Beyond the Sea of Ice Read online

  They were breathless when they reached the lake and paused before the corpse of the mammoth. It lay on its side, two legs totally submerged, and most of its great head imbedded in the ice. It was an enormous cow. And, strangely, it was untouched by predators. They should have noted this, but they did not. Hunger had consumed their caution.

  The cold had lessened somewhat with the drop of the wind, although, in the shadow of the towering moraine and the massive wall of the glacier behind it, the air temperature was well below freezing. The long hair of the mammoth was frozen into twisted pillars of ice above its equally rigid hide. It would take all the hunters’ energy to hack through the hair and hide to the frozen flesh beneath; but they did not care, nor did they hesitate.

  They leaped onto the body of the behemoth and set to work with their spears, chipping and wedging away at the hair, then bending to work, with their fleshing daggers to open the hide. Weariness soon dulled their excitement as they took up bits of frozen flesh and sucked the blood from them, silently acknowledging that unless there was another thaw, the meat of the mammoth would remain rock hard. It would take better tools than they had to cut enough steaks from it to transport back to their people. They would have to go back to the winter encampment and bring others to help them, leaving one of their number to keep predators from the corpse.

  As they crouched upon the body of the mammoth, trying to decide who should stay and who should go, a shadow fell upon them. They paid it no heed at first. They were already in the shadow of the moraine and what fell upon them seemed to be only a deepening of that shadow.

  It was Torka who was first distracted by the sensation of being watched.

  He looked up into the eyes of death.

  A full eighteen feet tall at the shoulder, the bull mammoth stood on stanchion limbs, with over half a ton of ivory curling forward in its tusks. Nearly as long as the beast was tall, the tusks were discolored at their tips, where, in its endless foraging, the bull had ripped and torn into the fragile flesh of the tundra as deeply as it had also ripped into the flesh of its own kind during many a battle for mating supremacy.

  Torka rose. This was what he had sensed walked within the night. His instincts had not betrayed him. Never had he imagined that any living creature could be so huge or so menacing. It was a haunting, risen from the tales that the old men told in the winter dark, close to the warming fire within the Man House—stories of monsters to frighten adolescent hunters, to emphasize the meaning of danger, to stress the full consequences of breaking a taboo. The beast that stood staring down at Torka from the top of the moraine made the great white bear of his memories seem as puny as a half starved Arctic hare. It made the most malevolent of crooked spirits seem less threatening than a winter-weakened ptarmigan flapping its wings in a snare.

  Instinctively, Torka knew that the bull must be the mate of the mired cow whose body he and the others were carving, whose flesh they had eaten to nourish their own. It was the bull who had kept predators from the body until, at last, it had wandered off, only to be drawn back to its mate again, following the hunters.

  The mammoth’s great head lowered and swung back and forth. Alinak and Nap saw it now. They crouched, gaping, incredulous as the low, measured exhalations of its breath reached them. Then, impossibly, it reared back and pawed at the air. Its huge trunk rose, and its long, sloppy-lipped jaw opened as it trumpeted its rage at them.

  Torka would never be certain of the exact moment in which it charged. He only knew that it was suddenly coming at him, and he and Alinak and Nap were grabbing for the spears that they had set aside. They leaped from the cow, slipping and scrambling madly along the ice-rimed embankment of the lake as they ran for safety. But there was nowhere to run. Torka heard Alinak scream. The choking, retching gurgle that followed put the hideous manner of his death into his companions’ minds, but neither Torka nor Nap looked back. They could not help Alinak now.

  They ran close together. Nap was sobbing as he rasped in terror, “Run wide of me, Torka. It is my crooked spirit. It comes for me. Make for high ground! Run for the ridge! I will lead it away!”

  “We run together!” was Torka’s reply, even though he knew that there was wisdom in Nap’s advice. If they ran wide of one another, the beast could not take them both at once. But if they both made for the ridge, running in an erratic pattern, perhaps they could confuse it, and then they could both make it to safety. The beast was the largest mammoth that Torka had ever seen, but somehow he knew that it was a mammoth and not a crooked spirit. And mammoths could not climb.

