Chakliux pressed his fingers over his closed eyes. In spite of his wooden snow goggles, the glare of snow during the past few days of searching had left his head aching, his eyes red and swollen.
He had lived most of his life without knowing Sok, without realizing he had a brother. When he had first gone to the Near River Village to marry the shaman’s daughter and thus bind the Near and Cousin River Villages in peace, Sok had been more enemy than ally. But now Chakliux wondered how he would live without the man he had come to love not only as brother but also as friend.
“Remember this,” he said aloud to comfort himself, “you did what you could. Now you must take care of your wives and the children they give you. Do not forget, you also have Sok’s sons to raise.” He would tell Cries-loud and Carries Much what a good and honorable man their father had been. He would tell them how skilled Sok was with his spear, and he would teach them to hunt. Through them, some part of Sok would still live.
Chakliux strapped on his pack, fastened his snowshoes and began the journey to the Cousin River Village.
THE COUSIN RIVER VILLAGE
The night was clear, and the moon gave a cold light. Dii was tucked into her bedding furs, nearly asleep, when she heard someone scratch at the side of the lodge close to her head. She sat up, saw that Night Man was asleep, and crept to the entrance tunnel. She opened the outside doorflap and shivered as cold air flooded in.
“Who is it?” she called in a whisper, and was surprised to hear Take More’s voice answer her.
He scooted into the tunnel, leaned close to say, “Is Night Man still here?”
“Yes,” Dii answered. “Where is Ligige’?”
“She stayed with Aqamdax. To help her pack and leave the hunters’ spring.”
“My husband plans to go in the morning,” Dii said. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Ligige’ says to keep him in the village one more day.”
Dii stared into the darkness. To keep Night Man in the village that day, she had pretended Long Eyes was sick. She had fussed over the old woman, begging her husband to stay, forcing tears to convince him that she thought his mother was near death. But by afternoon Long Eyes had been impatient with Dii’s medicines and scrambled from her bed whenever she had the chance. Dii would have to think of another way to make her husband stay.
“It is a long walk from the hunters’ spring to this village,” Take More said, “especially for an old man with slow feet.” Dii heard him laugh, a thin chuckle nearly hidden by the thick ruff of his parka hood. “As I walked, I thought of something that might work.”
The next morning Twisted Stalk was the first to come to Dii’s lodge. The scratch of her walking stick awoke Dii, who welcomed her, then hurriedly rekindled the hearth fire and set out food.
“I have come to thank your husband,” Twisted Stalk said. “This morning when I went to my cache, I saw one of his packs there, full of meat. I could not believe that he would give me so much.”
Her words were loud with joy, and they woke Night Man. When he saw the old woman in the lodge, he sat up with a start.
“My aunt has come to thank you, Husband,” Dii said, and handed Night Man a bowl of broth.
“To thank me?” he said, his voice still rough with sleep. He looked down at the bowl in his hands, shook his head as though to help himself remember, and asked, “For what?”
“The pack of meat you left in my cache,” Twisted Stalk said. “I know it is yours. The pack carries your mark. Two circles in red.” She looked at Dii. “That is his mark, nae?” she asked.
“I did not leave meat—” Night Man began, but he was interrupted by curses and barking just outside the lodge. Take More burst through the inner doorflap. He was dragging Night Man’s strongest dog.
“I have this one,” he said, “but I am not sure where the others are. I had to catch my own first, but then I went after yours. Awl said someone tried to cut First Eagle’s dogs loose, too. She thought they might be boys from the Near River Village. She heard them, but when she went outside, they ran. One looked like the son of a man who once owned her as slave. She said they were into the caches as well.”
Night Man erupted from his bed with a roar, upsetting the bowl of broth into his blankets. Then Yellow Bird was calling from the entrance tunnel, a pair of fine fur mittens in her hands. “For Night Man,” she said, her tears mingled with her thanks. “For the meat he left in my cache.”
Then other old women were also crowding into the lodge, wrapping their gratitude around Night Man until he was tethered so tightly he could not move.
