon, but he had to shake his head; he felt sick to his stomach, and could not have forced anything down.—Later, he promised.

Click was sitting on a snowy log and chomping steadily at a length of dried meat, taking it in chunk by chunk until all of it was gone. He drank a few swallows from Thorn’s bag and gave it back.—Tank oo, he said absently, the way Heather would have. He did not appear to be entirely there with them.

Thorn was completely there, his sunburned red eyes fixed on Loon.—Are you ready? Can you go?

—Let’s see, Loon said, and surged to his feet. He swayed and caught himself on Thirdleg.

—You need two good poles, Thorn said.—Wait there. He took another tour of the copse of trees, returned with a stout branch well over waist high, with a bend at the top end that could be clasped in the hand.—A good walking stick. Put both points down for your left foot, and push up over it. I had to hike for a week with a broken leg, once when I was your age, and after I got used to pushing down on the sticks, it went pretty well.

Loon tried it.—All right, he said. He waited until the others had started, and then followed Elga close.

But it wasn’t all right. With the poles he could take a lot of pressure off his left leg, it was true. But they were moving down this new canyon, and there was a lot of back-and-forthing to be done to get between knots of trees, where sometimes they had to slide down little drops in the snow. The other three glissaded down these, and Loon tried to follow them with one-footed glissades, and succeeded sometimes, but more often fell. And getting back on his feet hurt Badleg no matter what he did. He was panting and sweating with the pain of it.

Elga waited for him, and they fell behind the other two. Sun slanted through the pines and birches into their faces; it was a real relief whenever they were in their shade. The smells of the trees cut into Loon’s head, so familiar they almost made him cry. The old snow under the trees was mottled with pine needles and tree dust, and in the shadows it was icing up again. It seemed unfair of the snow to go from too soft to too hard with no good time in between. In some canyons like this, or in this one in another season, the walking would have been straightforward, but on this afternoon the canyon floor was becoming a matter of little ice slides dropping between trees. Loon began to sit on his bottom and slide down the steep sections, getting himself wet and cold in the process. If only the canyon had been flat, if only it had been free of icy snow… But really there was no kind of terrain that would have been easy for him on that day.

So he struggled on as the sunlight slanted through the trees. The others stopped and waited for him in whatever lanes of sunlight they could find, stomping their snowshoes to warm themselves. Of course in the snow they were still leaving tracks, slight though they might be. Presumably when this canyon dropped into the valley running south, Thorn would have them run for a while, then look for a snow-free slope they could climb over into another valley. Loon welcomed the idea of climbing again, as a way to keep Badleg from any more downward shocks. Although every up leads to a down. And it would be more work to go uphill, and he wasn’t sure he had that in him. It would take the coming of his third wind, that was certain.

Go and rest, go and rest. In the forest dusk the others waited for him, chilling in shadows. When he reached them he stood leaning his chest and elbows over his poles. He huffed and puffed as they rested and talked it over.

—We’ve got to keep going, Thorn said. His voice had the flinty sound it took on whenever he was thirsty, or angry, or making a shaman’s command.—We’re passing snow-free routes up to the ridges, so if they come down here at all, they won’t know whether we’ve stayed in this canyon or not. If we use tonight to get over into another canyon, we’ll lose them.

A wind gusted through the trees around them, and Thorn looked up. The tallest pines were swaying. All their tops pointed permanently east, and indeed this was another west wind, pushing at them yet again.

—Could be a storm, Thorn said, sounding surprised.—That would be good. We could use something good right now. And he tilted back his head and barked a muffled little fox bark.

They hiked on as the light leaked out of the land. They made Loon go first, so he could set the pace and they wouldn’t lose him.

He put his mind to seeing the best way downcanyon. He could do this as well as any of them. In all canyons there was a ramp of easiest travel, inlaid into the jumble of rocks and trees in ways that could be hard to find. The best way might zigzag from sidewall to sidewall, or run as straight as a crack. Sometimes it was overgrown by trees or brush, especially if it was an alder canyon; still it would reveal itself to the eye if one took the trouble to look for it. So Loon took the trouble, and the way came clear. He stumped along, his weight on his sticks as much as possible.

Finally the day’s light was gone. It was dark in the shadows of the trees. The lopsided moon was gazing down, however, so as Loon’s eyes adjusted to its light, he was able to proceed almost as before. Peering down; shuffling over bushes emerging from melting snow; getting to another turn; finding the ramp of fewest drops; feeling, under the pain Badleg was throwing up with every step, the pleasure of finding the right way.

But then the snow under his left snowshoe gave under him, a bad step-through that jarred him when he bottomed on a rock, and he cried out at the pain of it. The others rushed forward and helped him out of the hole, Elga reaching down and flexing his snowshoe sideways to get it up through the snowshoe-shaped gap in the surface crust. As it came through this hole, Badleg twisted in a way that sent a jolt of hot agony up through Loon’s nuts and asshole and guts. He cried out before he knew he was going to, then thrust his face into a snowbank and groaned again.

—Shit, Thorn said, arm around his shoulders.—Stand steady there, boy. Put your arm over my shoulder here. Let the bad leg hang free there for a second. There, there. Just let it hang. Now, wiggle the snowshoe. Just a little. Can you do it?

Fearfully Loon tried it. He could indeed move his left foot, although the rocking tweaked the bad point faintly as he did so.—I can move it.

—So maybe you can walk on it.

Loon tried, but he had to keep his weight entirely on his poles.

Thorn hissed to see it. He turned to Click, gestured at Loon.—Click, can you carry him?

He mimed what he meant. Click got it, and his bushy eyebrows lifted his forehead into four distinct furrows. In the shadows of the moonlight, his beaky nose and big brow and wrinkled forehead and bristly little chin resembled one of the wooden masks the western packs carved, expressing one feeling or another; in this case, surprise. He looked Loon up and down as if weighing him. Everyone had had to carry something big from time to time, a deer, a child, a mammoth head, a hurt friend, a log for the fire; so everyone knew it wasn’t an easy thing. Couldn’t be done for long. And it was night. And they had been going for three days and nights without pause.

Then Click’s mask of a face shifted, as if wood were shifting, the mask settling into a new expression: resolve. It was a more than human look, like Thorn on a spirit voyage.—Es, he said.

He shuffled over to Loon. Elga and Thorn got the snowshoes off Loon’s feet as gently as they could, and Elga tied them to the back of Thorn’s sack. When his feet were clear, Loon reached his arms around Click’s neck and clasped his own wrists well down on the old one’s massive chest. Click reached back and put his hands under Loon’s knees, and between the two of them they lifted Loon onto his back. Click took a step forward and stopped. He shifted Loon back and forth, up and down, took a few short slow steps.

—Roop, he said briefly.

Thorn led the way downcanyon. It was flattening out, which was good. The snow was hardening in the night’s cold, and getting slippery, Loon could tell. His front side was warm and his backside was cold. He hoped he could serve Click as a warm cloak at least, and clung to him hard and tried to stay light, to breathe himself upward, to cling to Click well and thus be an easier load, nothing for Click to worry about except for the weight itself, like a heavy sack. Thorn was carrying Click’s sack now, and as he strode through the forest’s moon shadows he looked something like the bison man in the cave, a big head standing on human legs.

Click was whistling through his teeth. He made a little triple hiss for each step he took, the air forced between his teeth; then a big breath in, then another triple hiss, all in a coordinated rhythm with his slow steps, like a thumping dance around a fire. He did not seem to be breathing particularly hard, nor was he much hunched over, nor slower than Thorn. It seemed like he could keep doing it. Loon tried to loft himself, to become a bird and wing away, to pull the old one up into the air.

