The Reindeer People

'Go deep,' he told the boy. 'Follow the little brown mouse when she takes her seeds and hides from the winter. Go to where the water bubbles up in a spring, and dive into its secret source. Follow the roots of the grandfather spruce down deep into the soil and beyond. This I tell you, for while every shaman must find his own entrance, these are ones that are known to have worked for some. Not all, but some. They are worth trying.'

Kerlew swallowed and tried to keep his drifting eyes on the old man's face. But Carp added another pinch of herbs to the lamp flame, renewing the wavering curtain of smoke between them. 'What do I seek?' Kerlew asked with difficulty.

Carp's tone was patient. 'I have told you. You seek for a magic, and a brother. Find a path into the spirit world and it will lead you to a deep room. The walls are of stone, and water drips down them. Roots hang from the ceiling. You must go through this room and out, into the spirit world. Do not speak to anyone in the stone room, not even if he calls you brother and offers you many fine gifts. For if you speak, you must remain there, and he will be free to take your place. Thus are many shamans trapped. I myself have seen them as I passed on my way to the spirit world. Don't speak to them!'

'I'm afraid,' the boy said suddenly.

The old man only shook his head, softening the gesture with a smile. 'You will go past those ones, and out into the spirit world. I cannot tell you what to expect, because for each shaman it is different. But when you meet your spirit guardian, you will know him. He may choose to test you. He may show you his teeth, or trample you beneath his hooves. He may rend you with his claws, or seize you in his talons and carry you up into the sky. Whatever he does, show no fear. Be bold, and set your palm between his eyes. Then he will be your brother, and he must give you a song or a magic to bring back with you. But if you cry out or flee or strive to hurt him, he will not be your brother. He will kill your spirit, and your body will waste away after you.'

Kerlew clenched his fists to keep his hands from trembling.

Carp saw, and for an instant the sternness of the instructor left his face. He looked down on his apprentice fondly. 'It will be all right,' the old man said kindly. 'Go ahead, now. Don't be afraid.' He touched the boy's cheek with his weathered old hand, dragged his fingertips across Kerlew's lined brow to soothe away the worry wrinkles.

'You will be a great shaman, and all will point and tell tales about Carp's apprentice.'

The boy gave a brief nod and tried to swallow the anxiety that started in his stomach but kept trying to squeeze up his throat. Old Carp smiled at him reassuringly, his pride and belief lighting his seamed old face. His teeth were yellow, separated by black and empty gaps. Kerlew thought his eyes must have been brown once. Now they were skimmed with gray film that reminded him of the green slime that clouded the surface of summer ponds. Kerlew knew that if one stirred the slime with a stick, the depths and wonders of the pond beneath it were revealed. Sometimes when he stared at Carp's clouded eyes, he thought he glimpsed the depths and wonders beyond the gray that misted them. Gray as the smoke that drifted and wandered through the tent. When he breathed it in, it was like breathing cobwebs. It clung to the inside of his nose and lined his throat with dryness.

Carp's withered lips were moving, and Kerlew focused on them with difficulty. He was supposed to be listening, he remembered belatedly. The smoke was supposed to make this easier. Instead it was making it harder.

'Just breathe deeply and listen to the drum. Let the drum guide you. Listen now.'

The drum. Kerlew shifted his eyes to Carp's hands. A little drum with a yellow-leather drumhead was gripped between the old man's knees. In one of Carp's hands was a tiny hammer, made from a bear's molar mounted on a stem of birch. Kerlew watched the molar lift and fall, lift and fall, lift and fall. Each time it struck the taut leather it made a sound. Listen to it. He was supposed to listen to it. The old shaman's fingers were the same color as leather that had been used a lot and hung up inside a smoky tent. Like this smoky tent. His eyes drifted away from the drum and fingers, rose to follow the gray smoke as it swirled silently through the tent.

Carp was still talking to him. His words drifted through the tent with the smoke.

'Listen to the drum and let go of this world. Breathe in in this world, breathe out in the spirit world. Let go and go down, into the spirit world to seek out your spirit beast. Go down, follow a mouse, follow a beetle, go down into the spirit world, followatrickleofwatergodown- deepintotheearth ...'

The words mingled with the smoke and swirled through the tent and up. Up and around, past the patch sewn on the tent wall, past his leggings hung to dry on one of the tent supports, past the old shaman's head. Kerlew lay still on his pallet of hides and watched them. His tongue was gummed to the roof of his mouth and he could not let out his breath. He could take in air, and he felt his chest swell tighter with every breath.

But he couldn't let the air out. For a slow moment he noticed this and it troubled him.

Then his attention was caught once more by the swirling smoke. He watched it glide, so gray and soft and free. He let out a long sigh and followed the smoke.

Once he had fallen into a river, and before his mother could snatch him out, he had been washed downstream on the buffeting flood. This was like that time, except the smoke was warm and soft and there were no great stones to batter him. It carried him up and around, toward the peak of the tent and the smoke hole. He brushed past the old shaman's bent head, heard a few lingering notes from the skin drum. For that instant he remembered that he was supposed to be going down, into the earth to seek the depths of the spirit world. Then he swirled past Carp and was carried aloft on the smoke. The old shaman's instructions no longer seemed important. He floated up and out of the smoke hole.

The night was black, studded with stars. Winter was but a breath away, yet Kerlew did not feel the cold. He hunted across the sky, the smoke soft beneath him, his every stride a stag's leap. Then, as he felt the smoke grow thinner and fade, he began to step from star to star just as one could step from stone to stone in a stream crossing, or from hummock to hummock in a bog. Gone was his usual clumsiness and halting stride.

Here he walked as a hunter and a man. The night wind touched his hair.

Higher and higher into the sky he climbed, until far ahead of him he saw the pale hides of the moon's caribou. Far above the stars behind the moon, the herd was scattered out across the black sky. Kerlew stood on the highest stars and lusted after them. Their coats shone like lake ice and their antlers swept white and gleaming over their backs. Their heads were down and they grazed across the night sky. He knew that the smoke of their breath formed the clouds, and the clash of their antlers presaged thunder and lightning. Their power and majesty made his heart ache. He knew that if he touched one between the eyes and claimed it as his spirit brother, he would be a powerful shaman indeed.

But between him and the herd the stars were few and widely scattered. He stood teetering atop two stars, yearning after the sky caribou, and wondering what he should do. Briefly he recalled that Carp had told him to go down into the earth, not up into the sky. With a sinking heart, he knew he had disobeyed his master; he would fail in his hunt. He would return from this journey, no shaman, but only the healer's strange boy.

At the thought, sickness washed through his belly and throat and tears nearly blinded him. He forced a shuddering breath into his lungs. Unless, perhaps, he could claim one of these creatures as his spirit brother ... He centered his courage in his belly and prepared to jump to the next star.

But from behind him came the sound of panting, and he felt hot breath on the backs of his legs. Turning, he beheld Wolf racing up the stars toward him. Wolf's coat was gray streaked with black, and his lolling tongue was red while his eyes glowed green.

His great paws splayed wide with every stride he took, and Kerlew noticed every black nail. Then his eyes met Wolf's, and in that moment he knew his brother.

He set his feet well and lifted his hand. Palm out he waited for Wolf, and when he was but a few stars away, Kerlew cried out, 'I claim you as my spirit brother.'

Wolf didn't pause but laughed savagely as only the wolves can. 'Fool!' he howled.

'You cannot claim me here!' With a sudden leap he sprang high over Kerlew's head, beyond the reach of his outstretched hand. To the next star and to the next he sprang.

The great white herd of sky caribou suddenly marked his coming. They threw up their antlered heads and bellowed to one another in fear. As one creature, the whole herd leaped into flight, bounding away across the night sky with Wolf panting behind them.

All this Kerlew saw in a teetering instant. The winds of Wolf's passage swept his balance away. His arms flapped vainly as he tried to keep his precarious perch, and then he was falling, tumbling down between the stars that snagged and caught at him like brambles. The bright light of the moon faded into a mellow darkness as he fell, and to his ears came the far sound of Wolf's hunting cry. Kerlew knew he called to his brothers, and he snatched at the words as they whispered past his ears.

'If you would be Wolf's brother, learn to follow the herds!'

CHAPTER ONE

The birthing had been long, though not as difficult as Tillu had feared. Elna's thick hair was sweat-soaked to her skull; in the heaviest of her labors, she had thrown aside furs and skins, panting with the heat of her struggle. But soon after the child emerged, she was shivering with cold and asking that her pallet be moved closer to the fire. The young mother slept now, her fat babe nestled in the crook of her arm, soft furs tucked closely around them both. Elna had been so proud when she saw her baby, her cry of joy louder than her cries of effort had been. He was the first child for Elna, and a large one. Tillu had feared that in her inexperience the laboring woman would push too hard and tear herself. But all had gone well.

She spread one more covering of soft fox furs over mother and child and bent to gather the bloody scraps of hide the newborn had been cleansed with. Tillu straightened slowly, wishing she could just lie down and sleep. Her back ached from her hours of kneeling and crouching by Elna, and her head ached from the tension of midwifing. The need for a successful birthing had been like a knife at her spine. The other women were gone now, but during the birth, they had crowded inside the tent.

Tillu had felt their eyes on her like clinging burrs. Had they believed she would do Elna some ill? She supposed so. She sighed again and rubbed at her weary eyes. A fine healthy boy, she reminded herself, resolved not to let her thoughts drag her down again. She was past that, now. She was going to be accepted again.

Outside the skin tent, Rak sat by a blazing fire, eating boiled meat the other women had prepared for him. On the opposite side of the fire, Benu's hunters shared his vigil.

All were dressed for hunting; all looked toward the new father. He gripped his best bone-headed spear, its butt grounded against the frozen earth. His deep voice obscured the crackling of the fire, carrying his proud complaints through the leather walls of the tent. 'No doubt that useless woman of mine has birthed a puny, whimpering babe no bigger than a squirrel. Such is my luck. She is too young and foolish to bear a child.'

'Foolish man!' chided one of the passing women daringly. Her voice carried clearly through the cold night, meant to be overheard by all. 'Your firstborn is so large a child, doubtless your wife will have all she can do to pack him about and tend him, let alone see to your needs!' The laughter of the other women of Benu's band swept the night.

'He will fill her arms and bend her back,' crowed another.

'To sew a shirt for such a babe will be the work of a day and a night, while you, poor man, will go naked in the wind, and spend every moment hunting meat enough to fill him!'

'Bold ones!' chided one of the men. 'Dare you speak to a man so? Get back to your own fire!'

But the shouts of laughter that greeted her daring compliment belied the rebuking words. Such tribute made the young father flush even darker with pride. Meanwhile the rejoicing women were cooking delicacies for him, fresh tender tongues and fat ribs simmering in their own rich broth. The tempting odors penetrated the tent, making Tillu aware of her own hunger. She did not need to peer out to know what went on. The young man basked in the honor due one whose wife had just increased the strength of the hunting band. The men of Benu's folk paid their silent respects with the items they dropped unmentioned at the young father's feet. Sinews for bowstrings and bone arrowheads; fit gifts for a firstborn son. Had it been a daughter, it would have been the women who would have casually 'lost' bone needles and hide scrapers beside the mother's pallet. Such gifts were never mentioned by giver or receiver but were quietly set aside and cherished until the child was of an age to use them. Any birth was a cause for celebration, but tonight the small band of hunters rejoiced as if this were the first babe ever born. After their losses this summer, they needed the comfort of new life, even a babe born this close to the fangs of winter.

She glanced about the tidied tent and poked at the wick of the stone lamp to shrink its flame. Her duties were done here. Tillu scratched away a flake of dried blood on her wrist, thinking. The other women of Benu's folk had already borne away the afterbirth, to set it out on an altar of five stacked stones. Tomorrow, Carp would study the signs of the animals that had visited it during the night, and then would announce the child's guardian spirit. Tomorrow would be Carp's day, to shake his rattles of leather and bone and speak in strange voices. Tomorrow Carp would be very busy, receiving the honor due him as a shaman. All the folk would be caught up in celebrating the birth of a new hunter. Tonight would be a good night to leave.

The decision surprised her. She tried to reconsider it as she lifted the tent flap and peered out into the night. The world balanced on the knife edge between autumn and winter. Only a fool would leave the safety of a tribe at this time of year. The tiny tent village around her was as much civilization as this part of the world knew. Beyond the temporary bounds of this hastily pitched camp was the forest. She knew the forest was not eternal; a lifetime away, to the south and east she thought, was a land of farmers and cultivated fields, of riders of horses and reapers of grain. It was the land of her childhood. But this was the reality of her adulthood: this northern forest, and the small bands of semi-civilized people who inhabited it. From group to group she had wandered; this was the farthest north she had ever been, and Benu's folk the poorest of any she had lived with. Of bones and stones, hides and meat were their lives wrought.

She pulled her wolf hood up and forward to shelter her face from the early winds of winter as she left the humid warmth of the skin tent.

The blazing light of the fire against the stark blackness of the night blinded her. The men had built it high, fueling it with branches both green and dry, and sometimes splashing precious oil on it to make the flames roar wildly. The dancing flames cast strange shadows that made the surrounding trees seem to writhe in the unexpected warmth. Close to the fire, the men feasted on the boiled ribs and juicy tongues, their faces shining with heat and grease and joy at the new hunter's birth. Tillu walked past them silently, her soft boots crunching frozen moss and grass underfoot. None of the men deigned to notice her passage. It was unworthy of hunters to pay attention to a woman and a midwife.

For a moment the night held her closer. It was a clear night of black skies and the stars were as thick as yellow pollen on a quiet pond. The camp had been made in a small vale between two hills, a place protected from most of winter's wind. The forest in this area was an open one, of paper birch and alder and willows that merged with brushy thickets and then bog grasses. Years ago this area had been burned over. Fire-blackened stumps and scarred giants of trees were reminders of that time, but most of the live trees were no bigger than she could span with her two hands. It was fine hunting for small game and browsing deer, and Benu's folk had summered well in the winding river valley. But the sparse leaves that now clung to the branches were gold on the birch, dirty yellow on the willow and red on the alder. The edges of the coarse grasses and fallen leaves that carpeted the ground were outlined tonight with shining silver frost. It was time for Benu's folk to seek out the older forest of spruce and pine that offered more shelter from winter's blasts. There they would cope and struggle through until spring. So Tillu knew from their talk. She had once thought she would go with them. Now she shivered and pulled her arms inside the loose sleeves of her coat to hug her body.

At a proper distance from the birth tent and the men, the women clustered together about their own, smaller fire, discussing every detail of the birth, and arguing as to whether the child was as large as Ardee's firstborn had been, or even larger. They were eating dried egg yolks, passing a sack made of deer intestine, each squeezing up a mouthful of the sticky, rich yolk and biting it off before passing it to her neighbor. Their hoods were pushed back in the heat of their fire. Their sleek black-haired heads showed glints of blue as they nodded to one another, and they muffled their giggling behind small browned hands so as not to annoy their menfolk. The joy of this small band of humans at now being eighteen instead of seventeen folk was a warm and tangible glow in the night.

Tillu could have gone to join the women at the fire. On this night, at least, she would have been welcome to share their yolk-sack and to chatter with them of babies and births she had presided over. She would be but the Healer and Midwife, just another woman at the fire. No one would mention the events of the summer. No one would speak of her son, Kerlew.

Tillu turned away from the small fire and the congenial women. She was too tired, she told herself. That was all. And her decision, sudden as it had been, was still strong.

She was going tonight, and that would take some preparation. Besides, she was hungry for more than the rich stickiness of egg yolk. Her midwife gift would be in her own tent, borne there by the women as soon as the child's cord had been safely bitten. The father would know nothing of it. Among Benu's folk, birthing and midwives were the province of the women, and for a man to stoop to being interested in such things would be strange indeed. And dangerous, for spirits had been known to become offended at those who did not keep to their proper roles. The child was still especially vulnerable until Carp announced his guardian spirit tomorrow. Thus the huge fire that burned before the birth tent, and the father's brave vigil through the night. The spirits could be jealous and vengeful to those who flaunted their will.

Like Tillu.

She pushed the thought away. She had not been brought up to believe in such spirits as populated every cranny of these hunters' world. She would not be cowed by them now. Had she lived so long among wandering hunters as to share their childish fears?

Then it was time to move on. Somewhere there were other folk who would welcome a healer and midwife, people who knew more than skin tents and tools of bone. She squared her narrow shoulders against the night fears she would not admit and hurried through the darkness and clustering trees to the isolation of her small tent.

Yellow lamp light escaped from the ventilation flap and seams to welcome her. She would have to scold Kerlew for letting the lamp burn so brightly and use so much oil.

But if he had been talking to Carp, as he did too often now, he would tell her that the tending of a lamp was woman's business, and not for him to worry about. She sighed a tiny sigh. It was not that Kerlew was harder to live with these days; it was just that she had been accustomed to his old differences and difficulties. These new ones were heavier to bear.

She lifted the tent flap, grateful for the light and heat that flowed out to greet her. It was good to be in her own tent again. She became aware anew of the tension that energized her whenever she had to move among Benu's folk. Uneasiness, she tried to tell herself. Not fear. But only when she was alone with her son did she feel safe from their accusing eyes. Only when she could actually see Kerlew did she stop worrying about him, lest some small but deadly accident befall him. She threw back her hood as she entered the shelter, ready to relax. The sight that greeted her stiffened her weary muscles.

The dished stone of the lamp was heaped with lumps of melting tallow. The twisted moss wick that drew up the melting fat smoked and flared dangerously high. The gift of food left for her by the other women had been reduced to scattered fragments beside the blazing lamp. The old shaman was licking gravy from the side of his hand as she entered. He gave her a gap-toothed grin. His face was like wrinkled leather dried after a rainstorm. The smell of his magic clung to him like the stench of carrion to a bear's hide.

When he stood staring at her as he did now, bandy legs spread wide and head nodding, her aversion to him was like a physical thrust. She wanted to strike him, to drive him from her territory. She suspected he sensed it. Sensed it and enjoyed it. So she ground her teeth but forced herself to keep the custom of Benu's folk. Carp was the shaman. No one could begrudge him anything. And no woman denied any man a share of the food in her tent lest she insult her own husband by implying he was too poor a provider to feed a guest. The fact that Tillu had no husband made no difference at all. Guests were always to be honored with food, to be pressed to eat and enjoy, while the host always bemoaned the fact that what he could offer was so unworthy. Then the honored guest would protest that the food was of the finest quality, much better than anything his own poor household could provide. And the next night, the guest would be the host, and the roles would be exchanged. Unless the guest were the shaman. Then the host knew that the spirits were pleased by his fine treatment of their friend, and would bless the household. Was not that honor enough? So Tillu chewed and swallowed her outrage. For the last time, she promised herself.

'This one is honored that you would be so kind as to share the small and stale provisions of my tent,' Tillu greeted him formally.

Carp belched politely and rubbed his belly to show the extent of his satiation. 'Your home has been generous to me.' His eyes followed Tillu as she bent and pulled her reindeer coat off over her head. She sat on her pallet to draw off her knee boots of fox fur soled with winter-taken deer hide. She pulled out the felt padding made by drying and pounding the tough supple stalks of sedge grass and put it by the lamp to dry. She stood barefoot on the cold packed-earth floor. The shaman stared. She was so different from the short stocky women of Benu's folk. She was small, as short as they, but to look at her was to see her as a smaller, fine-boned specimen of a larger people. From elbow to wrist and knee to ankle, her long bones were proportionately longer than those of the women Carp knew. The difference made her unattractively thinner in his eyes. Her hair was finer, more brown than black, as were her eyes. The color of her skin was subtly warmer, as was her temperament. But Carp was willing to overlook these flaws, for she was strong and healthy, and almost young. Besides, women were scarce among Benu's folk, and mostly taken. She would do.

Tillu avoided his gaze but could feel his thoughts. When she had first joined Benu's folk, he had been more subtle. But Tillu had resolutely ignored his courting gifts and the unsubtle hints from Benu's wives. She had no desire to be the shaman's woman. No man had owned her since Kerlew's father had left her, heavy with the child. She had not missed belonging to a man. Yet, among Benu's folk, a woman without a man to rule her was but half a being. Women had their fathers, their husbands, then their sons to order their lives and protect them. At first the other women had pitied Tillu, alone in the world. But as time passed, she had become an uneasiness among folk. Could the spirits be pleased with such a creature as she? By their traditions, Carp could not force her, though she knew that if she stayed much longer with this group, the social pressure could become unbearable. Then, if Carp did take her against her will, no one would intervene, but would say that the shaman knew the desires of her spirit guardian better than she did herself.

At the thought, Tillu clenched her teeth. It would never come to that; she was leaving this night. She could afford to be civil, for one last time. She drew a silent breath. And my son?' she asked courteously. 'Has he shown you the respects of our home?'

Carp rubbed grease from his chin. 'The man of this tent has been most gracious to me.' He inclined his head respectfully toward the pallet at the back of the crowded tent where Kerlew reclined. The shaman's dark old eyes, flawed by gray clouds, voiced a silent challenge. Tillu took a step nearer her son.

Kerlew lay on his side, staring up at the shadows on the slanting wall of the tent. He wore only his breechclout of yellowed leather. His coarse black hair was unbound and cascaded about his face and shoulders. His gaze was empty, wandering. For an instant, she could almost see him as strangers did, as a boy rather than as her son. His face always attracted stares. His hazel eyes were very deeply set on either side of the narrow bridge of his nose. The closeness of his eyes to one another made his passing glance seem a peering and his stare an unbearable intrusion. More than one adult had cuffed him for that seeming rudeness. His lips were full and his prognathous jaw emphasized this. Small ears were flattened tightly to his large head, nearly hidden by his hair. His narrow hands waved gracelessly in the air, and he stared, entranced, at their shadows as they flowed and danced on the hide wall. At rest, his fingers curled in toward his wrists, and the thumb stayed in close to the fingers. It gave his hands a blunt and helpless look. But now they flapped at the ends of his arms, and their shadows mimicked them. As he dreamed, his mouth moved silently, speaking, and then laughed gutturally at some pretended reply. Anyone else would have assumed that he was feverish and wandering, or in a shamanic trance.

Tillu knew better. This was Kerlew, her strange one, in but one of his own peculiar self-amusements. A child not only homely but almost repellent in his strangeness. That which would not interest a sucking babe held him fascinated for hours. While other children built leaf boats to sail on a stream, Kerlew would stare, entranced, at the sunlight glancing off the whirlpool. Silent and dreaming, he would come home from such a day to be caught by the dancing of the lamp flame or the movement of his own shadow on the wall. He could forget to eat in his fascination with the globules of oil floating in his soup, or stand soaking in the rain watching the circles of the drops that fell on the puddles. Silent, staring, unresponsive to a gentle voice or his mother's call.

But Tillu knew he could be cuffed or shaken out of it and told to bring water, or fetch fuel, or take broth to one who was ailing. Last summer he had all but given up such foolishness, for she wouldn't let him indulge in it. She had filled his days with simple chores, giving him no time for mindless staring, and telling him it was infant's play not fit for a boy of nine summers. She had forced him to learn, repeating aloud to him lessons other children learned without words. 'Kerlew. It is not polite to stand that close to someone. Move aside. Kerlew. Lower your eyes before a stranger. Kerlew. Do not touch another's food.' The endless repetitions of rules which children of two summers already knew instinctively, but which Kerlew had never noticed. Slowly, slowly, he had begun to learn and abide by it. But that was before Carp had taken him over. Before the plague of the bear. Tillu sighed at the memory and, as she took in a fresh breath, caught a peculiar odor in the air of the tent.

'What have you given my son?' she demanded in a low voice. She stepped forward to touch Kerlew, to check for the fever some of the wandering herbs could induce, but before she could lay a hand on him her wrist was gripped and Carp jerked her back.

'Do women ask of shaman's doings? A fine thing indeed! Shall I take up a needle and sew mittens for you while you venture out to bring down meat with a bow?'

'He is my son!' Tillu cried in anger.

'No! He is my apprentice! And he must be trained, and initiated by rites that are not for women to know of. Your time to be his mother is over. I am the one who guides him now. Ask no questions, Tillu, lest the spirits be angered.' He gripped her, eyes and wrist, and for a long moment she believed. Meeting the gaze of those clouded, gray-on-brown eyes that should not see but did, she felt her soul flutter within her, threatening to leave her body and take her wits with it. She felt the coldness of Kerlew gone from her, the pain of watching helplessly as he changed into someone she feared and loathed.

She could smell the fetid breath of the magic, a dark and slinking thing that Carp could call out of Kerlew himself, a thing that would steal her son away from her more permanently than death itself. Then the anger in her hardened to resolve, and cunning.

She freed her wrist with a quick twist and turned aside from the shaman and her son.

With pretended docility, she moved to the pots the women had left for her, helping herself to some bits of boiled meat still swimming in lukewarm water and oil. She kept her eyes averted before the old man, thinking quickly as she chewed slowly, and then licked the dripping juices from her fingers.

'A hunter was born this night in the tent of Rak,' she announced casually. All the men feast about his fire on tongue and ribs. A fine healthy boy, as large as Elna could pass.'

'That is a good sign,' Carp announced officiously. 'The spirits once more turn their faces toward us. My gifts to them and my hours of dancing have changed their hearts.'

'So were many saying about the fire,' Tillu agreed smoothly. 'Some were saying that Rak would surely gift you well for the health of his firstborn.'

Carp immediately took up his coat and dragged it on. 'Then they will be calling for me soon, to chant for a new hunter. Such a burden for an old man such as myself. Rak will press me to eat much meat to celebrate a new hunter, and to chant late under the stars, lest spirits come to steal his son before he has a guardian of his own.' He pulled his hood forward to shelter his wrinkled face. 'Then I shall have to arise early tomorrow, to read the will of the beasts to determine the boy's guardian, and to mark him as a hunter with the first blood spilled tomorrow, and to offer the feast of the first kill to the spirits. Uh-yah. An old man must do without his sleep to secure the hunters of tomorrow.'