When they finally left, their gifts piled beside the hearth, Night Man, grumbling, went out to find his dogs. By dusk he had found all but one. He returned to the lodge, his face red with cold, his nose dripping and his leggings caked with snow. His first words were a snarl, so loud that even his old mother looked up from the sinew she was twisting and scolded him with a rush of gibberish, so that Dii had to set her teeth into her tongue to keep from laughing.
When Long Eyes ended her tirade, Dii threw her arms around her husband and began to sob, praising him for his generosity to the old women in the village, then scolding him for leaving his own wife and mother with so little meat for the winter.
Night Man tried to break into her ranting but finally gave up. He pulled off his outside parka and leggings, flung them into the women’s side of the lodge and stomped over to his bedding mats. He refused food, lay down and turned his back on his wife, pulling a blanket over his head as he roared, “Let me sleep!”
Chapter Sixty-two
THE HUNTERS’ SPRING
L
IGIGE’ LIFTED HER VOICE
in a Near River song, one she particularly liked. Out of respect for the Cousin People, she had not sung it since leaving the Near River Village. She added wood to the fire, but still she was cold. She had not realized her stay at the hunters’ spring would last more than a day. Take More had had better success than Ligige’ thought he would in delaying Night Man’s journey.
She had made Aqamdax take most of the supplies and also the tent skins, so Ligige’ had only a crude lean-to of spruce branches, a woven mat for her doorflap, and a layer of boughs and dead grass as her floor. At least there was enough wood stacked to keep the fire going.
She shivered as she thought of what she must do and again sang the Near River song, but when the words did not chase away her fear, she began to speak to her dog as he lay beside her near the hearth. “I am an old woman,” she told him. “How many more winters can I expect to live?”
Certainly it was worth an old woman’s life to save Aqamdax and her baby. She hoped Aqamdax would find her way back to her own village. Surely Chakliux’s son would be a good Sea Hunter. After all, he would have some of his father’s otter blood.
Ligige’ tried to imagine herself as a hunter on a sea so vast that she lost all sight of land. But that, too, reminded her of fear. She slipped the knife from her sleeve, grasped it as tightly as she could, her fingers stiff and crooked in their clasp around its handle.
“Chakliux,” she said aloud into the smoke that rose to sift through the spruce needle roof of her shelter, “do not walk too quickly into that spirit world. It would be good to have a little company on my journey.”
Aqamdax stood at the top of a long ridge, and the panic that had forced her into a night and day of walking suddenly ebbed. She bent to stroke Snow Hawk. The dog answered her touch with a low rumbling growl. Aqamdax glanced at the sky, tried to make out the position of the sun under the gray clouds.
“We cannot stop yet,” she said. “We must get to the next ridge.”
If Night Man were following them, he would walk faster than a woman with a dog pulling a travois, but he would start from the Cousin River Village, and Ligige’, waiting at the hunters’ spring, would surely give him some story to delay his pursuit. There had been little snow since Aqamdax had left, and what was already on the ground had packed so hard that the wind could not lift it to cover her trail. Her only hope was to travel far enough so that Night Man finally decided to turn back.
How foolish he was to think she had killed Star. And what of the other people in the village? Why was it so easy for them to believe she was that evil? Or had their fear of a killer who still lived beyond their justice blinded them?
Surely some had considered that Red Leaf might yet be alive, living close enough to kill again. Or had they realized, as Aqamdax did, that Red Leaf’s killings, though terrible and evil, had some form of logic about them? What reason did Red Leaf have to kill Star? Why risk being seen, being found?
More likely some outcast—a nuhu’anh—had done it. What reason, beyond that of his own madness, did a nuhu’anh need to kill?
As the daylight faded, Aqamdax stopped and made a night camp in a ridge of spruce. The trees grew so close that their branches were twined, providing a shelter that comforted her with its calm. She wished she were one of those trees, her arms stretched to the sky, her feet buried in the earth. But she was a woman, too small to reach the sun.
Her loneliness rose up within her, numbing her hands, blinding her eyes, and she buried her head in the fur at Snow Hawk’s neck until the warmth of the dog’s body pulled away some of her pain.
Aqamdax slept poorly that night, heard voices in the wind, woke with a start when her dreams were filled with the sound of a baby’s cry. The morning brought snow. Not the howling snow of a storm, but wet, heavy flakes that weighed down the travois and melted into the fur of her parka.
