Breakaway: Clan of the Ice Mountains (10 page)

“We think she has two almost-grown cubs,” Paven said as the two of them settled back on the furs in Attu’s shelter.

Attu’s mother handed them each a bowl of ice bear stew.

“Thank you, Yural,” Paven said, and Yural ducked her head and withdrew from the tent.

As Attu looked down at the bowl of rich stew in his hands, he realized he didn’t feel sick as he had the first few times after the retelling. Instead, he was just hungry.
My body is healing, and my mind is winning the fight with the ice bear spirit,
Attu thought as he moved to get more comfortable on the furs. His back was still painful, but it also itched. He knew that was a good sign of healing.

“You have only seen the area of land along the ice where we walk each day,” Paven said. “You know there are low hills near the edge of the land with a steep ridge of ice and boulders dividing the whole length from north to south, right to the edge of the Great Frozen. Last sun, my hunters discovered tracks in the snow on the west side of that ridge, south of our camp here on the east side. We think another small group of bears is living there, hunting that side of the Great Frozen.”

Attu’s mind was still grappling with the fact that the ice bear who attacked him really existed in the Here and Now. He’d always thought of the ice bear as a one-of-a-kind being of the Between. Not a whole race of beings in his world.

“Ice bears are usually solitary,” Paven explained. “They hunt a large territory. But the game here is so plentiful they seem to be willing to share.”

“And now we’re here, like a nuknuk sunning spot, all gathered together in one place, ready to be feasted on,” Attu muttered.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell Moolnik,” Paven said. “It’s dangerous to stay here. But Moolnik is a stubborn man. Rika tells me you dreamed of the ice bear before it attacked?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know what it was in the dream.”

“But when the time came, you reacted in part because you sensed something wrong?”

“It was as if I saw the dream before me again, coming true.”

“Which gave you the courage to react quickly.”

“Yes, I guess it did. I hadn’t considered that before, but you’re right.”

“Beware of dreams, Attu,” Paven warned. “Do not trust them. Dreams are tricky, sometimes showing us what we want, sometimes what we fear, and rarely something important to come, like your dream. Many of us have dreamed. I act only on what I see in the Here and Now, with my own two eyes. I would not be taking my people through ice bear territory if I wasn’t convinced the Warming is real and the Great Frozen is melting. Some of my elders say I have waited too long to make this journey, that we will all die on the way. They are wrong. We will make it.”

––––––––

L
ater that day, Suka came by Attu’s shelter for the first time since the attack. He threw himself down across from Attu and tossed a pouch into Attu’s lap.

“What’s this?” Attu asked, holding up the pouch. The contents clinked together, making an unusual tinkling sound.

Suka scowled and grabbed the pouch back from Attu. He loosened the hide drawstring on the bag and pulled out a large necklace of ice bear teeth and claws. Attu cringed at the sight of the massive black curving claws and sharp yellow teeth alternating on a rawhide string. Suka dangled it in front of Attu, his face now a mask of stone.

When Attu didn’t reach for it, Suka dropped it on the fur between them. “Your mother has been given the hide of the ice bear and its meat. Small necklaces have been made for Shunut and Meavu. The rest of the teeth and claws are in this pouch.”

Suka tossed the pouch on top of the necklace. “They make good tools and weapons, my father says. Both can be sharpened to a point like bone, but much stronger.”

“Would you like some?” Attu asked. He began to reach for the pouch to give away as many of the teeth and claws as he could. Attu didn’t want anything to do with those wicked instruments, and his only thought was to get rid of them.

“Do I want some?” Suka suddenly yelled at him, half rising to his feet in his anger.

Attu winced. “What?”
Why was Suka so angry?

“Do you know how much grief your killing that ice bear has brought me?” Suka shouted at him. “My father has been throwing himself around our shelter, lashing out at all of us, just because of you and your trysta-forsaken ice bear.”

“It’s not my fault,” Attu protested. “Your father-”

“Not your fault?” Suka sneered. “Of course it’s not your fault. You can’t help it if you just got lucky and were in the right place at the right time. It’s not your fault that Shunut won’t take his necklace off and tells the story about how you saved his life from the awful monster to anyone who will listen...”