Down through the forest. The snow gave way to black soil and washes of sand, also bare expanses of flat rock. Thorn always led them to these bare rock stretches. From time to time Loon fell asleep, and would wake up falling away from Click, grabbing on to him, with the strong impression that he had been asleep for some time without letting go and falling back. He dreamed in these sleeps, and in his dreams the triple hiss from Click sometimes became a birdsong, or someone playing a flute. His back was getting very cold. He wiggled his left foot in quick little tests of what it could do, and tried to confine the resulting pain to its point of origin in the ankle. Keep it trapped there, let his blood flow past it and through the rest of his leg. Let it rest and gain the strength to go on.

The moon was in the west, but still well above the horizon, when the cold penetrated his back so far that he croaked,—I can walk now, I think. Put me down, Click, and let me try it.

—Tank oo, Click said.—Roop roop.

Loon slid down onto Goodleg, and then onto his walking sticks, held out to him by Elga, who had been carrying them. Gingerly he put Badleg down, placed that foot on the ground, shifted his weight that way. A little stab or click of pain; but after that, as it washed up his leg muscles, it diffused to something he could stand. He could still control the leg, around or through that wash of pain. It would work.

—Good man, Thorn said, and they took off again.

Loon hobbled along behind Thorn, and Click dropped back and brought up the rear. Clouds flew under the moon and thickened on their way east, but were still thin enough to light up around the moon, which shone right through them, and lit them all over the sky. Thorn stopped often for short standing rests, and when he did, Elga came up and held Loon by the arm. She was still going strong, but her stride had shortened, as if she were limping with both legs. She stepped like a heron in a marsh. No doubt she was hurting. They were all slowing down. The moon was still a couple of fists above the horizon; the night had a long way to go. Loon wondered if they could make it to dawn. But he was happy to be able to walk. Only that little click of pain in the turn of every stride, and he could almost lift over that with his arms and his sticks. So he could walk. And the walking was warming him up, not completely, but in his middle where it counted. He could feel the skin of his back burning as the feeling came back to it. His fingers too burned with new feeling.

The wind continued to get stronger. Even down in the forest they could feel it. The chorus of trees on the slopes of the valley sang their airy roar as gusts swirled this way and that. The cloud blanket overhead poured in from the west and filled the sky, thickening and then breaking up into puffballs of moonlit white. In the breaks between clouds the black sky swam with fugitive stars, which looked like they had come loose and were sailing westward. A longer glance would steady them and reveal how fast the clouds were flying east. A storm, coming in from the great salt sea. Loon could smell the salt on the wind. Thorn raised his spear and sang his storm welcome. He was clearly happy to see it. It was true that a new blanket of snow would cover all traces of their passing, so Loon had to agree that it was probably a good thing. But it was going to be cold.

Well, cold. He was used to it. He had been cold for months now, and he could endure more of it. The world was a cold place. One breathed and shivered and danced in place to fight it, and it was possible to endure. As long as there was food. And of course a fire would be nice. In a storm no one would be able to see smoke from a fire. Getting one started would of course be a test. Loon grimaced, remembering his failure on the first night of his wander. But Thorn was a real firemaster, like all the old shamans. And he had his kit with him, the firestarter stick and block, flint knockers, bags of duff kept dry in dovekie skin. He could do it and he would. They would make a shelter, make a fire, wait out the storm if they had to. Walk through it if they could. Maybe a little of both. Thorn would decide. He would make their plan, Loon didn’t have to do that; which was good, because he was too tired to do anything as hard as thinking. He couldn’t think beyond the next click in his ankle.

When the moon set it got a lot darker. The clouds went dark too, and closed up so that no more stars could be seen. Though Loon knew dawn had to be coming, he could see no sign of it. So much black time passed that it began to seem to him that they had fallen into a cave world, that the night would go on forever.

He never did see the eastern sky lighten, but only looked up from the ground under his feet at one point to discover that the whole world had gone gray and was visible again. Neither black nor white intruded on this world of grays. The clouds had lowered in the night, and now skimmed the ridges hemming the valley. Gray snow flurries draped gray forested slopes: this was as much day as they were going to get.

It was so windy they had to stay in the trees. The chorus of pine needles sang a constant roar. How big the world becomes in a wind. They were as ants on Mother Earth now, crawling under grass stalks, grateful for their shelter. Even down there in the trees the wind poured through and slapped them from time to time, ransacking their clothes of any heat they might have held. Even the jende would be taking shelter in a wind like this.

They could not see far in any direction. It was hard to believe their pursuers could still be out in this, and hard to believe they could have followed them into this particular canyon. They themselves didn’t know where they were.

Still Thorn hiked on, and Loon put his head down and followed, taking it step by step. Except for the clicks of agony, it seemed like the third wind was still flickering in him, fronting up to the storm. You have to face up to Narsook. He would go until Thorn told him to stop. That was simple enough; it was a thought he could hold on to. Go until Thorn says stop.

The wind roared. It was evening all day. Snow began to pelt them, even in the trees; heavy flakes at first, then icy sand thrown from the side.

Thorn stopped next to a little knot of trees and shrubs that filled a flat spot near a lead in the canyon creek, chuckling blackly as it ate the snow that fell on it. Here the wind was more heard than felt.

—Let’s make shelter, Thorn said.

—Oh good, Loon said.

Chapter 50

Thorn set about starting a fire while the other three gathered wood, then tangled branches into a shelter wall on the windward side of the knot of trees. Loon hopped around on his poles, gathering wood from the ground, snapping off dead branches from the undersides of trees. He had to keep his weight off Badleg, but he could do that, and it was good to be able to hop around and do something useful without causing himself pain.

Thorn was crouched on the windward side of a flat rock he had prepared for the fire, piling sticks and twigs on one side of the rock and dripping on them some of the fat from his bag. He got out his firestick and spin block, set the duff from his pack around the spin hole and in the cut that ran from the hole to his little pile of fat-soaked twigs. He spun the firestick hard, the shift of his hands from the bottom of the stick back to the top so fast Loon barely saw it. Back and forth he spun the stick, his red eyes bulging out of his black snake’s face, his teeth bared in a fierce scowl, hands rubbing down then jumping up and rubbing again.

The tip of his firestick blackened, and little wisps of smoke came from the duff nearest the spin hole. While continuing to spin hard, Thorn also leaned his head around his arms and puffed lightly on the block, contorting his whole body in the effort to call forth flame. When the duff pricked yellow at its edge, and smoked some more, he stopped spinning and crouched even lower, his face right next to the flame, one hand cupping it, the other pushing the duff gently as it burned. The duff’s flame remained little more than a tiny glowing ember, and when the twig next to it caught fire, the miracle popping into existence again, he began to puff faster, blowing it up in the way he would play a quick tune on his flute. Loon helped him by getting rocks into position on the windward side of the fire, and then all around it. By the time he had made a proper fire ring, Thorn had a good blaze going in the twig pile, and was carefully balancing small branches over the flames to get them started too. Click came crashing in from time to time with armfuls of wood. Elga was still making a weave of branches between the trees on their windward side, and then around them in a complete circle except for one gap between trees on the lee side. She stuffed so many branches into her barrier that it became a woven wall of wood and leaf and needles.

When they regrouped around Thorn’s fire, now a young blaze that no single gust could blow out, they wrapped themselves in their furs and sat like four taller stones in the fire ring, jammed together in a curve around the windward side. Loon sat to the left of the rest and let Badleg lie straight before him. The warmth of the fire helped calm the hurt. Thorn stood up and went out into the storm, and came back with his dovekie bag filled with water from the creek. After they drank from it until they were full, he held it as near to the fire as he could without burning it.