She walked beside the dog, stopped often to break away the balls of ice that formed between the pads of Snow Hawk’s feet. Aqamdax shivered each time she stopped, afraid that Night Man would catch her, her progress was so slow. She tried to keep her bearing by choosing landmarks—a tree, a ridge—as fixed points for her eyes, so that in the heavy fall of snow she would not begin to circle. Finally, looking ahead, she saw a darkness that was like a wall, thick and heavy, spreading side to side, as far as she could see. With a start she realized where she was, for what else could that darkness be but the black spruce that grew around the Grandfather Lake? Chakliux had once told her that a man walking could not circle that lake in less than ten days. It lay east a half day’s walk from the Cousin River Village, but she was north of that village, and if she walked to the far northern side of the lake, she would be at least seven days away from the Cousin People.
Once there, she could make her winter camp. The trees and brush would hide her. Through the ice, she could net the oil-rich blackfish, use them for food, burn them for light and heat. She could catch grayling and whitefish in her woven willow trap. Then, when summer came and her baby was born, she could find her way back to the sea, follow its shore to the villages of the First Men.
The wind blew harder. Aqamdax reached down and grasped the side of the travois, helped Snow Hawk pull it up from where it had settled into the snow, and together they walked to the Grandfather Lake.
THE HUNTERS’ SPRING
The walls of her spruce shelter were close, so Ligige’ kept the hearth fire only smoldering. Why risk that those brittle needles would catch and burn? She had caught a hare in one of the loop snares she had set near the spring. In the dying light, under a soft fall of snow, she sat outside her shelter, skinned and gutted the animal, then went inside and skewered it over the fire. The smell of it cooking made her stomach roll in hunger, and she warned away the dog as he inched closer to the roasting stick.
She had expected Night Man’s arrival for so long that when he came, suddenly thrusting the doorflap aside, she did not startle, only lay her right hand carefully over her left sleeve, where she had hidden her knife, then invited him to sit down and eat.
He frowned and squinted at her, his lips drawn back from his teeth.
“Where is she?” he asked.
Ligige’ shrugged. “She brought me this hare and went back out to her trapline. She wanted this cooked by the time she returned.”
He moved as if to leave, but Ligige’ spoke quickly, hoping to hold him with her words. “I knew you would come for her,” she said. “I knew you would realize that she did not kill your sister.” He turned to look at her, and she saw the surprise in his eyes. “Why take your pack?” she asked him. “Leave it here in the lodge. You will find her more quickly without its weight on your back.”
He grunted at her, and she helped him with the straps. He flexed his bad shoulder, and she said, “The hare is almost done. There is enough for you if you want some. Perhaps Aqamdax will bring another, and we will have a feast.”
She took the roasting stick from the rocks she had used to wedge it in place and, licking her fingers, gingerly broke away a haunch, offered it to Night Man. She thought he was going to refuse, but he only opened the doorflap, looked out, then squatted down beside her, took the hare and began to tear at it with his teeth.
Ligige’ pulled off a section of ribs, sucked at the thin covering of meat. When Night Man threw his bones to the dog, Ligige’ picked up the skewer, held it out to him.
“More?” she asked, but he shook his head. “Why go?” she said. “Where else would she come but here?”
He ignored her, stepped outside, leaving the doorflap open so the wind swirled in to batter at the hearth coals until flames leapt up toward the spruce walls. Ligige’ crept on hands and knees to the doorflap, jerked it from Night Man’s grasp.
“Go, if you think you will find her any sooner,” she said, “but why let the winter into my warm shelter?”
“I have no patience for your complaints, old woman,” Night Man said. “Which direction did she go?”
“There, that way,” said Ligige’, ducking out from under the door-flap to point toward the trail that led to the spring.
He settled down on his heels, facing the trail, his back to the door, his spear on the ground at his side.
“Bring me more of that meat,” he said.
Ligige’ crawled back into the shelter, broke away a front quarter and took it to him. He grabbed it and, as she turned to go back inside, said, “Do not eat that other haunch, old woman, and do not save it for Aqamdax.”