Suka’s voice drifted off as suddenly as it had erupted, and he sat back down on the furs across from Attu. “Why couldn’t it have been me?” He asked, looking pleadingly at Attu for some answer he must know Attu didn’t have. “Why couldn’t I have been the hero for once?”

Attu felt himself growing angry at Suka’s childishness, to wish for such a horrific experience to have been his, rather than Attu’s. “Yeah,” Attu replied, his own voice rising. “Then you could have these slashes across your back that will leave you scarred for life, and terrible Rememberings you have to relive over and over again. And,” he added sarcastically, poking at the pouch between them, “you would get your own tooth and claw necklace and some extras.”

“And the respect of my father, maybe, just for once, and of everyone else, too,” Suka retorted. “That’s what I’m talking about. I’m trying to make you understand.”

Suka rubbed his hand across his eyes, his own weariness now apparent to Attu. “Every person in both clans is talking about you,” Suka said. “Don’t you know that?”

Suka slumped where he sat, a defeated look on his face.

Attu didn’t know what to say. He’d had no idea he was the talk of both clans. He’d been moving as little as possible because of the pain of his injury, sleeping both day and night, and he hadn’t been outside the shelter for more than his brief walks with Paven each day to tell his Rememberings. They’d always walked away from camp for that. His mother and father hadn’t allowed anyone into the shelter since the attack except for Meavu, Paven, and of course Rika, who tended his wounds twice a day. None of them had mentioned it. Elder Nuanu had stopped in briefly a couple of times to check on Rika’s work, but she’d been strangely quiet lately. Suka’s words were a shock to Attu.

“I didn’t know,” Attu said, his voice a mere whisper.

Suka looked at Attu like he didn’t want to believe him.

“I didn’t know,” Attu repeated. He looked at Suka and his heart sank. Suka’s face had gone stony again.

Not knowing what else to say, the two young hunters sat in silence for a while. Then, with a quick sideways motion of his head, Suka got up and walked out of the shelter, leaving the flap open to toss in the wind.

Attu sat alone in the rapidly cooling shelter, his thoughts in turmoil. Killing the ice bear had caused a rift between him and Suka as impossible to fathom as the cracking ice and open water the clan had run from at the beginning of their journey. The clans rested on solid ground now, but Attu had never felt so vulnerable, as if he still walked alone on rotten ice.

He stuffed the necklace and pouch into his pack, his fingers trembling when he touched the smooth cool sharpness. His back ached just from remembering those teeth and claws. Wearing them was unthinkable.
Why hadn’t it been Suka? I’d gladly have changed places with you, cousin
.

But would Suka have been able to kill the ice bear? Or would the bear have killed him? And maybe Shunut and Meavu as well?
Attu shuddered at the thought, realizing he would never know. The spirits had placed him in the bear’s path, and he’d done what he had to do. No more.

––––––––

S
everal evenings later, Attu’s family gathered in the shelter around the nuknuk lamp after another meal of ice bear. They’d shared the meal with Paven, Rika, and her little brother Rovek, named after the young hunter who had died. Rika had no sisters, older or younger, and once Ubantu had discovered that Paven’s woman had gone Between, he had asked Yural to invite them to their shelter to eat the evening meal. Several days had gone by before Yural had finally asked them, at Ubantu’s insistence. Attu thought it odd, since his mother normally loved to entertain others.

Paven came into the shelter as dusk fell, and before Ubantu had the chance to invite him, Paven took the best seat, the one furthest away from the drafty door flap. Rika and Rovek hardly spoke, keeping their eyes down and flinching when Paven ordered them to sit, motioning to their places as if they might somehow forget the obvious, that Rika would sit with the women and Rovek with the men. Ubantu frowned, but said nothing.

Paven ate heartily, but did not thank Yural for the food, as was customary of a guest. It seemed like Paven expected to have the right to be there, as if once he walked into their shelter, it became his. Attu didn’t like it. This was a side of Paven he hadn’t seen before. In his own way, Attu realized, Paven was as arrogant as Moolnik.
Was this why his mother had been reluctant to invite him?

After eating, Attu sat in the light of the nuknuk lamps, listening to Ubantu and Paven discuss the need to move south as soon as possible. The two men were working to convince Moolnik and the other hunters that the two clans should travel south together, but neither man thought their chances were good.

