Breakaway: Clan of the Ice Mountains (2 page)

They stood still, breathing slowly, until Attu stopped hearing his blood pounding in his ears.

“Guess we go the long way,” Attu said.

He turned and walked east of the broken ice, carefully avoiding the cracks around the hole.

Suka followed, walking slowly as he checked the ice.

“We shouldn’t have been talking about Attuanin and his traps,” Suka said after they’d walked another spear throw’s distance. “Talking, or even thinking about something bad that could happen, sometimes makes it happen. That’s what Elder Nuanu says.”

“She should know.”

Attu adjusted his pack across his back again. The snow otters were heavy. Their dark bodies dangled the length of his torso, and their tails almost touched the ice behind him as he walked.

“Let’s think about how delicious these snow otters will taste instead,” Attu said. “I’m thinking of my favorite part, the livers, sliced thin, warmed over the nuknuk lamp, but still bloody.”

Suka’s stomach growled loudly in response. “You sound like the women talking about how to prepare the meat.”

“Your stomach seems to like it,” Attu teased. When his own stomach growled too, he patted it gently. “Soon, soon,” he crooned.

Suka chuckled.

A few more steps and they reached the large rock that marked the boundary between the Expanse and the safety of solid land.

Just beyond the rock, Attu and Suka paused for a moment, enjoying the ground under their feet. They shifted their spears to carry them loosely, spear point forward, and set off down the rocky shoreline path toward home.

“Don’t say anything about what happened,” Suka demanded as they walked.

“I won’t. My mother worries too, every time I go hunting-”

“It’s not that,” Suka interrupted. “I don’t want my father to know. If he finds out I almost fell through an old nuknuk hole, he’ll yell at me for the next moon.”

“Oh.”
Twenty-eight days of being yelled at by Moolnik?
Attu shuddered at the thought.
I’d tell my father everything, and he’d grab me up in a strong hug and thank the spirits for saving me...

Attu decided to change the subject. “Do you think Elder Tovut is still angry with me?”

“You did argue with him in front of everyone,” Suka said. “Why’d you do that?”

“Because he keeps telling those stories about the Great Frozen melting, and I just got tired of it. It scares Meavu, and it’s nonsense. I wanted him to stop.”

Suka stood in the middle of the path. Clearing his throat and leaning in toward Attu, he deepened his voice and spoke as if he were addressing a clan meeting. “It has always been cold on the Expanse, where we hunt. The sea has always been frozen. That is why it is called the Great Frozen. Water is always frozen on the surface; everyone knows that. Why tell such stories, Elder Tovut? Do you enjoy scaring the children?”

“Was it that bad?” Attu asked. Suka had repeated what Attu had said three nights ago when he’d confronted Elder Tovut, the clan’s oldest and most revered member, in front of the whole clan gathered in the great snow house.

“Yes,” Suka replied. “Worse, actually. Didn’t you hear your mother hissing at you? You’re going to go hungry if you keep talking that way to an elder in front of her.”

Attu shot a glance at Suka as they started walking again. Suka was shaking his head mournfully. Once the game was given to the women, it became theirs to do with as they saw fit, but Attu couldn’t believe his mother would let him go hungry when he was the one who brought the meat home. Yural was a kind woman, generous to all and a devoted mother.

Had Suka’s mother ever refused to feed him because she was mad at him? Mother had seemed angry the night I challenged Elder Tovut, but I still ate the next day. Besides, Elder Tovut’s stories are not new. I’ve been hearing them since I was small. It’s just that Elder Tovut has begun telling them as if they are true, not stories at all. That’s what made me angry enough to confront the frail old man, elder or not.

“The Nuvikuan-na, the land of our people, has seemed to us to always be a land of cold, with the Great Frozen and its frigid waters below the ice, and the Great Expanse, the top of that ice and the sky above, where we live,” Elder Tovut said. “We hunt the snow otter and the nuknuk, make our homes on the small rock outcroppings, gather the mussels, and light the lamps at night. Here we are born and live and die, each his eight hundred moons or so, if the spirits allow. Most go the way of the Between much sooner. More generations than we can count have lived this way, without seeing the Great Frozen melt and become water on the surface once again. But the Warming comes.”

