Shaman

UNDER THE ICE

It was on the second night of that summer’s eight eight festival, during the dancing just after the bonfire flares, when Loon noticed that Elga was not among the women dancers anywhere around the main bonfire. He danced widdershins to be sure, and then wandered back to their camp to find her. Heather was there, the babe and several other of the youngsters with her, but not Elga. He went to ask Heather about it.

Heather scowled in a way that caused Loon’s heart to flutter.

— What? he demanded.

— Find her. Heather glanced at the kids.-Find her, or send Thorn back to me right quick.

— Why? What’s wrong?

— Just go find her. I’ll explain later.

Loon ran off, alarmed by her manner. He quickly circled the main fire again, and all the subsidiary fires, and then the whole circle of encampments. No Elga. He had spotted Thorn with his little pack of shaman friends at one of the smaller fires, and panting now with fear he ran back to him and pulled him aside.

— I can’t find Elga anywhere, and Heather said I should get you.

— What do you mean? He sounded a little drunk.

— Elga! We left the little one with Heather at camp, and went to the dance, and she stopped to talk to somebody, and I kept going around the circle, and after that I didn’t see her for a while, but I thought she was just on the other side of the fire, in the women’s line. Then when I didn’t see her I figured she had gone back to our camp for something, so I went back but she wasn’t there either. And Heather, I don’t know, she didn’t like it.

— Let’s go see what she wants, Thorn said, his brow furrowed.

Heather saw them entering their camp and came right to them.-The girl came from the north, she said to Thorn.-She was a runaway from one of those packs up there. I’m afraid they’ve taken her back.

— Oh, no, Thorn said, voice rich with disgust. He glanced darkly at Loon and said, — Which pack?

— One of the northers. One that doesn’t come to this festival.

— Then why were they here?

— I don’t know, how would I know? Go find Pippiloette, and Schist, see what they say.

Thorn took Loon by the shoulder, squeezing it hard.-Go find Schist and Ibex, and your friends. Get everyone back here. Tell them I said we’ve got a problem.

Loon ran off toward the big fires, and in short order found Schist and Ibex and gave them the news. Within a fist they were all regathered at their camp’s little fire. Thorn came back with Pippiloette in tow, and the traveler sat next to the fire with them, warming his hands and watching the Wolf pack discuss their situation. He took a bag of water from Sage and drank from it, then splashed some of it over his face, shaking his head as if trying to clear the festival out of it. The noise of the crowd around the bonfires didn’t help any of them with that.

It suddenly became clear to Loon that Schist and Ibex, but also Hawk and Moss and Nevermind, had no desire to go after Elga.

— We have to save her! he exclaimed when he saw this.-We can’t let them do it!

— Be quiet, Schist told him.-This isn’t your decision to make.

— We do need to defend ourselves, Thorn pointed out.-Word will get around if we don’t.

— She was a runaway. She wasn’t ours, she just came.

— We let her in, Heather said.-You don’t get to decide that. She’s been ours all winter, and she helped us get through it, and she’s married to Loon and has his baby. So don’t talk about her that way.

Schist took heed of Heather’s black withering look and extended a hand.-All right, but she was a runaway from another pack, you said. And we don’t know where she is now.

— And you want to keep dancing, Heather said contemptuously.

Schist glared at her. No doubt he wanted to silence her, but he knew that trying to silence Heather often splashed back on one. No one could lay curses like Heather, not even Thorn. This was not the moment for that kind of scene. And he had not become the leader of their pack without a quick sense of what they needed.

So now he sat down next to Pippiloette.-Do you know who they are?

— Maybe. I don’t know for sure who took her. But I’ve heard the stories about where she came from, and if those are the people who took her, I know who they are.

— Are they a big pack?

— Northern packs are usually bigger than southern ones.

— Could you track them?

— Maybe. Depends if they’ve gone straight home or not.

— Why wouldn’t they?

Pippiloette stared at him.

Schist got to his feet and looked into the fire. He spoke without looking at Loon.

— We can’t go running off to the north after a woman. We just barely made it through this spring, we’re still weak, and we need to be here finishing our caribou, and getting back to Cedar Salmon River in time for the run, and putting enough together to give the Ravens something in return for what they gave us. We don’t have the food or the strength for a chase. That’s just the way it is. We can’t do it. Maybe next year we can steal her back.

Loon left the fire. He stood outside the light of it, on a low rise above the festival. The drumming around the big fire pounded inside him. He was numb; he couldn’t take it in. He understood what was happening, he sensed the enormity of it, but it was so big and sudden he couldn’t feel it yet. He was stunned in the way he had been once after running straight into a tree while looking behind himself as he ran. He had never done that again; he knew the truth of the saying Watch where you’re going. Now the buzzing in him suddenly resolved to a quick clutch of nausea, and he put his hands to his knees and hung his head for a while.

I am the third wind

I come to you

When you have lost everything

When you can’t go on

Pippiloette left their camp, and Loon took off after him. He made sure to catch up to him well away from camp.

— Pippi! I need your help!

— What do you mean? the traveler asked carefully.

— Can you show me where those northers live? And which way they go to get there?

— I could show you that, Pippiloette allowed.-But look, youth. I don’t want to take on the northers. It won’t be easy to steal your woman back from them, especially on your own. And a second person is no help either.

— I’ll do it, Loon said.-Just show me where they are, and you can leave.

Pippiloette frowned.-I will leave, he said after a long pause.-Understand that. You’ll be on your own. I’ll be headed east.

— Fine, I understand. That’s good enough. I wouldn’t expect any more.

— I should hope not.

The summer nights up on the steppe were so short that by the time Pippiloette had made his enquiries with friends around the festival, the eastern sky was growing light. Loon hurried past the bonfires and slipped back into their camp and sat down next to Heather, who was hunched over, drowsing by the little one’s bed. She started awake and sat up to look at him.

— I’m going after her, he said.

She hissed.-I don’t think you can do it on your own.

— I’m going. Take care of the baby. I’ll be careful.

— You’d better be, she said darkly.-And you’ll have to be more than that. It will take trickery, and patience. Go in by night when you get your chance.

— I will.

Suddenly she reached out and clutched his arm.-I don’t think you should go.

— I have to.

And he took off in the predawn gray to meet Pippiloette.

The eight eight festival site was south of an area that Pippiloette called Five Rivers, where several creeks met the Lir. The northers, Pippi told Loon as they hustled out of the festival camp, would almost certainly head up the valley of the Maya, a tributary of the Lir that ascended a gentle straight valley that trended north, often so much so that its river pointed right at the Spindle Star. At the head of the Maya there was an easy broad pass, and then a drop to a broad flat valley that sloped from east to west, where its river emptied into the great salt sea. On the northern side of this broad valley, Pippi said, was the big ice wall that covered everything to the north and in effect ended the world in that direction, just as the great salt sea ended it on its western side. The northers lived at this meeting of ice and land and the great salt sea.

— Does anything else live up there? What do they eat?

— The usual people. Salmon and caribou, geese and ducks, seals on the winter sea ice. Actually they eat very well. It’s just that it’s always cold.

— I couldn’t stand it.

— Don’t say that, Pippiloette said.-Never say aloud what you don’t want, didn’t your people teach you that one?

Loon didn’t reply. He hiked on the traveler’s swift heels, still feeling sick. His guts were knotting so badly they bent him as he walked. He wanted to run, but Pippi set the pace at a walk. A fast walk, it was true; Loon gritted his teeth and followed his guide, watching the ground closely in the predawn light of the steppe. It felt like it would have been easier to run.

Pippiloette breathed hard through his teeth as he walked, making a whistling sound that was like a little song, the song of himself walking at speed. A traveler provided himself with his own company, and Loon had seen a number of different ways they did that; some of them talked all the time, commenting on things no one from Wolf pack would have mentioned aloud; others sang, others beat their walking sticks together in between stabs into the earth. Luckily Pippi was not like any of those, he only had his little whistling, and he was proving to be fast, indeed very fast: Loon had to focus to match his pace.

They followed a riverside path for a long time, then a big tributary forced their trail upstream, to a bend in the tributary, and a ridge that bordered the Maya river valley on its west side. Up there a typical ridge trail broadened, and in the dawn light it was easy to hurry.

But now they had to be careful; the ridge was bare in the usual way, and in the gray they could see up it for a long way; meaning anyone up there could see down. It was crucial not to be spotted. And given that these people had stolen a woman, it was also possible they might leave behind some men to slow down any pursuit that might appear. A quick little ambush and no one would be following them anymore. So as the sky lightened, leaving only the morning star and a few others to prick the gray dome, they got off the ridge and hiked the border of trees and rocks on the Maya side of the ridge. This was hard ground to traverse fast, but they could slip between the little spruces and birches, and stay out of the willow tangles in the streambeds, and check the skyline of the ridge ahead as they proceeded upstream. It was safer, but slower, and so they pushed when they were concealed, to make up time.

They went very hard all that day, stopping only twice to sit and eat some food from their packs, and drink deeply from two of the little tributaries they crossed on fallen logs. Pippi ate fast. His long loping stride did not seem fast at any given moment, but covered ground with surprising speed. Over the course of the day Loon had seen that he had his own ways, cutting across the land in lines Loon would not have seen, but which revealed themselves when right under his feet to be slight trails.

— I’m a straightwalker, Pippi said when Loon asked about the trails.-I mean, I run a nice clean route. I don’t go straight at the land if it doesn’t make sense, but I don’t like extravagance. Ups and downs are usually not bad enough to justify a divagation. Anyway I look for the best way. I’m always looking to see if there’s a better way than the one I’ve used before, if I’m where I’ve gone before. And if I’m in new land, well, it’s the best thing there is, finding a good way.

— Do you remember everywhere you’ve ever been?

— Oh yes. Of course.

— And have you been this way before?

— Oh yes. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to go this fast. We’d have to track for sign. But as it is, I know where they’re going. And I’ve seen some signs that they’ve been by, and not so long ago. So we can catch up to them, hopefully. It would be ever so much better for your chances if you were to catch up to them when they’re on the move rather than in their encampment.

— Do they do this kind of thing often, then?

Pippi shrugged.-They fight the other northers from time to time. And there’s some wife stealing. As you have seen. Yes, there’s been bad blood up there for a while between some of those packs. Some say the great ice wall scares them and makes them angry, others that they get too cold to think straight. But they act hot, so I don’t know. They’re like otters.

— Ah, Loon said, feeling a shiver of fear. The indomitable otter, the murderous otter.-It seems strange to me.

Pippi looked over his shoulder at Loon, then turned and walked on.

— You come from a good pack. A good pack in a good pays. All the packs in the south are very friendly. But in some pays it’s not that way. The northers are tough. They fight for their lives up there.

— But why?

— What do you mean? There is no why. They like it. They like to fight, because the ones who survive think it’s not so bad. It gets them things, and up there maybe that matters.

Loon sighed, and tried to put the matter of the northers out of his mind. For the moment the task was to follow Pippi close and never slow the traveler down. Be his shadow, as one said when on the hunt. They would see what the situation was with Elga when they caught up to them. But thinking of her was even worse than thinking about these northern otter people. He felt his gut shrinking, and walked like a starved wolf, backbone hunched gingerly over its taut pain. He tried to watch the ground under Pippi’s feet and walk on it neatly.

Here in this long valley the soil was thin. In many places big broken flats of bare rock were furred in their cracks and low points by moss and ground-hugging willows. The rocks were covered with lichen that looked like splashes of paint. In the pass at the head of the Maya, a pale green lichen grew in big circles and then died from the inside out, clearing the rock of other lichens and leaving behind circles of clean pink stone. Briefly Loon glimpsed these things and then fell back into his fear.