  It was this certainty that gave him the power to quicken his pace, to lengthen his stride into long, earth-eating steps that would surely have brought him to the ridge in time had Nap not veered away, turning back toward the lake, directly into the path of the mammoth.

  “No!” Torka cried. “Run with me! We’re almost there!”

  But Nap had paused. He stood dead still, facing back across the open tundra to where the mammoth trotted toward them, its gait slow now, but gaining. It had stopped after knocking Alinak down. It had wheeled around and ground his body into a bloody mash within the heavy casing of his clothes. His blood was on its trunk and tusks and huge, toed feet. Its head was down, and its hairy ears twitched forward like wings below the high, twin domes of its skull. It eyed Nap, then nodded, huffing as it increased its speed from a trot to a gallop as it moved directly toward him.

  Torka stood frozen. “Run, Nap. Now! Run!”

  Incredibly, Nap did not run. He stood his ground before the charging mammoth, not raising his spear until the very end. Perhaps, in that last moment, when he smelled the stench of the beast’s breath and the acrid stink of its body, superstition fell away and he knew that what rushed down upon him was no crooked spirit but a creature of flesh and blood, as fully mortal as he. He screamed then and turned to flee. It was too late. The mammoth had him in its trunk. His weapon fell away, snarling uselessly in the beast’s thick, tangled red hair. He was thrown down and trampled, his organs exploding out through his mouth as every bone in his body was broken and every fiber of his being was reduced to jellied rubble.

  Immobilized by the horror of what he had just witnessed, Torka stood in shock, shaken by the mind-splitting reverberations of the mammoth’s trumpetings of victory over those who had profaned the body of its mate. It was as though the sound of its roarings permeated the skin of the world. The earth shook. Within Torka, the sound reached down into a never-before-tapped core of molten rage that rose slowly to burn white-hot behind his eyes.

  The mammoth was staring at him. Its eyes were round and dilated with its hatred of Man. Its great trunk swung upward. Its enormous body swayed. One massive forelimb lifted, then came down to strike the earth again and again until it seemed that all the world trembled.

  But Torka did not tremble. Terror had taken him beyond fear. Rage steadied his nerves. He waited, knowing that there was no escape for him now. The ridge was too far. Death was too near. The light that burns was bright behind his eyes. He thought of Umak and remembered the old man’s words: The hunter must face into the light. Only by facing death may his spirit overcome it.

  Torka faced death. With his body poised and his weapons balanced, he waited for it. And when, at last, the mammoth charged, Torka did not turn away. He ran to meet it, screaming. The hunter’s cry cracked the stillness of the Arctic noon. It was a shout loosed like a well-flung spear, hurled upward toward the sun so that it flew across the snow-whitened tundra as though it were a ptarmigan flushed from winter cover.

  But here, in this place, there was no sun. Morning had come and gone, and that was all there would be of day. There was no hunter. There was no spear. There was no winter white bird flying in terror of death. There was only an old man crying out of his dreams within the domed shelter of a pit hut beneath the appalling cold and returning dark of the Asian winter sky.

  “Behold! They come! The people shall not starve!”

  Joy propelled the old ma
n bolt upright upon his narrow mattress. It was a jumbled piling of time-worn hides stretched over the much-mended patchwork of oiled caribou intestines that, together with an under layering of leather tarpaulin, formed the flooring of the little hut.

  The cold dampness of the permafrost, into which the floor had been cut, had melted to congeal into a soggy ooze beneath the waterproof covering; but it did not soak through to permeate the old man’s bedding, nor did the frigid darkness bite at his bony brown body as his bed furs tumbled

  down around him into his lap. Since the death of his woman, he had taken to sleeping fully clothed. Now he was sweating with excitement within his sleeved tunic of caribou hide and his meticulously stitched vest of vertically aligned fox tails

  “Yes ...” he exhaled with a reverence born of pure longing. The caribou were coming. They poured out of his dream and into the darkness of the little hut in a tide so vast that he could see neither its beginning nor its end. Caribou! The annual spring migration to their calving grounds had begun at last! Soon the hunters would be returning with food for all!