The fire was even more beautiful than usual. Even Loon’s first fire during his wander had not comforted him as much as this one. Sometimes gusts blew its heat away for a time, then it slammed back with the full force of its radiance. Loon’s face and fingertips and ears burned and itched furiously. Finally he could give Elga a look in reply to her anxious gaze: he was all right. Beside this fire he would be able to rest, warm up, drink water, eat some of their remaining food. It was true that they were running out of food. But if the storm ended and the jende had lost track of them, then they could find food as they hiked on. They could find out where they were, if Thorn didn’t know. Loon certainly didn’t.

—Do you know where we are? he asked.

Thorn gave him a sharp look.—We’re here!

—And you know where here is?

—Close enough, Thorn said. He was looking through the bags in his sack, checking the food left to them, Loon supposed. Instead he pulled out one piece of clothing after another, to hold them up to the flames and dry them out: bits of leather, scraps of fur, mittens… After a while he stood and turned and stuck his rear toward the flames, growling at the heat burning his butt. His clothes quickly started steaming. Inspired by his example, they all stood and did the same. Click still hissed his quick triple whistle, as if dreaming he was still on the march.

When the fire had dried them and they were thoroughly warm, Thorn picked up one of the bags from his sack and took from it his sewing kit. Elga had made the entire hike so far wearing only her leggings and a bearskin robe from the women’s hut, and now Thorn offered to help her turn the robe into a proper shirt and coat, and to extend her leggings.

She agreed at once, and while Thorn worked on her robe she stood arched to the fire dressed only in her leggings, like a jende woman. Loon’s breath caught in his throat as he stared at her.

Thorn cut her robe up with his sharp blade, putting pieces of the bear hide up against her from time to time as he did so. When he finished the cuts, he punched holes around their edges with his antler awl, biting his lips. Then he sewed the pieces together with a length of leather cord he pulled from his sack, wound around a short stick.

Click stared into the fire as they worked, but Thorn frequently looked up and regarded Elga’s body closely, flickering there in the firelight. Her breasts were only half the size they had been the last time Loon had seen them, and in general she was thin, although her thighs were quite a bit thicker than any of the men’s, and longer too. And they were all thin now, even Click. Loon could feel his belly button just a finger away from his backbone. There wasn’t much left to him. Thorn too was skin and bones; he always was, and now more than ever.

But here they were, warm in the storm, and Elga’s body gleamed darkly against the snow and the flames and the trees flickering in the firelight. Thorn worked on, and held up pieces he was sewing against her from time to time. It was night before he had her dressed again.—There, he said when he was done, and added,—You look good. Even now when I’ve dressed you!

Elga laughed and hugged herself.—It feels wonderfully warm. Thank you Thorn.

That night they lay around the blaze like a fire ring of flesh, just outside the ring of stones. From time to time they fed in branches from their pile. The wind kept blowing, the snow drifted down onto them through the trees. If a snowflake landed on them it melted on their hair or the tips of their furs and quickly burned away. They were more comfortable in this storm than they had been for months now, any of them, and the thrill of that was another kind of warmth.

Loon fell asleep between one breath and the next, and slept hard. When he woke to the cold on his back, and fed the fire, he saw the others were sleeping well also.

The dawn gray showed it was still snowing, although it was less windy than the day before. Big flakes fell straight down. They had to decide whether to stay or hike on, and Thorn took a brief walk out of their grove to get a better sense of the day. When he came back he said gloomily,—It’s walkable. We probably should go.

The others said nothing. The fire hissed and popped on its big bed of embers, inviting them to stay and be warm. It did not seem possible that the northers would be out in this storm hunting them, given how much the falling snow obscured the view. It was flocking down, and up on the ridges it would probably still be windy, with new piles of soft snow ready to avalanche or otherwise give way underfoot. Surely the northers too were tucked around a fire somewhere.

But if they were, then going on would be getting farther from them; and if they weren’t, and were out on the hunt, still in pursuit, then going on would be keeping their distance. Either way they should go. They could all see the sense of Thorn’s position. But it was a hard thing to leave that fire and go out into the storm.

It snowed all that day. The new snow lay thick and soft on everything, flocking the forest and making the world a dapple of black and white. Summer storms could be like that.

It was lucky they had snowshoes, because without them they would have sunk in thigh deep with every step. As it was, the one breaking trail sank in knee deep, and had to step high. Most of the day Click led, and as he was considerably heavier than the others, they stepped in his tracks and had it much easier.

Thorn went second and gave Click directions. Occasionally Loon could hear them from behind.—No, left, left! Left is to your left, right is to your right, straight ahead is straight ahead! Why can’t you get that? Tell me what you call them and I’ll say that instead! I’m tired of you getting it wrong!

—Roop, Click said, pointing right.—Roop roop, pointing left.

—So there you have it, Thorn said heavily.—If you can do that, why not call them right and left?

The silence from Click suggested he didn’t have an answer for that.

—Mother Earth, Thorn finally said.—You’re just trying to make me angry.

After that he hiked closer to Click, and with his spear tapped the old one on one shoulder or the other as he said,—Hey, hey, that way, while pointing with the spear.—Go that way, that’s left, roop roop, left, and he would whistle a piercing whistle with an upward slide, like a hawk. Later, with a tap on the right shoulder,—Go right, right, roop, that’s right, with a down-sliding whistle. All through that day Loon could hear Thorn badgering Click about this matter of directions.—Straight is just straight! Not right nor left, just straight ahead. That way!

Loon wanted to say, He knows the way better than you do! but he didn’t have the strength to spare for speaking. He could only put his snowshoes in the holes and try to avoid the pain on the left. Click was probably taking the best way no matter how Thorn jayed at him.

Late in the afternoon, the valley they had been descending opened onto a broad plain, so big that its full extent was not visible in the falling snow. Thorn considered the white sky flocking down on them for a while, and then pointed Click in a certain direction, and off they went across the soft new snow. After a time they came to a flat stretch that was clearly a river. Like the big river back north, this one was about to break up, but under its new blanket of snow it was hard to say when or where it might happen. All the usual sounds were muffled. There were snow-capped plates of ice poking up in irregular lines, and black leads visible in long stretches of the far shore. From downstream, farther than they could see in the storm, came a low wet roar.

Then right before their eyes the new snow lying on the river straight out from them started trembling, and in a series of muffled cracks broke off and crashed downstream, riding a black spate of immense power. Down the river at the farthest bend they could see, crackling ice dams stacked up, building quickly into log jams of ice, then bursting away and rushing downstream.

Upstream from where they stood the ice on the river still held. The black river sheeted out from under it like a giant spring out of a white hillside, an amazing sight.

—Go! Thorn shouted at the other three. They could barely hear his voice. He pointed upstream and then took off, and they hurried after him up the bankside. They were too tired to hurry very fast, even Thorn, and soon Click took back the lead and stomped the snow down for them, and Thorn was right on his heels talking to him, and Elga not far behind. Loon did the best he could to keep right behind Elga, hoping that Thorn would not lead them across the river too close to the broken edge and its stupendous flow. He knew the faster he went the sooner they would be able to cross, and the better their chances would be that the ice would hold long enough for them to cross. And if Loon was close behind, Thorn might feel confident enough in their speed to go a little farther upstream before crossing. So Loon put his head down and hiked and poled along in the tracks of the others, ignoring the hot flare in his ankle, huffing and sweating, intent to keep right on Elga’s heels. She was fast, and looked different in her newly sewn clothing—taller, rangier. Suddenly it came to him again that she was there, that this was his Elga right there in front of him, free of the ice men, on the run with him, fleeing captivity, running for home. Something in his heart flew at that realization, and he bared his teeth at his ankle and pounded along, taking care not to knock the front of his snowshoes into the busted rims of high soft snow separating one track from the next. Step high and clean, huff and puff, curse the pain. Feel the cold air go to his head, leaving him as sharp as if hunting, or terrified. He only looked at the snow under him, also the river beside them, still white and unmoving. Everything in that bubble of falling snow had become closer and sharper and brighter, all of it pulsing with his pulse, bright even in the dimness of a snowy day. Everything was lit from inside itself, and he was seeing the way hawks must see.