'And your apprentice? Will you not stay to guide him out of his trance?' Tillu pretended unconcern as she spilled a vessel of blood into the remains of the warm oil and water and stirred them into a thick soup. She hung the pot near the lamp to warm it further.

'There is no need. He does not need the Smoke of the Traveler. I but burned some as an offering. The boy is gifted, for the spirits are ever with him, talking in his ears as loudly as chattering women. He will be a powerful shaman, and all will know him as my apprentice.' There was undisguised pride in the old man's voice as he pulled his skin boots up over his bony knees and knotted the thongs around them. 'My thanks for the hospitality of this house.'

'My thanks for honoring our cold and humble tent, and seeing fit to share in these poor foods.' And her heartfelt thanks that he was finally leaving.

'Uh-yah,' Carp grunted. He stood a long moment, holding the tent flap up and looking at her. 'Woman.' Tillu flinched at that tone, like a dog nudged in a sore spot.

'Tomorrow you will move my tent. Down here, next to yours. After the ceremonies. I will show you where I want it.'

She managed to keep her eyes and voice steady. 'Why?'

'Does a woman question a man when he says he will do a thing? Then a woman has lived too long alone, and has forgotten how the world is ordered.' He let the tent flap fall. Tillu listened to the crunch of his retreating footfalls. She swallowed her sickness, her mind racing. Soon he would be at the fire, and the men would press him to eat boiled meat with them and drink the rich broth to celebrate the new hunter. There would be chanting far into the night. Carp would he very busy.

She poked at the wick in the oil lamp so that the flame burned lower. The light in the small tent faded, and the soft murmur of Kerlew's voice ceased. His hands curled and fell to the skins beside him. He would be close to sleep now, full of his own idle stories.

Well, let him. The work of this move would be Tillu's, for the boy was still more hindrance than help with these things. Tillu stirred her blood soup, then took the vessel from its hanging string and drank slowly of the warmth. It gave her strength, and her courage grew.

She began to tidy her tent, eating what Carp had left of the delicacies the women had brought for her, wiping each pot as she finished with it and setting them aside. She set them on their sides on the earth floor of the tent, for they would not stand alone. Their pointed bottoms were designed to be nestled between the hearth stones in a fire. Their sides were rough where pebbles had been accidentally mixed with the clay that formed them. She set them down carefully, taking care not to crack any. She would take nothing that was not hers. She finished eating what there was and wiped her face and hands on a piece of skin. Putting her hands on her hips, she surveyed the task before her.

She wished that she had more to worry about. A little skin case held her sewing needles, awl, and sinew. Another larger bag held her healing herbs and the other supplies she used in treating the various ailments of the folk. A skillfully pegged-together wooden box, remnant of a stay with another people, held her extra reserves of herbs and roots and seeds. Besides that, there were her two cooking vessels made of baked clay and several baskets for gathering. Their sleeping pallets were no more than skins on top of piles of brush gathered each time the folk decided to stop and make a village for a few days. She had two stone lamps and a sack of oil. She thought regretfully of the dried slabs of fish, the pokes of berries in oil, the scored and smoked twists of meat she would have to leave behind. Some she could take, but not a winter's supply. She could only drag so much. Her wits would have to feed them.

Luckily their winter clothing was new, sewn for them by Reena before the disaster. It would last them most of the winter. She would worry about replacing it when that time came. The tent itself was no more than stretched and scraped winter hides sewn together. The poles that supported it would become the poles of the travois she would drag it on. It was a heavy load for one, but such was the fate of a woman with no man and a son with the mind of a babe.

No! That wasn't true! She fiercely rebuked herself for the thought. Kerlew was a good boy, a capable boy, and could grow to be a good man, if only Carp would leave him alone. His 'training and initiation' only made the boy grow more childish each day.

She hated watching him revert to the strange, introverted behavior of his earliest childhood. Carp had undone the work of months. Once Kerlew had helped her gather her healing herbs, had done simple tasks of fetching and tidying. But all that had been changed by the bear.

Tillu mourned the event as she gathered her possessions and bundled them, grieving as if it had been her own son lost. It had been a tragedy, but only that, until the old shaman had cast his shadow over it.

Kerlew was terrified of bears. Tillu had seen to that, and refused to regret it. Mother and son were too often on their own, traveling alone, for her to think of a bear as prey.

Her rule for the boy had been simple, the only kind of rule he could remember and keep. 'If you see or hear a bear, you leave any meat or berries you have, and come quickly to me' It had always worked well for them, when they were traveling as two alone. But last spring they had joined with Benu's folk. The other children had speedily learned of Kerlew's differences, but nothing had given them as much joy as his fear of bears. It was sport for them to rattle the bushes like a bear, snarling and snorting, so that Kerlew would flee and leave them whatever fish or berries he had painstakingly gathered. Back at the tents afterward, they would gleefully tell how he had run, and how they had enjoyed their ill-gotten gains.

All of Benu's folk, big and small, had found it humorous. Tillu had tried to believe it did not matter. Why let it rankle, when Kerlew himself would uncertainly grin as they told of it? Trying to tell him that he did not have to flee from the bear sounds made by children younger than himself only confused him. His old rule was too deeply ingrained in his soul. The children growled and Kerlew fled, to be teased later. Reena's two youngsters had taken the most joy in it. Scarcely a day passed that Kerlew did not come racing home, empty-handed, after an afternoon of foraging. Tillu had hoped they would weary of their sport. Instead they carried it one step further.

It had been close to the end of the summer. Mornings dawned clear and cold, and it took the sun longer to warm the chilled earth. The long days grew short again. Soon the brief season of warmth would be gone and winter would seal the earth beneath her white mantle. The plant life of the land was in a frenzy of bearing. In the shadowed woods grew the lingonberries, dangling red under great leaves already gone scarlet.

Blueberries on twiggy bushes ripened on the sunny hillsides, and in boggy places the ground was carpeted with red mossberries growing on their tiny, round-leaved plants.

Under the clear blue skies, the children collected baskets of them, to mash and cook into pudding with suet, or store away in leather pokes filled with oil. Small hands and faces were stained purple and red at afternoon's end.

Kerlew excelled at the monotonous work, crawling diligently over the ground, absorbed in his gathering long after the other children had abandoned their half-filled baskets to play. Reena's small boys had made no effort at all to fill their vessels, for they had plans that would let them play all day and still return to the village with a trove of berries. They giggled but refused to confide it to the other children.

Kerlew had been picking alone, the other children long gone, when he heard the first of the growls. That much Tillu had been able to piece out from his hysterical account.

Then he had seen Reena's boys stagger from the bush, screaming and choking, red flowing down their faces and hands. 'The bear has crushed us and clawed us, we die, we die!' With a terrified howl, Kerlew had fled, racing back to the tents, where he screeched out the news of the slaughtered children. In moments the armed hunters and frantic women converged on the berry-covered slope, to find all the children clustered about Kerlew's near-empty basket, filling their mouths with the sweet berries as they shrieked with laughter. The red stains had been only the crushed juice of berries smeared on their hands and faces. After the first commotion, all saw the fine jest that Reena's boys had played. There was much laughter that night around the cooking fires.

But in Tillu's tent, a shaking Kerlew refused to believe that all was well, that it had been but a jest. 'The bear got them. The bear got them!' he tearfully insisted. His breathing would not slow, and Tillu heard the long thundering in his thin chest. His eyes darted about the tent, and he winced fearfully from the shadows he himself made.

She put him to bed and urged errimi tea into him, which he drank in gulping gasps. His face was white, his lips red as he panted. And as she knelt beside him that night, silently baling all children but her own, he had sunk finally into a stillness deeper than sleep.

It frightened her and she tried to rouse him, with no success. Abruptly his body began to jerk in sudden, painful spasms like a fish on a riverbank. His face contorted; he opened his eyelids on white eyeballs that stared blindly about. His breath shrieked in and out of his body, and yellow foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. In all her years as a healer, Tillu had never seen the like. She was trying to still his frenzied jerkings with the weight of her own body when she sensed the others behind her.

Carp had pulled her roughly away from her son, his face tense with excitement. 'He sees, he sees!' the old man had exulted, and, as if in answer to these words, Kerlew had begun to speak. The voice was not his. He sighed and moaned the words. Tillu's Kerlew spoke as a child still, in a voice that piped like a shore bird. The voice that came from his heaving chest and snapping mouth now was the deep voice of a grown man. 'Ah, they bleed, they bleed!' he gasped. 'The bear has found their blood! It spills from their mouths, see it drench their shirts. They will die now. They will die!' The last words came out as a roar as Kerlew sat up on his pallet. His eyes rolled suddenly and were their startling hazel again, their foreign, empty hazel, as awful as their whites had been.

He bit his tongue, and the froth that dripped from his lips was suddenly pink.

The children had shrieked and tumbled from the tent, with their frightened mothers close behind. Even the stalwart hunters had muttered uneasily and found reason to leave. But Carp had been exultant, and had sat by the now quiescent boy, holding his thin hand until the day dawned again. The next day he had claimed the weak and baffled boy as his apprentice.

Kerlew had no recollection of his seizure, but rejoiced in the sudden exclusive attention of a man held in such great respect by the rest of the folk. In the old man he had found not only a willing audience for tales of his fragmented dreams, but one who attached great importance to them. He had begun to mimic Carp's gait and inflection, even his overbearing manner that made every request a veiled demand. He absorbed avidly all of Carp's teachings about the shaman's world, learning it as easily as other boys learned to make a spear head or draw a bow. After her first resentment, Tillu had grudgingly told herself that it might be a positive change in the boy's life.

Then the children had begun to sicken. Reena's boys were first, becoming weak and irritable, as their bodies spattered out all nourishment. Their bellies swelled, their skin stretched tight over the bones of their ribs and faces. They cried tearlessly, writhing in pain on their pallet. Tillu made root tonics for them, put poultices on their aching bellies, boiled pine needles for tea, to no avail. On the fifth day, they vomited great scarlet gouts of blood that drenched their shirts and bedding. They died.

The other youngsters of Benu's folk sickened rapidly. Tillu was powerless, and Carp chanted and made sweet smokes to no avail. Before ten days had passed, of nine children there were four, and they but pitiful, staggering shadows of themselves.

Kerlew alone of the children remained untouched by it. He no longer cringed and crept about in fear of the older boys' beatings. Without the other children, he romped fearlessly on the hillsides, gabbling his stories to himself and laughing his strange, broken laugh. Carp watched him and nodded knowingly. Kerlew alone ran and shouted and played unmolested among the tents. Until the day Reena came shrieking to her tent flap, to fling bones and stones at him. 'Leave us alone, brat!' she had screamed at him. 'Cannot you stop rejoicing in what you have done to us? Have not you punished us enough?' She had voiced the fear the others wouldn't speak; her husband beat her for her boldness, fearful of what she might bring down on them.

Kerlew had been touched by the spirits; he was theirs.

Carp had helped Tillu to move her tent, setting it up outside the village. Carp had forbidden the others to drive Kerlew and his mother away, saying that the spirits who had chosen Kerlew to be his apprentice would turn against the people that sent him away. Did they want to feel that wrath?

And thus had they lived these last two months, apart and yet united with the people who still ached from her son's curse. Until tonight, when in her birth pangs Elna had called for Tillu, and Tillu had come. Tillu sensed a healing in this night, as well as a birthing. If she wished, if she were willing to pay the price, she would be a member of Benu's folk. There would be other women to talk to, the work of a healer to do, the security of having a place within a people. All she had to do was abandon Kerlew to the old Shaman's grip. She could give the boy to Carp, and stop worrying about him. She would become the shaman's woman, under his protection. Carp never went without food and clothing. The best could be hers.

She shuddered. She knew she could never bear the touch of the shaman's hands upon her. No matter how she stiffened her courage to endure it, she knew she would writhe and struggle against him. Better to be mounted by an animal than by one such as him. Better to flee these people, to be cold and hungry. Those things she could more easily stand. But the boy?

She looked down into the sleeping face stained with his father's wildness. She could travel more rapidly without him. Carp could give the boy an easy life. He would not have to be forced to grow and change and learn. As the shaman's apprentice, he would not be cuffed for staring, nor mocked for his awkwardness. Benu's tribe would grow to prize his strangeness, to feel pride in their new shaman. It might be for the best.

Alone, her needs were simple. Since he had been born, he had made her life harder.

She had gone from being a girl to being his mother. And he had never been an easy child. Even as a tiny babe, he had cried and struggled uncomfortably in her arms when she tried to cuddle him. No one would blame her. Not even Kerlew? She smiled ruefully. A season from now, he would probably be unable to remember her. What mother could love a child like that? Who would choose to be bound to such a burden?

Her fingers reached, to push back a lock of his rough hair.

'Come,' she told him as his amber eyes fluttered open. 'It is time for us to travel again.'

'I have already been far this night,' he murmured drowsily.

'I doubt it not,' she agreed. 'But tonight we shall go farther still.'

CHAPTER TWO

She made her own trail, threading between trees just far enough apart to permit passage of the travois she dragged. Behind her, her long trail meandered through the forest, swerving and winding among the trunks but always bearing north. Benu's folk had been bound southward. She knew it was foolish to move north at this time of year, but Carp would not expect her to be foolish. Even if he guessed that she had gone north, Carp could not follow them, not unless he was stubborn enough to leave Benu's folk and travel alone. Perhaps, she thought as she plodded on, perhaps he could convince a few of Benu's hunters to track her, for a day or so. But they would be unwilling to trail her for longer than that, for they were anxious to get themselves south, to their own winter grounds. And despite Carp's power over them, they would be reluctant to go after his strange apprentice. No. Carp would be the only one with any reason to wish them back. She moved her fingers inside her mitten. Six days since she had left, and two falls of snow. If he had been following her, he would have caught her by now.

Safely out of Carp's reach, she told herself. She waited to feel some lightening of her heart but only felt her burden dragging at her shoulders. Out of Carp's reach, and into unknown areas and dangers. The straps of the travois cut into her flesh until she wondered if it was sweat or blood that damped her shoulders and back. Heavier than the drag of her tent and possessions was the weight of the task she had taken on. To do all, for herself and her son, in an unfamiliar territory devoid of human life. And to somehow change Kerlew, she reminded herself. To make him less strange, less difficult for other folk to understand. To drive Carp's strange notions out of his head and replace them with the skills he would need to live. To cleanse him of the magic Carp had started growing in him, just as she would cleanse a wound of an infection. Her determination set her teeth. She would do it. And until it was done, they would live alone and apart from other folk. No more Kerlew being hurt. No more hurting of others.

Her mind traveled hack through the catalog of folk they had lived among. Before Benu's hunters, there had been a river tribe. Tillu had liked them, enjoyed their cleanliness and the songs they sang as they tended their nets. She and her skills had been welcome among them, until Kerlew had come seeking her one evening, walking boldly into the women's hut where no male ever ventured, into the midst of a womanhood ceremony. When Tillu protected Kerlew from the flung stones, they had both been driven from the river tribe with little more than the clothes on their backs.

She flinched at the memory, and the others that crowded up behind it. Kerlew eating the jerky a hunter had set out as a spirit offering, Kerlew following a hunter of Oslor's folk and springing every trap he had set, Kerlew noting aloud that Trantor's son looked more like Edor than Trantor, to the great dismay of Trantor's wife. Kerlew, Kerlew, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong words in his mouth.

'Kerlew?' she called questioningly, realizing it was some time since she had last heard his voice. There was no answer. She halted, stilling the scrape of the travois's poles over the frozen ground and thin layer of snow. Awkwardly she turned in her harness, looking hack past her left shoulder. 'Kerlew?'

'I walk where no one else has ever walked before.'

She snapped her head about, found him just slightly behind her and to her right. 'I thought for a moment I had lost you,' she told him. She began walking again.

Some moments passed. Then, 'Not me.' The boy chuckled.

'Not you what?' she asked absently.

'Not me you lost. Carp and Benu's folk. We should find them soon?'

'Maybe.' She walked on a little faster. The first night they camped she had tried to make him understand why they had to leave Carp and Benu's hunters behind. But as he realized she meant that they were running away from Carp, he had become agitated.

The more she explained, the more upset he had become, swiftly reaching a point where he was not hearing anything she said. 'Carp, Carp!' he had wailed, rocking back and forth as he crouched on the frozen ground beside the small fire. 'Carp! Carp!' Until she had feared that if there were any of Benu's hunters tracking them, the sound would attract them.

'Hush, hush,' she had comforted him, choosing any words that would quiet him.

'Tomorrow, then, we'll go back. Just be quiet now, Kerlew, and tomorrow we'll go back to find them.' And then, cruelly, because he wailed still, 'Hush! Or a bear will hear you!'

That had silenced him, leaving him shaking with his pale eyes wide. 'We will go back tomorrow,' she had assured him, repeating the words until he slept. But when morning came, she had continued on her trek away from the hunters' camp, Kerlew none the wiser. A few times each day now he asked when they would find Carp, and she gave him nebulous answers. Soon enough he would forget. She knew her son that well; nothing stayed in his memory for long.

'I walk where no man has ever walked before!'

She glanced over at him. His smile was too wide, too wet. Sometimes she longed to slap it from his face, make pain chase away the vacuous, idiot smile and the foolish words. But she did not. She knew only too well the consuming self-disgust that would follow such an act. 'You chose to keep him with you,' she reminded herself. 'You could have left him to Carp. You know you cannot beat sense into him.' To Kerlew she said,

'That's silly. Just because you cannot see a trail does not mean that no man has ever walked there before.'

'On this snow!' Kerlew explained, smiling at the thought: 'On this snow, no one has ever walked before, for the tracks would be here. This snow fell new last night, and the first tracks on it are mine. I walk where no one has walked before.'

'Mmm.' Tillu kept walking. There were times when the hoy almost made sense, when she believed that, to him, his observations and statements followed some mysterious logic of his own. Carp's shamanic instruction of the boy had made him more vocal; there was that she could say for it. Unfortunately, what Kerlew vocalized was the mystical gabble he had picked up from the old man.

She glanced across at her son. If only he would stand straighter, not drag his feet when he walked. If only his eyes would not wander and stare through things, he would not be such an awkward-looking boy. Not handsome, perhaps, but no worse than some she had seen take wives and build homes. Perhaps she could change the way he moved and spoke. Alone and apart from all others, perhaps he would turn once more to her, listen to her again. She would teach him, and this time it would he different. This time he would learn and grow. He would walk at her side through the forest and learn, not only her herbs of healing, but a hunter's skills. He would learn silence, and swiftness, and skill with a bow. As he grew, he would stand tall and move as a man should move.

And one day she and Kerlew would be hunting, and they would come across strange hunters. Kerlew would be standing straight, having just brought down a fine deer, and the hunter folk would smile at the sight of the tall young hunter, and there would be a young woman who would look at him just a little longer than was quite proper, and she would be the —

'I'm hungry.'

The complaint broke the dream. Tillu sighed, both at her own foolishness and at Kerlew's request. She had taken what supplies she could, but already they dwindled.

The boy ate so much, so fast. She glanced again at him. Skinny. Perhaps she should give him the worm tea again.

'I'm hungry,' he repeated into her silence.

'Soon.' One more hill, she promised herself, and then, if the valley beyond it were a likely one, she'd stop for the night. This time she'd set up their tent and stay a few days.

Carp's seamed face came suddenly to her mind. Well, perhaps not just yet. Sleeping in skins was not so bad, it was not all that cold yet. Tomorrow she would push on for a day or so more, or perhaps three. She shivered. If Carp did come after them, with Benu's hunters, her fate would be sealed. The shaman's woman, prey to his withered hands and lined face, servant to his commands. To be touched by one such as that ...

She walked faster. She would not. That was all. She would not.

They crested a hill, and as they descended its other side, they passed abruptly into a forest. Here, for whatever reasons, the ancient forest fire had stopped. They stepped from a region of cottonwood, birch, and alders into the older pine forest. They went from trees that permitted light and snow to pass and settle on the forest floor to mossy-trunked giants that sealed out most of the light and snow. They moved through greenness, the air silent, almost opaque in the dimness. The poles of the travois hitched and bumped uncertainly over the deeper, softer moss and uneven blotches of snow.

This part of the forest was older, more silent, generating a soft green gloom that seemed to well up from the dense moss and deep drifts of brown needles that peered from the scattered mosaic of snow that bad penetrated the canopy of the forest.

There was a sense of peace to these huge trees. Their trunks rose straight and branchless for many man-heights before extending their needled limbs to block the sky.

The underbrush was very sparse. Here, Tillu thought, I could set up my tent and the trees would keep most of the snow and wind away from us. 1 can see well in every direction; I would know if Carp came to seek us long before he was in reach of us.

'... and she lay down on the deep moss to rest, but in the night it grew swiftly and covered her over, sealing her eyes and filling her mouth, and a tree, small and green, grew up from where her belly had been.'

Tillu shivered at the words and scowled at Kerlew. 'What are you saying?'

'A vision Carp showed me. Of a place like this, and how there came to be one small tree growing in the midst of many great ones. Like that one,' he added, pointing to a young spruce, its needles pale green in the wash of the forest light.

It did grow from a hummock in the forest's green floor. Tillu shook off the chill that came over her and set her shoulders more firmly to the chafing leather straps. 'We have to go on. There's no water here, and it would be hard for me to come up on game without it seeing me first. And there are too many trees to allow me a straight shot at anything.' Suddenly the deep forest seemed a very poor place to set a tent.

'We will go on.' Kerlew nodded agreeably.

The tongue of the old forest was not wide. They were out of it as suddenly as they had entered it, the snow once more crunching under Tillu's feet. The mellow green darkness of the great trees was left behind. The light of the young forest seemed too bright, the edges of the trees' pale trunks too sharp to look at. She struggled up a new hill, the travois humping against trees as it jerked along behind her. Kerlew walked behind her, taking advantage of the broken trail.

At the top of the hill she paused, taking in great lungfuls of the chill air. The sky, so bright only moments ago, was dimming now. Night would come early and swiftly. She glanced at the low-riding sun, trying to estimate how much farther they could safely travel today. The fire should be kindled before the darkness was complete. 'Kerlew.

Start picking up branches for tonight's fire,' she called over her shoulder. He muttered a reply.

'What?'

'Woman's task to gather the wood. Not a fit task for a shaman,' he reminded her calmly.

Tillu straightened suddenly in her harness. An anger like pain jolted through her.

She twisted to look back at her son. Kerlew stared up at her, his eyes suddenly going wide. He shrank from her fury. 'You are not a shaman!' She spat out the words. She glared at him, her fury strangling her. No more words would come. 'Pick up firewood!'

she snarled at last, turning away from him. The straps cut into her shoulders savagely as she jerked against her burden to get it moving again. She could hear him muttering sullenly behind her, but she also heard the snap of a dry lower branch broken from a tree. He would obey. She thought of Benu's son, who would have run ahead with his bow in hopes of a rabbit or grouse. He had been no older than Kerlew. An alert boy he had been, his eyes large and bright, his hands already clever at carving. He had died of the bear plague. All the women had mourned his death. But Kerlew had lived. They bad hated him for living.

The tears that stung her eyes were cold on her cheeks. She wanted suddenly to throw off her harness, to turn to Kerlew and hug him and tell him she was glad he had lived, that she loved him, would always love him, no matter what. But she could not. She had to get to the top of the hill, she told herself, and the boy would only have leaped away from her, struggled against her embrace. He did not need her tears and hugs. He needed her strength. She panted as she drew the travois over the crest of the hill.

Standing still to breathe, she heard his muttering.

'... and I will be treated better there, when I walk among the reindeer-folk. Yes, I will lead them all, and Tillu will be only a woman who must tend to the men.'

The valley ahead of her was a deep one, full of darkness and reaching trees. Tillu began the long descent.

CHAPTER THREE

Heckram stood alone on top of the pingo and looked back the way they had come.

Winter had already claimed the tundra. Diffused moonlight seeped through the overcast and reflected off the snowy plains, giving a false aura of dawn to the scene. But dawn was many hours away, and wiser men than he were sleeping.

Cold emanated up from the frozen heart of the giant frost heave he stood upon. The dark earth covering it was carpeted with lichen and vegetation; they in turn were frosted by last night's sprinkle of snow. The cold of the pingo's heart tried to numb Heckram's feet through his thin boots as the chill night leaned down on him.

The peak of the frost heave, a crest near sixty times the height of a man, lifted Heckram and made it seem that the tundra was a flat land, pale and featureless as the surface of a frozen lake. Distance and the uniform whiteness of the early snow cloaked its rolling swells and masked its long flat river valleys. The scouring of ancient glaciers had ground this part of the world into submission long ago. Ice had shaped it and mastered it and retained its dominance here. Freezes and thaws cracked its rocky bones and tortured its flesh into distinctive patterns, stripes and checks of earth separated by lines of ground frost. Even the long hours of daylight in the summer barely penetrated it. The skin of the tundra might thaw and bloom, but its heart was an icy secret.

A shallow blanket of powdery windswept snow covered all but the tallest grasses and brush of the tundra. There were no trees to stand tall and give a sense of distance to the vastness. The black line where the horizon met the night could have been but a step away, or mythically far. Clouds blanketed the sky this night; no stars betrayed the jest.

But Heckram had climbed the pingo to regain perspective, not lose it. He blinked his weary eyes and turned south, toward the foothills and forested mountains that were their winter goal. Ahead of them, perhaps two or three days as the herd traveled, they would find browse for the reindeer and fuel for winter fires. There, too, were the sod huts that offered as permanent a shelter as the nomadic herdfolk would ever know. In the winter camp, the older people and smallest children would shelter out the worst of the cold, while the herdfolk guarded against wolverines and wolves as their reindeer foraged on the snowy hillsides. For some, the camp ahead meant rest, and a time spent by the fires inside the kator. Some would slaughter their extra beasts and make blood sausage and boil marrow bones. The women would bow their heads over their ribbon looms, and some men would tell their children stories and make shadow plays with their rough hands against the walls of the sod huts. Some would take their excess wealth of animals and hides south to trade, while their relatives watched over their animals and families.