  The old man’s prominently lidded black eyes squinted as his tongue emerged to lick the imagined sweetness of caribou fat from his desiccated lips. He rested his strong, lean hands upon his mattressing. He pressed down hard. Yes! He could feel the hooflbeats of the approaching herd roaring deep within the earth. It was a rising, thundering reverberation of life pounding toward the little valley in which his people had made their winter encampment. The caribou were coming at last from out of a thousand secret sheltering canyons deep within the encircling mountains, where they had sought refuge from the seemingly endless storms of the time of the long dark. Yes, the caribou were coming at last! Or were they?

  Suddenly disoriented, the old man cocked his head, listening, straining to hold onto his dream as it dissolved into wakefulness, taking the vision of caribou with it. The roaring sound of the animals’ hooves melded into something else, something deeper, something dangerous somehow, although very far away. Then that, too, was gone, and the old man heard only the growling voice of his own hunger. His intestines lurched and contracted, hurting him with the gnawing, pitiless ache of starvation. He had not eaten a full meal in weeks, and for the last three days he had not eaten at all.

  “Umak’s belly speaks through his mouth.” The woman’s voice was a whispered monotone reeking of contempt.

  His face burned with shame as, through the long, unbraided strands of his black, as yet ungrayed hair, he allowed his gaze to meet the woman’s. So he had awakened her once again with his blasphemous cries of caribou sightings, which were nothing more than the pathetic outpourings of an old man’s wishful thinking.

  “Would that we could eat of Umak’s dreams, we would all grow fat,” she said, watching him out of her wide black eyes, eyes as cold and compassionless as the Arctic night.

  Her words shriveled his pride. Had he lost his dignity as well as his youth? How could he shame Egatsop, as well as himself, by allowing her to know that he suffered from the pangs of hunger while, by right, she ate his portion of the family’s remaining food? He could barely see her in the darkness. Sitting cross legged upon the piled sleeping skins that she shared with her man and children, she had pulled the bed furs up over the back of her head, so that they fell around her small, compact form like a tent. Her man was not there. She sat with her infant at her breast while her little son, Kipu, slept close by.

  In front of her, within the pebble-lined central fire pit, a small stone settled beneath the thick layering of banked embers. The stone, superheated, cracked and fell into two halves. Its movement caused the banked ashes of burned bones and dung to sag and separate, allowing a little fissure of heat and light to rise. Umak stared across the resulting light and saw the woman’s face shimmering red and gold. For all of its undisguised hatred of him, it was the face of a young and undeniably beautiful woman: Egatsop, Torka’s woman.

  Within the fire pit, another stone cracked. It made a sharp, explosive sound, which roused the nursing infant. The baby uttered a sleepy, plaintive cry, then took suck again, making small gasps of satisfaction.

  Egatsop continued to stare at the old man, her mouth downturned between her small nose and pointed chin. Her black eyes flayed him. “All the hunters have returned without meat. All but Torka, Alinak, and Nap. If they do not soon come with game, my breasts will begin to dry. Then this little one will be like the others .. . abandoned to the wolves or wild dogs or—“

  “The hunters will return. They will bring game. Your breasts will not dry.”

  “Have you seen this in your dreams, Spirit Master?”

  “I have seen this.” He resented her sarcastic reminder of his title. Once it was said that he, Umak, was the greatest hunter of them all, that he could communicate with the spirits of his prey and command the herds of game to appear or disappear at his command. These days, it was growing painfully clear to him, as well as to the rest of the band, that he could command nothing. Especially the tongue of his grandson’s cold-eyed woman.