He and Pippi crouched behind boulders among the pink and green splotches, inspecting the long prospect to the north. They saw nothing, and during the course of the rest of the day descended a ridge into the big flat valley running west. Pippi wanted to cross this valley’s river at a ford he knew, which was a bit to the west, he said. He headed that way.

Near sunset Pippi stopped.-Let’s eat, then see if we can go on by moonlight. They won’t do that, so we might catch them.

He pulled his food bag out of his backsack and rooted in it. He had a gooseskin bag of marmot fat in there, and offered it to Loon, who fingered a little of the liquid fat into his mouth. Ordinarily marmot fat was so rich that no one ate it by itself; if you did it would make you sick. Usually it was heated into a broth, and morsels of meat dipped into it. Out on the hunt, however, it could be downed in little sips, and after a little wave of nausea passed through one, it would expand in the gut and give a pulse of energy after. Little sips, fist after fist; it was the main hunting food in certain packs, and Pippi must have come from one of those.

It was the twelfth day of the eighth month, and so the waxing moon hung in the eastern sky at sunset, lighting the land as the sunlight drained from it. Pippi led the way to a low ridge and hiked north on it. He was slower now, and as they came up the ridge to certain knobs he crouched behind boulders and kept off the skyline, looking up the ridge carefully, then down into the valley next to them. Loon did likewise, heart beating hard; but they never saw anything below. Most of the night passed, the moon was setting in the west; they both moved slowly in the cold air. Loon felt the long walk in his feet. But as the moon set and the night blackened accordingly, Pippi topped a knob on the ridge and sat down quickly.-Keep down.

Loon sat and rested.

— Look, Pippi said, gesturing ahead.-Their fire.

Far downvalley to the north was a tiny yellow flicker.

— Ah yes, Loon said. Hope and fear made a furious crosschop in him.-What now?

Pippi was silent for a long time. Then he said, — They will probably have a night watch. And the day is coming. I don’t think we can do it tonight without being seen. Tomorrow night, if we come on them earlier, we can study them in the moonlight, then move when the moon sets. So I think maybe we should get some sleep now, while we can, and follow them at a good distance tomorrow. Keep out of their sight while watching them.

Loon was weary enough to accede to this. They found flat spots among the rocks, looked for moss to make a quick bed. They both had fur wraps in their backsacks; Loon’s was made of muskrat pelts sewn together so the fur overlapped the sewing lines, Pippi’s was a flank of a bear. They rolled up into these wraps and were quickly asleep.

At sunrise Loon woke briefly; Pippiloette was sleeping. After a moment of welcoming the rays of the sun on his face, Loon fell asleep again.

He woke as he was being jerked to his feet. He was in the grasp of two big northers, with three more holding spears and surrounding them. Pippiloette was nowhere to be seen.

The northers held their spear tips right to him, a frightful thing, and then after he went still, they pulled them back and indicated with them that he was to walk north with them on the ridge trail, or be speared on the spot. Soon they joined a larger group.

Off they all went. The ridge dropped until it disappeared into a steppe. Here shallow streams looped across plains of grass and scree. Sometimes exposed flat rock was split in warp and weft fashion, so that the streams pooled and poured in rectangular patterns.

All that day they walked north over the flat stony plain. During their first stop they indicated that Loon was to give them everything on him except his clothes. Most of what he had was in his backsack, which they already had, but he gave them his belt with all the things in its pouch. They tied his hands behind his back with what felt like a leather braid. While they were doing that, he saw that Elga was there, standing among their women with her head and shoulders down. She turned her head and saw him, then turned her head away. He flinched and did likewise, feeling in agreement with her, that it might go better for them if their captors did not know they knew each other.

Although perhaps the northers were already aware. They spoke in a language that sounded almost right, but that Loon often lost the drift of. It resembled how the people of the steppes sounded, but Loon understood the steppe people better. These people didn’t reply to Loon when he spoke, and he thought they didn’t understand him very well either. Pippiloette would have been useful in such a situation, knowing so many tongues. What had happened to Pippi? Had the traveler betrayed him to the northers, given them a captive for something in return? That didn’t seem possible to Loon, but on the other hand, if Pippi had woken to their danger, or known of it before, why hadn’t he told Loon about it, so they could have both slipped away? Would it have been that much harder?

In the end he could only suppose that Pippi had been as surprised as he had been by the northers, but had waked just in time to slip off into the dark with his things. Certainly the traveler was quick.

In any case there was no real need for a translator, as the northers’ meaning was simple in the end: Go! Ora! And he went.

Possibly they would sacrifice him to their gods, maybe eat him; it was said such things happened in the north. A bad situation, a dreadful possibility.

But Elga was there, and she had seen him. She knew he had come after her. Whatever happened, they at least had that. So he determined to endure, to submit and be a good captive, and to ignore whatever indignities might be inflicted on Elga, if any. She spoke their language, he saw. Back at the festival they had said she was a runaway, that this was her original pack. She didn’t look anything like these men, being much taller, and so dark-skinned she was almost black against the snow. The northers were not that dark, though from a distance, against the snow, every person was dark. Not as black as a black horse, but more the color of mud, which was the point of the story of how Raven first made humans, by clawing up some mud into a ball. Thus they were mostly the brown of the winter shag of a bison. These northers were the lightest brown Loon had ever seen, and their eyes were heavily protected by folds of skin. Most of them were short and rounded, although part of the rounding was their thick clothing.

His captors were joined by some of their men carrying parts of a caribou they had killed and cut apart. That night they roasted the head first, and Loon could see that they liked the same parts that other people liked; tongue and brain, but more than that, the jowl, and the pads of fat behind the eyes. After that they roasted the brisket, then the ribs, then the pelvis.

Meanwhile Loon and the two other captives they had with them, neither of whom Loon understood, though they did not sound like the northers, were fed the lungs, the heart, and the entrails, although not the entrail fat, which was scraped off by the women, melted in long-handled antler spoons, and poured into pokes.

Loon chewed the hard muscle of the caribou heart with a dignified lack of expression, as if thinking of something else. It would not do to be among these people like an evil presence or a manifestation of bad luck. He had to accept his standing and perform it as well as he could. He saw how it was that captives helped to capture themselves, just as part of staying safe, of biding one’s time, of hoping.

They walked for day after day. The steppe first sloped down to a big river, which looped westward through a broad marsh and grassland, supporting big larch and alder thickets in the loops and along the riverbanks. At the river itself, a leather braid rope crossed the river, tied to tall spruce trees on each bank. There were log rafts floating in the shallows on each side. They got in one, looped two loops of rope over the big rope bridging the river, and pulled themselves across with their hands and arms, moving the loops forward one at a time. Their raft stretched the big rope downstream, so they had to paddle and pull hard as they approached the northern bank.

Back and forth they ferried themselves and their loads. At the end of the crossing, some of their men took both rafts across to the south side, left one, and came back together on the other.

After that they ascended the steppe on the northern side of the valley. For most of the second day of this ascent, they passed through a strange forest, composed of the usual spruce, pine, larch, birch, and alder, but all of them only half as tall as they were to the south, and many tilted this way and that, as though the ground under them had collapsed. And apparently it had, for they passed big ponds sunken deep into moss beds, the water level well below the ground. Sometimes the banks of these sunken ponds were strangely white under the water line, turning the water a sky blue. There was ice down there. The soil and pine spill that made up the floor of this forest, and all the beds of moss and patches of muskeg, even the many ponds-all of them were resting on an underlayer of ice, it seemed, which here and there you could see down to. Whenever this underlayer of ice happened to melt, the trees growing on top of it tilted like festival drunkards. It was a strange forest to walk through.

On the upper edge of this drunken forest, the little trees gave way to low scattered ground willow and pine scrub, and they could see a long way ahead, to a range of hills. Then, as they topped a low ridge that headed northwest, and stayed on it, on a broad trail, they could see above the range of hills a white mass, a mass of ice overtopping all the hills in a stupendous white wall. Ice fingers fell down from this wall, filling the valleys between the hills under it, then splaying out onto the steppe in steep-walled ends, rounded like horse hooves. Some of these ice splays had overrun forests, so that crushed trees lay in a tangle under the bottom of the ice hooves. The big ice mass above looked like the ice caps in the mountains west of the Urdecha, but immensely bigger. Everywhere they could see to the north, ice ruled. Maybe it went north forever, in the same way Pippi had said that the land continued forever to the east, and the great salt sea to the west.

They came to a rise and could see down into a shallow valley under the hills and the ice, running toward the great salt sea in the west, which formed the mouth of the valley. Across the valley, under the hills, lofted columns of campfire smoke. As they got closer, Loon saw that there was a line of poles like bone needles, standing between the great salt sea and the smoke columns. Closer still he could see they were the dead trunks of immense trees, trees taller than any he had ever seen, and much taller than any growing up here. These barkless bare tree trunks were stuck upside down in the ground, their root balls at their tops all white and broken to the sky, with skulls hung on colored string from the outer tips of the roots. They were much like the dead trees at the eight eight, and something in that Loon found reassuring.

The northers lived in a camp of some ten or twelve houses, made of wood, bone, and hide. The houses were tucked in the gap between a hill and the rounded ice wall at the end of a great spill of ice flowing down between the hills from the ice mass. The open end of the gap faced south, with the ice wall to their east. Patches of snow lay everywhere on the ground, even now, in the latter half of the eighth month. A breeze dropped on them from the north, cold even in full sun. A grumbling shallow creek emerged out of the bottom of the ice hoof to the east of their camp and ran southwest toward the great salt sea, which was just visible from camp, a long curve of blue in the distance.

They walked into camp. More giant barkless tree trunks had been used for the corner posts of their houses. As there had been no tall trees at all in the last two days of their trek north, Loon guessed these immense trunks must be driftwood cast up by the great salt sea, suggesting a land somewhere to the west that must be home to giants.

The biggest house of all was about ten strides on a side, and about three times as tall as a person. They entered it through a low cut in the loam before it, a kind of long trap you could walk down a ramp into. When they had walked through this cut and gotten under their big house, the northers took off some of their outer garments, before stepping onto a tall block of wood and pulling themselves up through a person-sized hole, onto an earthen floor cut less deeply than the trap into the ground. Half of it was planked over, and on the planks another tall block of wood gave one a step up through a hole and onto a full plank floor set about head height above the earthen floor.

The captives were urged to climb up through both holes into the house.

Up inside, the only light came from a fire and from a hole made by a hollowed branch set in the roof’s high point. The walls were covered with overlapping bare hides. The air on the lowest plank level was cool, but there was a platform above it filling over half the house, and up there was where most of the northers sat. Some children were perched even higher, on raised wooden beds that put them not far from the roof. The children were naked, and the men and women on the upper platform were dressed only in leggings that covered them from the waist to the knees. Up at their level the fire made the air not just warm but hot, and the northers’ rounded brown bodies shone with sweat. They handed around ladles of water from wooden buckets, sipping as they talked. The fire was set on a large hearthstone under the roof hole, and it proved to be made up of several big fat lamps, set around a small wood fire burning atop a bed of embers. The fire was so small that it would require constant tending, and Loon saw that the northern women were doing that. They each had different sizes and kinds of breasts, in the usual way.

He counted a score and eleven people in the dim room. Elga was not one of them; she must have been taken into a different house. There were several more houses, so if this was just one pack’s camp, it was a very big pack.

They laughed a lot as they talked to each other. To Loon and the other captives they were curt. After spending some time on the first plank floor and getting inspected by some of the men, Loon and the two other new captives were directed to return to the earthen space under the floor, where he found seven other people lying on hides, and a few frozen ducks in cedar root bags.