But not Heckram. While other men enjoyed the peace of the fireside, he would be raiding the wild herds, hoping to carry off the calves that had summered beside their mothers. His winter meat would be tough wild sarva or lean rabbit. While other women amused themselves with pretty-work, his mother would protect their animals from predators. What it all came down to, he reflected, were the beasts, tame and wild. If a man had enough reindeer marked with his mark, he lived well and easy. He had meat and hides to spare, and the time to hunt wolves and foxes for the lush winter furs the traders so valued. He had leisure to follow streams, looking for lumps of yellow amber washed loose by the spring floods. He had time to travel south through the hills, to walk proud among the southern traders and bring home the goods and stories of the south. He had time for the things that made life more than another day of survival. If a man had enough reindeer. Heckram did not.

The knowledge roiled bitterly through him. He lifted his eyes as if to see over the blocking hills and beyond them. Beyond them were more hills, and between them ran the trails that a good harke and a pulkor could travel easily. A man could load his pulkor with winter furs and lumps of amber from the spring-rushing streams and follow those trails. And if he did, he would come to the camps of the southern traders.

They would make a man welcome with tongue-stinging wines from still farther south.

A man could trade furs and amber for good bronze tools, or woven cloth of soft wool dyed to flower colors, or ornaments of gleaming gold, or flint worked as bronze, ground and polished with spiraling decorations. There men were tall and pale of eye and hair, as Heckram's father and maternal grandfather had been.

And beyond the trading camps? There were tales. Beyond, men lived in tall houses with many rooms, an entire village in one shelter, and turned up the soil with wooden plows. They rode beasts with but a single toe on each foot, and brewed potent drinks from the seeds of grasses. The water of their lakes leaped and splashed by itself, and it was always summer. So he had heard. From his own father, so long ago. So he had seen, once, on a long-ago journey. Before the Plague Summer.

'It's useless to think on such things,' Ristin would say, her head bent over her work, a small frown dividing her brows. 'Stories and memories are fine for old folks and children. But you are neither, Heckram, and there are other things you should attend.'

His mother's bright black eyes would send him a peering reminder that was also a rebuke.

Useless. But there were times when he felt hungry for them with a hunger worse than the starvations he had known. Times when the dreams of far places and better days were all that could sustain him. It was a hunger that ate at him, that set him apart from the herdfolk and made him a foreigner among his own people.

'I want more than this,' he heard himself say. The words didn't impress the night, and he himself beard their foolishness. He closed his eyes, letting his mind wander back. When he had been small, his father had led their string of harkar. His mother had followed, leading her own string of reindeer oxen, and Heckram had ridden, clinging proudly to the pack saddle on the back of the most docile one. His clothing and the harness of their animals had been bright with ribbons of dyed sinew and grasses woven by Ristin's clever fingers. He had worn woven shirts made with wool from the south, and his father's knives had been of ground flint and gleaming bronze, not bone and horn. His mother had worn amber beads, and even a bronze armband. There had been extra animals and soft furs to trade south for luxuries, and plenty of rich reindeer cheese and blood sausages to share. Their tent had been a bright warm place in the winter evenings. His mother had helped him nock his own mark into the ears of his first calves, and he had tended them proudly. They had laughed often, in his childhood.

Who would not dream after days like that?

But few of the others ever did. Or if they did, they seldom spoke of it, for on the heels of those memories came the other ones. The memories of the Plague Summer. Heckram shook his head, trying to dislodge those other memories that settled and burrowed into him as relentlessly as warble flies.

The preceding winter had been mild. He had played in the snow beneath the eaves of the forest, and watched his calves grow large and strong on the easy grazing. Spring had come early, to green the forest before the herdfolk had even begun their annual migration to the summer grounds. They had followed the wild herd coming down out of the forest-sheltered foothills into the wide tundra. The early warmth softened the tundra's frozen face, thawing a shallow layer of the perpetually frozen soil beneath the hooves of the herd. The freed moisture and the brief warmth were all the vegetation of the tundra asked. Greens, purples, and golds with a scattering of blue, the hasty flowers of the tundra had leafed out and bloomed, so that the herd passed over a sweet carpet of lichens and mosses interspersed with the tiny bright flowers of the subarctic's stunted flora. Then warm weather had descended upon the herd when it was still on the flats of the tundra, far from the upthrust of the Cataclysm with its cooling ice packs.

The warble flies, the midges, and the mosquitoes had swarmed. They were far from the sanctuary of the glaciers. In the evenings the people had burned wet moss on their hearths to drive the insects away, but there had been no place for the animals to shelter from the stinging pests. The warble flies had driven many beasts to madness. The reindeer had galloped and fought the air as they were stung, pawing vainly at their nostrils when they inhaled the tiny, hateful creatures. The herdfolk had pushed on desperately, straining toward the Cataclysm and its blessed, cooling glaciers.

Bewildered calves died in the unseasonable warmth. Full-grown animals galloped in maddened circles trying to escape their stinging tormentors until they fell of exhaustion. Yet the majority of the herd had reached the Cataclysm and moved up its steep sides, to relief in the winds off its permanent ice fields. The trials of the herdfolk should have been over. But of those reindeer that did survive to reach the Cataclysm's height, where the stinging flies would not follow, many died anyway, coughing and choking and gasping in the sweet air of autumn.

He tried to rein his mind away from the memories, but like an unruly harke new-harnessed to a pulkor, bitterness dragged his thoughts once again through the misery of that time. The family's string of twenty harkar was reduced to lour. Heckram had walked back from the summer pasturage that season, his small feet dragging behind his burdened mother. There was no trading trip south, no shower of bright gifts on his father's return. His family no longer possessed enough breeding reindeer to slaughter several for winter meat. Instead, his father had fed them on lean rabbit and squirrel and tough wild reindeer, and spent every spare moment stalking the much diminished wild herd to steal calves to bring home. Until the day he had not come back from the hunt.

Heckram and his mother had searched the empty hills in vain. No one could say what had become of him. And that had marked the beginning of Heckram's manhood, come before its time.

He had been tall for his age, his southern blood showing early. His mother's father had been a tall, pale southerner, and his father's father, it was said, had hair the color of a summer fox. 'He's more southern than herdfolk,' he had heard the old Capiam say once. And so he sometimes thought of himself still, with unease and wondering.

At twelve, he had stood as tall as most of the men of the herdfolk. It had not made things easier for him. Folk expected a hoy with the stature of a man to have the skills and control of one. His clumsiness shamed him often, his inexperience and impetuosity even more frequently. He often felt the lack of a father's teaching and protection.

The quickness and high spirits of his early years grew into silence and caution. He felt no kinship with the short, stocky boys of the herdfolk. Not even with Joboam, whose ancestry shared some southern blood. Joboam, fully as tall and awkward as Heckram, had a father who matched his height and was pleased with his son's growth.

Growing with the plenty of his mother's and father's reindeer, Joboam's size seemed a credit to their wealth. His tunics were never too short; he was never solemn and anxious. By comparison, Heckram was gaunt as a wolf in hard times, and in his eyes was always the hunger of the wolf. He was a brooding youth, staggering under the burden of his manhood, the intensity of his dilemmas burning in his eyes. The herdfolk compared him with casual, confident Joboam, and in the comparisons he suffered.

Failing too often, being less than competent at a man's skills, made him wary. To keep from losing, he would not compete. Even now, grown and competent, he hunted alone and did not boast of his kills. He was most comfortable when he moved unnoticed, whether he was stalking an animal or moving about the tent village. His solitude and his silences worried his mother.

Tonight her worrying had taken on a new barb. He shook his head grimly, his mouth set. 'Twenty-four years old, and what do you have?' she had rebuked him as she mended a mitten by the fire. 'Where is your wife, your children, my grandchildren? Do you think you can wait forever? Other men your age have three, four children at their hearth. Not yet, you say, and another year slips by. Do you think you have forever? Elsa is patient, perhaps too patient with you. But a woman cannot wait forever. No honorable man would ask it of her. She is a pretty girl, a good herdwoman, all a man could ask. She is strong and clever, a good hunter, too. Do you think no one else sees her worth? You will wait too long, and another will not ask her to wait. And then you will be too old to catch the fancy of the younger girls. You will be alone.' She shook the mitten at him.

So he had risen, to drag on his heavy tunic. As he had pushed open the door flap, she had demanded, 'Where are you going? To Elsa?'

'No. To practice being alone,' he had retorted, and left. To climb the pingo and think.

Now he regretted his snappishness. It wasn't like him and would only upset her more. But too many of her words had been nearly true. He had wanted to answer her, but the habit of silence had grown strong. Talking was an effort, especially the painful talk of explanation. She didn't want to hear his truth. She wanted his agreement; she was so sure it would make him happy. He knew it wouldn't, but couldn't tell her why.

His thoughts turned reluctantly to small, dark Elsa. She was all his mother said she was. And more, for in their childhood, they had shared friendship. He knew her. There was gentleness in her, hidden behind her self-sufficient toughness. And a warm ardor she had shared with him more than once, when they were children no longer but not yet grown. And yet... He did not want her to wife. He didn't want anyone to wife. Not yet. He wished his mother had not been so openly hopeful of a match. Already folk had asked him if he and Elsa would join by the Cataclysm next summer. And Elsa herself blushed whenever he tried to speak to her. When he approached her, her friends drew aside that he might be alone with her. And then he wouldn't be able to speak at all, for the bright hope in her eyes. He wanted to tell her not to wait, to look elsewhere for a mate. But how did one tell a friend that he didn't want her for a wife, no matter what his mother had noised about? Soon, he'd have to. Soon. His heart went out to her with fondness and sympathy. He hoped she wouldn't hate him.

Without conscious thought, he reached inside his shirt and drew out a length of sinew with tiny flaps of skin strung on it. This was the tally of his calves this year, the soft bits of ear cut from each miesse to mark it with his own private mark. It was pitiful.

Five tiny flaps, and three of the calves were male, good only to neuter into the load-bearing harke, reindeer oxen, or to slaughter for winter meat. He would leave but one a sarva to service his vaja. His animals multiplied so slowly. Each vaja could bear but one calf a year, and there was no guarantee that it would survive the winter. The mysterious coughing sickness still claimed animals every summer. The diminished wild herds had forced the wolves and wolverines into new cunning and boldness as they preyed on the herdfolk's domestic animals. Heckram felt a twinge of despair as he wondered how he would protect his beasts from the marauding carnivores, and still find time to steal calves from the wild herd.

His mother's reindeer had done little better. Her tally string had but eight flaps, and five of the calves had been male. How could she urge him to take Elsa to wife? How did she think they would manage? Heckram reached up a mittened hand to rub at his face, to force the tightened jaw hinge to relax. He eased his heart by looking out over the herd and tents of his people.

The kator had been pitched in a village for the night. All had smelt the snow in the air, and sensed the storm to come. Better to set up the tents now, in the lee of the pingo, and be in shelter when the blast hit, instead of trying to struggle on toward the forest and be caught in the sweep of snow across the plain. Glows and streaks of light escaped from the simple hide tents, and he smelled the smoky fires of dried lichen and dung that warmed them tonight. It was a homey smell. The hobbled strings of harkar scraped away the shallow layer of snow to graze on the lush lichen of the tundra, awaiting the morrow when they would once more be loaded with the possessions of their owners and led on, toward the sheltering forest.

The herd, too, sensed the approaching storm, and had drawn themselves into a moving huddle of beasts. Their gray and brown backs were like a rippling sea in the moonlight as they shifted and stirred. The exhalations of their warm moist breath created a mist that drifted and rose from the herd in a cloud. The cold air carried the softly distinctive sound of their clicking hooves as toe bones flexed against stretched tendons. Their light-tipped tails flicked in an ever-changing pattern. Most of the great sarva had lost their antlers in their fierce autumn battles over the vaja. Gone were the great bulging withers of the bulls, their fatness battled away. In contrast, the neutered harker still carried their proud crowns, and their fur rippled sleekly over their muscles and fat. One would have thought them the monarchs of the herd. Even the vaja still bore their smaller, sharper antlers. The females would carry their antlers longer than the males, and would use them to full advantage for much of the winter, to make sure they and their young ones were not driven away from the best feeding. Heckram could imagine the soft grunts and mutterings of the settling herd, and the warm smell of the living beasts in the cold night. Wealth uncounted grazed there, his own paltry fortune among it.

'Heckram!' A thin panting voice sounded in the night behind him. His eyes sought and found the struggling figure that had ventured up the pingo to find him.

'I'm here,' he called back softly to Lasse. The boy made his careful way across the broken crest of the frost heave. Heckram found himself studying the boy as coldly as he would study one of his yearling calves. His short legs were already acquiring the typical bow of the herdfolk. When he finished growing, his head might reach as high as the point of Heckram's shoulder. But he would never fill out to be a sturdy, thick-shouldered herder like his father and mother had been. His body had known too much privation, too soon. Had he been a calf, Heckram would not have considered him worth gelding into a harke, let alone using as a stud. With a snort of self-mockery, he shook such images from his mind, and once more saw Lasse as Lasse. As reluctant as he was to have his solitude broken, at least it was Lasse who had come to do it. The boy seemed to sense his mood, for he was silent as he approached. Lasse was nearly ten years younger than he but Heckram never treated him as a boy. Lasse, like Heckram, had become a man before his time. If anything, Lasse and his grandmother lived in circumstances even more straitened than Heckram's. But Lasse never complained.

Perhaps because he had never known that life could be any different.

'See them?' Heckram asked softly, and Lasse nodded. Both sets of dark eyes were fastened on the distant smear that was the wild herd. Vast it was, and yet still but a splinter of the thousands that moved from tundra to forest to tundra in their annual migration. And before the plague, the herd had been even larger. He knew Lasse found that image hard to comprehend. But Heckram remembered. In his boyhood, the wild herd had flowed before them like a river making its own bed. Brown and heaving it had surged across the tundra, leaving a swath of grazed earth in its wake. It always ranged ahead of the domesticated herd, but followed the same migration path. It was closer to the forested foothills but it had settled for the night.

'How many shall we take this winter?' Lasse asked boldly, as if it depended only on skill and determination, and not luck.

'Ah, perhaps a hundred,' Heckram blithely estimated. 'Eighty vaja for me, and twenty sarva for you.'

They both laughed short, quiet laughs at the bitter jest. 'As many as we can, my friend, and it will never be enough,' Heckram amended.

Lasse grunted in soft agreement.

'I've been thinking,' Heckram began.

'Not much else one could do up here,' the boy commented.

'About our hunting,' Heckram went on firmly. 'What if we were to shoot the vaja as she grazes, and then try to lasso the calf? The calf would tend to stay by its mother, not understanding what had happened to her. And it would give us meat this winter.'

They were both silent, thinking. A live animal weighed about three hundred pounds.

A good portion of that would be guts, but that was not wasted. Heart and liver, bowels for the dogs, intestines and blood for sausages, bones and sinews for tools. Still.

'Tough meat,' Lasse qualified. 'And a calf with no antlers is not as easy to lasso. And it has less of a chance of surviving the winter without its mother's protection.'

'True,' Heckram agreed. 'But in a case where we couldn't get close enough for a good throw, it might at least be a chance for meat and a new animal.'

'But the calf would be too young to bear that spring and would not fare well without its dam. If we take the vaja, even if the calf doesn't follow, we have an animal that will bear again in the spring. Whereas we may shoot the vaja, and find we have made all that effort for a male calf.'

'Better than no calf at all,' Heckram rumbled.

'Or only an antler to show for it,' Lasse suggested wryly, and they both laughed companionably. It had been last winter. Lasse had stalked a vaja and her calf. He had thrown his lasso well and true, and the bone runner had slid smoothly as the loop of woven sinew had settled around the vaja's antler. But it had been late in the year, and with a sudden jerk the vaja and her calf had been free and fleeing through the woods, leaving Lasse with but an antler caught in the loop of his lasso. He had taken it back to the village and worked it into a needle case for his grandmother. The incident had become a joke among the herdfolk. But Heckram had admired the boy's pragmatism and went out of his way to befriend him.

'It's foolish to try and decide it now,' Heckram conceded. 'Better to wait until the vaja and her calf are before us, and then see which is more likely to work.'

'Snow,' observed Lasse.

It had begun to fall, tiny crystalized flakes that sparkled in the moonlight. In the dry cold, the flakes were like icy dust. It did not cling, nor dampen them as it settled on their shoulders and hats. A gust of wind stirred it, and the icy bits stung Heckram's face. He turned aside from it. 'Time to go back to the sita,' he suggested, tossing his head at the tent village.

'Sitor.' Lasse suggested the plural with an edge of mockery in his voice. Puzzled, Heckram looked at the tents again.

He saw what the boy meant. In a sense there were two villages below, not one. The division was subtle, but obvious once he looked for it. Closest to the base of the pingo, in the most sheltered area, was the tent of Capiam, the herdlord. Beyond it were the tents of the elders and his favored advisers. Beyond them, the tents of those wealthy with reindeer: perhaps a score of them. In a migratory caravan, such as the herdfolk were now, it was customary for each household to have two or more rajds. Each rajd was a string of neutered reindeer, usually about seven. Those tents nearest the pingo boasted three or more strings each, and some of them as many as five.

Then there was another village, pitched beyond the rajds of the first one. The tents of this village were clustered more closely together. More light gleamed from the seams of the worn tents, and fewer animals were picketed between them. His mother's tent was there, with the rajd of seven harkar they shared. Lasse's tent was beside it, and Elsa's not far from that. The poorer folk of the herd had drawn together in their own separate village, just as the wealthy had set themselves apart from them. It was a cold thing to feel, and but one more sign of a trend that Heckram despised.

'Did Joboam apologize?' he suddenly asked the boy.

Lasse gave a disdainful grunt and turned to spit into the snow.

'Did he?' Heckram pressed.

'No. Not that I'd have stood about to listen to it if he did. I've no use for anything he says.'

'He should be made to apologize, publicly.' Heckram's deep voice was soft, his words hard as polished flint. 'If Capiam were all that a herdlord is supposed to be, he'd have seen to that. And made him pay, too, for the insult.'

'Let him call me what he likes.' Lasse stooped to crack a stone from its icy bed and shy it down the frozen crust of the pingo. 'Those who know me know I'm not a thief.

And who cares what the others think?'

'I do. And you should. It's not just you, it's your family he's insulted. Isn't your grandmother upset?'

Lasse sighed and turned away from Heckram. 'Let's get back down to the sita before the wind really comes up.'

Heckram reached out to put a hand on Lasse's shoulder. It made the demand of friendship as it shook the boy's stiffened shoulders. 'What is it?'

The boy's voice came thickly. 'She heard that Joboam had accused me of stealing milk from reindeer that were not mine. A stupid accusation! Is a vaja going to stand still while a stranger milks it? Only a fool could believe that. And my grandmother is no fool, even if she thought that 1 would steal. But she is proud, in the old way, and she was angry. So she chose to show her pride and anger in the old way, to shame him with a gift. She sent three cheeses to his tent. "He will see these," she said, "and he will know what I think. I think that if Joboam is so poor a man that he worries about the milk of a reindeer, then we should give him cheeses to ease him through his hard times. When folk see the cheeses from my molds, they will know we have shamed him." She still lives in the old days.'

Heckram winced for his friend. The cheeses alone were a gift the family could ill afford. But, worse than that, Lasse's grandmother did not understand how deep the changes in the herdfolk went. The cheeses she had sent as an insult to one who accused her grandson would be seen as an effort to pay back a theft. She had as much as admitted Lasse's guilt to the rest of the herdfolk. The older people would know the meaning of her gesture. But it was the younger ones that Lasse had to contend with every day. In her pride and anger, she had shamed him deeply.

'It is as you say,' Heckram said with false heartiness. 'Those who know you know the truth. And those who remember the old ways will understand that your grandmother knows you are not a thief. Who cares for the rest of them?'

For a long moment Lasse was silent, and a wind laden with ice crystals rushed between them. 'There's a good fire in my tent,' he said at last. 'How about a game of tablo? You owe me a chance to beat you.'

Heckram managed a grin. 'This time, I'll be the Wolf,' he offered. He put a mittened hand on the youth's shoulder and they started down the pingo.

CHAPTER FOUR

The sun had not risen. Nor would it, for the next twenty days or so. Yet there was not absolute blackness, but a diffused grayness of moon and stars and white snow shining.

It was a shadowless light that filtered through the outstretched branches of the trees and rested coldly on the snowy ground. Tillu moved through the dimness, a shadowy figure that left crumbling footprints in the powdery snow. The cold had turned the snow to dust and crystals. At least it no longer clung to her boots and leggings, to melt and sog her clothing against her. Now there was only the absolute of water turned to dust, of cold so intense it made the hairs inside her nose prickle and her eyelashes stick together momentarily whenever she blinked her eyes.

She was carrying a dead hare. She gripped it by its hind legs, letting its skinny body swing. Ordinarily, she would have tied her kill to her belt with the thongs at her hip, to have her hands free to shoot if she saw other game. But her fingers had been too numb to manage the laces, so she carried the dead animal in one mittened hand. She had drawn her other hand and arm out of her sleeve and into her coat. Her arm hugged her chest, her hand in her armpit for whatever warmth it might find there. If she saw game, she wouldn't be able to shoot, but it didn't worry her. She was too cold to worry, and too tired to believe she'd see any game within the range of her crude bow.

The dead hare slipped from her fingers. She heard it hit the snow and she stopped, to look down at it dumbly. She had to move her whole head to see it, for she had tied the drawstring of her hood so tightly that the opening was just enough for her to see straight in front of her. She breathed shallowly through the long fur that edged her hood, feeling the frost form and melt with every breath. After a long pause, she pushed her warmed arm back down her sleeve and out into her mitten. Then she wriggled and tugged until the other arm with its numbed hand was inside the tunic with her body.

Stooping, she picked up the hare and trudged on again.

On days like these, she regretted leaving Benu's folk. Among them, she had not had to hunt for her meat. Her skills as a healer had fed them both and kept warm clothing on their backs. Now she was alone again, dependent entirely on herself. She had never been a skilled hunter. She had grown up among farming folk.

As she walked, her thoughts wandered back to the village beside the wide river. She remembered cutting the ripe grain with a flint-toothed scythe. The heat of those days had glazed everyone's body with sweat. But in today's cold, the heat of those days seemed but a child's dream. So was it all, no more than a child's dream. She stumbled over a buried snag and dragged her mind back to the present. She wondered if they would survive the winter. The boy grew so thin, and she herself grew so stupid with the cold and the ever-present twinges of hunger.

She crested the last hill and looked down into the little glen where her worn tent was pitched. Nearly home and safe, she told herself. Useless to think of those lost days in that far-off place. As useless to think of Benu's folk, a hundred hills and valleys from here. She started down the long hill, nearly stumbling in her weariness. Her lips were dry and she longed to lick them, but knew they would only crack in the cold. Nearly home. Halfway down the hill, she halted and stared. Something was wrong. Her heart slowed its beating.

No smoke rose from the tent's smoke flap. Frost was heavy on the flap, showing that no residual heat clung there. The pieces of broken branches she had left by the tent for firewood were undisturbed. The still gray tent reminded her of scraped hides swinging in the wind. Dead and empty.

She ran. Her numbed feet felt the shock as they hit the frozen ground and plowed on through the loose snow. 'Kerlew!' she called, but her voice was dry and cracked as a dead leaf. It floated weightlessly away from her. A wolverine, guessed a part of her. A wolverine was afraid of nothing. It would not hesitate to enter a human's tent and attack a ten-year-old boy. Or perhaps he had gone outside the tent to relieve himself and wandered off. He never paid attention to tying his hood tightly, or putting on extra leggings. In this cold it wouldn't take long. The cold could do it, even if he didn't run into the wolves she had heard this morning. Hadn't she herself assured him that they were on the other side of the ridge, and no threat to them? Would wolves kill a child?

They'd kill a calf that wandered from the herd. What about a calvish boy, all long awkward legs and flapping helpless hands?

It took her forever to reach the tent and burst inside. Her lungs and mouth hurt from the frozen air she dragged in with every breath. No matter. Where was the boy?

'Kerlew?' she asked breathlessly. The ashes were gray on the hearth stones. Nothing moved. Her life thudded to a slow halt in her breast, fell endlessly into the cold pit of her belly. The only sign of the boy was the bundle of hides on his pallet. Thoughts of bears and wolverines, of wolves, and of bands of wandering hunters sometimes more brutish than any animal rushed through her mind. And she had left Kerlew alone to face such things. Her throat closed. The dead hare slipped unnoticed from her hand.

'Kerlew!' she cried again, the sound ripping the stillness of the tent. She slipped her bow from her shoulder and gripped it. Tracks. Perhaps he had left some tracks. But as she lifted the tent flap, a tiny clucking came to her ears. She turned her head sharply, saw the pile of furs on his pallet stir. Stepping forward, she jerked the furs back, to reveal Kerlew on his side, talking softly to a smooth stone in his hand. Relief was overwhelmed and lost in the sudden rage she felt.

'What are you doing? Why is the fire out?' she demanded angrily.

'I forgot to put wood on,' he replied, not stirring. He stroked the rock in his hand, not even looking up at her. 'But it doesn't matter. I got under all the hides and stayed warm.'