Thorn tapped Click and turned toward the river, and seeing it Loon began sucking air through his teeth with fear. He bent forward and redoubled his speed, wanting to be with the others whatever happened, even if it was wrong, even if it put more weight on the river ice and caused them to break through. Thorn looked back at him, as if aware of his fear, and pierced him with a glance.

I slipped up into him in that moment, and seized him as tightly as he was seizing his poles. Slow down. Remember what the northers taught you, out on the frozen great salt sea.

He watched Thorn and Click as they roamed up and down the bank, stabbing the snow-blanketed river ice. He realized that it was probable he knew more about ice now than they did. Downstream the roar of open water reverberated in the trees, pulsed up through their feet.

Loon saw a good patch against the bank, which looked like it extended most of the way across the river. He walked as if his legs were both all right.—Let me lead! he said as he passed Thorn and stomped down the snowy bank onto the river ice.—I’ve been doing this all winter.

He struck out over the ice, stabbing ahead with delicate taps, as if his walking poles were short unas. He shuffled along at a slow but steady speed, feeling the ice below him for any flex. His body was thrumming in a way it had once when he had been stung by several bees. The snow falling in the air was now very small, making almost a mist of floating little flakes, swirling as they were tossed on a slight breeze.

Out on the middle of the river they could hear the open water downstream better than ever. The ice under them was heaving a little under its snow blanket, and it groaned all around them, including upstream. Clearly it was feeling the break-up moving upstream toward it, and so it was flexing in place and crying out, whether in fear or desire Loon could not tell. He shuffled forward at the same deliberate speed. The other three were bunched right behind him, keeping a little less distance from each other than the northers would have in the same situation.

Downstream a gigantic crack and a number of low booms announced another break-off. Ice plates reared downstream, and the black flood was more visible than ever. The roar was like rolling thunder.

Loon shuffled along as fast as he could go. He had no awareness of Badleg; his whole body buzzed equally. He kept his eyes fixed on the ice they had yet to cross. They were getting closer to the other bank: no river is very wide if you run across it. The outside turn of a bend is where the ice is thinnest. And this time there were open leads blocking their way.

Loon veered to the left, upstream, and poked ahead to make sure the ice was solid under its blanket of snow. The pokes sounded some solid thunks, which seemed to indicate ice thick enough to hold him; he turned right and shuffled quickly over that section to the bank, and stomped up the snow there, establishing steps for the other three to step into. The other three followed him up very neatly, as if performing a big-step dance they had danced a thousand times before.

When Thorn joined them at the top of the bank, he tilted his head to the clouds and howled. The others joined in, they howled like wolves. In the roar of the breakup and the wind they could barely hear themselves.

I myself howled, and then slipped back into my place.

Now the burn of their crossing throbbed all through Loon, and he discovered to his surprise that Badleg was griping ferociously. His whole left leg was hot to the touch. He went to a fallen tree trunk, swiped the new snow off, and sat. He rested his sack on the front of his snowshoes, his elbows on the sack, his chin on his hands. He watched the great roaring spectacle of the river as the ice plates broke off and clunked downstream.

Elga sat beside him. Click crouched on a rock. Thorn took off his sack, put it down on the snow, and did a little dance in place, singing the break-up song again.

—Shut up or you’ll make the ice stay! Loon exclaimed.

Thorn ignored him, if he heard. And as they were almost certainly going to stay sitting there until this part of the river broke up completely, it was only setting him up for an I-told-you-so. So Loon shut up and watched Thorn sing and howl. After it went on for a while, Loon dug around in his sack, and was shocked to find his food bags so small. Somehow he had thought there was another full bag in there, and there wasn’t.

—How are we for food? he asked.

But at that moment the river ice straight out from them heaved up and broke, then floated away around the bend, white rafts smashing together. The noise was incredible. The rushing black water now visible under them was shocking to see in a world so white and still.

Now they could hear each other if they shouted, but there was nothing to say, so they sat there speechlessly watching the spectacle. Ice broke off and floated by, raft after raft of it. Upstream the black water poured out from under a jagged white line that moved farther and farther away. The whole valley boomed with the noise of it.

Upstream, at the bend where they could see no farther, a shallows had been revealed, studded with rocks that nobbled the water and caused gnashes of white to bubble the black sheen. The rushing clatter and tumble of water in a rapids came back to them, a sound they hadn’t heard all winter. Ice chunks kept sweeping by. After a time the river was all black, from the bend upstream to the bend downstream.

Thorn finished his break-up song.—No one’s going to be crossing this river for a good long time, he said.—So let’s make a fire!

Chapter 51

They moved a little up and away from the bank, and found a flat spot in the middle of a small grove of bush pines and birch. By now the storm had covered everything with snow, so they could do nothing but stomp down a space in the snow with their snowshoes, and move some stones from a nearby boulder pile, the heaviest they could carry, to make a rough fire platform and some seating for themselves. They were going to have to bed down on snow; but with a fire, and their caribou hides, that wouldn’t be too bad.

The work of making camp took them the rest of that day, and by the time they were done, Loon was a one-legged man. Thorn had brought an ember from their last night’s fire with him in his belt flap, and with that and some duff and fat-soaked twigs and artful breathing, he got the fire restarted, after which he was very pleased with himself. In the cloudy dusk they settled in around their fire, their nook of trees again reinforced by Elga into walls of brush and snow. And between them they had gathered a tall stack of firewood.

It should have been a good moment. No one would be able to cross the river behind them, not for a fortnight for sure, and maybe not until late in the summer. So they had escaped the ice men, barring a twist of fate in which the northers took a completely different route to this same spot. That was so unlikely that it was not worth worrying about. So it was quite an accomplishment, outrunning such determined hunters. They should have been proud. And their fire was bright in the gloom.

But they had so little food. And it was still snowing.

They took account of what they had. Thorn had a nearly full bag of nuts, and he counted out a few for each of them, and passed around his water bag. They ate slowly as they dried themselves by the fire. They were quite wet, so that took a while. Loon had not even completed drying his things when he began falling asleep beyond any ability to fight it off. He gave up and lay on the snow just outside their fire ring, curled to stay as wrapped in his hide as he could. He was just barely aware that Elga was doing the same next to him.

Through the night he slept hard, only waking when cold air poured in some gap in his wrap and chilled part of him. He would shift, pull the hide closer, check the fire, throw a branch on if one was needed, then tuck his chin on his chest and fall asleep again. It kept snowing through the night, so it never got too cold.

In the morning they woke and stirred as soon as it was light. It was still snowing, and had become windier again. Even in the dim light it was obvious to Loon how gaunt his companions had become, and he supposed he looked the same; he could feel hunger pinching the inside of his backbone, making him weak and light-headed.

They sat up, added branches to the fire, drank water, regarded their remaining food, placed on a cleared stone next to the fire for their inspection. There wasn’t much. Nuts, dried meat, honey seedcake. Thorn heaved a heavy sigh as he regarded it, and took out his sharpest blade and began to cut very thin strips from the edge of his butt patch, lengths like the cords he had used to sew Elga’s clothes. Leather and fur: not an appetizing meal. But he handed strings to each of them, and started chewing one of his own. One nut, a bite of dried meat, a piece of leather and fur. Biting off the leather was hard. One chewed the leather for a long time before swallowing it.