“Moolnik doesn’t listen to me,” Ubantu said, his voice strangely harsh.

“That is unfortunate, for you are the older brother,” Paven replied.

Moolnik hates Paven because even our own hunters seem to prefer him as a leader
, Attu remembered his father saying the day before. Attu noticed his father seemed to follow Paven as well, listening to him, taking his advice, and urging others to do the same. Tonight, however, Ubantu seemed different. Sullen and angry, much like Moolnik.

Why doesn’t he step up and lead our clan himself, instead of relying on Paven to do it for him? Is he still feeling less than a leader because of his old injury? Why is he so out of sorts tonight?

It seemed to Attu that although his father’s leg rarely pained him or slowed him down anymore, he still acted as if he weren’t the strong hunter from before the accident. Attu understood how difficult it might be for his father to get his confidence back after his injury. Since the bear’s attack, Attu worried constantly about whether or not he’d get his full range of arm motion back, his strength to throw the spear, to carry the heavy animals home after the hunt, and to walk the long distances over the Great Frozen.

Meanwhile Moolnik seems to spend all his time trying to convince himself of his own greatness, when I know better...
Flashes of memory flooded into Attu’s mind: Elder Nuanu falling; Moolnik turning and seeing; Moolnik pretending he did not see; Attu exchanging a knowing look with Moolnik. Moolnik being forced to look away.

Attu glanced up from his own thoughts as Meavu and Rovek began giggling and wrestling on the furs. The two were playing a game of Bones. Small bones with markings on one side were tossed in the air and lost or won depending on which side landed facing up. It was a fast moving, simple game, and the two were obviously having fun with it. Attu smiled.

Rika and his mother were sewing by the light of the second nuknuk lamp, sitting so close to the flame to see their stitching that Attu worried their braids might catch fire. Rika’s mother had died when she was about Meavu’s age, according to his mother, but she seemed to still have been taught the women’s skills. Attu wondered who had taught her the healing ones.

Rika glanced up and Attu caught her eyes. Instead of looking away as most girls would, she continued to look at him, her eyebrows arched up as if to dare him, her gold-flecked eyes twinkling. He found himself looking away first, frustrated by his shyness. He turned back to listen to the men again, but he could no longer concentrate on what they were saying.

“Would you like more algae drink?”

Attu jumped. Rika was beside him, her hand clasping the steaming bowl of the hot blue drink, a strong smelling beverage made from algae that grew on the rocks at the shoreline.

“No thank you,” Attu said. He was annoyed Rika had been able to sneak up on him, even in the closeness of the shelter.

“I’ll take some, daughter,” Paven said.

Rika tensed as she stepped over and handed Paven the bowl, her eyes lowered. She slipped back to her seat beside Yural as silently as she had approached.

“Have you noticed how much more of the algae there is here than on the islands to the north?”

Ubantu looked surprised. This was women’s talk, about the small types of gathering foods. It wasn’t hunter’s work. He looked to Yural, who remained silent.

“There’s much more of the blue algae along the shoreline here, growing in great clumps along the rocks. Also, rock moss. Elder Nuanu sends women out each day to gather both and to dry them.” Paven looked at Ubantu.

“Elder Nuanu is a wise woman, a good leader of women,” Ubantu said. His words were halting.

“My hunters have been happy to watch out for the women of both clans as they gather.” Paven smiled at Yural as he spoke. She ducked her head and continued sewing.

“Oh,” Ubantu said. His father had apparently not realized that Paven’s hunters guarded the women of both clans as they gathered the algae on the shore, or the rock moss, which was rare on the other lands, but here seemed to grow abundantly in any sunny sheltered spot up in the hills.

The women went almost every day to gather, for both algae and moss could be dried and carried easily. Being stuck near the shelters, Attu had overheard the women discussing who would be foraging each day. Paven had chosen two hunters to do the guarding. One of them had no woman. There’d been much giggling involved, and a few hot arguments over whose turn it was.

“Oh,” Ubantu said again, in a drawn out breath almost like a sigh. He was looking at Paven, who was still eyeing Yural. Attu suddenly felt afraid, but he couldn’t figure out why. The moment passed.