Tillu stared down at him, feeling the cold eating through her clothing, feeling the hunger that would have to wait to be satisfied, but, most of all, feeling the despair that her son awakened in her. Would be always be this way, waiting for her to come home and care for him, heedless and helpless in the world around him? She didn't move, she didn't speak, she only looked on him, wondering what was missing in the boy, what she had failed to teach him, what it was that kept him from belonging to this world. She tried so desperately to make him right. But nothing changed him. He couldn't even see his own wrongness. All her waiting, all her efforts at teaching him were useless. Lost in the swirling hopelessness, she stared at her only child.

'Aren't you going to start the fire?' Kerlew demanded petulantly. He tugged at the covers she had pulled away. 'It's getting colder and I'm hungry. Is that all you killed today?'

The old rage, the rage she had thought left behind with his baby years, rose in her.

The unfairness of this burden chafed and burned her soul. She towered over him, her anger giving her strength. With one hand she seized his shirt front, dragged him from the blankets to his feet. She all but threw him at the cold hearth stones. He staggered sideways, caught his balance awkwardly, and then suddenly crouched down, cowering before her.

'No!' The word ripped her throat. 'No! I am not going to fix the fire! You are! You, the fool that let it go out! Even the youngest babe of Benu's folk knows that the fire must be always tended. Without the fire we cannot live! But you, old enough to hunt, if you were not so stupid, you let the fire go out while you huddle like a baby and fondle some stupid rock. Give me that thing!'

She wrenched the reddish stone, polished by Kerlew's touch, from his frantic grip and flung it through the tent door. Kerlew's face went white. The stone vanished into the snow and Kerlew cried out. He dove after it, but she caught him by the back of his shirt and dragged him back, to dump him roughly on the cold earth by the hearth. She was shaking with rage and despair. This was her son, her boy who would soon be a man? This crouching creature that wept with anger because she had thrown a stone from the tent? It was unbearable.

'I want my rock!' he screamed furiously. He tried to rise from his place by the hearth, but she shoved him back. She snatched down the leather bag that held the dry tinder high above the earth floor. She flung it at him. The boy cried out as the bag slapped him and fell to the floor. She followed it with the fire-bow. She had no flint and strike-stone.

'Make the fire!' she commanded in a voice that shook the tent. 'Now!'

'I can't. I don't know how. I want my rock!' He scrabbled away, but she seized him by the scruff of his shirt and dragged him back. Tears streaked his face.

'You try. Now. You've seen me do it a thousand times. Now you try. Now!'

'I can't! I can't! I want my rock! It was my rock, not yours.' There was fear in his voice as well as defiance, and any other time it would have melted Tillu's anger. But she was too cold, too hungry, and too tired of being the entire support of his world. She knelt behind him and seized his thin wrists, forced his hands to the tools. His hands were limp. He would not pick them up.

'Pick them up! Right now, Kerlew! You pick them up and you try! Do you think I will always be here for you, to come home and make the fires and cook the food? What if I had gotten lost today? What if a bear had killed me, or I had fallen and broken a leg?

Would you sit in this tent and cry, "I can't!" until you froze or starved? Would you?

Would you sit and stroke a rock until you died? Would you? What if I hadn't come back today?'

The boy craned his neck to look over his shoulder at her. His mouth hung open and his closely set eyes goggled at her in terror. 'Not come back? You not come back?

Kerlew alone?' His fear had reverted him to babyishness. His mouth hung askew, his bottom lip trembling wetly as he stared at her in mindless fear. Tillu was ruthless.

'That's right. Tillu not come back. Now you try. Try!'

The boy took up the implements awkwardly, waved them about helplessly, and then tried to fit them together. She held her anger as he made three faltering tries, then slapped his hands aside. 'Fool! Like this. Your top hand here, like this. Your other hand here, on the bow. Try!'

He shrank from her touch, but she seized him roughly and put his hands in place. He moved the bow awkwardly, his hand bent in toward his wrist as he sawed back and forth. The stick, trapped in the loop of the bow string, moved unevenly, dancing out of its nest, spending the heat of its friction as it skittered over the face of the wood. Tillu reached past him to set it firmly in place.

'Try!' she rebuked him again. There was no encouragement in her voice, only command.

'Ma-a,' he began pleading, but she jerked herself away from him, stalked to the door of the tent.

'Call me when you have fire.'

Despair was on his face, his breath coming in short sobs, but she lifted the tent flap and went out into the darkness.

The cold of a subarctic winter night snapped against her flushed cheeks. It made her realize she was sweating, that her anger had put heat back in her body. She trembled still with the force of her fury. Why did he always do these things? Why?

Then, as her anger died in the cold blackness of the night, shame came to warm her cheeks. She could hear the steady rasp of the fire drill from the tent behind her, and Kerlew's voice as he sobbed and ranted to himself. The world loomed large and empty around her, but there was nowhere she could flee to escape that small mumbling voice and the angry confusion in his eyes. Tillu's angers seldom left Kerlew repentant for his misdeeds. Instead, he would offer her his childish sullenness, and the wincing fear of her touch that cut her soul.

She had pitched her tent in a clearing in a small vale. At the edges of the clearing the forested hillsides rose. Pines were darker in the darkness, their swoops of branches laden with snow. Sometimes she felt a deep peace welling from the trees and snowy hills, felt cupped and sheltered in the palm of the forest. She heard the soft whicker of an owl's wings as it drove into the clearing, the thin cry of the seized prey as it rose. The sound scraped her raw nerves and she shuddered. Tonight she sensed only the deep and eternal struggling of life to master its harsh environment. The most blind of newborn mice was better fit to survive than her son. Why could not she admit the futility of trying to make him learn? Kinder by far to let him go on as he was, until he met his eventual end. What good did she do him by forcing him to learn, by throwing him into the struggle and insisting he try?

He was as he was. Beating him would not cure it, as well she should know by now.

Neither her tears nor her pleading had any effect. He was as he was. The most she could do for him was to let him take what small pleasures he could find in this world, and to bury him when he had finally blundered his way out of it. But what she was doing to him tonight was no better than beating him. Hadn't he had enough punishment in his life? Had not other children and sneering adults given him enough misery to last him until the end of his days? Her heart swung in its orbit, and she felt her anger rise against those who mocked his differences, who pointed out his lacks. Who were they to judge?

Who were they to say that what made him different also made him wrong and weak?

Her anger burned hot at the women who shook their heads over him and turned away, at the men who looked at him with distaste and cuffed him aside. And she herself? She was no better.

She thought of his red stone and shame stung her. Futilely she turned to where it had landed. Whatever dent it had made in the snow cover when it landed was hidden from her in the dark. She stood indecisively by the area for a long time. She longed to get down on her knees and paw through the snow for the rock, as if this useless endeavor would somehow prove her love for Kerlew.

Tears stung the corners of her eyes and she brushed at them with the back of her mittened hand. Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow, when the day was lightest, she'd come out here and find it for him. And now she had better go back inside the tent and make the fire and cook some food.

The surging storm of anger and frustration had passed, leaving her feeling only empty and tired. Vaguely she wished she had hugged him more when he was a baby, cuddled him more. But the thought brought back the memory of his small body rigid in her arms, his infant face red as he fought her embrace. She remembered the painful thudding as he banged his over-large head against her bony adolescent chest, over and over again, battering her with it as she carried him so that by nightfall both his face and her breasts were black-and-blue. When she had put him down, he screamed. When she picked him up, he went rigid. But perhaps she could have tried harder. Maybe if her mother or aunt had been there, someone could have told her what she was doing wrong.

But they hadn't. She wondered if they had even survived. The raiders had carried her far from her home on the river. When her swelling pregnancy made her an unattractive bed partner, they had abandoned her, with less thought than they had given to abandoning a lamed horse. She had never even known which of them bad fathered the hoy. When she thought of them now, she could not even remember them as individuals. Their coarse black hair and sallow faces blended into one nightmare of a smelly, heavy male pinning her down and hurting her. Trapping her against the rocky earth, all hot breath in her face and heavy weight on her torso and laughter all around as she struggled. She jerked her mind from the memory, shuddering.

She was shaking, she realized suddenly, shaking with the deep tremors that were the body's last effort against cold. She had stood still too long, and the night had sucked her warmth away. She had to have fire and warmth now, if she were to live. And she had to live, if Kerlew were to live. She turned to the tent wearily. She would take the bow and make the fire. She would take up once more the weight of their survival. Then from the tent she heard his shrill voice cut the night and the cold, his triumph ringing brighter than the stars.

'Fire! Tillu, Tillu, it burns, it burns for me!'

CHAPTER FIVE

Cold air moving against her face. As cold as it would be outside, not inside, the tent.

Tillu released her grip on sleep and stirred slightly beneath the hides that covered her.

Had the fire gone out? She dragged her eyes open and peered out from her huddle of skins. No, the fire was still aglow, though it would need more fuel soon. The draft came from the open tent flap, where Kerlew stood in his long nightshirt, staring out into the darkness. 'The wood is right by your left foot,' Tillu pointed out. 'You don't need to chill the whole tent to find it.'

'Not looking for wood,' Kerlew mumbled. Cold air flowed in past him, misting slightly as it met the warmer air inside the tent. Kerlew stood motionless in the swirling fog as it eddied past him.

'Well, put some on the fire anyway,' Tillu instructed him grouchily. She pulled the hides up to her chin again. Kerlew still stood in the doorway, staring out into the snowbound darkness.

'I heard Carp.' He swayed slightly, as if he were still asleep. 'Calling me.'

A chill ran over Tillu and the hair on the back of her neck hackled. Stupid! she chided herself for her reaction. But there was something in the boy's slow words and unseeing gaze that spooked her. In the dim light from the dying fire, he turned his face to her.

His eyes were black holes beneath the straggle of his hair, no trace of sleep in them. His intentness reminded her of a great wolf sitting, ears pricked, as his prey moved into his range. Not for the first time, she said, 'Carp isn't coming, Kerlew. You dreamed it.'

'I know.' The boy spoke in his hesitant way, as if each word had to be found before it could be uttered. He strung his words on the threads of his thoughts, visibly manufacturing his sentences. 'But it was one of the real dreams, like he taught me. I saw Carp, walking through the snow of the forest.' Wonder transformed the boy's face. 'He looked up at me and smiled so I could see where his teeth are gone. He was leaning on the staff we carved together. And I knew he was coming for me. He said, "You are mine, Kerlew. And I will come for you, because the spirits will it. Be patient, but do not forget." Then it started snowing and it fell between us until everything was white and I couldn't see him anymore. But I thought I heard him calling me, so I woke up and got out of bed to see.'

'Kerlew.' Tillu kept rigid control of her voice. 'Carp is not coming for you. He doesn't know where we are. And we have come a very long way since we left Benu's people.

They don't come this far west. We are out of their territory now. I don't think we will ever see Carp again.'

Kerlew stood silent, his brow crinkled, nodding slowly. Then he let the tent flap fall, shutting out the night and the greater darkness it sheltered. The tent became a small, safe place again, and Tillu could look at Kerlew and see her child. His bare legs stuck out from under his soft leather nightshirt. His thick black hair was tousled, some dangling before his strange eyes. For an instant she saw all his vulnerability and loneliness, and her conscience smote her. In all her travels, Carp was the only adult male who had ever shown anything near tolerance for her son. To some, Kerlew was an object of ridicule; to others, disgust. He had always been taunted by other children, ever since he was old enough to betray his differences with speech. Women either pitied him and treated him as a babe, or pitied Tillu and treated him as a misfortune. In running away from Benu's folk, she had taken him from the only person who had ever befriended him.

'Then why did he say he was coming?'

Tillu tried to keep her patience before the slow words of the dogged questions.

'Because you only dreamed it. He didn't really say it.'

He stood nodding by the fire, his mouth slightly agape, his tongue wetting his lower lip. Then his lips moved as he carefully repeated her words to himself. 'Ah,' he said, nodding at the flames. 'A dream.'

Tillu sighed in relief and began to settle back into her nest of hides.

'Do you think Carp will come tomorrow, then?' Kerlew's hopeful question jerked her back.

Tillu sighed. 'No. Carp won't come tomorrow, either. You never hear a word I say, do you? Bring in some wood for the fire.'

He stooped to obey her, dragging in sticks of wood frosted with last night's snowfall.

They sizzled as he dumped them clumsily onto the red coals.

'Not too many at once,' Tillu cautioned him. 'You'll put it out.'

'Then I'd have to start it again,' Kerlew observed, an edge of resentment showing in his slow-spaced words.

'That's right,' she agreed firmly.

They both fell silent, feeling the silent tension hanging between them. Part of her said it had been necessary, that the boy had to learn, however he could be taught. Part of her felt only sickened and sad. How well he remembered anger and hurt. He might forget what she had said to him moments ago, but his memory of last month's confrontation was still fresh. It was how his mind worked. As if he could sense the things that pained her and chose to keep those things for himself.

She looked at him now, saw his eyes steal up to the tent support where the meat hung. She smiled at him slowly, remembering his face shining with the triumph of fire.

That she would keep for herself. He stared back at her, then smiled uncertainly.

'It's nearly time to get up, I think. Shall I bring snow?' he offered hopefully. Then Tillu knew what had really awakened him. He was hungry.

She pushed wearily at her blankets. She knew she should make him go back to sleep and wait to eat until the true morning. But she felt guilty and, she realized, hungry herself. She was not providing well for them. She knew the forest offered ample food, even in the hardest winter, for the skilled hunter. But she was not skilled.

In the time since they had left Benu's folk, she had been feeding them on rabbits and ptarmigan and the like. At first, there had been the dried meat and oil to supplement what she caught, and the late vegetation of autumn. But snow had locked the plants away now, save for bark teas and the like, and they were reduced to whatever meat she could bring home. Yesterday it had been two hares, neither of them large. She had stewed them up, reserving the hindquarters of one for breakfast. The little creatures had already lost their autumn fat. The lean, stringy meat had been more tantalizing than satisfying. She craved fat, and no amount of stringy hare could satisfy that craving.

She gave in to Kerlew with a curt nod. He snatched up the pot and ran to pack it with snow, not even bothering with his boots. Tillu pushed her sleeping fur back and dressed hastily in the chill of the tent. She added more fuel to the fire and set the pot of snow close by it to melt. The semifrozen hindquarters of the rabbit were hanging from one of the tent supports. She took them down, shaking her head at how small they were, and cut the meat into tiny bits that would cook quickly. Bones and all went into the pot. She poked at the fire to bare the coals and set the pot among them, screwing it into place to brace it. Kerlew had dressed quickly. Now he picked up the bone knife she had used to cut up the meat and licked the traces of blood from it. Tillu chided him:

'Don't cut your tongue.'

'I'm careful,' he told her and ran his fingers over the piece of wood she had cut the meat on, licking them eagerly. His hunger and the crudeness of their surroundings struck her suddenly. Shame vied with anger, but weariness won over both of them. If she didn't start doing better, they weren't going to last out the winter. She stirred the pot of stew thoughtfully. Everything they had was on the verge of wearing out. The bone knife needed to he replaced, mittens needed sewing, the small scraped hides of her kills needed to be worked into useful leather. But there was only one of her and most of her time was taken up with hunting. The solution would have been simple with any other child: Put the boy to work. But experience had taught her that teaching Kerlew a new skill took more time than doing it herself.

Still. He had relit the fire. And he had been responsible for gathering the wood since then, without being reminded. Maybe the harshness of the fire lesson was what he had needed. Maybe it was time to expect – no, demand more of him.

He had come to hunker beside her, watching like a camp-robber bird as she stirred the stew. The water was beginning to warm, and she could smell the meat cooking. She added a handful of dried ground lichen to thicken it. Kerlew's nose twitched and he sighed in anticipation as he crouched beside her. Sitting down flat on the cold earth floor of the tent, he leaned against her, taking comfort in her closeness and warmth as if he were a much younger child. Tillu reached to rumple his hair. He flinched, then looked up at her questioningly.

'Kerlew. We can do better than this, but only if we both try harder. I need you to learn to do more things, make more things for us.'

His wide eyes looked up at her in alarm. 'I brought the firewood yesterday.'

'I know. I know. You've been very good about remembering to do the things I asked you to do. But you're big now, and it's time you started to do even more things. I could show you how to stretch the rabbit hides, and you could learn how to fix your own mittens, and -'

His lip jutted out rebelliously. 'No. That's women's work. Carp said so. I'm not supposed to do those things.'

Tillu clenched her teeth, biting back her anger. Carp. Always Carp. How far would she have to travel to escape that man? She began again carefully. 'Different groups of people have different ways. We are on our own now, so we can make up our own ways.

We can do any kind of work we want. And there are many kinds of work we are going to have to do if we are going to survive on our own. We can't trade healing for meat and garments anymore. So I am going to have to sew our clothing for us, and hunt our food. Even though I never used to do those things. And you will have to do things you didn't do before, either.'

Tillu paused to look at him. His brow was wrinkled, but his look of stubbornness had diminished slightly. He had pushed his lips out as he thought. It was a lesson that her years with Kerlew had taught her. Other children might be told firmly, or be persuaded with the threat of punishment. Kerlew would go unmoved by such tactics. As slow-witted as he seemed, he would not do a thing until he had firmly in mind the reasons why he must do it. Once persuaded, however, he would not be swayed from what he perceived as necessary. Such as the need to flee from bears, and to keep the fire burning.

'So why can't I hunt, then?' he asked suddenly.

'You don't know how. I thought you would want to learn simple things first, like carving and making tools for us, while I hunted.'

'Other boys my age hunt. Graado was always off hunting, before he died.'

'I know. Graado was a very good hunter. But it had taken him a long time to learn.

Now isn't a good time for you to be learning to hunt, because if you accidentally miss, we won't have anything to eat that night. But it is a good time for you to learn to make bowls and knives and other useful things. Do you see what I'm saying?'

'Yes.' Grudgingly. 'I'd rather learn to hunt.'

'You'll learn to do both this winter,' Tillu promised, surprised to find she meant it.

Now, living alone with the boy, she could teach him some skills, both useful and social.

Perhaps the next time they joined a group of people, his differences would not be so apparent.

'It would be easier for you if we just found another group of people for you to heal.'

Kerlew spoke with insight Tillu had not known he possessed. She looked at him sharply.

'What makes you say that?' she demanded.

He shrugged stubbornly.

'Well, it might be easier, but there's no one around here for me to heal, Kerlew. So we'll have to do for ourselves.'

He looked at her without speaking, not denying her words, but withholding his agreement. She sighed. He had made up his mind that there was another way to solve their problems. And he'd cling to his own solution for as long as he could.

'Is it done now?'

She gave the meat soup another stir and nodded. He jumped up to fetch the carved wooden bowls, and to watch ravenously as she poured out their shares. They drank it in a companionable silence, Tillu thinking and Kerlew completely absorbed in eating.

It was finished too soon. Tillu rose to gather her supplies for the day. Taking up a soft leather pouch, she tied its sturdy belt around her waist. Into this went the bone knife, a long hank of braided sinew, and the smaller pouch that carried her healer's supplies. Ever since her days on the riverbank when her great-aunt had first instructed her in the skills of a healer, she had carried such a pouch. In it were a few powdered herbs in bone vials and a roll of soft leather for bandages. Over all, she dragged on her heavy outer coat. It had been cured with the hollow-shafted hairs on it and, when new, they had trapped the heat and held it close. Rut reindeer hair was brittle, breaking off easily, and in places the coat was now rubbed nearly bare. As she often did, she wondered if the weight of the leather was worth the warmth. But she knew that if a storm came up, or if she were caught out overnight, she would be glad of it. The garment was a long-sleeved tunic that could be belted at the waist.

As she tugged up her mittens, she told Kerlew, 'Today you should tend the fire and gather firewood, as much as you can. Pile up a lot so that you won't have to go after wood tomorrow or the next day. And watch for pieces that might make a good bowl or spoon. Tonight, when I get back, we will try some carving.'

'Can't I go hunting with you today, so I can start to learn?'

Was he back to that idea again? 'Tomorrow, maybe. When we have a good supply of wood, so we can bank the fire for the day. Remember, you have to gather lots of wood today if you want to hunt with me tomorrow.' She took up her bow and paused.

'Watch, too, for a piece of wood to make a bow for yourself. You'll need one if you're going to hunt.'

'Shall I chant to the spirits to bring you good hunting?' Kerlew offered cautiously.

She could tell that he expected her usual snort of refusal at his offer. But what could it hurt?

'While you gather the firewood,' she agreed and ducked out the tent flap. She heard his thin voice rise behind her in the strange monosyllabic song Carp had taught him.

Tillu had never been able to decide if the song was in the words of some strange language, or was merely monotonous noises to lure Carp's spirits closer. She thought briefly of the beautiful carved goddess of her river-village childhood. The raiders had dragged the image down and burned it as fuel to roast the fat piglets that Tillu had once tended. She had not trembled before any spirit-being since then.

Graceful white birches edged the clearing around her tent, while tall dark pines made the hills around it green. A clump of twisting willow grew at one end of the glen; Tillu suspected a summer spring hidden beneath the snow. The glen itself seemed an open, airy place in contrast to the hills around it. Sunlight struck the hide walls of the tent during the day and helped warm it, while the pine forests on the surrounding hillsides sheltered it from storms and provided firewood and game. It was a good place to shelter out the winter.

Tillu spent her days hunting in the surrounding hills. She was beginning to know them now, and to think of exploring the neighboring valleys. It was still dark as she entered the silent pine forest. The cold of night had put a good crust on the snow. Tillu walked on top of it, heading steadily west, instead of having to plow through it. She picked her way carefully, following old game trails and avoiding the snow-laden swags of the pines. She didn't expect to find game close to the tent. She and Kerlew had been camped there nearly two months now. Their noise and smoke would have spooked away most small game. So she strode along, seeking to put distance between herself and the tent before the brief hours of light dawned.

The hours of light were few, but the day was long for her. She hunted first under a starry sky disturbed by the pale ribbons of the aurora borealis. She did not turn her gaze up to that spectacle, but peered into the shadows of the forest as she strode silently along. The stew had warmed her stomach but not filled it, and hunger soon chewed at her concentration.

The gray light of 'morning' found her moving silently, arrow ready, through an open forest of pine. The great trunks soared up around her. Brush was sparse, making it easier for her to walk, and to watch for the small game that was her target. She hated the constant tension of keeping an arrow ready to fly, but knew that any game she spotted would be aware of her. A movement such as drawing out an arrow and setting it to the bow would send them fleeing.

She watched, not for rabbit or squirrel or ptarmigan, but for movement and shape.

The flash of an eye or the flick of an ear in a clump of brush, the white curve that might be the haunch of a rabbit beneath a tree. She loosed once and missed, both bird and arrow vanishing silently into the snowy forest.

Her first kill came close to noon, and had nothing to do with her shooting skill. She had emerged from the forest into a small clearing. A blackened stump and a few fallen trunks protruded from the snow, showing where lightning had started a fire that had not spread. The open meadow was thick with brush. Tillu stood silently on the edge of the clearing, only her eyes moving. Dawn or gray evening would find this clearing alive with small game, she suspected. But she had discovered it at the wrong time of day. It was empty.

Or was it? A tiny clump of snow fell from one of the hushes, jarred loose by movement when the air was still. Tillu shifted her eyes to study the bush, while keeping her head still as if staring in a different direction. The hare was crouching motionless beneath the bush, thinking his white coat would conceal him. She clenched her teeth.

The branches of the protective bush were just thick enough that they would probably deflect her arrow and let the hare escape. She could spook him into the open and try for a running shot. But she knew her limits. There had to be another way to take him.

As long as he thought he was undiscovered, he would stay frozen there. Tillu began to walk slowly forward, looking everywhere except at the animal. She kept her head high, as if she stared across the clearing, and walked casually. But her eyes were turned down on the crouching animal, and her path carried her within a body's length of his hiding place.

The snow crunched lightly under her tread. The bright sun off the open meadow threw light up into her eyes, dazzling her after the soft shadows of the forest. She wanted to rub her eyes, but dared not move her hands. Closer. She was passing him now, and still he was motionless, his ears drawn flat to his back. She did not spring. She fell on him, letting her body crash down on both bush and animal, pinning the wildly struggling animal to the snowy earth in a tangle of snapped brush.

She gripped at him frantically with both hands, caught a leg, felt him kick free, clutched his body, felt him wriggle from her grip, then closed her hands on his neck.

She had him. With a swing and a snap she broke his neck, the tiny pop sounding loud in her ears. She hefted the warm, limp body. He was larger than the other two had been. He'd make a good meal. She pierced the thin skin between the two long bones of his hind legs and strung a fine line of braided sinew through them, knotting the ends. It made a long loop that went over one of her shoulders, so that he dangled upside down by her hip. The weight of her kill felt good. Now, if she could only get one or two more ...

But luck deserted her. She crossed the meadow and moved on, into somber woods where the branches that met overhead defeated the brightness of the short day. Nothing stirred. When the waning light of afternoon forced her footsteps back toward the tent, the stiffening hare was still her only kill.

She crossed over her morning's trail and worked the hillside above it hopefully. Most animals that browsed or grazed on hillsides kept their attention fixed downhill. Often they paid little attention to the hunter who stalked them from higher ground. But the light was going bad, and she wondered if a chancy shot would be worth the risk of losing one of her precious arrows. She gained the crest of a small hill and looked down into the next valley. She hadn't hunted this area yet. She wondered if she should take the time to explore it now, or head home with her kill and save this for tomorrow.

She froze for an instant, peering into the shadowy forest below her. She heard several tiny clicks, then the soft sound of snow being moved. A clack, as of wood against wood.

She could not see, and then, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom and distance, she did see.

Trunks and branches of trees interrupted her view, but the hump of an animal moved briefly in the snow and was still. It stirred again, and, as it did, Tillu slipped behind the cover of another tree. The creature was large, with a brown coat. But stare as she might at the shadowed shape, she could not resolve it into the outline of any beast she knew.