The snow continued to fall, hissing into the fire. The renewed wind called up the choruses of trees on the slopes around them. It was not a good day to travel. Possibly they could dig up some roots to eat, if they spent the day foraging under the blanket of new snow. And they had a good bed of embers here. So it seemed like they should hunker down and wait another day, and Loon watched Thorn apprehensively as Thorn went out to take a look. But the moment he left their little knot of trees, three enormous claps of thunder broke, booming from ridge to ridge overhead, as if some river above the clouds were experiencing its own great break-up.

Thorn still had the spirit to smile a little as he ducked back into their camp.—I guess we’re supposed to stay here today. Let’s gather more wood, and see if we can find anything to eat.

Sixth month after a bad spring: one of the worst times for foraging. A time of starvation and drowning in snowmelt. Well, that meant they might be able to scratch up some dead little creatures. It was easier to face that kind of foraging than another day of walking.

So they spent the day making short excursions out into the storm, bringing back more firewood after scratching around with sticks looking for things to eat. They kept the fire big. At one point in the afternoon, feeling weak with hunger, plopping down by the fire to recover from a bout of light-headedness, Loon again said to Thorn,—Do you know where we are?

—Yes, Thorn said shortly.

But he couldn’t know, as far as Loon could see. Not that Loon doubted that Thorn’s knowledge exceeded his own in many things. And maybe here too. But maybe all he meant to say now was that if given a chance, he would be able to find out where they were. Loon saw by his look not to inquire further. They weren’t going anywhere that day, and even the next day was now questionable; all this new snow dumping down, being blown into drifts, would make the flats difficult and the slopes dangerous. And Loon was discovering he could barely walk. He could not put any weight on Badleg, he felt weak with pain when he tried. Thorn shook his head when he saw that, out near their boulder pile, and waved Loon back to the fire. Nothing to be done now but eat some more leather and wait it out. Find their way when they could move again.

That night was long. The hungrier you are, the colder you get: they proved this old saying again. They had to eat fire, as it was said; it was all they had. Only the fire kept them going that long night.

The next day it snowed harder than ever. There was no question of walking in it.

Late in the day, as the dark got darker, Elga went out and found a little meadow under its snow blanket, and came back with her sack stuffed with meadow onions she had dug up with a stick. They went back out with her and got more.

Roasting them on the fire made them taste bigger. They were not much in their stomachs, but something to join the leather strings. They ate some portion of the green stalks topping the root bulbs as well, and at one point, chewing on roasted greens, Thorn eyed Elga and said,—I never really wanted to live the swan wife story, but here I am. And only as the old helper at that.

Elga pursed her lips and shook her head.—I’d fly away if I could, she said.

Thorn barked his short laugh, not unlike a snort from one of the unspeakable ones, trundling through the forest. He held out one of the meadow onions at her.

—Have some more goose food and maybe you will.

Again the night was long. At one point Loon woke from a dream in which his father was warning him against crossing the ice on a river. He had been telling his father that it was all right, that they had already made it across. But now apparently they were supposed to be crossing the other way. It was going to be hard, he said to his father anxiously, with the ice gone.

The fire was almost out. Just a flicker inside the bed of embers, a pink glimmer all crusted with gray, going black and hissing where snowflakes fell on it. He placed three branches on the bed and fell back asleep before they had even caught fire.

In the morning Thorn woke them, kneeling on the snow behind Loon and Elga. His lips were pursed and he looked like a big lizard.—Click is dead.

—What? Loon cried.—How? Why?

He had not meant to say why, and the word hung there in the air like a hummingbird standing on its own flight. It could have been awkward, but Thorn was busy in his own thoughts, and did not appear to have heard him.

—I don’t know, he said at last,—he might have choked on something. Or been hungrier than we thought. Anyway he’s dead. Nothing to be done.

Loon and Elga found themselves sitting up. It was still snowing. Elga had a fist to her mouth, and was looking across the fire at the hide-covered lump that had been Click. His body lay there in its furs, motionless. Loon saw that it was true: there was no mistaking a dead body. So much went away.

Thorn stood, took one of his deep heavy breaths: in, out.—I’m going to move him away from the fire.

He stomped unsteadily around the fire to Click, crouched and stared at the old one’s face, which was turned away from Loon and Elga, as if Click did not want them to see him dead. Thorn reached down and pulled the man’s bearskin blanket up over his head. It already wrapped the rest of him; now he was no more than a man-sized lump in a bearskin hide. Thorn grabbed him by the part of the bearskin wrapped around his feet and hauled him away, following the path in the snow they had stomped while passing in and out of their tuck. Snow fell in tumbling flurries, and the hillside pines sang their airy windy song.

When Thorn had pulled Click’s body out of sight, on the other side of some trees, Loon and Elga could hear him singing one of his shaman songs, one of the ones he sang to help dying people into the next world:

Then for a while there was silence, punctuated by some grunting and thumps. When Thorn returned to the fire he had Click’s coat bunched in his hand. He sat down heavily on his rock by the fire, got one of his blades out of his pack. Without a word he began to cut Click’s coat up into lengths of leather.

After a long time he suggested that the other two go out and gather firewood. Elga got up and left the tuck, avoiding the way that would lead past Click. Loon stood and hopped around. Badleg would not move at all, and his whole left side ached, also his chest and shoulders. It was clear by the parts of him that were sore that he had made extreme efforts to walk on his poles. He went to the closest trees and knocked around, looking for dead wood under the drifts. Snow flocked down.

That night was windy. They kept the fire big, and slept hungry.

The next day was stormy again. They lay wrapped in their furs, staring into the fire. From time to time one of them would get up and venture out to relieve themselves, or to collect more wood. They had a bed of embers now that would burn damp or green wood, so it was not hard to supply the fire. But it was hard to get around in the deepening snow, hard to think about anything but their hunger, eating them from inside. It was hard to believe it was the sixth month. Although sixth-month storms were known to be bad.

That night was windy again. They kept the fire big, and slept hungrier than ever. And hungry means cold.

In the gray morning light Thorn built up the fire to a roar, then stood facing east, his arms raised and outstretched. He sang a song with words Loon didn’t know, words so strange that maybe they were just sounds.

When he was done he turned to face Loon and Elga and put his hands on his hips. They looked up at him from their wraps.

—We need to eat, he told them.—We can find our way home when this storm is over and the snow settles, but we have to have food, or we can’t do it.

He stared down at them.

Elga said,—So we have to eat Click.

Thorn nodded deeply. He looked at her in a way he had never looked at Loon.

—Yes, he said.—Exactly. Click has been dead two days. He’s frozen. So I am going to go cut a few steaks out of him, and we will then cook and eat them. It will be tough old meat, but it’s all we’ve got. I’m sorry to do it, but Click will understand. I’ve just finished talking to him about it, and his spirit is well clear of his body by now, out in the stars. He said he is happy to still be of service. He said thank you. Just like he always did.

Loon glanced at Elga; he could feel all of a sudden that his mouth was hanging open. She returned his gaze, swallowed. Loon closed his mouth, swallowed too. He was salivating. He had to pee, and his mouth was running at the thought of cooked meat.—I have to pee, he said.

—Go that way, Thorn said, and pointed away from Click.—Then leave me alone. And he tromped through the new snow toward where he had stashed Click’s body, blade in hand.

Loon got up and went out the other way to pee. The air was frigid. He could feel the hunger in him. The worst of it was not the weakness in the muscles, but the light-headedness. The world around him was depthless, washed out. Trees on the higher slopes bounced in the wind, he couldn’t look at them, he had to turn his head or he would lose his balance. He couldn’t tell how far away things were. This was the real danger that hunger brought, that and the sheer lack of strength.