It was cold down there on the ground floor. There were several caribou skins covering the planked part of the floor farthest from the step-up, and the other captives lay wrapped in these hides, clumped together for warmth. None of them responded when Loon asked what was going on. He couldn’t tell if they understood him or not.

The northers above were exchanging news, it seemed, the newly arrived travelers no doubt describing the trip they had just completed. Some of them cut up a frozen caribou and handed the pieces to the cooks by the fire, and the cutters threw the caribou’s heart and lungs down to their captives, and later the intestines, scraped of their fat coating. The group below shared this food without fuss, taking a few bites and then passing the chunks along. When they were all sated there was still a good quantity of caribou organs left, neatly piled in the far corner: the least palatable bits, it was true, but they would have eaten them too, if they had still been hungry.

Loon waited until all the other captives were bundled in hides, and then went to an unused half-hide consisting of the rear legs and back of a small caribou, and rolled it around himself. He would be covered if he kept his knees tucked up. He burrowed in and tried to sleep with as little as possible of his side pressing on the hide over the ground. He needed a second hide under him, and got up to use a scrap in the corner for that purpose. The caribou meat was a cold mass in his stomach. His thoughts were as stunned as they had been on the night Elga was taken. He could not quite get a grip on what was happening. It was so bad that he could scarcely move, and even rolled in the hide and lying on the free scrap, he started shivering, more from fear than cold.

I am the third wind

I come to you

When you have nothing left

When you can’t go on

But you go on anyway

I stepped in to help him. With my help he would change over between worlds and sleep while waking, wake while sleeping, and live on in the dream world, but nowhere else. And thus endure.

Some of the other captives spoke in ways he somewhat understood. They seemed to say that the northers did not consider the captives to be people. They were just captives, kept alive to help the jende, the real people, by working for them.

So they went out by day, a pair or trio of jende men carrying spears and blades, accompanied by one or two captive men. Usually the jende led the way downstream to the sea shore, to haul back travois and sleds loaded with bags of fish, or entire frozen seals, or blocks of skin and fat cut from giant furred seals, or from beached whales. If there was soft snow on the ground, the captives were given snowshoes to wear. Their travois for hauling loads had antler blades tied to the back ends of their poles, giving them a broader surface to let them ride higher over the snow. Their sleds had runners made of whale rib bones. The jende wore backsacks tied to wooden frames, which they filled on the sea shore and carried back up to camp.

Once back in camp, the captives lifted their loads up onto a wooden platform which was perched on top of a thick dead tree trunk buried in the ground such that its top was well over head high. A platform had been built in a circle around the trunk just under its top, and up on that raised floor lay many twentytwenties of fish, all frozen hard as flint, and set so they formed a wall all around the outside of the platform, with a single open passage in the wall at the top of a ladder. Caribou furs protected them from the sun.

Up on the platform, which reminded Loon of his pack’s raven burial platform, he discovered that inside the wall of frozen fish were carefully arranged piles of sealskin bags, each bag made of a whole skin that had been stripped off the animal without cutting the skin much; the holes had been sewn up, and now each skin lay bulbously full of frozen fat, visible through drawstrings. One of the jende opened up the drawstring on one of these bags and scooped out some semi-solid white fat into a bucket. Loon was startled by the sight of all the bags, so startled that he briefly came out of the waking sleep he had fallen into. The food stored on this platform would feed the camp’s people for two or even three winters. He had never seen anything like it. These people were rich.

Not only that, but they kept captive wolves, as well as captive people. Loon was again startled to wakefulness when he first saw this: there at the eastern end of their camp, under the groaning ice wall, stood a roofless house of sorts, a circular wall made of a line of tall alder shoots tied together, and inside this enclosure was trapped a small pack of wolves, snarling and snapping whenever the jende opened the short door into it. But when the jende entered, the wolves shrank back and rolled on their backs and peed themselves as they stared up pleading at the northers, licking their own muzzles hungrily. The northers threw them chunks of the same offal they fed to the human captives, and the wolves eagerly snatched the chunks and wolfed them down. Then they crowded around the norther men, heads low, wagging their tails, and the northers reached out and grabbed them by the ears, then tugged their heads this way and that! And the wolves only wagged their tails harder! Loon watched this agape, and marveled again when the men let the wolves out of the enclosure, and snowshoed off with a few of the wolves dashing happily around them. And when they came back to camp late that day, the wolves were still there with them, pulling chunks of wood and bloody meat over the snow, at the end of ropes tied to rope harnesses around the wolves’ forelegs, something like the harnesses people put around their waists to pull travois.

Loon could scarcely believe his eyes. These people were… he didn’t know what.

He found in the days that followed that the main thing the northers wanted from their human captives was not to carry food up from the great salt sea, which their captive wolves could do, but rather to gather firewood from the ravines to the east of their camp. So the days spent walking down to the shore and bringing back fish and seals and fat turned out to be much less frequent than long hikes to the east along the line of hills, turning up one or another of the short valleys that rose to the great ice wall. These valleys had floors filled with forests that were surprisingly thick, even though the tallest trees were no more than head high. The trees were mostly the same types as those to the south, with more birch and larch, less pine, and no oaks; but all of them small. Walking among these trees all day made Loon feel like he had entered some land on the other side of the sky where living things were smaller, turning ordinary people into giants. Maybe this was part of what had made the northers so strange.

Their jende guides or guards carried stone wedges and blades fixed sideways into branches, and they swung these bladed branches to make a first cut in trees, low to the ground, after which they inserted a stone wedge into the cut and had the captives pound the wedge with rocks, or the thick ends of stout branches, until the tree’s trunk cracked across and fell. The captives were also sent farther upstream in the steep valleys to forage for downed wood, or dead branches that could be broken off trees.

The jende made no effort to guard the captives during their forays up these little valleys; there was nowhere to escape to, except to death itself. Nevertheless, Loon found this neglect interesting enough for it to break through his waking sleep and give him something to think about from time to time. Sometimes the jende had some of their captive wolves with them on these forages; that was perhaps another reason they didn’t have to guard their human captives. But if he had Elga with him on one of these forage days, and they managed to flee, and if they had sacks with bags of fat in them, and snowshoes, why couldn’t they simply run faster than any pursuit could catch them? For he had the growing impression that he and Elga might be faster than these northers over a long run.

Although they wouldn’t be faster than the wolves. But if they could hold the wolves off with thrown rocks, drive them away, then who human could catch them? But could you throw and run successfully at the same time?

These questions poked at him, and he pretended to be as insensible as before, but it was a pretense, because he had a little itch now. He was awake again, or at least in a dream that was not so benumbed. He started looking for ways to steal things from the jende and hide them away. At first he didn’t find any, but he was looking.

One day he saw which house Elga was kept in, because they both stepped out of their houses at the same time. She didn’t see him at first, and he stared at her intently. He couldn’t tell how they were treating her. He supposed she was again the wife of some jende in that house. He assumed or hoped she was being treated as jende rather than captive, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe the northers’ wives were captives too, although they did keep a women’s house at the upper end of their valley tuck, for their monthlies he assumed. And the women in his house were cheerful and active around the fire, cooking everything they all ate. How Elga was joining that or not, he could not tell.

Now that he had an itch to know things, it was quite an itch; but it could not be shown.

There was a young man among the captives who spoke like Loon, and who also understood the jende. As they ate at night in the cold trap, he told Loon that he was a member of the eagle clan. None of the jende were eagles, he said; they didn’t even have clans.

This youth didn’t know how long he had been a captive in the house. Many months, he said, as if it had been more than anyone could count.

While Loon was outside gathering wood, he looked around and told himself stories about how he and Elga would make their escape. All the stories had obvious problems in terms of their actual performance. On some of his days out he would be free to run away for a fist or two, but the jende would soon know he had gone, and set their captive wolves after him, perhaps. Also, during the days he didn’t know where Elga was. During the nights he knew which house she was in, but then he too was in a house, under the eye of the jende.

When mornings were orange, they too said a storm was on its way. During stormy days they stayed inside and sat around cooking, eating, making things, sleeping, or telling stories. The jende men quickly grew impatient at staying in. Once they drove Loon out of the house wearing only his leggings, and instructed him to run around the shelter while they threw snowballs at him, shouting happily at the storm to go away. The next day it did. This was the only time they performed anything like a shaman’s ceremonies, and really it was more like a joke. Afterward they fed him a chunk of cedar salmon and a roast caribou shank.

In new snow they wore snowshoes. These were bigger and better than the ones the Wolf pack had, made of single long spruce branches bent in a full curve to a point behind the heel, and the ends lashed together. Across the widest part of the bend, two hard sticks had been lashed. An open weave of leather strips was tied to the outer frame, making the surface that rode on the snow. Leather straps were tied to the cross stick and used to tie their boots to the forward cross stick. The snowshoes were light and strong, and floated a walker over all but the softest snow. They were better on flats than on traverses. As when on the cruder snowshoes the Wolf pack used at home, while descending a snowy slope one could slide down on one foot until enough snow piled up under that snowshoe to bring it to a halt, and just before that happened one shifted to the other foot, thus glissading down the slope in long slow steps. In the steep ravines these dreamy glissades added to Loon’s sense of being a giant on the land.

Put your head down and get through the days. Eat as much as you can stand to. It was hard to eat, there was a permanent clutch in his belly, though sometimes he also felt a raging hunger. He couldn’t tell hunger from nausea, and so ended up getting very cold at night, even to the point of shivering from time to time. No one can shiver for long.

Day followed day. The winter solstice came and went. Around that day, the jende men let one of their captive wolves out of their enclosure and surrounded him and abruptly clubbed him to death, and then skinned the body and ate it, giving one bite to every jende person. Seeing this made the captive humans very quiet, that night in the cold trap.

In the depth of that winter Loon learned the surrounding countryside well, especially the ravines to the east, and the land falling south and west to the great salt sea. On that broad riven slope the jende trapped beaver and marten and fox, and the other furry small people of the marshes and waterways now lying under their thick blanket of snow.

As the winter got colder and colder, despite the lengthening days, they spent more time in the house, and Loon learned more of what could be learned in there. He saw which men were the leaders of this big pack, and which women, and how the group split into its clans, or whatever they had that was like clans. The women ran the house’s affairs in a way recognizable from his own pack. Elga still went to the women’s shelter during the new moon, as she had at home. That was something to know. On the days when he glimpsed her going there he felt a prick of hope, as if one piece of a riddle had been answered. Anytime he spotted her it was hard not to startle and look away. He still wasn’t sure whether the jende knew of his connection to her or not.

Later in the winter some of the jende men walked out onto the sea ice to hunt seals at their breathing holes. The great salt sea was frozen to an immense distance offshore, even reaching to a few low rocky islands poking over the horizon from the land. So out they went on it, and on certain days Loon was required to follow them, his heart as cold as his feet.

The jende men walked straight to spots where they expected to find seal holes, and there they waited, hiding behind low snow walls they built, to spear seals who came out unsuspecting. They tied leather lines to their javelins so the speared seals couldn’t swim off to die. Some of those killed were pregnant, and the unborn seals were a favorite delicacy back in camp.

Loon’s task was to haul the sled carrying the kill, which was heavy, and seemed to him therefore to have the most chance of breaking through the ice and pulling him down with it into the great salt sea. But he kept his eyes down and followed.

Big cracks in the ice had sometimes refrozen clear, so that he could look down right to the bottom. Once he saw yellow sand down there, covered by purple starfish like big flowers. On this clear ice the jende speared ahead of themselves frequently to test the ice’s solidity. Once, stopping briefly to look down at the purple starfish, the jende called Elhu said, — Too bad! in the particular way the jende had when they were laughing at bad luck. He added something to the effect that the starfish would be prized for something, making a scratching motion as he said it.