Then the female reindeer lifted her antlered head from the hollow she had pawed into the snowdrift. She peered about alertly for danger as the calf at her side butted up against her for warmth. Tillu grinned silently to herself: two animals, not one, and the adult with its head invisible. That was what had baffled her. She gripped her bow tightly and wondered.

She had four arrows left. But she did not deceive herself about their quality. Their tips were no more than fire-hardened wood. She had made her bow herself, and knew all its faults too well. The force that was sufficient to stun a bird or pierce a rabbit's thin hide would probably do no more than bruise the animal below. But the lure of that much meat wrapped in a useful hide sent her slipping from one tree's shelter to the next, getting ever closer as she worked her slow way down the hillside.

The mother pawed snow away to bare for her calf the tender lichen beneath. While the calf fed, she lifted her antlered head and stared about, watching for wolves and wolverines and the occasional lynx. When she was sure all was well, she dipped her own head into the hole. It was during those moments, while the mother's watchful eyes were below snow level, that Tillu advanced.

Tillu halted while she was still out of range. Her heart was high with hopes, her head whirling with plans. If she didn't spook the animal now, perhaps she would still be in this area tomorrow. Even if she weren't, sighting this reindeer meant there would be others in the nearby valleys and hills. Their winter hides would be thick now, good for boots and coats and bedhides. Their long sinews made fine thread, their bones and antlers good tools. To say nothing of rich slabs of red meat frosted with layers of fat, or the steaming liver and succulent marrow bones from the new kill. Tillu let her hunger rise as she thought swiftly. What would it take? A spear? And Kerlew to spook the animals to where she waited? It was possible. The mother lowered her head again, and Tillu peered out from the cover of the tree.

And froze anew.

She was not the only hunter here. Even as she watched, two shapes were converging on the deer, rising from the snow to creep forward. They were a mismatched pair, and she watched them curiously. One was a man, tall and wide-shouldered, dressed in tunic and leggings of reindeer hide. His dark hair was touched with bronze when the light hit it. It was cut straight, jaw-length, and swung forward by his face as he scuttled soundlessly on his hands and knees. A bow was slung on his back and his eyes were fixed on his prey.

The other was a youth, or a very small man. He was short, not only in height, but in every measurement. His short, thick legs were slightly bowed. He did not move as smoothly as the older man, but twitched along like a nervous weasel. His hair was black and dense, lying flat on his head and framing his wide face. His cheekbones were high, his nose broad, his lips finely drawn. Tillu studied him as he studied the deer. An odd thrill of recognition ran down her spine. He was not so different from the raiders who had snatched her away from all she had known. He had a coiled rope of some kind in his hands. He was in the front, and seemed intent on getting as close as possible, while the other seemed content with getting within close bow-range. The men exchanged glances, and the older man nodded to the youth. One rolled into place behind a tree, to unsling his bow and draw out an arrow, while the other slithered forward, rope in hand. When the feeding reindeer lifted her head, the youth froze, belly and face flat to the snow. The animal widened her nostrils, snuffling audibly in the cold evening air.

But the air was still beneath the black-barked pine. No wind carried their scent to the mother. She began to lower her head again.

Tillu never knew what turned her eyes. There was no sound, so perhaps it was a tiny bit of movement at the edge of her vision. Whatever it was, she lifted her eyes from the scene below and looked down the hill to her left.

Years ago, one of the forest giants had fallen. Its great trunk lay prone, half submerged in snow. Its bare reaching branches rose from its trunk like a screen. When it had gone down, its great roots had torn up a huge mass of soil with them. Parts of the tree were still alive, nourished by the half of the roots that were buried still, while some of the roots clawed blindly at the air, the mass of earth that had surrounded them slowly eroding away from the clump still clinging to them. It was a tangled, brushy place, perfect cover for any small animal seeking shelter. Or for the bowman who stepped out suddenly from its cover.

Tillu saw no more of him than the shape of his hat, the outstretched hand that gripped the bow, and the long black curve of the how itself. She sensed the tension in the bowstring she could not see. A smile cracked her cold face; he wasn't going to wait for his fellow hunters to get closer. He was going to take the deer now, and, from the steadiness of his hand, she'd wager his shot would be true.

The reindeer lowered her head, and Tillu fixed her eyes on the scene. She wondered if they would carry it off whole. She decided to wait. She was not too proud to take whatever they might leave.

The bow sang just as the youth reared up to swing the rope over his head. Tillu cried aloud in horror, a warning that was too late. Swifter than sight, the black arrow ripped the air, snatching itself in and out of the boy's upraised upper arm, to go wobbling off, its flight spoiled by this unexpected obstacle. It buried itself in snow.

Reindeer and calf bounded away, crashing awkwardly through the snow that would not support them. Tillu clung to the tree trunk that had hidden her, feeling giddy. The tall man who had signaled the boy sprang out from his hiding place to dash to his side.

The boy wallowed in the snow, his bright blood staining it. Of the other bowman, Tillu saw no sign.

She would be wisest to flee. She was a woman alone, and she knew nothing of the men below her. Perhaps the wound was but a scrape; perhaps they didn't need her skills. If she went down there, she could be putting herself in their power, men she knew nothing of. Foolishness. They could kill her or drag her away, and Kerlew would never know what had become of her. She stepped deeper into the cover of her tree, watching.

The big man pulled the youth's tunic off over his head, more swift than gentle. He seemed smaller without his coat, younger than Tillu had first estimated. The boy wore a shift of some woven work beneath it. Tillu was startled. How long had it been since she had seen folk who wore woven cloth? The shirt was the color of ripe grain, save for the one sleeve that was brilliant red and dripping. The youth gripped his arm, his gasps of pain audible even to Tillu. He sank suddenly to his knees, his companion following him down. Shock and pain were overpowering him. The big man supported his body, speaking hoarsely to the boy who wasn't listening. His ignorance was obvious. Bleeding like that had to be stopped right away, or the boy would not live. Tillu began a stumbling run down the hillside.

Heckram knelt in the snow, Lasse half in his lap. He could hear nothing but the thunder of his own heart and rasp of breathing, and Lasse's thin cries as he squirmed and clutched at his arm. It was a nightmare. Soon he would awake, sweating in his bedskins. He tried once more to see the damage to Lasse's arm, but the boy only gripped his own arm the tighter, his eyes squeezed shut against the pain. Heckram had seen the black flash of the arrow that had ripped from nowhere to slide through Lasse's arm. He held Lasse tighter.

'Calm down. Please, Lasse, calm down. Lasse! Let me see your arm. We have to stop the blood.'

Lasse gave a sudden whimper and went limp in his grip. The boy's head rolled back, and for an instant Heckram's soul froze. Then he saw the wildly jumping pulse in the boy's neck. He was alive still, just unconscious. Perhaps for the best. He pulled at the stubbornly yielding weave of Lasse's wool shirt, trying to expose the wound. He had nothing to bandage it with, nothing, and the talvsit was a day's hike from here. He could carry the boy that far, but if this wound didn't stop bleeding, he would soon he carrying a corpse. Lasse had no flesh to spare, and his face was now near white as the snow he lay in. The arrow had pierced the heavy leather of Lasse's tunic, opened a deep gash in his arm, and ripped out the other side of the sleeve. The wound was a gaping, ragged thing. Heckram thought he caught a gleam of white bone deep inside it and felt dizzy.

Someone dropped into the snow on the opposite side of Lasse. The stranger was dressed in an oddly cut coat and leggings, hood pulled forward as if against a snowstorm. A bow was slung on his back. Sudden fury rose in Heckram, and when the bowman reached for Lasse, he pushed him roughly back. 'Did you come down to see what meat you had taken?' he demanded angrily. The man was even slighter than he looked, for Heckram's push sent him sprawling in the snow. He sat up, spitting snow, his hood fallen back to his shoulders. The small man yelled something angrily at Heckram and in that instant was revealed as a woman, not a man at all. She tore her bow from her back and flung it down into the snow, followed by a stiff hare on a string.

Lifting the skirt of her tunic, her hands worked at something at her waist. Heckram could only stare at her. Was she going to disrobe here in the snow? Why?

Then she was dragging out a pouch of soft leather and opening it. Taking out a roll of very fine, thin bird skin, she shook it in his face. She knelt again in the snow on the other side of Lasse's body. Her black eyes flashed at him as if challenging him to push her away again. He didn't. But he kept his grip on Lasse, holding the youth close, trying to put his own warmth into the boy's body.

Her skill was apparent as she eased the torn fabric back from the gaping wound. She was talking fast, in what sounded like a strange parody of his own language. She said words he could almost understand, then shook her head angrily at him. In sudden silence, she firmly gripped Lasse's arm above the wound, nodded violently at her own hands, then released Lasse's arm and grabbed one of Heckram's hands. She set it where hers had been and told him something commandingly. He stared at her in puzzlement, then gripped the boy's arm as she had. She nodded her violent agreement, and turned aside from Lasse to scoop up a double handful of clean snow.

The boy jerked slightly as she applied it directly to the wound. Heckram kept his grip. The snow reddened in her hands, but the bleeding slowed. She bent her head over his arm, studying the wound, then applied more snow. This second treatment seemed to satisfy her, for after examining the wound a second time, she spoke softly in reassurance.

'It's not that bad?' he asked and she seemed to understand, for she nodded, but again patted his hand and told him, 'Grip!' The word was strangely accented, but he understood. She rummaged again in the leather bag and brought out a container made of a deer's hollow leg bone. She pulled a wooden stopper from it and shook a grayish-brown powder into her hand. 'Willow bark.' She spoke very slowly and clearly. She trickled a pinch from her fingers into the open wound. The bleeding almost stopped.

Gently pinching the wound closed, she wrapped the soft skin bandage over the wound.

He watched the practiced way she slipped a finger under the binding to be sure it wasn't too tight. Lasse began to stir, and she spoke to him as she worked. The boy's eyes were huge in a face gone sallow.

'Who is she? What happened? How bad is my arm?' The rising urgency in Lasse's voice reached the woman, who knotted the bandage gently and patted his shoulder.

She motioned to Heckram to loosen his grip. Lasse hissed in pain as he removed his hands. The woman spoke again, more slowly this time, and Heckram understood enough to tell Lasse, 'You're to rest and not try to move your arm for a while. And eat or drink something.'

'Of course,' Lasse agreed calmly. 'Before or after I pass out again?'

'I don't blame you.' Heckram pulled his eyes from the reddened patch of snow. His face was so pale. He kept his hand companionably on the youth's shoulder, but suspected that if he moved it Lasse would topple over.

The woman was already gathering her things. 'You! Healer!' Heckram called to her.

She looked around at the familiar word. 'Are your people close by? Is there any kind of a shelter close by? A kator? Talvsit?' At first he thought she couldn't understand what he was asking, but then he caught the wariness in her eyes. 'It's the least you can do after you shot him! All we ask is shelter for a night. Look at him! I can't drag him home this way. If he doesn't bleed to death on the way, the cold would get him. After all, you're the one who shot him!'

He gestured angrily at her bow. She seemed to finally catch the idea, for she shook the bow at him and flooded him with words. He caught 'hunter' and 'accident' and watched her gesture vehemently at a fallen snag uphill of them.

With a wave of his hand, he accepted her story. 'Seems to have been an accident, though she doesn't seem too apologetic. I suppose she feels we're the ones who carelessly got between her and her prey. Lasse, if I can get her to take us to her shelter for the night, is that all right with you?'

'You mean because she shot me? It was an accident, Heckram. And she could have just run away and left me to bleed in the snow. No. There's no sense in holding a grudge, my friend. Besides, I don't think I have the strength if I wanted to. Has it gotten colder?'

'Yes. Night's coming on,' Heckram lied easily. He picked up the boy's coat to shake the loose snow from it. He couldn't pull it on over his head, so Heckram wrapped it around his shoulders. Lasse rose slowly.

'I could carry you,' Heckram offered softly. Lasse shot him an offended look that rapidly became abashed. He gave him a grin that was part grimace. 'Not yet, anyway,'

Lasse told him, but he put his good hand on Heckram's shoulder, and with it a part of his weight, 'I wish we had brought a pack-harke. I'd ride him like a child.'

Heckram looked at the woman. She had retrieved her bow and hare. Hesitation was still evident in her eyes, but Heckram stared at her coldly. She owed them shelter for the night, and she knew it. For Lasse's sake, he wasn't going to let her out of it. At last she nodded curtly.

'Tent,' she said, and, with a beckoning gesture, she started off slowly through the snow.

CHAPTER SIX

Tillu's mind seethed with plans. She set a pace through the snow that kept her well in front of the two hunters. As soon as they sighted her tent, she raced ahead. The glow of the fire showed through the worn seams and the ventilation flap of the tent. She pushed hastily inside, scarcely noticing the wealth of firewood Kerlew had stacked by the entrance. Inside the tent, she dropped her bow and hare on the floor and looked about frantically. How to give the impression that men shared her tent and were expected to return soon? Quickly she snatched half the hides from her pallet and heaped them on the floor to make them look like a third bed. No, that wasn't right. She should have spread them out to make it look like two persons slept in her bed. She snatched them up again.

'There is blood on your hands. But the blood on mine will be darker.'

Kerlew's words jerked her attention to him. He hadn't moved since she came in, but remained sprawled on his pallet, staring into the fire. His arms dangled over the edges of the rough bed, his hands resting palm up on the floor. His eyes were unblinking and unfocused, his voice deep and dreaming.

'Kerlew! Wake up and help me!' she snapped irritably.

The boy took a deep breath and rolled over. He looked up at her. 'You were gone so long. Was the hunting good?' His voice was his normal halting speech and she breathed a sigh of relief.

'Help me get ready. Two men are coming. One of them is hurt. Don't talk to them, for they can understand some of what we say, and you might say the wrong things. I want them to think that someone else lives with us, a man who may come back -'

'I found my rock.' Kerlew grinned uncertainly as he interrupted her, holding up the polished red stone for her inspection. She glared at him.

'A lot of good that will do us! Get busy!'

Kerlew was still gawking in confusion as the man pushed the tent flap open. The youth staggered in before him, dropping instantly to his knees before the fire. He swayed in place, and the big man steadied him as he glanced about. He scuffed his foot against the scraped earth floor of the tent and asked something.

'Birch?' Kerlew guessed, his tongue slow but his face eager. Tillu frowned, but the big man nodded. The boy shrugged his lack of comprehension, and the big man hissed in exasperation. Tillu spread out a hide on the floor beside the youth and eased him down onto it. The big man made a gesture for waiting and disappeared from the tent. The youth closed his eyes. Tillu watched him breathing. He was too pale. He had bled more than such a wound should, and he seemed more exhausted than should a boy of his years. She narrowed her eyes, looking at him shrewdly. He was not as robust as the man he hunted with. She would guess that he had not been eating well recently, perhaps not for a long time. And she surmised from his growth that he had never been a sturdy child. But, for all that, he was healthy enough. He'd live to hunt again.

She knelt and checked the bandage on his arm. He opened his eyes to watch her, but tolerated her touch. The bandage was damp, but the blood had not soaked through it.

Better to leave it alone than to open the wound trying to change it. Food and warmth and rest were what he needed now. She scowled at the stiffened hare that would have to feed four instead of two. Nothing to be done about it except to do it. She took the pot outside to pack it with snow, leaving Kerlew to stare curiously at the injured stranger.

The big man made a strange profile in the dark as he returned. She held the tent flap open for him. He unslung a huge bundle of birch twigs from his shoulder and pushed them in before him. Tillu followed, setting the pot of snow by the fire to melt, then watching him curiously. As he began to spread the birch twigs in a layer over the earth floor, she wondered if this were some healing ritual of his people. She had been taught the uses of the birch tree: Oil from its bark soothed skin disorders, and syrup from the tender roots pleasantly eased a cough. One could steep its tiny cones for tea to ease a mother's body after a difficult childbirth, or toast the same cones over coals, that the fumes might clear a stuffy head. She watched carefully to see how he would use such a quantity of twigs on a bleeding wound. But then he boldly took another hide from her bed and spread it over the twigs. Careful as a mother, he helped the injured boy move on to this softer resting place. Then he straightened and looked around her small tent curiously. She could not tell what he was thinking.

Abruptly he placed a hand on his own chest and announced, 'Heckram.' A gesture toward the youth. 'Lasse.'

'Tillu,' she replied and, pointing to her son, added, 'Kerlew.'

'Tillu,' he muttered and, turning, left the tent again.

'What happened to him?' Kerlew demanded, pointing at Lasse as she knelt to open up the hare.

'Some fool shot him instead of a reindeer,' she told him tersely.

'The big man?' he asked with interest.

'No. Someone else, someone who ran away instead of staying to help as he should have. So I had to help them instead.'

'Why?'

'Because they needed help. Isn't that a good enough reason?'

'I guess,' he subsided. He watched her with interest. 'Is that all you killed today?'

'Yes. And we're going to have to share it.'

'Sharing makes less,' he observed without rancor, returning to staring at Lasse. The youth opened his eyes and at first looked confused. Then he smiled weakly at Kerlew and made a vague effort to sit up. 'Better lie still,' Kerlew advised him. 'Or you'll be bleeding all over. Bleed too much and you die.'

'Kerlew!' Tillu chided him, for the youth had understood enough of his words to look stricken. 'Be quiet, as I told you. The less you speak, the less chance of making a fool of yourself. Besides, you say things I don't want said. So, be quiet.'

Kerlew went into a sulk, poking angrily at the fire and nearly upsetting the pot of warming water. Tillu turned back to Lasse. She spoke slowly and carefully. 'Don't try to move right now. I'm fixing something to eat. Your friend will be back soon. Your arm.

Does it hurt much? Much pain?'

'Yes, pain. Sick.' He made a vague gesture with his good hand at his head and stomach. Tillu understood. The shock of the wound, the long cold hike, and the unrelenting pain of the jagged gash made him feel weak and ill. She wasn't surprised.

She moved to her healer's pouch and began to sort through it. 'Heckram?' he asked anxiously as he watched her.

'Yes. He'll be back very soon.'

As if in answer to her words, the flap was pushed open once more. Heckram and more birch twigs came in. He spoke reassuringly to Lasse, and the youth visibly relaxed. He spoke to Tillu over his shoulder as he spread the second bundle of twigs over the floor and blithely covered them with hides from her bed. The gist of his words seemed to be that this was warmer and better than the bare earth floor. Tillu nodded curtly and went on with her work. Anything that occupied him without bothering her was fine.

She poured a small measure of the snow water into a cup. From her healing supplies she took several small packets made of gut and an assortment of bone vials. Inside each were herbs or ground roots or bark. She opened several, frowning at those that had not kept as fresh as she might have wished. She chose carefully from among them, taking a pinch of willow bark and crumbling it finely into the water, adding a thumbnail-size piece of sorrel root and letting it steep. She added a small portion of dried anemone flower. It was a potent sedative, one that would cause collapse in a patient if too much were taken. In the boy's weakened condition, she would use too little rather than too much. After a few moments of steeping, she dipped her little finger into the mixture and touched it to her tongue. Heckram unnerved her by squatting down on his heels by her fire and watching her with friendly interest. He nodded in turn to Kerlew, who sulkily turned aside from him. The big man did not seem offended, but rose and moved casually around the tent, pausing to rearrange some of the hides on the birch twigs. He spoke softly to Lasse as he crouched by the boy and then returned, sighing softly as he seated himself on a layer of birch twigs and hides near the fire. Tillu rose as he sat, to take the cup of amber liquid to Lasse.

'For pain,' she said, searching his face for understanding. He looked to Heckram, who nodded to him slowly. The boy drank. Tillu took back the empty cup, ignoring the wry face Lasse made at the unfamiliar taste. She knew his pain would ebb now. And he would probably just have time to eat before sleep descended. The willow bark should keep fever away as well. She nodded in satisfaction and crouched again by her fire to carefully rinse the dregs from the cup with more of the snow water. Heckram watched her intently, apparently curious about the herbs and roots she so carefully repacked.

She paused a moment, thinking. Then, hoping her face didn't show how reluctantly she parted with her precious store, she mixed more of the herbs and root in the now dry cup. With mortar and pestle of calf's bone she ground them to a powder and rolled the mixture carefully in a tiny square of skin. 'For tomorrow,' she told Heckram as she offered it. 'Only if pain.'

He studied her face, then asked, 'Pain again, new day?'

She nodded, hoping he understood. She busied herself once more with the hare, hoping he would return to his friend. But he continued to crouch amiably at her side, looking from her to Kerlew with friendly curiosity. Cocking his head, he asked something in a casual tone.

Tillu shrugged at him.

'He asked if we live alone,' Kerlew interpreted helpfully.

She glared at him as Heckram nodded, clearly understanding the boy's rewording of his question. 'Don't you remember that I asked you to be quiet?' she hissed at him, speaking as rapidly as she could. To Heckram she made a vague gesture that could have signified anything and said, 'Soon. Very soon.'

The man looked slightly puzzled, but nodded and smiled in return. Then he transferred his attention from her to the obviously rebuked boy. 'Come,' he said, speaking slowly and plainly. 'You help me.' His gesture could not have been misunderstood even if Kerlew hadn't known his words. He glanced at Tillu for permission. She nodded, her lips tightly pressed. Kerlew rose to move around the fire and squat at Heckram's side.

The man rose, to open his loosely belted tunic and take out a packet from inside it.

Then he pulled off his heavy tunic of reindeer hide, revealing a woven shirt beneath.

'What fur is this?' Kerlew asked in amazement, instantly reaching to touch the fabric.

The man smiled at his curiosity and suffered the boy to pluck at the sleeve of his shirt.

After a moment he motioned at the package and took a knife from the sheath at his hip.

Tillu watched from the corner of her eye. The sheath itself was woven, from sinew or something. The knife was flint, ground, not flaked, to a fine edge. Beside it, her bone knife looked like a child's crude toy. As the man unwrapped the package, a smell at once familiar and foreign filled the tent. Kerlew wrinkled his nose at it, but Tillu could not keep herself from turning to stare. Cheese.

A half round of yellow cheese filled the man's hand, marked with a woven pattern on its rind. He set it down atop its wrappings and began to cut it into portions with his knife. Lasse called something to him and Heckram rose to remove a similar package from the youth's pouch. This one contained a piece of river fish with its smoky smell.

Tillu understood that they were sharing their hunting rations and nodded to indicate her thanks. At the same time, her mind was racing. A folk that knew weaving, and the making of cheese, that used ground flint tools as casually as Benu's folk used bone.

These were no stray hunters from some wandering tribe. Surely cheese meant a settled village somewhere, and woven goods meant livestock kept, crops grown, and village life such as she had once known. And where polished flint tools were known, there was usually bronze as well. She pushed down a vague hope and dropped the last piece of hare into the pot.

Heckram was offering a piece of the cheese to Kerlew. The boy took it, sniffed it suspiciously, and glanced at Tillu in confusion. 'Cheese,' she told him, but had to revert to the language of her childhood to find a word for the food. 'You eat it. Try it, it's good.'

The hungry boy needed no further encouragement, but crammed most of the chunk into his mouth, then made a wry face at the unfamiliar taste. Heckram burst into a roar of laughter that Lasse weakly echoed. Tillu felt her face flush, her nerves prickling as they laughed at her son. She kept her head bent over the fire so they would not see the flash of anger in her eyes. Always it was this way; adult men either made sport of the boy, or dismissed him in disgust. If did not help her spirits when she looked up to see Kerlew smiling vaguely at their laughter. He had swallowed some of the cheese in his mouth, but still looked like a squirrel with its cheeks pouched.

'Eat nicely,' she hissed at him. 'What must they think of us?'

He gulped to clear his mouth. 'It tastes funny,' he tried to explain.

'Then don't eat any more,' she snapped, letting her anger find a target.

'But I think I like it,' he hedged, unwilling to surrender anything that resembled food.

Tillu felt tension pull tight in her. The two strangers had noticed the exchange between her and her son. They were trying to ignore it politely, talking casually to one another as if they did not sense the unease. Tillu stirred doggedly at the stewing hare, feeling the familiar ache of the emotions Kerlew roused in her. She had to protect him, but wished there were no need. She loved him as he was, but wished he were not that way. She wanted others to accept him, to see the value in the boy as he was, and yet wished his differences were not so apparent. Everything she felt for Kerlew was a contradiction. Her mind snapped back to the old midwife putting the tiny baby into her arms. She had shaken her head, patting a soft skin around the babe, her mouth pursed.

Tillu had still been amazed by the reality of this new being when the old midwife spoke. 'Love him while you can, but don't lose your heart to him. He has the look of the ones that don't live long.'

That had been the first time she had felt the now familiar anger at the unfairness. All were so quick to judge the child. She had left the wandering tribe and their midwife as soon as she was strong enough to travel. The people had watched them go, and in their eyes she saw their belief that her tiny mewling babe would be dead soon. But he had not died, she thought fiercely. He had lived and he was hers, and she would fight for him, every day of his life. The sooner these men were gone, the better. She needed to be alone with Kerlew, she told herself fervently, to teach him slowly what other children learned rapidly, to give him manners and skills so he could merge unnoticed with other folk. She would not follow them back to their village. And as soon as she had that thought, she was surprised at the poignancy of the regret she felt. Were woven cloth and cheese, the idea of a village and a settled life, such a powerful lure to her? She pushed the thought away.

A hand plucked at her sleeve, but she rudely pulled away from him. She didn't want to touch Kerlew just now, lest in her frustration she strike him. But it was Heckram's voice that spoke, saying, 'Fish,' 'for you,' 'eat,' and other words she could not understand. His tone was the excessively polite one of the guest who had given offense.

Tillu's embarrassment deepened. She thanked him without looking at him or at the food he placed carefully beside her. Instead, she gave the stew a final stir and rose to go to the door flap and lift it. She peered anxiously out, as if awaiting someone's return.

The coolness soothed her flaming cheeks, and the necessary deception gave her a measure of control again.