  “Old men see many things,” she said with a rude snort of derision. “But never do they see with the clarity of youth, or they would be out with the hunters, scouting for game, not consuming the food of others when they are unable to provide for themselves.”

  “I will hunt again. My leg is nearly healed.”

  “Nearly is not good enough. Torka hunts for you. Torka shall always hunt for you. And give to an old man what should be for his woman and children.”

  Her words struck at his sense of justice. At forty-five, Umak was the eldest member of the band. He knew that many considered him to be ancient; but he did not feel old. Surely, even a youth could have slipped and sprained a knee while running down and tackling a steppe antelope, as he had done earlier in the winter. Recently widowed, without a woman of his own to care for him, he had agreed to spend the remainder of the time of the long dark with Torka. From the very first, sensing Egatsop’s sullen resentment of his presence within her pit hut, he had made certain that half of everything that Torka apportioned to him went to her and the children. Food, drink, furs. When Torka had objected, Umak simply claimed that his needs were less than they truly were. And for the past three days, since Torka had been gone from the encampment, every morsel of his food had gone to Egatsop so that she would continue to have milk for the baby. He reminded her of that now.

  She snarled at him. She told him that it was his duty to give up his food. She held no gratitude toward him, only disgust. “You should have fed your spirit to the storms long ago, old man. Torka has been too kind to you. It is a weakness in him. But now the headman has said that if Torka and the others do not soon return, we will be forced to break camp and move on without them in search of game. It will be better than staying here to starve. But without Torka to walk at your side, how will you keep up, old man? This woman will not help you.”

  Once again his belly lurched. He thought of his game filled dream. Had it been the vision of a spirit master? Or had it been only the wishful thinking of a hungry old man who could not hunt for himself? The winter had been so long, so cold—perhaps snow still blocked the passes through which the caribou made their migrations. Perhaps the herds would not appear at all this year. And what of Torka? Why had he not returned? He, Alinak, and Nap had been the first group of hunters to go out from the encampment. They should have been back by now ... if they were going to return at all.

  For the first time in his life, Umak felt the weight of his years. All of his children were dead, and the last of his women. Torka was all he had left to remind him that they had ever lived at all. Torka and little Kipu and the infant. How the old man loved the children! Almost as much as he loved Torka. He knew that he had allowed himself to feel too much affection for his grandson. Their years together had formed a bond that choked him now as he thought of what his days would be like if Torka did not return. Egatsop would take another man. She would send Umak from her pit hut, and he would be alone, w
ithout shelter. And who, in these starving times, would see to it that one old man, who could not hunt for himself, was fed? Little Kipu would, but the boy was only five. Egatsop would forbid him to show compassion for one who was useless. She was a wise woman who would make him understand that survival was for the strong. The old, the weak, the children who showed no potential for becoming contributing members of the band had no right to a place within it.

  Despair was a cold and alien wind that stirred within the old man’s soul. He was not old! He was not weak! His leg was taking a long time to heal, but it would heal! The knee was only sprained. He could already hobble about on it. Soon it would be as strong as it had ever been. Soon.

  “Soon we will go from this place.” Egatsop’s voice was low; she did not want to wake Kipu or disturb the infant who now slept, still sucking fitfully, at her breast. “If Torka returns, he will care for you, Spirit Master. He will walk at your side across the long miles and deprive himself of strength for your sake. He will see to it that Umak has food that should be for the mouths of his woman and children. One who is not worthy to live will live. Torka will see to it. Then we will all starve, because soon he will be too weak to hunt.”

  Shame filled him. He could not speak. He knew that she spoke the truth and that the other members of the band would view Torka’s kindness as weakness.

  Her voice continued on, barely audible, a croon, not to the old man, but to the sleeping infant. “You sap me of my strength, little one. There is not much milk for you now. If the hunters do not soon return with game, the band will move on. But do not be afraid. Sleep. Dream. In this place where you shall stay alone, the spirits will ease your hunger. Dream of that. And know that, in better times, this woman will give birth to you again.”