Elder Tovut had paused, looking at each of them sitting in the large gathering snow house, his dark eyes like two polished beads beneath his deep lid folds. “It is part of the cycle of the Nuvikuan-na,” he continued, “and we must heed this cycle or die. We must remember, or all the clans will perish. I’m the oldest of this clan, and it was told to me by my father’s father, whose father told him, and his father before him. It is a sacred trust to be told. It is my duty to make you see the truth of what I say.”

The old man cleared his throat. His breath sounded ragged in his thin chest. Elder Tovut’s skin looked sallow in the light of the lamps, and the shadow he cast against the curving walls of the snow house seemed more like a child’s than a man’s. But as he spoke his voice became stronger, and his words caused the hair on Attu’s neck to rise.

“The Cold is coming to an end. The Warming is coming once again to Nuvikuan-na. Soon I will travel to the Between, and the trystas will change me into a star and hook me on their spear of light. They will hurl me into the great bowl of the sky. After I am gone, the cracks in the Great Frozen will become larger. You’ll begin to see open water, like that in the cooking skins, where once there was only ice.”

Elder Tovut coughed. One of the women brought him a bowl of warm drink. He took it but did not drink from it.

“And,” he repeated, “the Great Frozen will stay open water, just like the water in this bowl.” He held up the bowl in his veined hands, misshapen from years of exposure to the frigid elements. “It will not freeze again for countless generations until the Warming ends and the Cooling comes, finally bringing the Cold again.”

A child began to cry. Many of the clan shook their heads in disbelief...

“Attu.”

Attu realized he’d let his thoughts wander. He looked at Suka. “What?” Attu asked.

“What do you think about Elder Tovut’s stories?” Suka asked. His voice sounded anxious.

“Whether or not I believe in the Warming, and I don’t,” Attu said, “we still need to leave this place, and soon. We were lucky with this last hunt, but the game has grown scarce. We must move on before we starve.”

“But do we have to go as far south as Elder Tovut says?” Suka asked. “He said we have to cross over strange mountains to a new land, to keep us from drowning when the Great Frozen melts and the water rises.”

“I don’t think we have to do that. I think Elder Tovut is starting to slip Between already. His stories are crazy.”

Suka grasped the stone amulet hanging around his neck and spoke a word of protection over himself. “He seems so feeble...”

“I know,” Attu said. For a moment, he felt guilty for thinking of Elder Tovut as an old man no longer in his right mind, instead of the wise elder of Attu’s childhood.

Attu struck a loose piece of rock with his spear butt. It skittered over the rocks and ice toward the nearest hill.

“Stories or not, we must head south soon. We can’t go north, because that’s where we came from. The game won’t have recovered there yet-”

“But not as far south as Elder Tovut says?”

“No, just far enough to find game. That’s all.”

Suka placed his mik over his slitted bone goggles, shielding his eyes even more from the sun’s glare. He looked down the windswept shoreline of jumbled rocks and gravel with hills of ice rising behind it. “We’re almost there,” he announced.

At the thought of a meal soon, Attu began the slow loping gait that would cover ground quickly but not make him sweat. Suka matched strides with Attu like they had since they were children.

Rounding the last bend, they saw the settlement ahead, a sprawling group of snow houses, mounds of white resting among bright patches of sunlight and shadow cast from the hills behind them.

“Race you,” Suka shouted, and he took off across the packed snow toward their dwellings on the far side of the settlement.

The snow otters weighed Attu down too much for him to beat the longer-legged Suka.
He knows that,
Attu thought.
Why does Suka always have to make a competition out of something he knows he will win?

Suddenly, Suka stopped. He turned back to Attu.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

Attu looked around him. Suka was right. This time of day the settlement should be noisy with children playing, people working outside, and the smell of cooking meat filling the air.

But instead, there was no one outside at all. And it was deathly quiet.

“E
lder Tovut has gone Between,” Meavu whispered into Attu’s ear as he scooped his little sister up with his free arm upon entering his family’s snow house. She was getting too big for him to pick up easily, but she wrapped her legs around him now so he could hold her, leaning into him, her two dark braids falling on both sides of his face. “Father hasn’t spoken to me since he was told, and Mother has been checking all our clothing, furs, and cooking tools, getting us ready to move south. The men have decided it’s time.”