'What's wrong, Tillu?' Kerlew asked anxiously. He felt his disgrace without understanding why.

'Nothing,' she replied evenly. 'I just thought I heard him coming.'

'Carp?' asked the boy excitedly, rushing to the door. He poked his head out under her arm and stared wildly into the darkness.

'Mmm,' she said, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. At least Kerlew was convincing in his appearance of waiting for someone. She hoped they would think her man delayed somehow on his hunt. She turned from the door to find the strangers watching her expectantly. She shrugged. Lasse lay on his side, holding a bit of fish in his good hand.

His color was still not as good as it should be. She went to kneel beside him. She inspected the bandage once again, then felt the band below if. It was a little cool, but the stricture of the bandage was necessary to hold the flesh together. 'Make a fist,' she told him, then demonstrated. Lasse winced, but was able to obey her. She nodded her approval, but his eyes were cast down before her. His youth suddenly struck home to her. He was, at most, five years older than Kerlew, and obviously unaccustomed to a woman's touch. He was shy. Yet she knelt by him a moment longer, savoring the fantasy that Kerlew would grow this well, would hunt like this youth did, and bear himself with a man's dignity. 'He's a good boy,' she said, more to herself than anyone, but looked up to find Heckram nodding with a vaguely paternal air.

'Brothers?' she asked aloud, to break a suddenly heavy silence.

'Friends,' Heckram explained gravely. 'Hunt together.'

She nodded her understanding. But for the accent, the languages seemed to share many common words. She was unprepared for his question.

'Little brother?' He nodded toward Kerlew. 'Father comes? Mother comes?'

Tillu snorted. 'Son,' she explained, then wondered if it wouldn't have been smarter to let him think them siblings. What difference could it make anyway? But now the big man was anxious to talk. Words and questions spilled from him.

'You come from ... far? South?' He added other words she did not recognize. The intensity of his interest gleamed in his eyes. It made her uneasy. Why did he want to know so much about them? She picked up snatches of his meanings, but tried not to let it show. Had her man gone to trade to the south, or was he hunting? Where were the rest of her people? She let the questions flow past her, smiling apologetically as she shrugged, and then covering her thoughts by bringing out bowls to divide up the stew.

Kerlew had his in his cup, and Tillu had hers in the cooking pot, to make enough dishes. She saw the big man's forehead wrinkle in puzzlement at this, but decided to let him think what he would. He made another slow appraisal of her tent and its contents.

Tillu covered her nervousness by eating.

The fish had been smoked into a hard slab and tasted of salt and summer fires. It had been so long since she had tasted cheese that she was not sure if the flavor had changed, or just her memory of it. She ran a fingertip lightly over the rind, feeling the woven impression where the curd had been packed into the mold. After the weeks of lean hare, it seemed unbelievably rich, and the stew tasted heartier in its company. She looked up suddenly from her empty dish to realize she had ignored everyone else while she ate.

But Kerlew and Lasse seemed likewise occupied with their food, with only Heckram's eyes wandering about the tent as he chewed.

Their eyes met and she dared not glance away in what might be a submissive gesture among his folk. They looked at one another, while she struggled frantically to think of something to say, anything to fill this silence. But it was he who spoke.

'... hard ... winter ... wild ... herd ... but ... hides ... payment ... heal Lasse ...'

She listened carefully, trying to string the words she knew into some kind of sense, but finally had to shrug at him. He gave his hands a small toss to indicate the dilemma, and then said quite clearly, 'Wait. Understand soon.'

She nodded and rose to gather the various vessels and clean them. By the time she had finished, Lasse was sprawled in sleep. She knelt by him to check him. No fever, the bandage seemed comfortable, the hand below it warm. She looked up to find Heckram's eyes upon her. 'Thin,' she said, spanning the boy's wrist with the circle of her fingers.

'Thin seasons,' he agreed solemnly. He covered Lasse with one of the bedhides and then his own coat.

'Kerlew,' Tillu rebuked the dreaming boy, jerking his attention from the fire. 'Don't sit and watch it burn out. Put some fuel on it.'

The boy moved slowly at her bidding, bringing in frosty wood that he heaped carelessly on the coals. 'Are we going to carve tonight?' he asked her.

She had forgotten her lecture of the morning and was not inclined to do any kind of work just now. The unexpected strains of the day had tired her, and her full stomach was making her sleepy. Evenings for most hunting folk were a busy time of day, for making household items, for conversation and stories. She realized that she had let them become idle times of silence and staring, sometimes because she lacked materials to work with, but more often because she was simply too tired. Heckram was glancing about as if wondering what to do with himself. Although it was dark outside, it was still early for sleep. So Tillu nodded stiffly to Kerlew, who seemed suddenly energized.

The boy darted to his pallet and returned to her with a great armload of sticks and chunks of wood. He rattled them down in a pile at her feet and sat expectantly. She smiled wearily at the boy. 'I tell you to find one or two pieces, you bring me a forest.'

He smiled proudly back at her as she began to sort through the sticks. She felt Heckram's eyes on her, and her reluctance toward the project grew. Her skills for this were rusty; she didn't enjoy the idea of someone being amused at her awkwardness.

Even more daunting was the prospect of someone watching the painfully slow way that Kerlew learned. But to do this was better than to sit idly through the long evening, avoiding the stranger's uneasy glances.

Many of the sticks were plainly unfit for use, dry and brittle ones, ones so small they would be carved to nothing before anything could be made of them, some so full of knots they would defy any shaping. These she set aside, until of Kerlew's bundle there were five pieces of wood left. She chose one at random and put it into his hands. He looked up in surprise, and she had to smile at his expression.

'You thought I would do it while you watched, didn't you? No, there has been too much of that. Now Kerlew starts to do things while I watch. There is the knife, you have the wood. Wait a moment.' She rose to rummage through her possessions and returned with bone scrapers. They were for hides, but they would have to serve. She put them out in a row by the boy. He sat holding the wood and knife in his lap, not moving.

Heckram was watching them both silently, his face mildly puzzled, but friendly. She refused to be ruffled by his scrutiny. Sitting down beside Kerlew, she said, 'First, you strip the bark from the piece.' He met her gaze, unhappy in his uncertainty. His anxiety wrinkled his face, pushing his lip out like a shelf. 'Go on,' she encouraged him, and he took up knife and wood.

She watched the boy attentively, flinching each time the knife skipped over the bark by his fingers. He hit a stubborn knot and tried to hand the work back to her. 'No. Keep trying,' she told him gently. He pursed his lips, his eyes going darkly bitter, and went on picking at the stubborn bark. It would not yield to his awkwardness, and she saw his chin start to tremble. The boy knew failure all too well; even the threat of it could cripple his efforts. She forced herself to sit still and watch him struggle, believing he must learn his own way. Kerlew's breath began to catch. He curled himself around his work, as if to hide it from her, but doggedly continued to dig at the unyielding knot.

Then a large shadow moved between them. Heckram did not look at her, but crouched behind the boy, and when he spoke there was only interest in his voice.

'What do you make?' The meaning was plain even if the words were not.

'Probably nothing,' Kerlew replied sulkily. He was already braced for the expected blow.

The man reached out a slow hand. Kerlew flinched slightly as the hand settled on his wrist, and Tillu readied herself to intervene. Some men thought Kerlew pretended his difficulties and tried to make him learn by cruelty. If this Heckram ...

The boy hastily tried to surrender, pushing the knife and wood into the man's hands, but Heckram only pushed them back, then rearranged them in the boy's hands. He shifted the boy's small hands on the wood, and then his own large hand engulfed Kerlew's small one on the handle of the knife. He guided it as the edge of the knife went under the stubborn knot. 'See?' he asked Kerlew, and, as the boy nodded nervously, he added his strength and the bit of bark went flying across the tent, to bounce off the hide wall. The man laughed easily, and after a moment Kerlew joined him. The piece of wood shone white and smooth in Kerlew's hands. 'What you make now?' Heckram asked easily.

'A spoon,' Kerlew decided.

Heckram tapped the wood gently, asking permission to take it for a moment. The boy released it, and the man took it, turning it this way and that as he perused it thoughtfully. Taking up the knife, he marked the wood with shallow cuts. 'Here cut,' he instructed softly. 'Here cut. Here,' he made a scraping motion of the knife near the knot.

'Make strong. Hard, strong.'

Tillu rose, feeling suddenly excluded. Kerlew didn't even notice her departure. His head was bent over the wood as he carved with more energy than skill. She stepped outside the tent into the crisp cold of the night. The night was clear, the cold settling over the world like a blanket. She gathered an armful of Kerlew's wood and took it back into the tent.

It could have been someone else's tent, with the one youth flung wide in careless sleep, and the other crouching by the man, carving diligently as the adult worked more sedately at a piece of his own. Heckram said something to Kerlew as he tossed a handful of parings into the fire, and the boy grinned, though Tillu was sure he didn't understand the words. She set down the firewood and felt suddenly at a loss for what to do with herself. The two muttered to each other as they carved, ignoring the language barrier. After a moment's hesitation, she took up Lasse's coat, covering him with another hide. She rummaged through her sewing things and then examined the ragged rents the arrow had made. She threaded her needle with a length of sinew and looked up to find Heckram's eyes on her.

'Thank you.' The courtesy was clear and honest.

'Thank you,' she replied evenly, nodding at the intent boy.

Heckram touched his own chest. 'Heckram ... no father. Hard learn man's work.

Understand.'

Tillu nodded and then felt her face burn as she realized she had betrayed herself. He knew no man was coming back this night. He was smiling at her easily, but she didn't return his smile. She sat as frozen as the hare had earlier, but felt her exposure keenly.

For a long moment he watched her, and the smile faded from his face. He made a motion of his hand that seemed to indicate it was no concern of his and went back to supervising Kerlew.

By the time she had finished mending the sleeve with tiny, tight stitches that would keep out wind and weather, Kerlew's eyelids were drooping over his work. He was obviously sleepy, but loath to surrender Heckram's attention and guidance. It was part of his nature to accept people at face value. If Heckram had cuffed him and pushed him away, Kerlew would have seen it, not as an offense, but simply as part of the man. That the older man accepted him and took time with him he assumed just as easily. He held up his rough spoon for inspection as he rubbed at his eyes. Heckram set down his own more finished product and took the boy's. Turning it, he muttered approvingly at some parts, and pointed to others that needed more smoothing. But when Kerlew would have immediately gone back to work on it, Heckram made a show of yawning. He sheathed his own knife, and the boy was quick to follow his example.

'Sleep,' Heckram said simply. He glanced about, including Tillu questioningly. She stiffened with wariness, but held up the mended garment. He crossed to take it from her. He nodded slowly over her work as he ran his fingers over the place where the sleeve had been torn. She was suddenly conscious of his tallness, the depth of his chest as he stood over her, blocking the fire's light and warmth. She shrank before him. But,

'Thank you,' he said again and then stepped away, to spread the coat once more over Lasse. Without a glance at Tillu, he lay down not far from his companion. Kerlew was suddenly at his side, offering a sleeping hide from his own bed. The man gave him a grin and a friendly poke of thanks, and settled for sleep.

Tillu rose to bring in wood to bank the fire. Kerlew followed her out into the cold to relieve himself, then brought in an extra armload of fuel.

'I like them,' the boy said suddenly. 'Let's go live with their people. You can be the healer and I can be the shaman.'

'Shush!' Tillu glanced warily at the unstirring men. 'Go to sleep now. We'll talk about that later.'

She arranged the wood with care, thinking of Kerlew's words. Could it be he missed being part of a people as much as she did? A foolish idea. What had folk ever meant to him besides beating and taunts and mockery? Except for Carp. And this man, tonight.

But the way a man behaved around a child when he was alone with him and the way he treated him in public were two different things. She remembered a man, several years ago, a man who had seemed to like her. He had courted her with meat and gifts, and then, one night as Kerlew slept, he had offered, with the kindest of smiles, to take the child out and leave him 'where the wolves would find him quickly, so that you and I could have children of our own. The gods never intended one such as he to live this long.' Tillu and Kerlew had left that folk before the sun rose the next day. She and Kerlew had both liked that man, too. She shook her head, felt the sting of fool's tears.

She banked the fire so it would burn long and then retreated to her own pallet. But she could not relax with strangers in her tent, and she lay for a long time, staring at the slow fire and dreaming. She glanced at the sleeping Heckram and found herself speculating. If she had not seen them hunting together, she would never have guessed that he and the boy were of the same people. The boy had a short, broad build. His thick black hair and yellowed skin reminded her of Kerlew's parentage. But Heckram, while he showed signs of kinship in his high cheekbones and dark eyes, also reminded her of the men of her own people. Blood and people had mixed somewhere. She lay still, smelling their unfamiliar odors. There was the smell of blood, sharp and disturbing, from the boy's injury. But beneath that there were the subtler odors of hides tanned by a different method, of the cheese and fish, and of the man himself.

Inexplicably, he smelled of reindeer. Not the dead odor of meat and hides, but the subtle wild scent that she picked up when she stalked such game. He smelled of living reindeer as her own father had once smelled of his sheep. It was a puzzle. She meant to stay awake and ponder it, but didn't.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Lasse put out a hand and steadied himself for a moment against Heckram.

'I'm out of breath,' he explained.

'Me, too,' Heckram agreed, standing still while the boy panted. 'But there's not far to go now.'

The last hill had been a steep one, but now they stood on the final ridge. The barking of the dogs bounced echoes through the hills, and the wood smoke of the talvsit was a distinct tang in the air. The forested slope below them hid the winter camp with its huts of sod and bark, but they were nearly home.

'And just as well, too,' Heckram muttered to himself. Lasse had not asked for any help, but he walked awkwardly, his injured arm held close to his chest. Usually the boy plowed eagerly through the snow ahead of Heckram. Today he had followed in his wake, taking advantage of the trail he broke, and Heckram had consciously slowed his pace. Now relief lightened Heckram's mood. The brief light of the day was already fading. He was glad they had made it home before dark.

'Just as well ... what?' panted the boy.

'Just as well everyone will be busy at their chores when we come in. Bad enough to come back empty-handed. Worse to come back saying, "Here's the only meat that was shot, and it's not worth eating.'"

Lasse snorted his contempt for the weak joke, and they began to make their way down the hill. They soon intersected one of the many trails that led into the winter encampment, and the going was easier. On the trail the snow was packed, and there were no overhanging branches to duck. They passed a few harkar browsing on the outskirts of the camp. Their ears swiveled toward the men curiously but the deer didn't pause as they nipped the tenderest tips of the naked branches. The rest of the domestic reindeer would be either with the herd grazing up on the hillsides or harnessed to pulkor, journeying south with the traders who sought wool and bronze tools and other supplies.

Elsa was drawing water from the spring as they passed. She straightened with her dripping buckets and called out as she caught sight of them. 'You're back! What kept you? Too much luck, I hope.' Her voice was warm with welcome and relief.

Heckram felt the familiar tightness in his chest, that sense of a duty shirked. It made him brusque. 'Too much luck of the wrong kind. Any news here?'

She shook her head, walking ahead of them as she talked. 'Not much. Wolves got one of Jeffor's vaja last night, so most of the sita has been out hunting today.'

And not you?' Lasse asked. 'Then they won't get much.'

The girl smiled at his compliment. 'Not this time. My mother is not feeling well, so I stayed behind to bring in the water and do the heavier chores. Father went with the hunters.'

'Well, the man who taught you to shoot so well can surely shoot as well himself,'

Lasse observed.

Heckram was silent on the subject. He knew that Kuoljok's eyes were starting to fail him. The same thought must have crossed Elsa's mind, for her face saddened for an instant. But she recovered well, easing her heavy buckets to the ground outside her tent, then straightening with a sigh. Then, as she noticed Lasse's odd posture: 'What's happened to you?' she demanded.

'A mishap,' Heckram said and suddenly did not want to say much about it. 'A strange hunter. She must have been taking aim at the same vaja that Lasse and I were stalking. Lasse stood up with his rope at the same instant that she let fly. The arrow took him through the arm. But he'll be all right. She had some skills as a healer. That's why we were out overnight.'

Elsa nodded and spoke to Lasse. 'Your grandmother was worried, but refused to make a fuss over it. She just said that doubtless you'd had better hunting than you expected and were having a hard time getting it home.'

'I wish,' Lasse snorted.

'This strange hunter? Is there another talvsit close by, then? I've bone needles and antler work I'd like to trade. I tried to send some south with the traders, but they said they'd already packed as big a load as their sleds would carry. Still, another village might -'

Heckram shook his head, but Lasse elaborated. 'No. No talvsit at all. Just a woman and her son living in a skin tent alone. And not even much of a tent at that.'

'Outcasts, perhaps?' Elsa asked, her curiosity piqued.

Heckram shrugged. 'I doubt it. They've a foreign look about them, a strange way of cutting their clothes, and their speech is different. One can barely understand them.'

'Still,' Elsa persisted in wondering. 'How do folk come to be alone like that? There must be some evil in their past... like a plague that destroyed the rest of them, or becoming separated during a river crossing,' she hastened to explain at Heckram's puzzled look.

'The boy has the look of something like that. Did you see how he watched us leave this morning, Heckram? More like a black crow in a tree than a child. Like he knew too much of life to be a child, but wasn't concerned by any of it. He watched us go, but I would swear he didn't see us. It seemed a very strange look for a little boy,' Lasse added, shaking his head.

Elsa's eyes brightened with curiosity.

Heckram shrugged uneasily. 'You're imagining things, Lasse. Let's get you home to Stina. She's been worried about you all this time, and my mother as well. As if we were children out playing late.'

'Not too far off the mark, if you ask me,' Elsa commented lightly, then waved a farewell as she ducked into the domed sod hut with her buckets of water.

The winter camp was quiet as they wended their way between sod and bark shelters to Stina's hut. They passed the meat racks and storage huts of their neighbors. Here were the atti, platforms on four tall legs where frozen sides of reindeer meat were resting. They passed njalla, tall racks set high on a single smooth, slippery pole, the best way to guard food against voracious wolverines. A row of reindeer sledges, turned upside down to keep out the snow, looked much like a row of upended boats, with their keels, sterns, ribs, and bulwarks. There were the covered akja for hauling loads, and the half-covered pulkor for driving. Lasse drew energy from the familiar sights of home. But Heckram found he dreaded seeing Stina.

Every winter the herdfolk returned to the talvsit for a few months of rest. The sod and bark huts were patched, or new ones built by younger couples. Fresh birch twigs were cut and spread on the earth floor and covered with a layer of hides. Down from the storage racks came the sledges and winter skis that had rested there all through the summer while the folk were on the wide tundra, and up on the racks went the summer gear that would not be needed until the spring migration began. Their lives made an elliptical orbit between this winter talvsit and their summer camp at the base of the Cataclysm.

Heckram loved the site of their talvsit. He had visited other ones, when he was but a child on the back of one of his father's harkar, but thought none of them were so well placed as his own. Here were deep fresh springs that never failed, steaming in winter as the cold water gushed out of the ground and made contact with the colder air. The forested hills offered plenty of fuel for the fires and ample birches with their tender twigs for flooring and their knurled bark for the carving of utensils. The snow fell deep on the hillsides, but beneath it were tender lichens of the pine fells, no inedible soggy green moss. The herd wandered, but never far from the camp. The watchful herdfolk guarded their beasts as they pawed deep holes in the snow and shoved their hairy muzzles down to feast on the revealed lichen.

The old woman's winter shelter was on the outskirts of the sita, where she and her husband had built it when their life together was new. Heckram lifted the door flap of Stina's hut and motioned Lasse in. He paused outside to stamp the clinging snow from his boots, then gritted his teeth and ducked in to face Lasse's grandmother.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the sun-bright snow to the fire-lit dimness of the cosy hut. Flames burned cleanly on the stone hearth, the arran, near the center of the hut. Stina knelt nearby, tethered to the center pole of the hut by her belt weaving. She did not deign to notice their entrance, and both stood, feeling awkward.

She was dressed in worn but brightly colored woven garments decorated with the bright ribbon weaving of her own hands. Her deep black eyes flashed at them once from their deep nests of wrinkles. Then she looked away as if they were of no consequence to her. Her thinning black hair was pulled back from her face in a severely neat roll, and her busy hands never paused in their manipulation of the bright fibers she joined. Neat shanks of dyed fibers and grass rested near her, waiting their turn to be worked into the bright pattern. Everywhere was the work of those same tireless hands, in the cheeses and blood sausages that hung from the rafters, in the cheese molds and salt flask woven from grass fibers, and the traveling baskets with their intricately simple patterns. The water buckets stood brimming with fresh water from the spring. Here a roll of shoe grass hung from a rafter, ready to insulate the laced boots her hands stitched. The carved shoe-grass comb near it had been worked by Lasse's father and was older than the boy. The hut smelled of the birch twigs and clean hides, of the fire's heat and the cheeses. It was a homey, welcoming smell, and Lasse sighed as he sank gratefully by the fire.

Stina knotted a bit of the fibers and slowly unfastened the work from her waist. 'So.

You've found your way home, have you? Never mind that someone might have been worrying about you, out hunting two days when you said you'd be back in one.'

The two men looked at each other, and Heckram shrugged at Lasse and whispered,

'You tell her. She's your grandmother.'

But Stina's ears were as keen as ever, and she went on mercilessly, 'Never mind that someone's old grandmother has to fetch her own water, and check her grandson's harke as well as her own. Never mind that she cooked food enough for two last night, and kept it warm far into the night for someone who wasn't coming. Never mind that she must spend an hour looking for the milking scoop that someone had hung up out of sight and reach, and then struggle to milk a vaja that hasn't been trained to stand properly still. Never mind -'

'I got shot.' Lasse's words dropped on the lecture like a load of tree snow on an unsuspecting hunter. 'Heckram, help me get my coat off.'

But before Heckram could move, Stina was there, tugging gently at the sleeve as the tone of her lecture changed abruptly. 'It's just as your mother was saying last night, Heckram, when the poor woman stopped in to see if Lasse had taken supplies for more than one day. "Off they go to hunt, with never a care as to whether we'll see them again!

Off chasing the wild vaja, when they'd both be better off at home, tending to what they already have, yes, and perhaps looking to a future that is not so far away." Oh, but what does a man care when he worries his mother and gives her a night without rest?

Nothing.'

Her tongue stopped for a moment as a tousled Lasse emerged from his coat. She handed the garment to Heckram for him to hang up and knelt by her grandson as if he were a child. 'Well. You may be a bad shot, Heckram, but at least you made a neat job of bandaging it. Here I expected blood and a mess, with a piece of leather strapped over it.

But this is as nice a job as I've seen since Kila the midwife went south with the traders and married there, never to come back to those who needed her, never even thinking of her old uncle left alone. But look at your shirt, boy! Now where am I going to get the wool to mend that, and this your father's own shirt, made for him by your mother's little hands. You've bled all over it! She traded the hides of her own reindeer for that wool, she who could scarcely afford to, and worked into the night by the firelight to weave -'

'Heckram didn't shoot me,' Lasse cut in mercilessly. 'It was a stranger, hunting alone and on her own. And she's the one who bandaged me.'

'Well!' Stina rocked back on her heels, to regard him with wounded anger. 'And never a word of this do you tell to your own grandmother! I suppose the whole sita is buzzing with this tale, and I shall have to hear of my grandson's adventure from that gossip Bror. Well, what am I to expect? What am I, just a worthless old woman, fit only to weave and cook and mend and clean and milk and ...' She added sting to her words as with seeming meekness she turned to the fire, to move a simmering pot from its edge. Turning her back on them, she shuffled with exaggerated care to the wooden trunk to take out bowls and spoons.

'You are the first to hear of it,' Heckram declared hastily. 'But for a word or two to Elsa, just enough to be polite. She knows she'll have to get the gist of the tale from you, while Lasse eats and sleeps. No, thank you.' He shook his head to the proffered bowl.

'Now I must leave, so that Lasse can tell you all of it. I've a mother of my own to return to, and no doubt chores to catch up on.'

'Listen to him! As if Ristin would let her home go to wrack and ruin because her son is gone for a night. It isn't so long, young man, since she was bringing in wolf pelts, and you but a brat in the wood komse hanging from her pack saddle, yes, and bawling so that she had to stuff sweet marrow in your greedy little mouth to keep you quiet. But no, now he's a man, and the only one who has ever hunted or worked, I suppose. Well, Lasse, are you going to tell me of this strange woman who shoots my grandson and then mends him? Or must I wait to hear the tale from Ristin?'

Lasse rolled his eyes at Heckram, but he only grinned as he ducked from the hut. He took a deep lungful of the cold air, grateful that Lasse was in competent hands, and that Stina was not angry with him. Evening had fallen swiftly, and the only light in the sita was that which leaked from the huts. He hurried over the familiar paths between the huts, avoiding sleeping dogs curled before their owners' doors, ducking around the looming storage racks. A figure stepped suddenly from the darkness directly into his path, and Heckram halted abruptly to keep from running into him.

'Sorry,' he murmured as he moved to pass him.

'Of course you are,' drawled the other, and Heckram halted, turning slowly.

'Do you have a problem, Joboam?' he asked with excessive courtesy.

'Only with fools who charge into me in the dark. You're late back from the hunt, I hear. I thought perhaps I'd seen the last of you. But here you are again, no doubt with a fine kill.'

'No doubt,' Heckram said lightly. 'But you're far from your hut this night, Joboam.

Looking for something?'

'Perhaps. Capiam likes to know what goes on in all parts of the talvsit. He knows it is easier to stop trouble before it starts. So, on his behalf, I take an evening stroll, to make sure all is well. Surely you don't object?'

'Why should I? If the dogs run about between the huts by day, why shouldn't Joboam by night?'

'I'm sure Capiam will find your jest very amusing when I report it to him.'