Back at the fire he found Elga sitting up, wrapped in her hide and tending the fire. New branches were bursting into flame. She looked up at him and they shared a glance, and Loon could see what she was thinking: nothing to be done. They would back each other in the time to come, tell the same story. Nothing to be done. Now it was time to live.

He sat down beside her in a little collapse, and they wrapped both their hides over their shoulders, over their heads. They huddled together like kits when the vixen is gone.

Thorn came back with his leather patch wrapped around a mass he held before him with both hands. He sat by the fire and took up a slender old branch, stripped of its bark, and broke off its end. He pulled open his wrap and took a chunk of meat from it, about the size of his fist; rump, by the look of it. Still frozen. He had to poke a hole in it with his blade to get the sharp end of the branch to stick into it. When it was securely stuck on the branch, he held it out into the fire. First right in the flames, to sear the outside; then beside the flames, to thaw it; then above the flames, to cook it. It sizzled a little when fat and blood dripped from it into the fire, but hearing that, Thorn pulled it back and let it steam in the air. A few ticks of snow fell down from the trees over them, pushed by the wind. He tested the meat with his lips, exposed a fang tooth like a cat and bit into it; chewed off a piece, examined the meat where the bite was: pink. It was done. He chewed and swallowed the piece.—Ah, he said.—Thank you.

He handed the cooked piece, branch and all, to Elga, who thanked him and bit into it matter-of-factly, as she would any other cut. Loon’s mouth was flooded with saliva, and he was glad when she handed him the stick and gave him a bite. The meat tasted a bit like bear meat. Very tough. It was as if Click’s whole body had been made of heart muscle. Briefly Loon’s face spasmed and he cried, but Elga and Thorn ignored that.

Thorn cooked a second chunk, and as they ate that, he cooked a somewhat smaller third cut, possibly the back or front of a thigh. They passed the stick around and ate in silence. When they were done, Thorn passed around his water bag. He watched the sky for a while; the clouds were still low, scudding quickly east, but they were breaking up too, into dark gray masses separated by bright white filaments, like seed threads.—Lie with that good food in you, let it spread out in you, he said.—You know how it is, after a while your stomach is so empty it forgets how to eat. We shouldn’t go anywhere today anyway, the snow will be too soft. After a while we’ll eat again, and then tomorrow we’ll go.

And it was true, what he had said about food on an empty stomach; for a time Loon felt sick and hard-bellied. It was easiest just to lie there and watch the fire, clutching Elga by the arm. After a while he felt better: warmer, stronger, clearer in his sight. Later he had to go out in the snow and shit, and back by the fire again, warming back up, he felt better than ever.

All day the three of them lay there, soaking in the fire’s radiance and warming from the inside as the meat from Click gave them strength. Each went out into the gray windy day from time to time to relieve themselves, or just stomp the feeling back into their feet. Loon was worried to find that Badleg no longer had any feeling in the foot. It didn’t seem frostbitten, but it was largely numb. It was better than pain, but he didn’t see how he could walk.

Next morning dawned clear and cold, and after one last big build-up of the fire, and another small meal of Click’s cooked flesh, his calves, they stood and gathered their things together, packed their sacks. Quickly they were ready to leave.

Thorn stopped them.—We’re taking Click with us, he said.—We’re going to need him.

He held up a rope that he had made out of Click’s coat. He had knotted all the strips he had cut into a line. It was longer than Loon would have thought the coat could stretch, and looked strong. Thorn went out to where he had left Click, and came back hauling the body feet first, wrapped in its bearskin along on the ground, the hide tied at each end by lengths of leather, so that it made a kind of sled which could be pulled over the snow. The rope was long enough for Thorn to be able to wrap it around his middle twice in a quick harness, and return it to the bundle to tie off on the foot tie. He pulled the bundle out of their grove and onto open snow, then came back for his snowshoes and sack. He strapped on his snowshoes while in the sled harness.

They began walking. The snow was not yet completely settled down, but the snowshoes were once again a big help, holding them ankle deep on snow their boots would have plunged deep into.

But on the first downhill, Loon fell to his left and could not get back up. Badleg wouldn’t bend at ankle or knee, and he couldn’t feel its foot. He cried out and struggled, got up to his knees, straightened the snowshoes, used his arms and the walking poles to stand, then at the next step fell left again. He stared up at the others helplessly.

—I told you we would need Click, Thorn said grimly.—Loon. Crawl over here and sit on top of the sled. Lie on your side on it. It won’t make any difference to Click. And we have to move.

—I’ll pull it, Elga said.—You find the way, she told Thorn.—I’ll pull them.

—All right, Thorn said.—That’s good. As they got the rope arranged into a harness around Elga’s chest, he added to Loon,—I like your wife.

Briefly they all laughed.

Chapter 52

It was like lying on a fallen log. They all had done that at one time or another in the forest, lying down for a nap on the flattest surface around. The bearskin wrapping Click covered him completely, and Thorn had it well tied at toe and head. And Click was frozen hard. With her snowshoes on, and two walking branches to propel her, Elga hauled the sled over the snow without many problems. When the snow softened later in the day it would get more difficult. But under the layer of new snow the old snow was rock hard, so Loon and Click would only sink in so far and then stop. And in a day or two the new stuff would get harder too. And Elga was strong.

When they went downhill, she had to let the sled slide down before her, and had to be careful not to be pulled off her feet when it got steep. Loon could help at these moments by putting Goodleg and one of his poles into the snow to slow them so they did not pull her down. Lying on his side he could look right at Elga’s face on these downhills. On the steeper slopes the creases between her eyebrows formed a deep wedge on her forehead. Her eyes were sunk deep in her head, her top ribs stuck out; the pads of fat behind her eyes and around her ribs were gone.

Once or twice Thorn led them on traverses down slopes, and she tried to follow, but the sled was always hanging straight downslope from her, so she had to stomp her snowshoes down several times, balancing just so, then stride down and stomp the next step down, leaning back fast if the snow gave way. Loon was frequently astonished by the fluid balance and power of her moves; he did not think he could do what she was doing, even if his leg were fine. Suddenly he saw that she was an ice woman, had grown up in snow. His wife came from a different world, just as Thorn had suggested by the fire with his talk about the swan wife story. She stood there huffing and puffing in the difficult moments, face red, eyes squinted to slits, but her moves were sure. And she kept on making them.

Thorn too saw the difficulty the sled gave her on traverses, and he began to range ahead, glissading down slopes first to get a look around points of stone, then gesturing up to her to follow, or trudging painfully back up to them to continue in a different direction.

The valley they were in trended south, and it became clear that Thorn wanted to head east. At midday he stopped for a rest, and while Loon and Elga sat on a log by the sled, he stuck a stick in a flat spot in the snow, and broke other sticks to measure how long the stick’s shadow was at midday. It was the middle of the sixth month; Loon wasn’t exactly sure which day, the moon had been so long hidden by the storm. But Thorn knew. And he also knew, as he explained to them while he broke sticks into different lengths, how long the shadow of a stick would be relative to its height, at midsummer noon in their home camp. Which meant he might be able to see whether they were north or south of their camp, by how much longer or shorter the shadow was than it would be at home. At home the shadow was one-sixth the length of the stick.

Here, about the same. And because the shadow was close to the same length, he decided, after a close inspection, accompanied by a great deal of muttering, that all they had to do was head east and they would reach home. Because he was quite sure they were west of their camp.