Loon nodded, looking around. Out here one could see that the great ice wall looming over the hills extended to the west as far as they could see, covering the great salt sea as it did the land, although on the ocean it did not stand as high. Possibly it rested on the sea floor, like the sea ice nearest shore did; or perhaps it too was floating, like the sea ice farther offshore. One could see where the waves of summer had struck the ice wall to the west and frozen to it in a frolic embroidery of white curlicues and icicles. This white tangle somewhat resembled broken water and spray, but as everything was frozen, the scene was strangely still.

Loon was always scared out on the ice, and he saw the northers were nervous as well, as alert as deer who smell wolves, so that he knew he was right to be scared. The ice under them sometimes bowed down, especially under the sleds, you could feel it behind you. When that happened the jende altered their course and turned in easy curves, never stopping, and one shouted to the slowing Loon not to stop, never to stop: Oma! Oma! Apparently stopping was exactly wrong, as the norther’s quick mime of crashing through made clear.

Staying safe was apparently a matter of staying on the whitest ice. New ice was nearly black, and the northers called those areas beltz, and kept away from them. As the new ice thickened it turned gray, and at its thickest, white. The line where gray turned to white would hold a man and a sled. They stayed well away from any open water, no matter how white the ice next to it was. They had with them a long pole with a bone point at one end and a bone hook at the other; this was called an una, and was lighter and longer than any javelin, and used to poke suspect ice ahead, to see if it could be broken enough to let sea water up. Drifts of snow lying on the ice were also probed, to see if there was in fact any ice under them; apparently the winter’s sea water was so cold that snow could float on it without melting, looking solid when it wasn’t. This slush was called pogaza, and if it had frozen into a solid mass, it was called igini. Igini would hold a man and even a sled, but it was almost impossible to haul a sled over it, or even to walk on it without falling. Also, there was no visible difference between igini and pogaza, so they had to avoid both whenever possible, and treat igini as a great danger if they had to cross it to get to better ice. With gusto they mimed what would happen if you fell into pogaza; nothing to climb out onto, nothing to hold to, so you would quickly freeze and die. They seemed to enjoy miming death’s arrival.

One day out there, a short day in the middle of the second month, Loon was hiding behind a snow wall near a hole in the ice, and a jende named Kaktak, along with Elhu and another friend, were killing the seals that emerged from the hole, when suddenly there was a loud crack to landward. The northers immediately ran off in that direction, leaving their captives to follow or not. By the time Loon and the other two captives had caught up to them, they were standing still, looking at an unjumpable width of open black water. No miming anything now. They were on a floating chunk of ice, sliding out to sea.

The northers conferred briefly among themselves, then returned to the seal hole and made a shelter out of their snow wall, the sleds, and some hides from the sleds. Each of them used a hide to sit on, and the flat rock they carried on the sled for a hearth was placed at their center. They quickly spun up a fat fire, not hugely warm but better than nothing. After that there was nothing to do but sit and wait, and hope that an onshore wind would eventually come out of the west and blow them back to the sea ice still attached to the shore. Meanwhile they were on a raft made of ice, drifting on the great salt sea. One of the jende stood and shouted a prayer to the winds, or a curse; then they huddled in their furs and sat, waiting to either live or die.

Night fell in the middle of the afternoon, and the temperature plummeted. The fat fire’s warmth was palpable then, though it was little more than a big lamp, and they blocked the entry to their low shelter with snow and hides, and huddled together around the little flame, pressing against each other in a tight circle to share what warmth they could through the sides of their bodies, and holding hands out to the fire from time to time to warm them a bit before tucking them back into their underarms.

Loon was too cold to think. He sat hunched, pinching his toes, feeling in him a deep sadness that he would be unable to rescue Elga, that it all would end for him so soon. He hadn’t felt anything so strongly in a long time.

But sometime in the night the wind seemed to change, and in any case picked up. Though they couldn’t be sure of it in the dark, when a gray light crept over the eastern horizon, and they took a look outside the shelter, the wind was clearly coming from the west. They stirred a little under the hides, ate a little frozen fish to give them strength for whatever the day might bring.

With the sun blinking over the horizon, they left their shelter to have a quick look around. In the distance they could see the hills behind their camp, and the ice wall looming over the hills. Their floating island slopped in the great salt sea, getting wet around its edges. Happily it was big enough that they stayed dry in the middle, even though it was getting windier, and broken waves sloshed onto the west side of the ice, throwing up little bursts of spray.

They went back inside to stay as warm as they could. For a long time they sat there in the gloom of their shelter. Finally the raft came to a grinding halt, and they rushed out to find they were well to the south of where they had broken off, and had been blown up against new black sea ice, very thin.-Bad luck! the jende exclaimed, laughing mirthlessly.

The northers walked quickly around their little island, then had a long discussion. Crossing the black ice was going to be hard; the possibility of falling through it was all too obvious.

Kaktak spoke and mimed to Loon and the other captives, in a way that Loon did not find completely clear. It looked like he was mimicking the big white bears who lived out on the sea ice. When confronted with black ice, these ice bears lowered themselves and shoved forward on their chests and bellies, toeing their way forward as fast as possible without kicking downward. Toe pushes and finger sweeps were the most that could be risked when it came to pressure on the ice. The only thing that differed for the humans compared to the ice bears, Kaktak indicated, was that they would also hold an una in each hand, lengthwise right next to their bodies, and would push down on them to help spread their weight over a bigger patch of ice as they slithered forward.

Kaktak spoke briefly to Elhu and the other man, and then with a graceful kneel and dive, he slid onto the black ice and squiggled forward like a big lizard, always moving the unas close to him on both sides. When he had made it to gray ice he quickly stood up, and immediately began to finger water down the fur of his jacket and pants, sweeping it onto the snow under him. He shouted to the rest of them happily.-Omoo! he called, and then slid the poles back over the black ice to them. It goes!

So it would, if you were good. But knowing it could work was the main thing, and Kaktak having tested it, the rest of the stranded jende were quickly across, one at a time, over slightly different places on the ice, trying to stay close to Kaktak’s route without repeating it exactly.

When it was Loon’s turn, he banished from his mind a vision of the way loons slapped the water when taking off across a lake, and recalled instead a red water lizard he had once seen slither away from an overturned rock in a stream, looking like a live root and quickly disappearing. He crouched and cast himself forward as smoothly as he could, smacking the ice right away with his nose and mouth, so that the salty tang of the coat of water on the ice was in him as he slithered forward on knees and toes and the two clutched unas. It was an awkward kind of crawling, but soon the ice was dirty white under him, and he pushed up to his knees and got to his feet, and began to squeeze the water down and off the front of his clothes before it froze there in the fur. Even though the air was very cold, there was some kind of wetness on the new ice, made of water saltier than the great salt sea itself.-Gatzi! Kaktak said when he saw Loon’s face. Salty!

The northers were very pleased at their return to land and their escape from death, so pleased that Loon suddenly realized they had not expected to survive. He had not been able to see that in them during their time at sea, and was impressed at the way they had fronted the situation.

The other captives slithered over to the gray ice and imitated the jende, drying out their furs with their fingers as completely as possible, which left their hands pink and wet and throbbing with cold. Then the jende pulled the sleds off their ice raft by throwing ropes in loops over them, and when they caught them, tugging them over the new ice to them as gently and smoothly as they could. The black ice bowed under them, but did not break.

When they had recovered the sleds, the jende took off toward camp faster than Loon had ever seen the northers move. He soon realized it was because their clothes were damp, despite their best efforts to dry them; the chill was so numbing that they had to run to be warm enough to move at all. The captives followed as best they could. After the running created some warmth in them, they slowed to a walk and caught their breath, but soon chilled and were forced to run again. So it went, run then walk, run then walk, but mostly run, huffing and puffing so hard that their blood should have been burning inside them, though it wasn’t; the best they could do was to keep just warm enough to move.

Loon followed the jende, and made no attempt to help the other two captives falling behind him. Surely that was the northers’ job. But the northers did not help, did not even look back, and when Loon looked over his shoulder he saw the last man, named Bron, was falling and struggling back to his feet. Loon waited, and when Bron caught up to him, he tied the man’s sled to his own, freeing Bron up to make his way back without pulling a sled.

Except a little while after that, he looked back again and saw that Bron had collapsed onto the snow. He circled back and left Bron’s sled behind, pulled the man up onto his own sled, then took up his rope again and heaved forward to start. He pulled and pulled on the loop on the end of the rope, and got going at last with his legs burning hot, while the rest of him burned cold; the hot pushed from inside out, the cold from outside in, but both painful. And yet somehow the two together would be enough to see him home. He began to sing one of Thorn’s running songs as he approached the northers’ camp, and he only stopped singing when he arrived at the tunnel entrance to the big house’s cold trap and went in to get help for Bron, still lying on the sled. He was not sure what the northers would make of his rescue of a fellow captive, and he was irritated with himself for standing out to them in any way. He went to his corner of the ground level and stripped to his leggings and stood right over the captive’s lamp fire to get warm and dry. Thawing out caused some of the fiercest burning of all, as usual, but it was all on the surface, simply the burn of feeling coming back into his numbed hands, then his face and ears, and, after he had eaten a lot of fish dipped in marmot fat, even his feet. Meanwhile the northers carried Bron up to the middle platform in the house and put him by the fire there, and only when he was coherent did they send him back down to the captives’ level to spend the night. Once down there again, he squeezed Loon’s arm with a look that Loon did not want to see on any captive’s face; he did not want to think of himself as one of them, or as a helpful stranger. But in the nights that followed, Loon sometimes woke to find Bron draped against his back, making of himself a living blanket in the coldest part of the nights. They did not know any words in the same language except for the northers’ words, and those words none of them spoke aloud. The ground floor under the big house was a quiet place.

Loon had intended to make himself invisible to the northers, to be a captive beneath notice. Now some of the northers might be aware of him. And he had hidden a sheep shank in the corner of the cold trap, and on every new moon scored its edge with a pebble to mark how many months had passed, and one night it wasn’t there anymore. Whether whoever took it had noticed the marks, or knew the bone was his, he could not be sure. There was no overt sign from Kaktak or Elhu or any of the rest of the ice people that they were watching him. But he felt that the men going out earliest and farthest on the day’s affairs were calling for him more often. And during their days out, checking traps, or hunting on the sea ice, or foraging for firewood, they gave him as much to eat and drink as they took themselves, and treated him almost like they did each other, except when it came time to pull the sleds home. And of course he was never allowed to have anything to do with the captive wolves they sometimes took with them. They talked among themselves, and Loon only caught part of that, but he was understanding more than he had at first. The northers were content in their life by the great salt sea. It was always cold, and mostly dark in the winter, but they took a good living from the sea and the hills. They never went hungry. They laughed at bad luck. They faced up to Narsook.

One morning Loon left his house and there was Elga right there before him. He said-Hello! but she ignored him, looked away, and then he was cuffed in the back: Kaktak had been behind him, coming into the house from around the corner.

Kaktak glared at him as he regained his footing.-Why did you say anything to her? he said in his tongue, perfectly comprehensible to Loon.-You know you aren’t to speak to the women.

Loon nodded, looking down.-She was just there. Sorry.

Kaktak kept staring at him.-Why did you go back for that other captive? That was none of your affair. You leave the other captives to us, understand?

— Yes.

— Good. Because I want to take you out with me. You pull hard. But we’ll leave you in the house if you do anything more like this.

— I understand, Loon said, still looking down, his cheeks burning.

Kaktak went into the house, taking a last look at Elga, who had kept walking toward the women’s house.

Loon resolved to keep a stone face and do what he was told and nothing more.

Late in the third month of the new year, Kaktak and some of the other northers instructed Loon to haul a sled loaded with firewood and bags and follow them as they climbed up the nearest valley onto the ice wall itself. Now we go up in the wind, they told Loon as they left camp.