'If he's half the man his father was, he'll find it more than that,' Heckram replied recklessly and pushed past Joboam on the narrow path, not quite touching him. He strode on, his shoulders tightened, wondering if Joboam would jump him from behind.

But all remained silent behind him as he walked on.

He pushed his seething anger down, telling himself he really had no reason to be incensed. So Joboam walked among the huts by night, checking to be sure all was well.

What was there to be concerned about in that? Only his superior attitude as he deigned to walk among the humbler huts. The man was assuming authority to himself. Capiam, as the leader of the herdfolk, should not have to ask others to be sure the sita was secure at night. Had he not legs of his own to walk among his own people? But no, ever since the older Capiam had died last winter, his son had taken himself seriously, acting more like some barbarian tribe chief than the leader of the sita. His spare time was spent in his own hut with his wife and son. If Capiam had to send someone to patrol between the huts at night, then why not send his boy, Rolke? Let him start learning to act like the son of the herdlord, instead of crouching by his mother's hearth all day. She was as wealthy as Capiam himself. She did little sewing or weaving or hunting anymore. Stina had once wondered aloud what the woman did all day, other than berating their daughter, Kari, for her laziness. Yet she herself looked as heavy as a pregnant vaja, while the girl looked starved as an orphaned miesse. Heckram shook his head in distaste. Capiam seemed proud of his wife's girth, as if she were a harke fattening for a winter feast.

'I'd never share a hearth with a woman like that,' Heckram vowed heartily, and was surprised to hear himself speak. What kind of woman, then, would he share a hearth with? That was the next question, and one he'd already banished from home conversations. He detoured to his meat rack with its scanty stores. Climbing up, he took out his knife to carve a generous chunk of meat from one of the haunches there and to lift down a blood sausage as well. He was hungry after the day's effort with no rations to sustain him. So he would eat now, leaving his rack barer than ever, and hope for better luck tomorrow. And what kind of woman, he wondered, would sit at hearth with a man with an empty meat rack? He dashed the thought from his mind with a shake of his head and lifted the door flap of the hut he shared with his mother.

The fire on the arran was nearly out. Ristin knelt by it, feeding it bits of twigs to coax the coals back to flame. For an instant she looked small as a child to Heckram. It was the shadows diminishing her. Not that she was a large person. She had the short, stocky build that most of the herdfolk shared. At times, Heckram felt like a lumbering elk in a herd of reindeer. So had his grandfather been, a big man from the south who came north to trade and never left. Even his hair was pale, Ristin would say, light as the flash of a reindeer's tail. Short and dark herself, she showed no sign of her mixed blood. Only in her son had it come to bloom. She still wore her warm furs, and her bright wool hat covered her hair and cheeks. Her mittens hung from strings at her wrists, baring her hands.

'Just leaving?' he asked, coming in quietly.

Ristin made a startled noise and dropped the piece of wood she held. 'Oh, it's you.

Well, I'm glad you're finally back. No, just coming in. I've been hunting today, but without much luck.'

'Oh. For wolves or sons?'

Ristin shrugged lightly. 'A little of both. I was worried about you, and a new pelt would be nice. So I took my bow down and went out. Why, does that surprise you?'

'Not from a woman who was hunting wolves when I was a brat in a komse with a mouthful of marrow to keep me quiet.'

Ristin laughed quietly. 'Sounds as if you've been talking to Stina. She was worried about Lasse. I'm glad to see it was without cause.'

'Not quite.'

'Oh?' Ristin had been shrugging out of her coat, but she paused, peering out the neck hole like an owl from a tree.

'Nothing serious, but it could have been. A strange hunter, hunting alone, aimed at a vaja and got Lasse instead. Not seriously!' he added hastily as Ristin's face went grave.

'But it might have been. Luckily she was skilled as a healer. She bound up his arm, and gave us shelter for the night in her tent. I ... I said I'd pay for her healing. I'm not sure that she understood me, for she speaks our language poorly. And I know that if Lasse knew of it, he would say it was his debt.'

'But you feel responsible for his injury?' Ristin guessed.

'Somewhat.' Heckram scratched at his ear and the day's growth of stubble on his chin.

'Could you have prevented it?' Ristin pressed.

'No. Probably not. But he is only a boy, in some ways, and Stina trusts me with him. I don't like to have that trust betrayed, even accidentally.' He paused and cleared his throat. 'But that isn't the only reason I want to pay the healer for her work. There was something about her and her son.' He stared into the fire as he shrugged off his outer garments. 'Mother, do you remember the year, several years after the plague, when we lost the two calves at the river crossing, and you decided we couldn't slaughter any of our animals for winter meat?'

Ristin slowly put her coat on its peg, shaking the garment out to air it well. She sank down by the fire to loosen the laces on her boots. Her eyes were distant as she pulled them off and drew out the handfuls of shoe grass that insulated them. She fluffed it out and set it by the fire to dry.

'Do you remember that winter?' Heckram pressed.

She turned to him. 'How would one forget such a time? Your father was gone, we had no fattened autumn reindeer meat, no blood sausage, no marrow bones. Only hare and ptarmigan and fish from the summer catch. The wild reindeer were still decimated from the plague, and what there were of them, the wolves hunted better than I. It was a hard time for us all.'

Heckram shook out his tunic and hung it to air. He turned to her, his face grave. 'Her son eats like I did then. He watches food cook like he's afraid it will leap out of the pot and run away. Their tent is not sewn well, the hides they sleep under are thin. Worse, the knife she has looks like something I might have made back then. I do not think she is the hunter you are, either. Other than winging Lasse, the only meat she had shot was a thin hare.'

'It is not as if we are wealthy ourselves,' Ristin began slowly.

'I know, but —'

'Don't interrupt. But there is much cluttering this place that another might put to better use. I do not know why I keep mittens that are too small for you now. And how many bows can I use at one time ... though if her bow was good enough to down Lasse, perhaps that is something she does not need.'

Heckram chuckled softly. 'I admit I did not notice the condition of her bow. It was the boy I looked at.' As he spoke, he took down the tablo board and turned it over to show its scarred back. Setting the meat atop it, he began to carve it into slices that would cook quickly. He was hungry tonight, hungrier somehow for having met the boy and the healer. 'They were so strange. I wanted to talk to her, to ask her where they had come from and why. She has a look of far places to her and acts as if she doesn't really know how to provide for herself. I am sure she has tales to tell, and I wanted to hear them. But she didn't want to talk. I think she understood more of my words than she let on. But she was fearful, as if talking to me might leave her open to harm. And the boy ...

He was all eyes, and so quiet, staring all the time.'

'Hunger can do that to a boy.' Ristin paused, remembering. 'And being alone can make a woman that cautious. But Heckram ...'

'Yes?'

'The worst of those days, for me, was the pity of those around us. We had the village to help us, and some were kind. I cannot count how many times you were fed by Lasse's father at his tent. Some mornings there was meat on our rack that I knew had not been there the night before. I knew it was done out of kindness, but it was -'

'I know. Some I shall take as payment for Lasse. She also had a bag of herbs there, and seemed to know the mixing of them. It has been long since there was a healer among the herdfolk. I am sure there are medicines that would be useful to us and that she might make. I will leave her pride intact.' He had spitted the meat pieces and now set them to cook over the revived flames. The fat sizzled and his stomach rolled yearningly.

Ristin nodded thoughtfully. 'Sometimes it is all one has left to lean on. You might talk to Elsa as well. She had some bone work and ribbon weaving she wanted the traders to take. She might be willing to trade some of it for something to ease her shoulder when the days are cold and wet. It has never been the same since that fall.

Perhaps you should even take her along when you go to pay the healer. The girl works so hard, and this chance to trade might be a bit of a rest for her. Is it far to the healer's hut?'

'Not by skis. If we had not been on foot, hoping to drag a vaja home alive, Lasse and I would have been home by noon. And now that I know where it is, I should be able to get there in a short time. I will tell Elsa I am going. If she wants to come along, I'm sure she will.'

'You might treat her with a little courtesy.'

'I do. With as much courtesy as I give to Lasse, or Jakke. Or any of my friends.'

'Heckram ...'

'Are you hungry? The meat is nearly ready.'

Ristin noticed the tone of his voice with a sigh. 'Yes. But I'll remind you once more that you aren't getting any younger. Nor I.'

'Nor Elsa. I know. But I won't have a hungry child at my hearth, mother. I won't look for a wife until I am sure I can care for one.'

'If you wait until you're ready, you'll never be wed.'

'Mother.'

Silence fell. Heckram drew the still sizzling meat from the flames, portioning it into the wooden trenchers his mother set beside him. She brought juobmo as well, sour milk preserved in a small keg and flavored with sorrel leaves. With cheese and blood sausage, it made a pleasant meal, although it was a quiet one. The meat was more flavorful than tender. Heckram chewed the fine-grained chunks, watching the fire and thinking. After the dishes had been cleared away, Ristin took up a half-finished basket.

She seemed to give much thought to which fibers to choose and then abruptly set it aside. She stared at him until he lifted his eyes to meet hers. She spoke softly.

'Heckram. Your father and I ... we never intended to have a hungry child at our hearth.'

He shrank at the pain in her voice, 'I know that,' he said gently, 'I did not mean my words as a rebuke to you.'

But she spoke on relentlessly. 'We never expected the plague, and I never thought to lose him while you were just a boy. But for all that, Heckram, even knowing all that was to come, I would do it again. I'd take him as husband again.'

A small silence was planted in the hut and grew. Ristin took up her belt weaving and knelt to fasten it to the center pole. Drawing it out taut, she knelt and took up colored root fibers for the pattern, some stained red from alder bark, some yellow from wild onion. She sorted out a handful.

'When I feel that way about Elsa,' Heckram offered, 'I'll ask her. But only when I feel that way.'

Ristin looked up from her work, holding her son with her eyes for a long moment.

Then she slowly nodded. 'That's fair,' she said softly as her head bent over her work again. 'That's fair to both of you. But let us hope she still feels that way about you when you get around to asking her.'

CHAPTER EIGHT

The ptarmigan were small. She hefted them by their feathered feet, studying the scarlet eyefeathers that had betrayed them. But for that shot of color, she would never have seen them in the willow thicket. But even two of them weren't much more meat than a hare. Well, she would be able to skin them carefully and keep the feathered skins. And their succulent flesh would be a welcome change from all the hares they had eaten lately. She would spit one and cook it over the fire, and stew up the other with herbs and lichen to thicken and flavor the broth. Two dishes might make Kerlew feel as if there were more to eat.

The long shadows of the trees crossed her trail in a bluish network against the snow.

Evening was seeping up the hillside, rising about her as if darkness began in the hollows and shadowed places of the land and welled up to meet the night. Already the brightest stars were beginning to show in the deep blue of the sky. The sun itself had but peeped over the horizon today and sidled along the skyline. Soon it would dip out of sight again. She'd best hurry.

Tillu ducked under a branch, careful not to disturb its load of snow. She moved silently, always watching for that flicker of movement that might give her one more target for her bow. She was getting better with it. She grinned to herself; soon she'd have as much skill as one of the children in Benu's band. But the landscape around her was still. The slowly encroaching twilight was darkening the green of the pine boughs into near black, merging the ranked tree trunks to either side of her trail into a curtain of grayish bark and shadowed snow. Perhaps if she had not wasted so much time watching the herd of reindeer and trying to think of a way to kill one. Her mind swung back to that challenge. She had already proved that her crude arrows from her flimsy bow did no more than bounce off the animals' thick hides. All she had accomplished was spooking them. A flung spear would do no better, for she hadn't the skills to make a good one. And even in the deep snow, the reindeer would easily flounder away from her before she could get close enough to use a jabbing spear. But there had to be a way, and she would discover it soon.

She tried not to think of the long nights of winter that still remained. She should remember that the darkest part of the cold time was behind her now, and they were still both alive. She sighed lightly, promising herself that things would get better. Look how Kerlew was changing. In the three days since the strangers had stayed with them, the boy had turned out twelve spoons. True, some were cruder than others, but each one seemed improved. And, in typical Kerlew fashion, now that he was confident of one implement, he was not inclined to try to carve anything else. She would let him enjoy his success for a while, and then persuade him to try something new. The point was, they were surviving, and Kerlew was growing. She wouldn't worry any further than that. Tillu crested the last rise and started down into the sheltered dell that held her home.

The strange tracks cut across her path, the twin lines of them looking almost blue against the snow in the evening shadows. Tillu froze, looking up and down the line of the trail's passage, but seeing nothing. They vanished into the snow-mantled trees, with no sign of what had made them.

She crouched down to study the track, to touch its clean edge with her mittened hand. She had seen nothing like these before. The tracks were long and narrow and continuous, almost as if a man had dragged something long and narrow through the snow. But there were no footprints beside them. Indistinct dents in the snow alongside the long narrow tracks at irregular intervals puzzled her. Nothing about them resembled the footprints of any creature she knew. She strained her ears, but heard nothing. She couldn't even tell if the mysterious tracks were going or coming. But as she continued on her way home, she found her tracks paralleling them. As it became more and more obvious that her tent was either their destination or source, she hurried.

She was panting when she arrived at the clearing. Her eyes followed the strange trail right up to the edge of the beaten snow that surrounded her tent. She approached cautiously, heart thumping and ears straining. Four long, narrow planks of wood with strange leather fixtures rested on the snow outside her tent. The tips of the planks had been warped up at one end. Four staves stood in the snow beside them. Tillu had never seen anything like them. Muffled voices came from within the tent, Kerlew's piping one and the deeper voice of the stranger. Worry squeezed her stomach as she ducked into the tent.

Within, the fire burned merrily, casting its dancing shadows on the skin walls.

Kerlew, his finished spoons in a row before him, crouched on his heels, busily explaining to a nodding Heckram exactly how each had been made. Another stranger, not near as tall as Heckram, stood by the entrance, looking down on the boy with a strange expression on her face.

The woman turned to Tillu as she entered, regarding her with wide black eyes above high cheekbones. Her fine lips parted in an uncertain smile. Her hair, shining black, had been coiled around her head under a bright cap of yellow and red knotted wool.

Tillu could only stare, feeling a strange ache of homesickness such as she had not experienced since Kerlew's birth. Over the years she had grown accustomed to seeing folks in clothing of leather or fur, skillfully designed and sewn, functional, sturdy clothing. Such did this woman wear, also. But at the cuffs and hems and throat, on the band of her hat above her eyes, everywhere there was room for it, her garments were decorated with woven bands of brightly colored fiber and wool interspersed with strips of fur. Beads of glowing yellow amber, of white and brown bone and horn, clicked against each other when she moved. The bright ornamentation woke in Tillu a sudden sharp hunger for a settled life, for villages where crops grew and domestic animals grazed, where a man or woman might spend a few moments of the day in doing more than simply surviving. She remembered her parents in the evening, her mother weaving something for the beauty of the blending colors, her father carving and painting useful objects to transform them into art. For a world she had long believed lay so far to the south of her that she would never again see it, her eyes stung.

'Heckram,' the woman said softly, and he turned on his heels, to nod easily to Tillu.

'Good spoons!' he said by way of greeting, and Kerlew turned a pride-flushed face to his mother.

'They came while you were gone, to pay for your healing the arrow-shot man.'

Kerlew's explanation limped along in his usual halting way. 'I've been showing him the spoons I made. He likes the goose one best.'

Kerlew waved the ladle at her as he spoke. This was his latest creation, with the long curving handle possessing two knots and a stub at the end that suggested a goose's eyes and bill at the end of its long neck.

'Tillu the healer,' Heckram said. 'Elsa my friend.'

Tillu nodded to the introduction, not moving. She had not expected him to return and pay her. Their village must be closer than she thought. She covered her confusion by unloading the game bag from her waist and hanging her bow and quiver from its hook.

'Lasse is better?' she asked as she turned back.

'Much better.' Heckram's teeth were very white in his wind-bronzed face.

'Good. Good.' Her profession came to the forefront, rescuing them both from awkwardness as she asked, 'New bandage? Swell, bleed, hot?'

'New bandage,' he assured her. 'Wound closed. Arm moves, little pain.'

'Good, good.' She bobbed her head like a courting duck.

'You sound like you're talking to a baby,' Kerlew said in disgust.

Heckram caught the gist of his words, for he laughed as he replied, 'Makes easy to understand.'

And you, don't be rude. It's better to be quiet and learn manners when you are young,' Tillu suggested firmly.

Kerlew hung his head and retreated. Heckram hid a grin at the familiar rebuke. Even if he had not been able to decipher most of Tillu's words, he would have known what she said. It was a rebuke he had often heard himself when a child. Tillu sensed that he shielded the boy from further scolding with a change of subject.

'Pay healing,' he said to Tillu. He gestured to a hide that had been rolled into a pack.

Stooping, he unfastened the knots of sinew and unrolled it, revealing various smaller bundles within. Their wrappings were cloth of woven fiber, some dyed in bright colors.

He tapped each as he spoke. 'Fish. Cheese. Reindeer.' He paused and looked up at her as if asking her to make her choice. Perhaps he wanted her to choose what she would take for the healing. She didn't hesitate. She and Kerlew both had a permanent craving for fat of any kind.

'Cheese.' She smiled as she copied his inflection, remembering his word for it from the last time he had been here.

'Cheese,' he agreed uncertainly, trying to understand why she had repeated it. Then he shrugged, rolled up the hide with its smaller packages, and offered it to her.

'All?' she asked, stunned by the size of the offering.

'For Lasse,' he explained.

'Too much,' she refused quickly.

He shrugged innocently at her words, but she was suddenly certain that he was pretending not to understand her. 'For Lasse,' he repeated slowly. 'You healed him. I pay.' He kept his eyes from hers as he set the bundle down on her pallet.

Tillu hesitated, but Kerlew's eyes were on her with mute appeal in them. 'Thank you,'

she said stiffly, but Heckram grinned at the boy as if they shared a secret. All stood about silently for an awkward moment.

Then Elsa spoke. 'I come, trade?'

'Trade?' Tillu asked, puzzled. She had not expected the woman to speak. Was not this Heckram's woman? She glanced toward Heckram to see his reaction. She was accustomed to men handling all such negotiations. But Heckram seemed engrossed in some talk with Kerlew.

'Old hurt.' Elsa was not paying the least attention to her man. Tillu turned back to her words. 'Fall into river, hit rock. Long time ago.' The young woman put a hand to the small of her back, then to her shoulder, miming pain.

'Cold, wet day? Swell?' Tillu asked.

Elsa nodded quickly at each of Tillu's questions. Tillu pointed to her knuckles and wrist. 'Swell, hurt here, also?'

'No.' Again she touched the small of her back, and her shoulder. 'Only shoulder, only back. Fall down, long time ago.'

'Elsa work hard? Lift heavy loads?'

Elsa laughed ruefully. 'Yes. Elsa herdwoman. Hard work, heavy loads.'

Tillu nodded back. 'Tillu see?'

Elsa nodded and bent to draw her heavy skin tunic off over her head. She glanced once at Heckram and the boy, and then turned her back on them to pull off her undershirt of woven wool. Stepping to her side, Tillu ran a careful hand over the shoulder. There was no indication of an injury. She hesitated, then pressed gently and finally probed at the joint. A smooth layer of muscle coated the young woman's back.

Lift heavy loads? Tillu didn't doubt it. Her diminutive size was belied by the musculature of her shoulders and back.

'Not hurt now,' she reminded Tillu as the healer manipulated the shoulder. 'Only cold wet days. Then ache, stiff.'

Tillu nodded, satisfied. This was a thing she had seen before, and often. Her mind was working swiftly. She had some herbs that would make a tea for that kind of pain.

She had others that would work even better if they were blended with fat into a greasy ointment. But fat was something she didn't have.

She made a sign to them to wait and went to the back of the tent for her medicine box. Elsa pulled her shirt back on as Tillu mixed the herbs and placed them into a pouch of dried intestine. 'Mix a little of these with hot water and let them soak, oh, just until the leaves are soft. Then drink, but only one cup, no more. Too much can be bad.' Tillu suddenly realized that she was making no effort to make herself easily understood. She glanced up, but Elsa was nodding, seeming to understand the directions. 'You have bear grease? Wolf fat? Glutton fat?' she asked her.

Elsa nodded slowly, looking puzzled.

'You bring some. I make medicine to rub on. Better kind, help more. Put where it hurts only. Understand?'

'Next time,' Elsa suggested, and Tillu nodded. Next time. So there would be a next time, with people coming and going. Perhaps that was a good thing. Elsa seemed kind, and Heckram did not cuff Kerlew and push him aside. Perhaps it would work out, this limited contact.

'You take for medicine?' Elsa asked. She was offering a piece of carved horn, incised with figures painted red and black and blue. She didn't look to Heckram for permission before offering the trade. If a woman had behaved so in Benu's group, her man would have beaten her for her forwardness. But Heckram was not paying attention to them.

Tillu took the horn slowly and turned it over in her hands.

'Open here. See?' Elsa took it back, to pull off the fitted cap. She spilled three bone needles into her hand. They were new and sharp, made by skilled hands. Tillu nodded in appreciation, and reached to touch one shyly. Elsa smiled. 'I make them, and case.

My father, no sons. Teach me to carve instead. Now he says I am better than most men at carving. I makes knives, needles, arrowheads, harness rings. Mine are not just strong.

Mine are pretty.'

Elsa recapped the carved needle case and offered it back to her. Tillu took it cautiously, to examine the carved and painted surface. The tiny decorations pleased her more than the new needles inside. After a moment, she remembered her guests.

'You stay, eat?' Tillu offered.

Heckram shook his head as he rose from where he and Kerlew had been conferring.

'Dark nearly here. Hurry back to talvsit. You come talvsit, sometime? People welcome healer, much work for healer. You come, sometime?'

'Sometime, maybe,' Tillu agreed slowly as Kerlew bounced in excitement at the prospect. She followed them to the door of the tent, watching in consternation as they strapped the long flat pieces of wood to their feet and took up their staves.

'Skis,' Heckram explained, smiling at her confusion. 'Go over snow fast, not sink.

You, skis?'

Tillu shook her head, eyes wide.

Heckram grinned at her. 'You come talvsit, I teach you. Teach Kerlew, too. Good way to hunt, on skis. Go fast, quiet. You come to talvsit, visit, learn skis. Maybe tell about your people, your lands?'

The request and offer took Tillu by surprise and she found herself flushing in confusion. Heckram smiled down at her and nodded assurance at Kerlew, who was capering with excitement.

Elsa settled her hat firmly on her head and glanced at Heckram with annoyance.

'Time to go,' she suggested, a trace of irritation in her voice.

'I'm glad you came,' Tillu said awkwardly, wondering if she had somehow offended the woman. But Elsa's smile seemed warm as she promised, 'Next time, bear grease.'

With a wave of her hand she pushed off, sliding her feet in long steps as she coasted over the top of the snow. Tillu marveled at this strange method of traveling. There was no denying it was swift. Already Elsa had reached the base of the trees and was starting easily up the hill. Tillu expected her to have to struggle to ascend, but Elsa leaned into the walk. It looked so easy.

'You come talvsit, soon,' Heckram suggested as he pushed off to follow the woman.

His leg muscles worked and the skis carried him forward effortlessly. Tillu watched him go. With his longer stride he would catch up with Elsa easily. She must have known that, for she showed no sign of waiting for him. Still, it was strange to hear a woman announce it was time to go, and stranger still to see a man follow her. Kerlew peered from the tent flap after them.

'Skis,' Tillu told him, pointing after them. 'Would you like to do that?'

'Someday I will. See my knife?' He held up a bone knife in a sheath of woven fiber.

As Tillu reached for it, he pulled it close to him. He drew the blade from the sheath and flourished it dangerously near his own face, not letting her touch it.

'Where did you get that? Did the man forget it?' she asked, hoping Kerlew had not somehow stolen it.

'He didn't forget it. He wanted the goose spoon, so we traded.' Kerlew spun away from her touch, eluding her. 'Now I am a man indeed!'

'A knife does not make a man!' Tillu scoffed. 'Let me see it.'

'Look, but do not touch,' Kerlew told her with tolerant pride. 'Carp told me to never let a woman touch my own tools. A shaman can hide his strength in his tools. I put good luck in the goose spoon for Heckram.'

'Carp!' Tillu snorted, but put her hands down.

He held the blade steady for her inspection. It was a fine piece of work, with the handle wrapped in a leather thong to keep the grip from slipping. Away from the cutting edge, decorative lines had been etched shallowly into the blade and stained black. It was worth far more than a crudely carved spoon and Tillu chewed at her lip, pondering. What made Heckram treat Kerlew so kindly and pay her so generously for the simple healing of Lasse? She could not understand it. It made her uneasy. 'I shall find a way to make it even with them, when next they come,' she promised herself softly.

'She will not come again.' Kerlew spoke in a voice that was next to a whisper, but deeper. He stood suddenly still, staring up the hillside. The point of his new knife touched the base of his throat.

The two skiers had appeared on a bare shoulder of the hillside, limned against the darkening sky. Colors had fled from the earth, taking refuge in the sky on the horizon.

Branches and trunks of trees had turned black against the pale snow. The people on the crest of the hill were no more than dark shapes against the violet streak on the horizon.

'She has to come back, to bring the bear grease so I can make the ointment for her shoulder,' Tillu pointed out. 'Move out of the way and let me back in the tent. It's getting cold out here.'

'She will not come back, for he is going to kill her. Even now the blackness swallows her down, and she is gone.'

A chill not from cold racked Tillu's body. Kerlew stood in the entrance of the tent, the knife held before him like a finger pointing at the far figures at the top of the hill. His eyes were full of the setting sun and the violet light made his face look like a corpse's.

Tillu could not keep herself from following his gaze. The woman's form went over the crest of the hill, appearing to sink into blackness. The sunset splashed the surrounding snow with spreading pink and shadowed purples. As Tillu watched, the figure of the man plunged after her. A chill wind rattled branches, dropping plops of snow like irregular footsteps. She started at the sound. When she glanced back to Kerlew, he smiled up at her ingenuously.