—We’re lucky I know that, he added,—because there’s no way of telling whether you are east or west of a place, only north or south. Old Pika taught me the trick, and he said his raven taught it to him, and that he was the first human to know it. He was always saying that, but I never heard any other shaman talk about this trick, at the eight eight or anywhere else.

—If we were east of camp we would be in the big mountains, Elga pointed out.

—True.

So. They were to head east when possible. But the valleys in this region were trending south. So it was hard.

Eventually they climbed over into a narrow but smoothed-floored valley that curved east, and Thorn led them up its floor, somewhat away from the creekbed, on the hardest snow he could find. On they went for the whole of that afternoon. When the sun was low behind them, such that their shadows stretched away in front of them far up the valley, Thorn stopped by a copse of trees where a little snowed-over tributary met the valley’s creek. There was an open lead in the snow where the two creeks met, and this water gurgled happily at them, almost the only sound in the landscape aside from their breathing.

It was windless at last. Clouds were visible over the horizon to the south. It was going to be cold that night, and Thorn stomped down an area for their fire ring. He had carried another ember in a mass of pine needles, tucked in a burl in his belt; with it he coaxed more of his duff supply into flame. It was very well done, but he did not bother to congratulate himself this time. He pulled Click away from the fire so that he would stay frozen. Loon hopped around on Goodleg and his poles and collected firewood. In this task especially they missed Click’s help, as he could break off branches none of them could. It was almost dark before they had a sufficient supply for the night.

Once again Thorn squeaked off over the hardening snow, blade in hand. The sky in the west was a rich pure blue, cut off sharply by the hilly black horizon. The lightest part of the blue lay right on the black of the hills, and pulsed and crackled redly in Loon’s eyes. If he opened his mouth he could hear his heart tocking at the back of his throat. He was hungry again.

Thorn came back as he had the night before, his leather patch wrapped around a lump which he carried farther out from his body than was normal. He flame-seared and then roasted the chunks. Once again Loon’s mouth ran with saliva, and he hadn’t even been walking that day. Elga’s eyes were fixed on the meat such that the whites of her eyes were visible all the way round.

They ate in silence, then wrapped themselves up by the fire and built it up to burn a big bed of embers. They went out under the starry sky to relieve themselves one last time, and Thorn moved Click back in a bit closer to the fire, so that night scavengers would keep their distance. One didn’t have to be very far from the fire to be in freezing air; it was going to be another cold night, maybe the coldest of their trek so far. The end of a storm is its coldest part.

They bundled tightly into their furs and lay around the fire so close that the smell of singeing fur filled their nostrils from time to time. After midnight it got so cold that without discussing it they pressed together like horses in a storm, with Elga between the two men at first, but then as the night crept on at the slow pace of the stars’ creep, the one farthest from the fire moved inside the one closest to it, and pressed back against them. The coldest part of the three of them was thus pressed into the warmest, and the person newly on the outside huddled against the back of the one in the middle. Round and round, fist after fist, like kits in a litter. Finally the moon set, breath by breath, the only time when you could easily see the sky rolling. After that there were only a couple of fists of the night left to endure.

In the first graying of the eastern sky Loon woke to find himself next to the embers, pressed back into Thorn. Some movement across the fire caused him to lift his head. It was Click. He was standing on his knees, because of course Thorn had removed and cooked his shanks. On Click’s face there was an expression Loon couldn’t quite understand, some odd mix of pride and longing, disappointment and grief. Loon shaped his lips to say roop, but he didn’t want to speak, for fear of waking Thorn and Elga. He realized that he was still asleep too, that he was dreaming. He mouthed the shapes of the words, and spoke them in the dream:—Thank you; and put his head back down and closed his eyes, thinking, Now Click’s spirit will keep watch over us for the rest of the night. Although only a spirit would be out on such a cold night, so nothing would challenge him.

The next three days were hard. It warmed up a little. Their sled got shorter. Loon got up and walked as much as he could, but each time he did he was forced to get back on the sled long before he wanted to. Elga and Thorn now took turns pulling it. Elga was still losing weight: her breasts were almost completely flat, her eyes sunken deep in her skull, her top ribs sticking far out. It was easy to see the shape of her skull. Thorn, always skin and bones, had turned into a snake’s head, earless, lipless, fleshless. He spoke very little, especially for him, and was always anxious to get up on ridges that might give him a view to the east, walking ahead of the other two frequently. They followed his tracks and found him up on the ridges, gazing east with hand over eyes, searching for a sign, fretting. No one mentioned that they were lost. Every afternoon they stopped and made a fire, successfully using an ember from the night before, and every evening in the blue dusk they ate cooked meat, including kidneys, liver, and the heart itself, tougher even than the tough old muscles they had started with. At night they lay bundled together by the fire. Only one night was close to as cold as the last night of the storm had been, and the morning after that one, Thorn went out and came back with a double handful of starlings, holding them by their feet; he had found them under a knot of black spruce trees, where they had frozen in the night and fallen off their perches. Roasted, they made for a welcome change.

They also found more meadow onions in meadows they passed. Eating those made them feel bloated and gassy, but they did it anyway. The new snow melted off quickly, and every day the old snow melted a little more, and now during the afternoons, sheets of black water rushed over more and more black ground. Summer was finally arriving. Now they had to search for snowy stretches to make it easier to pull the sled. As the last old snow melted, the remaining suncups got bigger and bigger, and these were almost as hard for sled pulling as bare ground. Loon walked for longer and longer stretches, using his sticks in place of Badleg, but Thorn was impatient, and sometimes would demand that Loon get back on the sled and be pulled. Elga only pursed her lips and pulled the sled, with or without Loon on it. Sometimes Thorn took a turn, but he was getting too light to hold the sled on the downhills, and was forced to give it back over to Elga whenever their way went down.

Then an afternoon came when Elga fell on the snow, and was very slow to get back up. Loon got off the sled, so much shorter and lumpier now, and hopped over to her, feeling terrible. He saw all of a sudden that she was emaciated, sunburned, almost too weak to get back up. She had walked herself into the ground without saying a word about it.

—No! Loon said, when she finally stood and tugged on the sled lines.—Now it’s my turn.

He took the harness off her and put it around his waist. Between his walking poles and his legs he had become a four-legged creature, in form not unlike a hyena, high-shouldered and ugly. But still he could hop along, hauling Badleg and making it help whenever he could manage it. Elga limped behind him in the shallow trench over the snow that the sled made.

By now none of them were walking very well, but they were moving at about the same pace as each other. They stumped along wordlessly, and made camp earlier each day, and hunted for bulbs as well as firewood, and at night slept on dry ground, or dry stone slabs, warm in the fire’s heat.

Finally a day came when they all were failing. On that day it was Badleg who saw them through, having the only muscles among them not completely tapped out. As Loon walked it was now Badleg who gave the most push, painful though it was. So sometimes Loon hauled the sled by itself, sometimes with Thorn on it, once even with Elga, who wept with frustration to have to lie down and be pulled. But Loon insisted. Badleg was fresh compared to them, and Loon quickly learned to contain the pain to a little stab of agony that burned at a single point in every step, a pain to be ignored as an unwelcome guest, an intruder, someone to thrust past unacknowledged time after time, like a hyena or a pike. Step after step this attitude worked, almost. His third wind, or some wind beyond the third wind, had come into him, and he gritted his teeth and felt the strength, still there in the parts of Badleg that didn’t hurt. Even Goodleg was not as strong as Badleg now.

That afternoon they ascended a forested snowy slope to a bare ridge running southwest to northeast, resting every three or four steps. On the ridge Thorn shaded his eyes with a hand, staring east.

Suddenly he said,—Here now, what’s that?

He pointed.—See that peak just over the horizon there, over those trees? That’s Ice Cap South. Puy Mir.