To get up the steep side of the ice wall, they ascended one of the hilltops flanking their valley, and followed a ridge from that hilltop north and higher, until they were overlooking the ravines on each side. This ridge ran right up into the massive wall of ice, which stood above them tilted back a bit, gray with rubble and dirt and dust, and riven by cracks and melt lines that were blue in their depths. As high as they were on the ridge, the ice still bulked over their heads, and they could not see the high plateau that must be up there. But here they could see that the ice sloped steeply down into the ravines to each side of them, making fat tongues of ice that the jende called glaciers. These ice slopes ended either in clean walls of ice, like the one east of their camp, or in curving bars of rubble and milky gray ponds.

Now the jende making this ascent led the way in a traverse up the side of the glacier to the east of the ridge, moving up on ice intermixed with rocks of all sizes. It was possible to find good footing on rock after rock, as most of the stones were more than half-buried in the ice; they must have warmed up enough by day to melt the ice under them enough to sink into it a little, and then at night they froze in place, and eventually they sank too deep in the ice to warm up in the sun anymore and stayed stuck where they were. So the men could traverse up the ice slope easily on these rock steps, and after a while, as they got higher, the slope lay back.

Hauling a loaded sled up this traverse after them proved difficult, and the jende came back once to help Loon drag it up an ice channel between two rocks, then lift it up over some others. But soon enough they were all on top of the glacier, where they headed north up a slight rise onto the ice wall proper, with Loon hauling the sled behind them.

When they came onto the ice plateau at the top of the wall, they stopped and looked back south, down to the hills and the steppe and the big snowy valley, and the frozen curve at the edge of the great salt sea, the whitest white of all, with the blue of its water beyond. Loon had never seen the great salt sea look anything like so big, it was stunning to see it from this high up, extending west and south with no sign at all of any shore to the west. The world was huge.

The ice on top of the plateau rose and fell somewhat like the moors north of their home camp. As they walked north over this ice, Loon could hear the ice shift and breathe. Ah: it was alive. A white cold thing of the north, devouring the world. It spoke in low heavy creaks, also cracks, also shuddering booms, as low as any sound he had ever heard.

The ice plateau was not at all like land covered by a winter blanket of snow. The ice was almost all bare ice, mostly white, but in some places blue, in others clear. It undulated in ways that ground never did, nor the great salt sea; the rises and dips were something between hills and waves, but neither. In a few places it was perfectly flat, but mostly it was rounded up or down. Here and there it shattered to a rubble that resembled a close-packed array of smooth-edged ice blades. Little creeks of water cut the ice now and then, and these flowed downward, of course, but curving in ways that creeks on land would never have thought to go. When the jende wanted to cross these streams but they were too wide to jump over, they followed them downstream rather than upstream, because soon enough they always disappeared down a hole in the ice, the creek’s water swirling down into icy blue depths with a fearful clatter. The men kept a good distance from these round holes, and spoke apologies to the talkative ice for bothering it with their passing. They also avoided the areas of shattered ice, which came in patches.

Most of the ice surface they walked over was pitted, and about as white as old snow. It was too bright to look at, and indeed Loon had to squint hard to look at anything. As they walked farther north, the ice under them grew cleaner and less nobbled. Here and there boulders and pebbles were heaped up in long curving lines. These grew fewer as they proceeded north, but some still snaked over the ice, about waist high and very strange to see, because they looked like low walls that people had piled up, but were too big and long to be that. Looking back they could see south a great way, but as they walked on, eventually all they saw was ice; even the great salt sea was only a sunbeaten verge to the southwest. It looked like a world covered entirely by ice, a sight to put a pinch in one’s throat. But the northers hiked on.

Late that day they hiked on creamy blue ice that was almost too smooth to walk on. Up on a low rounded hill of this blue ice, they could see a long way in every direction. There was only ice as far as they could see. Up here the northers stopped and made a small fire on a hearth rock they had brought with them, and cooked little strips of fish and seal and caribou to black fragments like charcoal. They broke up and dumped the black bits on the ice, while chanting a chant in which the words for ice and cold were frequently repeated. Eeeeesh! Kalt!

After that they smoked a pipe they passed among themselves, and when they were done, Loon was allowed a puff too. It was a harsh bitter smoke, Loon found. The jende coughed as they expelled it, and Loon decided he wouldn’t, but he did anyway.

One of the jende men, named Orn, made apologies to the great windy ice. Then he pointed north. There on the horizon was a low black prominence. That was their destination. The nuna, they named it. A rock island in a sea of ice. The pupil of the eye, they called it, pointing at their squinting eyes. It was the reverse of the ice caps on the hills to the west of the Wolf pack’s camp.

The jende took off toward the nuna. Loon followed them head down, eyes nearly closed to reduce the glare of beaten sunlight off the ice and the sky. He would have closed his eyes entirely, but he needed to see the ice under his feet to set them properly against the nobbling.

When they came closer to the island of rock, they found that the ice had reared up over its edges, like a wave that was about to crash on a shore, frozen at the last moment. It was not possible to cross the blue trough between the frozen wave and the scraped rock under it; they had to walk around the island to the west, until they came to a break in the ice wave which allowed them access to the rock’s edge. Here, however, the rock, which was reddish black, and as smooth as chert, was a short cliff with no obvious way up. The jende led the way left, down what became a flat floor of blue ice separating the rock cliff and a growing ice wave. They descended this little rounded slot, which grew deeper as they hiked, walking on blue ice covered with reddish rubble scattered on it, each bit of rock half-buried in the ice. It was strange to walk down this rubble-floored gorge, with a wall of rock to their right and an overhanging wall of blue ice to their left. It seemed as if the wave of ice would fall on them at any moment, though it never moved, nor groaned, nor scarcely even breathed. Nevertheless the jende walked in silence, and Loon nervously followed their lead, letting his sled down ahead of him. After a fist or so of this uneasy trek, they came around a curve of the island and the rock wall shrank in height until the ice and rock were the same height, and they could simply step from the one to the other.

They walked on flat blocks of dark red stone. The sled’s bone runners scraped, but the rock was so smooth that Loon could still pull it behind him. The blocks rose in distinct steps, and the jende helped him lift the sled up each of these knee- or waist-high walls. By the time they reached the center of the nuna, they were two or three trees’ height above the ice. The tops of all the red blocks were smoothed to a polish, with straight lines scoring the polish north and south. There were also crescent breaks, the shape of day three or four of the moon, cut into the rock. Small shallow gaps between the red blocks were filled with scree and sand that was dotted with black lichen, the only living thing on the island.

They reached the high point of the rock. From there they could see out over the great windy ice for a great distance in all directions. A turn of the head gave Loon the ring of the whole earth, its western edge blazing with sunblink. The ice below them was a creamy blue marked by patches of white, lined with gray lines of broken stone. That they had walked in a single day onto this new world was astonishing. The stories at home all spoke of three worlds, one inside the earth, one in the sky, one on the surface between them. Loon had had glimpses of all three. But here the northers had simply walked north onto a fourth world, bulking over the earth. A higher realm, a frozen sky.

The northers were looking around attentively. It was not their way to speak much when they were out by day; later, in the evenings around the fire, they would talk at length about the day’s happenings, but in the moment itself they did not like to talk.

At the northernmost end of the big block at the top of the island, there was a ring of waist-high stone shards, standing on their ends. The northers walked to this circle of stones, and before they got there, indicated to Loon that he should stay behind.

The highest block had been cleared of any of the small stones that lay scattered on much of the rest of the island: only the ring of standing stones was left on it. These stones were all roughly rectangular, and had been balanced on their ends so that they seemed to stand like short men. There were about a score of them. Gathering them must have been a considerable task, accomplished by a big group of men; the stones were big enough to be very awkward to move.

A squarish boulder lay flat at the center of this circle of standing stones, and on it the northers prepared a fire with branches and twigs they had brought from Loon’s sled. They dripped fat from a bag onto them, and soon had a fire sparked to life. On the fire they burned the wing of an eagle and the wing of a raven, while singing in their harsh voices. When the fire was at its biggest, though still nearly invisible in the glare of the sun and the sky and the ice, Orn took a red swath of cloth from his backsack and unwrapped it to reveal a human skull, missing its jaw but otherwise clean and fresh. He held it up to look at the sun one last time, and all of them likewise looked right at the sun, eyes closed, singing together. Then Orn put the skull in the fire, and they watched as it blackened and, when they had poured some fat on it, burned as well, not like wood, but like the tip of a giant lamp wick. As with a wick, it took a long time to burn away. White flame danced in its eye sockets and out of its gaping mouth as if it were comfortable living in fire, but eventually it broke and fell in on itself, and joined the embers under it. As the fire burned itself out, the skull became no more than black chunks, like the other bits of char there in the ash.

When the fire went out, the men stirred the ashes gently, waited again. In the frigid chill of the breeze out of the north, the heat quickly left the ashes, and as soon as they were cool enough to handle, the northers all scooped up double handfuls and carried them outstretched to the ring of stones, where they walked around the outside of the circle and stopped to sing at each of the cardinal points; after which they surrounded one of their company and tossed their ashes into the air, such that the wind caught the ashes and blew them over this man. He held his arms out and his face up, and took the rain of ash on him as if he wanted it.

This was as close to shaman stuff as Loon had ever seen in the northers, and he watched with a pang in his chest as he thought of Thorn, and wondered what Thorn would have made of this, and whether he would ever see Thorn again and thus have a chance to describe the northers’ ceremony, their ring of stones, this immense fourth world of ice that they had walked right up onto. He still did not see how getting back to Thorn could happen, and the pain of that made his body weak. His stomach shrank, his knees buckled, he had to collect himself to be able to walk. With all the standing around their feet had gone cold, and they had to proceed carefully as the jende walked west and north, to an edge of the rock island where they had not yet been.

Here the rock stood high over the ice. At their feet a steep cliff of cracked stone dropped away to the creamy blue. All the narrow ledges of this cliff were green with moss, so they saw it as mostly green; then the cliff steepened as it dropped, such that much of it could not be seen from above. The ice beyond the green moss looked a long way down.

The jende had gone quiet on the approach to the cliff’s edge, and by signs required that Loon do the same. They stood back from the edge and looked around them. The great windy ice covered everything they could see, extended to the distant sun-singed horizon.

Suddenly the jende rushed to the cliff’s edge as if to cast themselves off, and stopped and screamed as they threw handfuls of small rocks down the cliff, bouncing from ledge to ledge.

Up and out into the air screeched a great flock of birds, flapping across each other in wild disarray, some even colliding and tumbling down before catching the air and flying again. They were crow-sized black-and-white birds, with big curved orange beaks, twentytwentytwenties of them crisscrossing the air overhead until they were everywhere over the men.

When they were past their panic and high enough, the birds flocked and began circling in groups, and either returned to the cliff below, ignoring the northers who had disturbed them, or flew off. Black backs, white undersides, ducky feet that were the same orange as their beaks. Their faces were two big white circles holding little black eyes. They flew so close together it seemed like they should be colliding, but now that they were over their fright, they never did. Birds were good at that.

The jende watched the birds’ crisscrossing very intently, hands on foreheads shading their eyes. When the birds were either gone or had returned to the cliff, with only a few still circling overhead, they talked it over for a while, in a way they usually wouldn’t. Loon could see they were interpreting what they had seen in the birds’ splash into the sky, because they sometimes scratched curves on the rock with their hand blades, or made swooping motions with their hands. The way the birds had flown off in their panic meant something to them. It was going to be a good year, they were telling each other.