Meavu placed her mik covered hands on either side of Attu’s face, drawing him even closer to her own, so he was looking directly into her bright dark eyes. “I should be excited,” she continued, her voice still low, “because I don’t remember the last time we moved; I was still a poolik, riding in Mother’s hood.”

Meavu shook her head, and a few strands of thick black hair escaped her braids, curling at the sides of her round face.

“I know it is the way of our people. It’s time to move. But I’m scared, Attu...” and Meavu slid her arms around Attu’s neck and clung there.

“Kip, scared?” Attu teased.

“The people are afraid to go,” she breathed into his ear, in case speaking their fear aloud might make the situation worse. “I heard Moolnik talking with Mother about it. He’s been talking with everyone. Some want to go right away, as Elder Tovut said to do. Some want to stay to follow ritual for his burial. No one seems to know what to do. And Moolnik is in the middle of it all, stirring up trouble. Father said, ‘Even though he’s my brother, Moolnik’s name fits him. He’s a troublemaker, stirring up any evil he can find with his stinging words.’

“Mother said, ‘Quiet now, Ubantu, or the Moolnikuan will hear you speak so of your brother and then we WILL have trouble. The men follow Moolnik now because he is strong, an excellent hunter, and the father of three sons, two of them grown hunters for our clan. His tongue is quick and his temper quicker, but the men seem to admire him for it. They don’t know him like you do. They don’t see the danger in following such a hothead.’ Father agreed with her. That’s why I’m scared.”

Attu hugged Meavu and set her back down on her feet. “Don’t worry, little Kip. I’ll talk to Father.”

Attu felt his blood quicken at the thought of leaving soon.

“When is the stone gathering?” Attu asked.

“Next sun.”

“Where are Father and Mother now?”

“Father’s with the other men, trying to decide on plans for the move now that Elder Tovut has passed. Mother’s seeing to the preparation of Elder Tovut’s body.”

Attu, suddenly feeling weighed down by the news of Elder Tovut passing Between, realized he was still shouldering his pack and his kill. He slipped his pack onto one of the sleeping platforms.

“Oh, what a good hunt you’ve had!” Meavu removed her miks and clasped her hands together.

“And new miks for you, just in time for the move.”

Twin bits of red appeared on Meavu’s pale cheeks. She’d accidently sliced a hole in her miks with her ullik knife just a few days ago. But she didn’t scold Attu for his teasing now, just as she hadn’t scolded him earlier for calling her Kip, the sound newborn nuknuks made crying to their mothers. Instead, Meavu reached out her hands, palms up, and said, “May the spirits of the snow otters be thanked for the offering of their bodies to you, mighty hunter of the Nuvikuan.” With her mother gone, Meavu had stepped into her place as the woman, accepting meat from her hunter.

Attu inclined his head to his sister and replied, “Indeed may they be thanked, and live again in the body of another to grow and be given to our people yet again.” He smiled as he carefully handed the large otters to his sister and watched her struggle under their weight. Still, she maintained her dignity in this ritual display of roles and most important exchange between the hunter and his family. She turned and, straining to lift them, carefully set the otters onto the cooking slab.

Attu left as Meavu began the ritual of the preparation of food. He heard her clear high voice chanting to the spirits of the otters as she dripped a few drops of water into each snow otter’s mouth, giving them a drink to send their spirits on their way in comfort, before she began slicing her ullik knife down the front legs of the one closest to her. Attu knew they’d eat well tonight, and that thought brought him pride. He was the hunter, and he’d done well. And Meavu, his little sister, was growing up.

Attu entered the snow house of his father's younger brother, Moolnik, and sat on the edge of the sleeping platform where his face was in shadow. The six older men, led by Moolnik, were talking in low voices, gathered around the nuknuk lamp in the center of the snow house. Attu could see the cords in his father's neck bulging.

For two moons, Father couldn’t walk; he still can’t hunt. Meanwhile, Moolnik, being the next oldest hunter and the leader’s brother, has smoothly stepped into his place. Too easily, too quickly.

Moolnik was making slashing motions with his hand against the mik on his other hand as if by doing so he could convince the others of his opinion.