'Let's eat all that food tonight!' he suggested happily and vanished into the tent, his treasured knife waving in his clutched fist. * * * 'Wait!' Heckram called. Elsa had cut across the smooth face of the snow on the downside of the hill and was nearly out of sight in a thicket of willow. He gave a final glance at the lonely tent with the woman and boy standing before it, then pushed off to follow her. She was right to hurry, with the sun setting and the light changing, but he suspected she was feeling playful as well.

They had always competed as children, on foot, on their skis, or in their pulkors as they raced over the snow in winter, shouting wild encouragement to the bounding harkar that pulled them. As a youth, Heckram had strained to stretch his wolf hides tighter as they dried, so they might appear larger than those of his slender young neighbor. In summer they had compared strings of fish and each measured their new calves against the other's to see whose reindeer prospered most. Elsa was a strong herdfolk woman, competent and independent. But he had enjoyed her challenges more when they were younger.

'Wait,' he called again, and she gave in, sinking her poles at the sides of her skis as she paused.

A sting of evening wind kissed Heckram's cheeks as he caught up with her. The same wind, and effort, had reddened Elsa's cheeks. Some of her thick hair had escaped from her bright cap. She shook her hands free of their mittens and tucked it back in. She had dark, liquid eyes that flashed like those of a proud little vaja. She pulled her fingers from her cap, but her hair snagged on them and spilled out worse than ever. Heckram grinned as she ruthlessly stuffed it back.

'Why not just let it hang out?' he asked as she struggled with it.

And spend all evening picking the snarls out of it? No, thank you. Why didn't you tell me about the boy?'

'I did. I'm sure I did. I told you the healer had a son.'

'That's not what I mean. Why didn't you tell me how strange he was? Lasse said something about it, but when you said he had imagined it, I believed you. But when we first went in there, before his mother came ... brrr. It was all I could do to keep from turning around and leaving. The way he looked at us!'

'He's just a boy,' Heckram snorted, feeling more annoyed than her remarks merited.

'Lonely, probably, and a bit hungry all the time.'

Elsa dropped her hands from her hat and began pulling her mittens back on. 'You actually believe that, don't you? I guess you haven't been around children that much.

That boy is ... well, he isn't like other children. Look how he behaved when we first got there.'

'I don't know what you mean.'

Elsa shook her head at him. Taking a firm grip on her poles, she pushed off, Heckram following behind her and slightly to one side. 'When traders from the south come to the talvsit, what do the children do?' The rhythm of her words matched the rhythm of her pumping arms as she chose their trail through the woods.

'They rush out, chattering like magpies, making the dogs bark and pester them with a thousand questions,' Heckram replied grumpily. He felt as if she were lecturing him and he didn't enjoy it.

'That's right. But what did that boy do when strangers came? He didn't even come out of the tent, although he must have heard us talking outside. Not until you shouted to ask if anyone was home. Then he came silently to the tent flap and let us in, and sat down by the fire and invited us to sit, as if we had come all that way just to see him. He didn't run to find his mother, or call for her, or even mention her until you asked where she was. And the way he showed those spoons he had carved, as if they were some kind of treasure. You know that spoon you took wasn't worth the knife you gave him. I wonder that his mother allowed it.'

'I doubt that she even knows of it yet. It was just between Kerlew and me. And it wasn't the spoons he was showing me, so much as that he had learned from what I showed him last time. As to his manners ... Elsa, they aren't herdfolk. They're bound to have different customs. Perhaps among his people it is unseemly for children to be noisy. And I suppose, living alone as they do, he has learned to behave older than his years.'

'That's not it at all.' Now her voice was mirroring his annoyance. 'That boy is not right. He's ... well, not a half-wit, but only a step from it. Listen to how he talks!'

'He doesn't speak our language!' Heckram put in irritably.

'Even when he speaks to his mother in their own language, he sounds like he doesn't speak the language! Why are you getting so upset? You act as if I were criticizing Lasse or your mother! He's just the healer's boy.'

'Because I ... I don't know. Because, maybe, he is a bit different. As I was a bit different, with no father to teach me a man's skills. My mother hunted and herded and fished and wove, and I worked alongside her where I could. But there was always that secret worry for me: What if something happened to her? And always the knowledge that our life was different from those around us, in ways they could never understand.'

Elsa had gradually slowed, as Heckram's words and pace had picked up. She was alongside him now, staring curiously at him. He clenched his jaws tight against any more words, feeling embarrassed that he had said so much. And angry. Angry at the past for the way it had been. He could not go back and change how it had been for himself. The most he could do was change how it was for Kerlew now. He glanced across at Elsa.

'There's no talking to you, is there?' she observed. 'A person can't say a word to you without your taking it personally. Is everyone supposed to tiptoe around your feelings?

I'm the one who should be hurt. That knife you so casually traded for a crooked spoon is the one I made for you. Remember? At the last herd sorting, I borrowed one of yours to mark a calf after mine broke. And then I broke yours, too. So I had to make two new knives, and I gave the best one to you. But look at me. Am I carrying on about it as if I am insulted because you traded it away? No. But I make one little comment, and you are mortally offended. Over such a silly thing. And Heckram, you were nothing like that boy, and you know it. As well as I know it. I was around when you were a boy, remember? And you were never as strange as that Kerlew. But if you want to carry on about someone else's child, it's your business. I won't stop you. All I was trying to say is that he's not normal. But you'll find that out for yourself soon enough. I don't know how Lasse can bear to hunt with you. Everything has to be so grim with you!'

He let her talk on, hunching his shoulders to her words. He felt shamed that he had traded away her gift knife without even remembering it. She did have a right to feel insulted. But he would rather that she be insulted than that she scold him like a thoughtless child. He should never have told her he was going to see the healer. But, as the old tale went, in trying to please everyone he had pleased no one. He was sure his mother would soon hear about how unsociable he had been.

He glanced across at the girl. Her cheeks and nose were flushed with more than cold.

He supposed he had offended her, and she was only saying he hadn't to save his feelings. But that was even worse. With an effort, he changed the subject and asked,

'How is that calf doing? The orphaned one you were hand-feeding?'

'It died,' she said coldly. 'Nearly a month ago. As I'm sure I mentioned to you at the time.'

'That's right,' he hastily amended. 'So you did. Well. That shows you how well my mind is working lately. I've had so much to think on, I can't seem to keep my thoughts together. Even Lasse scolds me about it. I just -'

Elsa abruptly jammed her poles into the snow, halting herself. With an effort, Heckram checked his own skis and looked back at her. He was astonished. She was crying.

'I'm sorry I forgot about the calf,' he said, feeling ashamed of his thoughtlessness and baffled by her response to it. Had one calf become so important in her life?

'You are an idiot. You and that boy make a fine pair. I really do believe you don't know anything of what goes on with the people of the herd. All you think of is the reindeer and hunting, and dragging animals back to cut your mark in their ears. Did you know Joboam has said that he will marry me?'

After a moment, Heckram shut his jaw with a snap. His head reeled with contradictory thoughts. 'He's a very wealthy man,' he observed, addressing his remarks to a nearby pine tree.

'Yes. And he smells like an ungutted carcass and has the manners of a wolverine, and I wouldn't have him near me if he were the son of the herdlord. Which he seems to think he is, even if Capiam has a son of his own who will inherit that position. But he comes around, and comes around, and comes around, following me about like a dog follows a bitch in heat. And he gives my mother and father gifts they cannot refuse for fear of offending him, gifts of things I know they need, but I cannot supply for them.

Things I cannot hope to pay back for. He sits by our arran late into the evening, and if I go outside into the night to be alone, he follows me. If I say I am going to visit, he says he will go with me. He will not let me avoid him. Even when I say I will not hunt with him because I prefer to hunt alone, he follows me at a distance. I know he does, even if my father thinks I am silly. He has already told Capiam that I am going to marry him in the spring by the Cataclysm. I heard from Marta that Capiam was pleased and said that there would be a fine celebration, with many gifts for us. I feel like I am being swept down a river current, with nothing to grasp at.'

'Tell him no,' Heckram suggested harshly. He felt he was suffocating, as if he were a salmon with the mesh of the net lifting him from the rushing water. The urgency of his mother's matchmaking was no longer remotely humorous. Why hadn't she spoken honestly to him of Elsa's dilemma? Anger seethed through him. Who was Joboam, that all should fear to offend him?

'I did tell him no. He told me to think again. He laughed and told my father that young girls didn't know what was in their own best interest, but that if I thought on it, I would change my heart. I don't want to offend him, but -'

'Why not offend him?' Heckram demanded. 'Surely he is just a herdman, like any one of us? He has no right to force his attentions on you. Is he of the herdfolk, or is he some forest savage who must steal a wife to find one?'

'But what reason can I give him? What can I say to him?'

'Say "I don't like you. Go away and stop bothering me."' He tried to make the words sound like a jest, but the eyes she turned on him were swimming with tears.

'Heckram ... times have changed. Don't you see that? Joboam has many reindeer, and his rack is always heavy with furs and meat and hides. My parents bore me late. They are getting old. My mother seems always sick, and my father's eyes ... I cannot hunt and herd for three. And' - she paused. 'Joboam frightens me. When he says that girls do not know what is in their own best interest, his eyes are ... dangerous. He does not look at me like a man looks at a woman. He looks at me as I look at a harke who must be broken to packing. I do not ask the harke what it prefers, because that has no bearing on what will be. I do not think Joboam cares what I prefer. I think he believes I will marry him in the spring.'

'Why do you tell me?'

It came out harsher than he meant it to. She turned her face from him and he saw her stiffen. Cursing their mothers and their wagging tongues, he maneuvered his skis to where he could reach and touch her shoulders. She turned to him abruptly and he embraced her awkwardly. Little Elsa. Not even as tall as Lasse. Childhood friend. A good-hearted, sturdy woman, independent and skilled, capable of taking care of herself.

But that was no longer enough. Her responsibilities were more than she could shoulder, through no fault of her own. He remembered, vaguely, her two older brothers. They had been close to his own age, and as small as Elsa. They had not survived the Plague Summer. He patted her awkwardly and felt her shoulders shake once in a great sob.

'It's going to be all right,' he told her. Knowing it wouldn't. Instead of one woman taking the responsibilities of a family of three, it would be the two of them taking the responsibilities of two households. His own mother was starting to feel her years. Or three households. He supposed they would have to have a tent of their own, and their own string of harkar. Their own cooking utensils and bedding, their own pulkor and meat rack.

He reined his mind viciously from the list. 'I'll speak to Joboam. I'll tell him we have an understanding. That will put an end to him bothering you.'

'I can't ask you to do that!'

'You don't have to. I'm asking you, aren't I? To join with me,' he pointed out gently.

Relief made her tears break out anew. She put her face against his chest and leaned on him heavily. The top of her head did not even reach his chin. 'You say so little. I had begun to think you did not care, would never speak. My mother kept saying not to worry, that you were like your father. Shy. But I was so afraid. I love you, Heckram. I'll be a good wife to you.'

Hampered by the skis and their heavy winter clothing, he patted her back awkwardly. 'You're a good woman, Elsa,' he said, carefully choosing honest words.

'Joboam doesn't deserve a woman like you.' And she deserves more than carefully truthful compliments, he told himself. He tried to find more he could give her. 'I'll be a good husband to you.' He felt the words bind him as he spoke them, and his heart sank beneath them.

'Will you come to my tent tonight?' she asked softly. It was not an unusual question for a woman of the herdfolk. With or without the assumption of marriage, she was free to invite him. Nor was it the first time she had let him know he would be welcome there. But he felt the question like a wolf feels the thud of the second arrow.

'No,' he said quickly. And then, more gently: 'In our own tent, when I have traded for the hides and you have sewn them. Then we will be together, as is fitting.'

'You never used to mind,' she teased him gently, her face against his chest still.

'Mossy hillside or grassy meadow, it was all one to you. Even in the snow that time.

Remember?' She turned bright eyes up to him, challenging him playfully. But she found him staring up at the sky as it darkened over the forested hillsides. His mouth was solemn.

'Heckram?' she asked gently.

'Bror has been wanting me to help him make a new pulkor. I've been telling him that I was too busy hunting. But, perhaps if I agree, he will trade me tent hides for the work.'

He glanced down to find her eyes uncertain. 'Don't worry,' he assured her quickly. 'I'll find ways to get the things we will need. You won't lack what you need, Elsa.' In the gathering darkness, he stooped to kiss her carefully. Her arms went quickly around his neck, holding his face close to hers as her kiss became warmer. Her weight dragged at him, and his back bent as under a burden.

KERLEW: THE POUCH

So Tillu had gone hunting without him. Good. He didn't care. A shaman didn't need to know how to hunt. A shaman had better things to do with his time. He didn't really care if he never learned how to hunt. She could keep her secrets and he would keep his.

Kerlew sat down carefully by the fire, his pouch beside him. He poked at the fire with a narrow willow wand. The peeled stick gleamed white against his sooty hands.

He held the tip of it in the coals, watched it blacken and then suddenly flare alight. He lifted it carefully and held it as he would hold a flower with a long stem. He smiled upon it lovingly. It was short and fat if he held the stick still, long and thin if he moved it. He stopped moving it and there was the short fat flame again. Now he gently waved it, and it was long and thin. After a long time, he remembered that there was more to this game than the flame on the tip of the wand. He stared into the flame, opening his eyes wide to the light as the old shaman had taught him. He blinked involuntarily against the light, and started at what he saw with his eyes closed. He closed them again and stared. Pale wolf eyes inside his eyelids. Wolf looking into him as he looked out.

Wolf watching, coming to him? He shivered deliciously and opened his eyes to the flame again. The bright, yellow, dancing flame. He brought it close to his face until he felt the heat of the tiny flame against his lips. He stared deep into the flame. 'Carp?' he whispered questioningly.

In an instant the flame was gone, leaving only a thin streamer of spiraling smoke.

Kerlew sighed. 'He's still angry at me.' He threw the stick onto the fire. 'He's still angry at me,' he repeated dismally. 'For going up instead of down.' He stared into the fire for a long time. His stomach felt heavy and his throat felt tight and sore. 'Mother!' he called out. Tillu, I think I'm getting sick. Tillu!' Then he remembered she wasn't there. She had gone hunting and left him here alone, and Carp was angry with him.

He sighed again and rubbed at his face. He wished the stranger man, the spoon man, would come again. He liked how big he was, and how he didn't hit. And he smiled at Kerlew. Usually the ones that didn't hit didn't look at him either. He pursed his lips and squinched his eyes, straining to group the ones who didn't hit but did smile at him.

There was ... the spoon man and ... Carp. He smiled. It was the first time he had put them together in his mind, and it pleased him. The spoon man and Carp. Too bad Tillu didn't like them.

Tillu. The fire. He looked at it in sudden trepidation. As he feared, it was burning low. He scrabbled to his feet and hurried to the woodpile by the door. He brought back an armload and let it crash down onto the coals. The fire sizzled and sparks leaped out onto the bare earth around the hearth. Steam and smoke rose as the new wood began to catch fire.

Smoke. If only he had gone down instead of up with the smoke. If he had gone down, he would have a spirit brother now. And Carp would be with him, and he would be a powerful shaman. If he had gone down instead of up, he wouldn't have to tend the fire. All people would respect him, as they respected Carp. They would bring him tongues and livers, gifts of soft furs and new tools. No one would ever hit him again. And if they did? His yellow eyes narrowed. Then he would curse them, would take their hunting luck, would make their women die in childbirth, would make their meat spoil and their children sicken. Yes! Then they would know Kerlew the shaman, would know his power and treat him well. Even his mother would hurry to build up his fire for him, to bring him the best of her kills. Not that she often brought home good kills. Usually it was rabbit or squirrel, little red-meat animals with thin hides. Kerlew liked meat that was edged with white fat, big pieces of meat he could grip with both hands when he ate. He held up his hands, pretending to grip a big piece of meat, and grinned. When he was shaman, he would eat big pieces of meat and wipe his greasy hands on his hair to make it shine. Carp did that. Carp. Carp was angry.

The thought sobered him and the smile faded from his face. His hands fell into his lap and he stared once more into the flames. Maybe he should try to see Carp in a flame on a willow wand ... No, he had already tried that. What else?

He reached for his pouch and untied the strip of leather that held the mouth shut.

Then he put his nose and mouth against the opening and breathed deeply. He liked the smell of the pouch. It smelled of tanned leather and his mother's herbs. For a while he amused himself by taking a deep breath of the delicious smell and watching the leather sack go flat. When he breathed out, the sack would puff up like a fat little rabbit. It was very funny. He giggled into the sack; it sounded different from when he giggled out loud. It made him laugh even more. Finally, when his stomach hurt from laughing, he took the sack away from his nose and mouth. He reached in carefully.

It was important to touch only one item at a time, and to take them out in the order he touched them. Carp said so. He touched the knife first. It seemed he always touched the knife first. It was biggest. Maybe Knife-spirit was trying to tell him something. He took it slowly out of the bag.

The knife pleased him. It was a very good knife. Much better than the one his mother had, and he knew she wished she could use his knife. And it was the first tool anyone had given him. When he had offered the spoon man the special spoon with the good luck in it, the spoon man had seen what a special thing it was. That was why he had given him such a fine knife.

Kerlew drew the knife from the woven sheath. There were reindeer on the knife. One was running, with its head thrown back so far that its antlers touched its rump.

Another, near the handle, grazed with a calf at its side. That one had no antlers.

Between the reindeer, there were swirling designs, that reminded Kerlew of the stars he had climbed. This reindeer knife was very important. Not only did it have the spirit of the animals he had seen in his first shamanic journey, it was carved from the bone of that animal. He turned it in his hand, gripped it with a tight fist and flourished it aloft.

Such a knife! Holding it was almost like touching Reindeer between the eyes. The Knife had a strong spirit of its own. To show his respect, Kerlew pointed it toward the flames and sang to it: softly for a long time. Then he resheathed it and set it beside him.

He reached into the bag again, wondering what would be next. His reaching fingers brushed a smooth, cool surface. The red stone. He pulled it from the bag and considered it. He wondered if it was still angry at him, too. He rubbed it with his hands until it felt warm. The time Tillu had thrown it into the snow, it had been very cold and angry when he found it. Now it did not seem so angry. He held it between his palms and sang to it. It was an important talisman, and he didn't like it to be angry with him. The Blood Stone, Carp called it. Carp had shown him how to find it. It was the first sign of his power. That first day ... Kerlew's brow wrinkled as he reached for the memory. It was such a long time ago, and everything before that time was like a long dream. Carp had wakened him from the dreaming time.

Yes. Carp had wakened him and made him stand up and walk with him, even though Kerlew's legs had been as bendy as the tips of willow boughs. The sunlight was too bright for his eyes, and he had kept touching his head to make sure it was still there.

His neck had grown long and his head bobbed at the end of it. But he had felt very good, very fine indeed. And the important man, the shaman, Carp, had held his wrist and led him along. They had gone behind the tents into the hills. Kerlew had felt cold and light; he had feared the wind would blow him away. He had wondered where they were going.

Then they had come to a trampled place on the hillside. Carp had stopped him by a scatter of squashed berries. 'Here,' the old man had said. 'Look for it here.' Kerlew remembered squatting down on his heels and nearly falling over. He had wondered what the man wanted him to do. The shaman towered over him. 'Find it!' Carp had urged him. The man's eyes were serious, and Kerlew had cringed, fearful he would kick him.

But the expected blow had not come, and after a few moments Kerlew had cautiously run his fingertips over the scattered berries. He still didn't know what the shaman wanted, but sometimes they didn't hit you if you pretended to understand them. He let the berries sift through his fingers, peering up at Carp through his eyelashes to see if this pleased him. Was this what he wanted him to do? But the old man had only watched him.

When there were no more berries to handle, Kerlew had dragged his fingertips over the moss and leaves that coated the ground. He picked them up and looked curiously at them and again peered up at Carp. Did this please him? But the old man's face never changed. He stood over the boy and waited.

Kerlew had begun to feel dizzy and sick, but he dared not complain. Tillu was far away. She had gone to fetch water, he suddenly remembered, and she was gone when Carp had led him away. If Carp decided to kick and strike him, she was not there to make him stop. His lip jutted out and began to tremble. He had seen the bared earth through a shimmer of tears as his stubby nails dragged across it.

He had felt very ill then. The earth got far away, and then closer, and then far again.

His fingernail caught on something, bent back painfully. Kerlew exclaimed at the hurt and heard the shaman's gasp of interest. The old man suddenly stooped down beside him, watched avidly as Kerlew's fingers pried the stone from the soil. Kerlew had picked it up, held it close to his face to look at it carefully. A tear had fallen onto its dirty surface, and the small drop let a sudden streak of red show through. Aahh!' Carp had sighed.

'Is this it?' Kerlew had asked, offering the stone to the old man. Maybe he would take it and leave him alone, let him crawl back to the tent. Maybe his mother would wrap him in a soft, warm hide and make warm, salty soup for him. He hoped.

But then the old man had leaped at him, had seized him in his wiry old arms and clutched him close. Kerlew's breath left him; he had no air to scream and he feared he would die now. But this man did not shake him or pinch him or throw him to the ground. The shaman only held him and muttered words of praise, then had helped him to rise and walk back to the tent. The shaman himself had taken the bowl of warm, salty broth his mother made and fed it to Kerlew and sat by him until he fell asleep holding the red stone.

Kerlew set the stone down reverently. The Knife and the Blood Stone. The two most important talismans in his pouch. Always they seemed to come forth together. Was the Knife asking for Blood? He shook his head perplexedly and wished Carp were here to advise him. He eased his hand into the pouch again. There was not much left in it, and he was not sure if the other items held power or not. He had picked them up because he felt drawn to them, and put them in his pouch because he could not bear to throw them away. There were few things that belonged exclusively to him. He parted with none of them willingly.

The withered but feathered foot of a ptarmigan. He had found it in a bloody patch of snow, amid the feathers that marked the fox's feast. He liked the way the toes were so tightly clutched, a bird fist, while the feathers were so soft still. He stroked it with a reverent fingertip and murmured to it before he set it with the other talismans.

Again into the bag. A wolverine's tooth. Tillu would be angry if she knew he had this. She had told him not to touch the dead wolverine when they found it tangled in some tree roots beside a stream. She said it had drowned. If it had drowned, why wasn't it still in the water, he had asked her. And she had said the water had carried the wolverine downstream and put it there. He had thought, and then asked her again, why wasn't it in the water, then? But she only said the same thing over again. Maybe Water-spirit had done it. Water-spirit might be strong enough to kill a wolverine and throw its body aside. Maybe his mother had been afraid Water-spirit would be angry if he touched her kill. Or maybe Tillu had just not wanted him to have the tooth. But he had crept back that night and gotten it. Alive or dead, Wolverine was a fierce spirit. To have one of his teeth might give Kerlew power over him. He rubbed his thumb along it, and then set it back beside the bird's foot.

The pouch was very light now. He tried to think what might still be in it, but could not. There were just too many things in it. He looked carefully over the many objects he had already taken out. There was the Knife, and the Stone, and the bird's foot, and the tooth, and the bird's foot, and the Stone. More than he could count. And there was still something inside the pouch. Something soft. He pulled out the puff of a rabbit's tail.

From a rabbit that Tillu had brought home. He patted it softly against his face, feeling the small scratch of the tailbone still inside the fluff of fur. He sniffed it, smelling the smell of Rabbit, and again ran it lightly over his face. Reluctantly he put if down. He liked it. He hoped it had power.

He put his hand inside the pouch and ran his fingers carefully along the seams.

Anything left? Yes!

It was wedged into the far corner of the bag. He picked it loose cautiously, wondering what it was. It was only when he brought it out into the light that he remembered.

The owl's nest had been wedged high in an old willow stump, on the far side of the dell. He had climbed up it one day when Tillu was hunting. In it he had found the remains of a nestling. He had known it was an owl's nest by the castings and feathers around it. But the tiny beakless skull had frightened and alarmed him. Men's skulls were not so different from this. He had left it in the nest, afraid to touch it. But whenever he saw the nest, he thought of the tiny, fragile skull. It drew him. And finally he had climbed the stump and taken it for his bag. These sockets had held the eyes.

They were empty now, just a tracing of old flesh in them. Here the beak had been; he wondered what had become of it. Or what if it had never had a beak? What if it had never been an owl at all? A strange thrill ran through him and he nearly dropped it.

Trembling, he placed it carefully among his other treasures. That this one had power he never doubted. Always it filled him with foreboding.

He gazed at his talismans, let the wonder of them fill him until the hair stood up on the back of his neck and prickled along his arms. There was a message here for him: Carp had told him that just by setting out the contents of his pouch, a shaman could learn many things. Again Kerlew's eyes roamed over his trinkets. The Knife, the Blood Stone, the bird's skull. The feathered claw, the rabbit's tail, the Blood Stone. His mind teetered on the edge of knowing all, understanding all. There was a pattern here. Knife wanted something done, something Bloody. And the bird's claw ...

As rapidly as the ideas had built, they fell apart. He was cold, staring at the arrangement of articles in front of the dying fire. The fire. Tillu would be very angry if he let the fire go out again. He would have to wait to eat if the fire went out. Hastily he scooped the items back into his pouch and returned it to the hollowed place beneath his pallet.

He brought an armload of wood from the pile by the door and tumbled it onto the embers and coals. It hissed, and steam and smoke rose from it chokingly and swirled up toward the smoke hole in the peak of the tent. Smoke. He wondered if Carp was still angry with him. Suddenly he had an idea. Taking the knife from his pouch, he went outside, to look for a good, thin willow wand to cut and peel. Maybe Carp wasn't angry at him anymore. Maybe this time Carp would speak to him.