After that they headed back. Down the many blocks of scraped rock, back onto the breathing blue ice, once again sliding along carefully, the sun now blazing off the ice to the west at an angle that hurt. They had to squint until their eyes were slits nearly closed shut, and here the jende’s eyelids gave them quite an advantage, it seemed. For Loon the ice was so bright it went black, as if burning at its edges. It was a light like the fire in the skull on the block. Blindly they walked down the slope of the ice plateau with the wind at their back. Badleg throbbed badly at the growing length of the trek. They were walking back down into the world. Soon the sun would set and they would have to finish their descent in darkness. For now, the world blazed.

Some of their late winter storms lasted a fortnight or longer. They passed these in the big house, eating, sleeping, and sleeping some more. On the upper platforms the jende sat around or lay on their sides. In the dim light coming down through the roof tube, they made things and talked, and their elders told stories, long stories in short rhythmic bursts of speech, the winged words following one on the next in a way that lulled Loon into something between sleep and waking, something that was not exactly dreaming, but like it. When the jende elders finished their stories they were just like Pippilouette, and would say something to effect of, Look, the icicles seem to be melting already, to remind their audience how much time they had eaten up with their story. The more the better, on days like these.

Sometimes Loon made things too. He carved spear throwers from shoulder bones in their food, using not blades, which the captives weren’t allowed to have, but broken pebbles. Sometimes after they broke bones for their marrow, there were splinters left over that were easily sharpened into trap stickers; but these could be blades as well, obviously dangerous, and there was no place to hide them, so he usually broke them up when he was done making them. One however he slipped between two hides on the wall where they overlapped, near the floor. No one noticed.

But he couldn’t see a way out.

As they waited out the spring storms, they spent more time in their house than in any month of the winter. At dawn one or two of them would dress and look out the entryway, and then report on what the winds told them they could do that day. If it wasn’t storming, out they ventured into the cold, and did what could be done. They fed their captive wolves, visited their shitting field, got more frozen fish from the food platform. At sunset they convened in their big beaver den of a house and talked the day over while they ate in the heated air. They sweated freely through the evenings, resting on their highest levels in their highest heat. They slept on the lower levels where it was cooler, just above Loon and the other captives, as they seemed to like to sleep snuggled into their furs. The air flowing in the low entryway’s cold trap was the same coldness as the outside air, of course, and if you put your hand down from the captives’ level into the tunnel of the entryway, you could feel just how cold it was, very much colder than on the ground floor of the house, so quickly did the air warm as it rose. It always amazed Loon how quickly that happened, but he could feel it with his hand, and also reach up and feel the greater warmth just above him. In the distance from the cold trap to the jende’s first level, the air went from freezing cold to mildly cool, indeed almost warm, or in that in-between that was neither warm nor cool. It was like the way air warmed from one’s nose to one’s lungs, or when the sun hit you in the morning: strangely quick changes in the heat or coldness of air.

In their big house, the warmth had to do mostly with the fire kept burning on the platform level, and the way in which every wall of the house had been covered in leather, making the place windproof and holding in its warmth as if in a bag. The jende’s bodies glowed like lamps in the gloom, their plump skin flush with blood and gleaming with sweat. They looked like the rocks they put in their fire, then lifted with stout branches into buckets of water they cooked in: these stones too glowed in the dimness and sizzled the air. On storm days the hollow branch at the top of the house was kept almost completely plugged by a patch of fur, and that held in even more heat. When they retired to their beds in the evening, they pulled out the fur patch and opened the top hole entirely, which let the whole house cool down a little. After that they would curl into their furs and the near darkness of the lowest fire, really just a lamp fire, with three wicks burning through the night.

Before going to bed, they had a final meal. They often ate fishes while they were still frozen, chewing on them with relish. But sometimes they boiled the fish in wooden buckets, using the hot rocks to heat the water. When they did that, they ate the fish and then drank the soup they had been cooked in. The jende women would snatch out the fish, dry them with their fingers, hand them out to every jende in the house, with particular attention to who got what. After the fish were eaten, they passed around ladles of the soup. Then they went to bed. Sometimes they woke at night and peed into their pee buckets. Mostly they slept, with only Loon to ponder sometimes through the long fists of the night, feeling Badleg throb with the cold.

The days began to last longer. They would soon be in the hunger months of spring, and yet the jende were not even close to running out of food. They could have made it through yet another winter with the food frozen on their platforms, Loon judged, and maybe another after that. And yet every day that the winds allowed, the men went out hunting and fishing and trapping. Loon didn’t know what to make of that. Probably they just liked to be doing things. They did have more kids in their pack than most packs in the south had. And sometimes they stole wives from other packs, as he very well knew. Maybe having so much food made them want for other things to do. Maybe they wanted a lot of kids, wanted to increase their number. One time he caught a glimpse of Elga in the entry to the women’s tent, and she looked well fed, and he wondered if she would get pregnant. Loon sucked air through his teeth at the thought. But he didn’t know what to do about it. At night he could only lie wrapped in his hide on the cold floor, eating his cold meat; and if the impulse came to him in the darkness, fucking the cold earth. But the impulse rarely came. His feet were always cold, and a cold lump inside him too. Nothing he could see was going to free them from this place.

Still. He had that bone sticker hidden in the hides on the wall. And whenever he was sent out for firewood, or frozen fish from the food platform, or sealskin bags of fat, he tried to steal things and hide them, first in the hides on the wall, or in snowdrifts around camp, and then, when he went out foraging for firewood, under a boulder in the valley nearest camp, one boulder in a clump of boulders at the bottom of a rockslide. The hole under this boulder was like a marmot house, and of course marmots could get into it, so he did not leave food. But over time he hid stolen bags and backsacks, and later two jackets with hoods, and sticks that could be walking poles or spears. Anything he could steal that was not food, that he thought might be useful for the walk home, he took and put there.

But he still couldn’t think of how to get away.

Thorn was crossing Quick Pass when a figure appeared in the meadow at the head of Lower’s Upper. Thorn went still and watched for a while. He couldn’t see like he used to. Then the figure waved at him. It was Pippiloette. Thorn waved back, and the traveler ascended the headwall under the pass at speed. Thorn tugged at the remnant of his left ear, a stub that he seldom touched. When the traveler appeared in the pass, Thorn went to him and they embraced, then regarded each other holding hands.

— Do you know where Loon is? Thorn said.

— Yes. He was taken by the same northers who took his wife.

Thorn growled.-When?

— Right after they took her. I helped him track them, but their scouts took him in the dawn. I heard them coming and slipped away, but I had to stay quiet to do it.

— And then?

— They went north to their place. I followed them for a while, but then I had to go east. Now I’m on my way home, but I wanted to let you know what happened.

Thorn nodded, frowning.-Come to our camp. You’ll be our guest, and you can tell Heather.

Pippiloette nodded.

Back in camp the people gathered around the fire to listen to Pippiloette tell his tale. He stood to do it.

The youth and I tracked the northers on their way home,

Keeping our distance, unseen by them,

For two days, tracking by night and sleeping by day,

And we were faster than they were,

And on the second night we stopped in a good ridge hole,

A place I had used before, a good lookout.

But we both fell asleep, and in the dawn after first light

I woke to the knowledge that men were nearby,

And they were on us before I could wake Loon,

And as they seized him I slipped under a boulder like a marmot,

And had to stay silent so that they would not know I was there.

All my regular nooks have tucks,

And so should yours if you travel alone,

If you are a person who needs sleep, even just a fist now and then.

After that I followed them from a day’s distance,

Only spotting their scouts when they made their rearguard inspection,

Late every afternoon. The northers are not very careful that way,

Because they don’t believe any people would dare follow them,

And are only checking for lions and bears.

So I followed them north to the big river running west

At the bottom of that great plain,

I slipped through the marsh grass

And through willow brambles where I never stepped on the ground,

And yet never made a sound or caused any branch to move,

So quick and sure am I.

And I saw them on the other bank of that river,

And saw them head north from there.

A bluff standing over a bend in the river

Gave me sight of them far away,

Headed north and west to their home place.

Out that way some hills plunge into the great salt sea,

And above and behind those hills is a higher world,

A great windy ice that covers everything north of those hills,

Except for the great salt sea.

This ice is sometimes better to cross than the land under it,

Being smooth and not a place animals go,

Except for the great white bears, and they never go far from water.

Up on the white heights you can run for days without a care for danger,

Except for cracks in the ice so big they would swallow a man,

But these can be seen and avoided.

They who took Loon live at that meeting of ice and land and water,

They call themselves the jende, meaning the people,

As ignorant packs often do.

Thorn said, — Could you lead us to them?

— I can describe the way, Pippiloette said, — in a way you can’t miss. I myself have to go home now.

The people of Wolf pack talked it over. Schist and Ibex didn’t say much, but indicated that they were not interested in taking on the northers for a wife that had been the northers’ to begin with, nor for anyone who might have gotten involved with her. The younger men, Moss and Hawk and their friends, spoke with more heat, because they missed their friend, but really, they didn’t want to go either. As they urged Schist to act they tried to suggest they were the ones needed at home, to do their part in the pack’s work. There was even some truth to this.

Thorn wandered away from the fire, down to the riverside and its view of the sky to the north. It was late; Two Valleys had tipped on its side, and the Ladle was pouring its contents back onto its curving handle.

Later still Thorn returned to camp and went to Heather’s nest. He sat by her little fire and warmed his hands. All her helper girls were asleep in their caribou blankets, faces turned to the fire. Heather eventually creaked over and sat down beside him. For a long time neither of them spoke.

— I’m going to go get them, Thorn said finally.

— No.

— Yes.

Heather made a little snort.-We need you here.

— We need them too.

Heather said nothing. She was the one caring for Loon and Elga’s child.

— I’ll be fast.

Heather regarded him for a long time.-Is Pippiloette going with you?

— No.

— But you’ll need help.

— Maybe so.

Heather said nothing.

Thorn said, — Is that old one you cured still hanging around? What was his name?

— Click, Heather said.-I call him Click. It’s like the sound he makes for himself. She made a clucking sound by pulling her tongue away from the roof of her mouth.-That’s the way he says it. Yes, he’s around. Up at Hill In the Middle. He visits with me when I go there looking for hellebore.

— Will you help me find him? And ask him to come with me?

She stared at Thorn and he let her. Finally she said, — Why him?

Thorn shrugged.-He’s strong.

She kept staring at him.-And he’s the only one who will go with you.

— That too. But he’ll be good. He’s stronger than any of them.

He went to Pippiloette and said, — Tell me where they are. Show me.

They went to the sand bank by the bend in the river. Pippi scuffed smooth a patch of the sand, and first made a very clear copy of the festival meadow and its surrounding hills, piling up ridges of sand with his bunched fingers and using some pebbles to indicate peaks. He was one of the best bird’s eye makers at the eight eight, and when he had finished shaping the festival area, he continued by shaping the sand to the north of that, showing rivers crossing first steppe and then a broad valley running east to west. North of that, right against the sea’s edge, drawn with a curving line, were some low hills, and among these hills Pippi stuck a stick.

Thorn nodded. It was a long way north.

At sunrise Thorn rose and finished packing his sack. When it was full, and he had eaten some smoked salmon and a few handfuls of pine nuts, he went to Heather’s nest.

She was ready, her sack already on her back. Before they left she gave him a little sachet.-It doesn’t work right away. It’s fast, but not immediate.

— I’ll remember, Thorn said, putting the bag in an inner pocket of his coat.

Together they headed out of camp upstream, toward Quick Pass and Hill In the Middle. Heather led the way at speed. Where Lower’s Upper widened and its creek split to go both ways around Hill In the Middle, she stopped at a little cedar grove and whistled a rising note that ended with a triple peep-peep-peep, like a little bird.