—Are you sure? Loon couldn’t help saying.

Thorn kept staring. Then he looked at Elga and Loon and smiled. It was like seeing a snake smile, unexpected and repellent, but a smile nevertheless.

—I’m sure.

Chapter 53

The idea that they knew where they were did a lot to restore their spirits, of course. But their problems were by no means over, because Ice Cap South was well to the west of their camp, and all the rivers and even the creeks were now broken up and running high. No more crossing ice, which was a relief given the break-up they had seen; but they were too weak to cross streams at any ford higher than their ankles. Camp lay to the east of them, but the ravines here ran northeast to southwest, so they often had to walk across the grain of the land, and cross creek after creek. Usually the best way over these little creeks was a tree that had fallen across them. As he didn’t trust Badleg’s balance, Loon found these logs about as frightening as any ford. On every crossing he sat down and scooted himself across the fallen trees, or crawled, even if they were logs so thick that ordinarily he could have crossed them standing on his hands. Meanwhile Elga and Thorn, who had recovered a little, had to cross while grabbing the two ends of Click and lifting his body, like a fur-wrapped log, over and between branches sticking up. Loon could do nothing to help them with this.

Now also, as the days were warming to well above freezing, from about midday to just after sunset, poor Click was thawing a little in the afternoons, then refreezing at night. His meat was therefore going off. Thorn spent a final session with him, one night after they chewed on some of his ribs, and came back to the fire with three last bags of meat that he thrust into a snowbank near them.

—You can walk all the time now? he said to Loon.

—Yes, Loon said, hoping it was true.

—Good. Tomorrow we’ll leave him. We can come back later and give his body a proper burial.

He took Click’s leggings from one of the bags and put them on the fire to burn, chanting the good-bye farewell to Click’s spirit:

After another cold night bundled together by the fire, a night unvisited by Click, they woke to a cold north wind. This was very unfortunate; wind was by a long way the worst of their foes; snow would have been better, even rain. Their luck seemed to have left them entirely, perhaps because of their treatment of Click, but anyway: bad.

When they were as bundled up as they could get, they went together to the remains of Click’s body, hauled it to an area of south-facing rocks, and laid it out for the birds. Already black buzzards scrapped around overhead in the gale. Thorn sang the funeral song and made a promise to Click to return and collect what bones might remain, for proper disposal when the time was right.

Then they took off on their own.

Now Loon walked as much as he could on his poles, but of course Badleg had to do its part, there was no way around it. Whenever they were on remnants of snow in the afternoon, it still helped to be on their snowshoes, and that involved Badleg no matter what. Loon just had to stride over that little click of agony. It was an almost audible click. Indeed in the mornings, when he was stiff and it was quiet, he could actually hear the click as he felt the pain jolt up him. It was very like one of Click’s little click words, and so it began to seem to Loon that Click had taken over from Badleg, and from Crouch, and had now settled in their place. Click had moved into him to protest the bad treatment he had received from his comrades after his death, or perhaps to help him along. Step by step Click clicked in him.

Thorn kept a steady slow pace, although whenever he approached a ridge that looked like it was going to give him a view east, he hurried up it with a speed that suggested to Loon that the old man still had a little reserve of strength. Elga was slower, and Loon could see that she was wearing down. She had eaten all she could of her own fat, and was now as thin as she could get. But she was stubborn too. He knew that now full well, and could see it clearly in the set of her shoulders, and the deep wedge between her eyebrows, and the look in her eye. She was not going to stop now that they were so close.

So really it came down to a matter of isolating Click to his single objection, the same stab over and over again, and then getting along without any more hurt than that. Over wet ground, over rocks, over big suncups when they could not be avoided; they were getting really bad, whether hard in the mornings or soft in the afternoons. Up ravines and over passes, sometimes following animal trails, with some human trail signs too. Keeping a general aim east. From every high point they stared east hungrily, and Thorn would point at something he recognized, and on they would go, down again toward the next creek crossing, the next up, the next pass.

That night by the fire they ate the last of Click’s flesh, and Thorn built the fire larger even than usual and warmed his hands at the flames, dancing just a little in place.—Tomorrow we’ll be there, he said.

—Really? Loon and Elga said together. They looked at each other, sharing their surprise.

—Tomorrow or the day after, if we’re slow tomorrow. But it doesn’t matter. We’re going to make it. Thank you Click, thank you Click, thank you thank you thank you.

The next day they woke and drank water, sat by the fire warming up, went out to perform their ablutions. Stood stiffly and shuffled off again. As that day wore on, and they came to what Thorn said was a tributary of West of Northerly Creek, Elga tied her snowshoes on and led the way down a valley of softening suncups, stomping down a path for Loon to follow; and Thorn too followed. Now, at the very end, Thorn was finally slowing down, taking each step as if it were a complete effort, as if he were utterly tapped out, with no second wind or third wind, or any wind at all; just one step at a time, each a full effort. So he was like Loon in that regard, and Loon wondered if Thorn had hurt himself, or had just run out of wind. He only shook his head when Loon asked about it, and stepped on in the same gait.

—Remember! Loon said, mimicking Thorn’s teaching voice,—in a journey of twentytwenty days you can still trip on the last step!

Thorn just shook his head. He was too tired to object. But he had always said that a little irritation could jolt one’s spirit in a good way. So Loon kept it up. How often he had heard this one.—Oh, yes, he repeated in Thorn’s tones,—in a journey of twentytwenty years, you can still fuck up on the very last step! So don’t! He almost laughed, he had heard this one so often.

The first feature of the landscape that Loon recognized on his own was the giant boulder that lay in the middle of West of Northerly Creek, straddling most of the streambed. He stared at it, feeling stunned. A little seed of relief was sprouting in him, right behind his belly button. He had often visited this boulder with Hawk and Moss, when wandering up this canyon; the charcoal drawing he had made of a cave bear was still there, on the big white side of the rock that fell straight into the water. He had had to climb the boulder from the other side, then hang down from its top and draw while hanging upside down. Hawk and Moss had laughed themselves silly. But there the bear shambled with its sloping forehead, eyeing any viewers on the bank as if considering whether to attack them. Excellent work for someone hanging upside down, and Loon found he was weeping to see it, not for the drawing, or even for home, but just at the idea that he could soon stop walking on Badleg. Only a certain finite number of steps now. They were less than a half day from home.

Although it took them longer than that. Still, in the last good light, late that afternoon, when everything was lit yellow from the side, the sky overhead darkening, the world big with the approach of night, they stumbled up after their long shadows to West Pass and looked down on the headwall meadow. It was empty. But then around a tree strolled Heather.

She stopped short as she saw them. For a moment she was frozen with surprise. Then she turned her head over her shoulder, and said,—Child, your parents are here. Even the unspeakable one is here.

Then she sat down abruptly on a log and stared at them as they approached.—I thought you were gone, she exclaimed, and put her face in her hands.

Their child stared curiously at Elga, who dropped her poles and caught him up, then lifted him into the air. He stared down at her, suspended between fright and some huge surprise. Loon joined them, and the two of them held the child between them as he began to sob and struggle to get away.

Heather wiped her face and watched this from her log.—You are one lucky boy, she said to the child.

She stood up and hugged Elga and then Loon, and then even Thorn.

—What about Click? she asked.

Thorn shook his head.—He died. I’ll tell you about it later.

Heather regarded him. Finally she said,—You’re uglier than ever, I see.

—You stole my beauty long ago, Thorn replied, turning away from her.—Here, take our sacks. Take Loon’s sack. His leg is bad again.

—He can thank his shaman’s wander for that.

—Woman! Thorn said.—Shut up. Please. Shut up now, and help us get down to camp. We’re tired.