After a time a similar whistle floated down on them from the hill. Out of the forest stepped the old one that Heather and Loon had helped when he was hurt. Thorn had visited briefly during the old one’s recuperation in Heather’s care; he had played a little exorcism tune, while pulling from the old one’s throat a mass of spit the size of a toad. So now the old one recognized him, and though it was clear he was surprised, he did not look particularly alarmed. Thorn bobbed his head in the way the old ones had, and made the little roop roop sound that the old ones used when they were trying to locate each other in the forest, sounding just like loons locating their companions when they came up from an underwater swim.

Click repeated the sound.

— A loon to find a loon, Thorn said to Heather, who ignored him and spoke in a slow voice to Click. Click cocked his head to the side and seemed to understand her, though for the most part she used the pack’s ordinary words for things.

The old one’s face was hairy. His beard, hair, and thick eyebrows all tangled together to a mat like the winter shag of a bear. The skin of his cheeks and forehead and nose was as pale as a mushroom; his nose was big and beaky. His irises were dark brown, the whites of his eyes bloodshot. He stared with a fixity that reminded Thorn of old Pika. Around his neck hung a leather thong with three lion fangs tied to it. He was not quite as tall as Thorn; burly in the chest, short-legged, with a slight limp. His head was long, front to back; it was to a person’s head as a cave bear’s was to a forest bear’s. Under his smoky smell there was a musk like a muskrat’s. He carried a spear, and had a big hide bundle slung over his left shoulder. He wore marten and fox furs, and bearhide boots, and looked thoroughly capable, indeed almost like any other woodsman. And there were woodsmen out there who had forgotten how to talk. Still, this one was stranger than a woodsman. The old ones were old.

Now to Heather he made a little honk of assent, onk, onk, clearly a kind of yes, with a fixed look on his face that suggested he was not really sure what he was assenting to, but would find out in good time. Good-natured, perhaps; and yet one didn’t want to run into more than one of them when out alone. Somewhat like bears in that respect too. Bears were said to have been people in the old time, before Raven stuck their coats to them by mistake. Maybe the old ones were bears that hadn’t gotten the coats.

Heather spoke a mix of old one and human.-Thorn good, oop oop, go look for Loon. Then a series of clicks.

Click nodded.-Onk, he began, and then clicked away for a while.

Heather replied with more clicking sounds.

She turned to Thorn.-He’ll go with you and help. He knows you’re going north to the ice, to save Loon and the girl.

She clicked at Click, who smiled fearfully, Thorn felt, and then nodded once more.-Tank oo, he said, something he had learned when they healed him.

— No, thank you, Thorn said, and then, to Heather:-How do I say go?

— Hoosh, she said, with an outward flick of the hand.

Thorn nodded and tried it. He looked Click in the eye.-Hoosh, he said, and waved to the north, over the Hill In the Middle. Then the pack’s word for it: skai. Possibly in this way he could teach the old one some more of the pack’s tongue.-Skai, hoosh, skai.

— Onk, Click said again. Then:-Food. With a wave up Hill In the Middle.

Thorn nodded.-Good idea. Go get food.

Click looked for reassurance at Heather, who clicked to him. He slipped away into the trees.

Thorn and Heather stood there waiting for his return.

Finally Click reappeared through the trees, the bundle over his shoulder bigger than before.

Suddenly Heather clutched Thorn’s arm.-You’d better come back. We need you.

— I know. I’ll come back.

— As soon as you can.

— It’ll be two months or not at all.

They shared a glance, and Heather let go of his arm.

— Hoosh, she said to Click.-Skai. Go with Thorn, do what he says.

The two men traveled fast. It was the fourth month, and the days were now longer than the nights, and getting longer fast. Suncups dimpled the snow on south-facing slopes. In the mornings the snow was so hard that they could almost run on it, and on the north-facing slopes they could slide down on their boot bottoms.

Around the black leads of open water in the river surfaces, it was obvious that many creatures had passed by. Every track on the snow had melted out to three times its original size, so that it looked like they passed through a country of giant animals.

The first part of their trip simply repeated their caribou trek, so Thorn walked and slid as hard as he could all day long, and on the nights around the full moon, continued on till midnight. The snow-blanketed hills glowed in the moonlight such that one could see almost as if by day, though moonlight drained the colors away. But one did not need color to walk. Several times during their night hikes they saw big cats, and when they were trailed one night by a big cat with tufted ears, Thorn shouted at it once to let it know it was being watched. The old one’s presence seemed to keep the cat and indeed all animals at a greater distance than they would have kept from Thorn by himself. It might just have been that there were two of them.

Thorn watched Click when he took the lead, watched the way he hiked and how he looked around. Click crossed ground fast, and yet did not appear to be pushing himself very hard. His feet never stumbled, and his boots looked as good as anyone’s, their sinew stitching covered with some kind of gum. He hummed a little to himself as he walked, and made little clicking noises, so that he sounded somewhat like a cicada or grasshopper.

When Thorn made a little fire after they stopped, at the coldest part of the night, Click sat close by it, arms out to gather in its warmth, and always mewing and clucking. He had things to say to himself. Thorn sat looking at the flames, listening. From time to time the old one would make a quick double click to get Thorn’s attention, then point to things and make the same sound. Thorn would say the name of the thing, and Click would open his mouth and twist his lips, tilt his head, as if on the edge of repeating the word; and yet in the end would not.-Roop, he would say instead. It was almost precisely the loon’s little hello on surfacing in a bay, alerting companions. Thorn could only shake his head in reply, and either repeat the word requested, or say roop himself, or remain silently watching the fire. Thorn spoke, the old one spoke, but they did not share a language. One night Thorn played his flute, and the old one whistled the tunes after him, and then continued as Thorn began again, but offset, and so making a round. That was the best conversation they had.

Click always fell asleep while their fire was still burning, so Thorn would dry anything of his own that might have gotten wet during the day’s walk, then look into the fire until gray films fluttered over the orange glow of remaining embers, and then lie back in his furs and watch the stars wheel the rest of the way to morning. When he got sleepy he would play a little night song on his flute, and when this roused Click, Thorn would mime keeping an eye out, and Click would click twice, and Thorn would fall asleep almost between the first click and the second, and wake only when the sun cracked the eastern horizon.

Once Click woke him with a very light tap from the base of his spear, and when Thorn sat up, gestured at him to stay still, then slumped forward and mimed a stalking cat to perfection. Thorn picked up his own spear and spear thrower and readied to throw, then rose to his feet, listening all the while. He never heard or saw the beast, and after a while Click wiped his pale face with his pale hand and gave Thorn a look that was perhaps meant to express relief, although his great brow with its perpetual frown was not well suited to doing that. They sat back down to pack their things and drink from their bags of water, and press on.

Out on the broad open land of the steppe it was possible to lope along and really cross ground. They both used their spears to push themselves along at a pace just short of a run, and so they made much faster time than the whole Wolf pack could ever have achieved. The important thing was to stay on the great rock plates of the plain, which in places lay one after another, only slightly broken by flat-bottomed muskeg channels. In the mornings it was easy, because they could walk over even these channels, the snow in them was so hard; after midday it softened, and step-throughs became more frequent. Click was so heavy he plunged thigh deep where Thorn would scarcely sink to his ankles. Under some snow patches it was possible there were hidden melt ponds, so in the afternoons it was best to stay on the rock slabs. Click called these slabs burren, it seemed, humming the word as they hurried over it:-Burren, burren, burren, burren.

North, then, at speed, and with the sun at their backs. They were a fast team. On the fifth day they came to the festival grounds, looking very strange under the snow, but it was definitely the place, all shrouded in suncupped white. By now all their journey’s habits were set, and they seldom bothered to try to speak to each other, as there was no need.

Thorn had occasionally consulted a piece of birch bark he had brought with him, on which he had drawn a version of Pippiloette’s bird’s eye view. Now they were moving into what for Thorn was new land, and the bark drawing thus became their only guide.

The river Pippiloette had indicated as the way to head north beyond the festival grounds was still frozen hard, and they could hurry down its discolored snow surface, poking ahead of them with their spears as they walked. This far north it was still cold even at midday, and the ice on the river still thick and strong. What few leads they passed they welcomed as chances to drink, for in such a land of snow and ice, water itself was scarce. And they were still far south of their destination.

The best response to the growing cold of the days was to hike hard, and they did that, and then huddled around little fires if they could find the wood, or over Thorn’s fat lamp if they couldn’t. Twice they passed tributaries of their river that were almost as big as it was.

On the third day north of the festival grounds, there came a moment of choice for Thorn. Almost any north-trending valley they now came to might be the one Pippiloette had indicated they should take, as far as Thorn could tell by his birch bark sketch. So with nothing to distinguish them, he took the first big one they came to.

This valley resembled the land surrounding the ice caps west of the Urdecha. There were fewer trees, and they were stunted and gnarled. People had used them; they had few dead branches, and many had been chopped down waist high, and had regrown above the cuts. Thorn and Click had to burn fat and dung on more and more nights, unable to find enough wood for their fires.

After two days up the bare valley, they crossed a pass and found another valley that led downhill in the same northerly direction, and two days farther along, this valley debouched onto a broad plain tilted east to west, just as Pippi’s map said there would be. The plain was covered with muskeg and head-high forest, mostly larch and alder swamps, and cedar brakes. It was not easy country to cross, and inevitably they found themselves following animal trails, marked on the land by all the animals who had crossed the plain looking for the easiest way.

— When the way is hard the trail comes clear, Thorn announced to the world every time he ran into one of these animal trails. The trails came and went with baffling frequency. Often they found one only after thrashing through brush for a fist or longer, so they were very welcome, even if they were only deer trails, sure to disappear soon. Each time, Thorn would repeat the old saying, which Pika had repeated often.

— Way har, trail clar, Click said once when he was leading and came on a trail.

— Yes, very good, Thorn said.-Thank you.

— Tank oo.

On the second afternoon crossing the plain they came to its river, now a flat white walkway. Thorn had never seen a river so wide, and was grateful they could walk across it. If the people of this pays managed to rope a raft between riverbanks as far apart as these were, it would be a real accomplishment.

They walked on, north from the frozen river. Thorn often consulted his birch bark map, though it was of little use; in the part indicating this region it was almost bare of features, and he could not recall Pippiloette talking about how many days’ walk it took to get from the big river to the ice people’s hills.

They found out by walking: three days. At the end of the third day, low hills rose over the northern horizon of the snow-blanketed steppe. The next day the foot of the hills hove over the horizon. Then the tops of the hills separated into two lines, the lower one dark and bumpy, the higher one straight and white. Those hills were overtopped by ice from the north, just as Pippiloette had described. They were getting close.

Thorn turned to the northeast then, and in an alder brake made a little shelter for them to hide in. He started a fire and made it as small as possible, fanned what little smoke was rising from it to disperse it. After they had eaten he let the fire die down, and they lay through the night by the cooling bed of embers. In the morning, when the snow was hard, they walked fast north, right into the hills.

The little ravines between these hills were all filled with boot tracks and footprints, and even wide trails beaten into the old snow. And the little trees in the ravines, and on their walls, were often chopped off. They were near someone’s camp, no doubt about it.

Thorn said to Click, — These are the people who have taken Loon and Elga. We have to come on them without letting them see us. I want to watch them for a while to see how they live. Then we will raid them and take Loon and Elga back.

— Roop, Click said.

The hunger months passed without hunger. Loon feasted on the jende’s scraps and watched them eat luxuriously as they cheered on summer, which they clearly wanted, though they did not need it like the Wolf pack did, backwards though that seemed. Maybe that was why they lived here. Freeze for ten months of the year, and in the other two months drown in mud and mosquitoes; but always enough to eat, and more than enough. This might also explain all their food prohibitions, so many more than Wolf pack’s: they had enough food to be picky about it. Their women were not to eat many things, some only when pregnant, others all the time: otter, lion, mammoth, musk ox; in short, the women said with certain looks, all the best meats. Young people were not to eat the parts of animals that looked like humans in their old age, such as sagging elg jowls or rhino lips. Never eat marmot meat, never hunt the unspeakable one. Don’t drink too much water or it will make you slow. On and on it went, far beyond Loon’s understanding. Eating only the least-favored foods dulled him to the distinctions they were making on the higher platforms of the shelter, up there in the warmth. They kept the captives cold to keep them stupid, he realized one dismal night when Badleg was throbbing more than usual.

One time near dusk Loon was sent back out to get more frozen fish from the platform. He was allowed to go by himself now, because there was no reason not to. He wasn’t going anywhere. He knew the jende had seen this in him, and it gave him a little pleasure to contemplate it as an artifact, like one of his carved sticks, or the wall paintings back home, still so clear in his eye if he thought about them. Sometimes he thought about them on purpose, to get away from the jende at moments when they might be inspecting him. Red bear, black bison.

And so when they sent him out alone to fetch something, or take a meal’s refuse out to the midden down the hill, in a snow mound that in summer would melt, carrying all the refuse into the river and out to the great salt sea, he continued to try to take something useful from the house and hide it in his marmot tuck in the boulder field under the hill east of camp. There were twentytwenty boulders at the foot of this hill, and the biggest had rolled farthest. In this great shatter no one would find his tuck.

His runs to his boulder and stashing of stolen things, followed by his return to camp, not to mention the completion of whatever chore he had been sent out to do, all happened so fast, with his heart beating so hard, that only in these moments was he awake as of old. These times felt so rushed and strange that leaving the house became like jumping into a dream.

Then back into the warmth of the big house, breathing slowly and with care, each breath crafted to show a calm spirit. And in fact the breathing helped make it so. Asleep on his feet, just another cold captive.

One time he was sent out with the night bucket to empty it down at the shitting field, another snow-covered space that would melt out of their world come the thaw, and he saw Elga coming back from the same destination, an empty bucket in her hand.

They stopped in their tracks, looked around. They were alone. Loon approached her, his free hand extended.

— We can’t let them see that I know you, Elga reminded him sharply.-They’ll kill you.

— I know. I’m still looking for our moment. Be ready.

— We’ll need snowshoes, she said.

Loon felt his chest expand with a huge in-breath.-So you want to go?

— Yes! she said fiercely. He saw it was true and his throat clamped.

— No more now, she said.-They’ll come looking for me soon. I’m only supposed to go out with others.

Loon nodded.-Be ready. And with a light touch to the arm he passed her and went down to the shitting ground.

Late spring: snow still covered the world, but it was melting everywhere, suncupped everywhere. On some south-facing slopes the suncups were waist deep. In the mornings, when they were frozen hard, it was like walking across upturned blades of rock, and seemed dangerous. Later in the day one could step on the blade edge of a suncup and smash it down just right for walking on it. Later still the snow became so soft and sloppy that it disintegrated underfoot in ways that skidded the walker this way or that, mostly crashing down into the holes of suncups, where sometimes step-throughs took you down right to the hip. Badleg took some horrible blows that way. It was remarkable how in just a fist or two the snow could go from a white rock to a watery mush. After dark it hardened back up fairly quickly also. It was not as fast as air, but fast.

All this time the jende had their platforms of frozen fish and sealskin bags. They had so much fat that they could use it as firewood. And the days were getting longer. Soon the break-up would come, and the earth reappear from under the snows. Summer would be on them.

One night the wind came strong from the west, and in the morning it was blowing so hard that the roar of it was loud even in the big house. Outside the entry tunnel, even the old spring snow was flying east over the ground. They had to block off the entryway to keep air from flying up into the house and blowing it apart like a popped seaweed bladder. Loon went outside with the men dealing with that, and as they put together a door of poles and hides to cover the entryway they were frequently knocked over by strong gusts, after which the wind sometimes had them sliding like seals over ice. They all laughed, shocked to feel just how strong the wind could be.

Later in the day, when the wind had died down a bit, the same men went back out to see if everything was all right around the camp, and also just to be out in such an extraordinary blow. After making sure camp was secure, they pushed down into the wind to the edge of the great salt sea. The sea ice was gone without a trace; they watched wild broken white waves roar in and surge in a boil up onto the snowy strand, there to launch foam streamers that rolled inland until they snagged on rocks or tufts of grass and were blown to nothingness. All of that was astonishingly loud; they could barely hear each other even when shouting in each other’s faces. Some gusts were so strong that they had to sit down with their backs to the wind, and even then were scooted over the sand by the heaviest buffets. They couldn’t stop laughing.

In the midst of this, one pointed out at something in the waves, and some of the others stood and leaned into the wind to look, their arms outstretched like birds gliding, or holding their parkas onto their heads. Out in the broken waves floated one of the gigantic tree trunks they used as house posts and markers by the shore. Some of their older standing posts had fallen down in this day’s wind, but most withstood it as they had so many previous gales, and held their position without even quivering.

Now a new log was floating in sideways on the white-capped rollers, then crashing onto the beach, where it was nudged and sloshed farther with every big surge, until it lay there like the dead body it was, corpse of a tree bigger than any Loon had ever seen. He wondered what kind of land could be on the far side of the great salt sea, to grow such trees.

Later, when the wind had died, all the jende men and many of the women went out and grabbed ropes they had tied to the new driftwood log, and together they pulled it onto a collection of smoothed branches placed crossways. They pulled the log easier over these branches, and picked up the branches from behind it when they emerged, and moved them to the front. This reduced the pull needed to move it by a great deal. They hauled the log to the line of standing trunks at the back of the strand, and after digging a hole, hauled the broken end into it, and when it tipped in, pulled on the root end with ropes until the log was standing upright among the rest of them at the back at the beach, there to defy the west wind until it too fell down, or was hauled off for use in camp.

One night when the jende were boiling fish in buckets using rocks heated in the fire, and the upper levels of the house were at their hottest, two figures draped in furs leaped up out of the cold trap and stuck people with spears and threw fat on the fire, causing it to splash blazing all over the room. In the screaming and smoke and confusion one of the invaders took up the bucket of boiling water and threw it in all their faces and then onto the blazing fat fire, after which fire ran everywhere. Like otters in a beaver’s house the invaders stuck anyone they passed while dropping back to the ground floor. One of them grabbed Loon by the arm; only then did he see it was Thorn. Beside him the old one Heather had nursed to health was shrieking like a lynx, teeth bared; the inhuman howl cut through the jende’s screams and made the assault even more stunning.

Loon snatched his boots as Thorn hauled him down into the cold trap. They ran out the entry tunnel and Thorn tossed a burning brand back onto an opened bag of fat he had spilled behind him. Soon the whole entryway blazed.

— I’ll get snowshoes for all of us, Loon said.

— Good, Thorn said.-Take Click and get them while I get Elga.

— She’s in the women’s house.

— I know! Get what you have and follow Click, he knows where we’re to meet. I’m going to make it so all the men here are putting out fires for a while.

— They’ve got wolves! They’ll set their wolves on us.

— I know! In fact the captive wolves were now howling.-Fuck the wolves, they can’t stop us.

He ran off toward the women’s house, and Loon led the old one up into the boulder field, found his hole and slipped down into it, handing out the sacks to Click as fast as he could. The opening was smaller than ever as he tried to hurry in the dark, and he didn’t feel he was moving as well as he should have, given how often he had told himself the story of this event. After the first shock it had struck him as something he recognized, so now it was happening as in certain dreams, wherein he watched himself act from above or behind.

They ran back down to the jende’s camp, and Loon watched himself go to the shelter next to the big house where they kept their outside things and grab four pairs of snowshoes and give them to Click, then take up a stone wedge blade and smash it down on the front curve of all the rest of their snowshoes, breaking each cleanly lengthwise. He was startled to watch himself do this, as he had never thought to do it. But it was a good plan, and he smashed the bent spruce frames as if cracking the jende’s skulls. When he was done the old one clicked rapidly and led Loon downstream to a little brake of alder. Thorn was there with Elga; she was draped in a fur cape, but other than that wore only the leggings the jende wore in their houses. The four of them stood there staring at each other, eyes wide. The night was old, the half moon would be setting soon.

— She needs clothes! Loon said.

Thorn said, — We’ll make them out of her cape. For now it will have to do.

— I’ll be fine, Elga said, and took one of the sacks Loon had hidden. She was wearing soft boots.-Let’s hurry, they’ll cut their way out of those houses.

They stuffed two backsacks with what Loon had taken, and Loon put his own boots on, and stuck his arms through the straps of one of the sacks. Elga took the other one. Thorn tied the stolen snowshoes onto Loon’s pack and the old one’s, and then they were off through the night, headed south.

They walked over the frozen snow as fast as they could without actually breaking into a run. When the moon set they had to slow a little, but under the stars the suncupped snow still glowed enough to see it pretty well, and they hurried on at almost full speed. All that night they continued in silence, except for the times when Thorn yelped, — Skai! and they would go hard, running in a kind of wolf lope until one of them would slow down, and then they would all stop running and walk hard again. Across one long descending slope the snow had melted and refrozen so many times that the suncups were flattened out, the hard snow left as slippery as ice. There they stopped to put on the snowshoes Loon had taken. Loon showed Thorn and Click how to tie their boots to the foot platforms. Elga tied hers on, and Loon saw that the snowshoes would give her soft boots some needed support.

Thorn set a pace that the rest of them had to work to keep up with. It got colder as dawn neared, but aside from their noses and ears Loon was warm all through his body, even in his toes and fingers. This could only happen when throwing oneself forward, even breaking into a little run from time to time on level ground or on downhills. Thorn always urged them on by example, and with an occasional look back; to Loon his face was like a slap from a dream, a vision of Otter Man, implacable and intent after killing the beavers in their den and taking one of their women away. The sight sparked Loon, and his body flew after the others without awareness of the effort. It was like a dream and yet he had never been more awake, not ever in his life.

Coming back into himself a little as dawn grayed the eastern sky, he could not help noticing that Badleg had not had a walk this rigorous in many a moon, and was speaking up to voice its protest. He needed a stick, and the first time they passed a lead in a streambed, curving swiftly at a kink in a little gorge, he took a hand blade from his sack and hacked an alder branch that was a bit too short, but otherwise sturdy, and after that used it to lighten all the impacts on Badleg. Being three-legged in such a manner was not as easy as simply walking, but it was worth the extra effort.

When the whole sky lightened to gray, Thorn redoubled his efforts.-We have to be out of their sight all day today. I don’t know how much of a lead we got on them, but they’ll be fast.

Loon and Elga could only nod at that. Click threw himself onward with a heavy long tread, puffing hard at every exhale, although it also seemed he would be able to carry on like that for a long time. Loon realized he didn’t know much about the old ones’ abilities. Of course his encounter with them during his wander remained firmly in mind, indeed just the thought of the memory was enough to put an extra thrust in his walking. He had escaped old ones, but he didn’t know what that meant about them. He realized that of all the kinds of animals in the world, this one hurrying beside them was the one he knew least. Of course they were the ones who hid most carefully from people, so maybe it was just that: they didn’t want people to know them.

The jende, however, Loon knew. They were very fast over snow when they wanted to be. Of course every pack’s hunters were fast and could go long; that was part of being a hunter. But the jende, with all their summer treks, and quarrels with their norther neighbors, were both fast and used to the snow. Snow was their home ground, and so anywhere there was snow they were on home ground, and would be faster over it than people from elsewhere. Or so Loon feared.

And they had wolves to set on their prey.