Ivory and Bone (24 page)

B
y the time the sun is fully up the next day, I am already on the sea in my kayak, far north of Mya’s camp. I stole out of the hut I slept in, shrouded in the stillness of the pale morning, anxious to leave without being seen—without having to apologize for my hasty departure.

It’s not that I wasn’t well cared for. Yano and Ela warmed me up and cleaned and treated my wounds, including
an ankle I’d sprained on one of my trips into the ravine—now tucked inside the kayak, unnecessarily splinted and wrapped—and a deep cut on my forearm, the cause of which I could no longer remember.

Like many days following a storm, today the sea is still and smooth. As I stab my paddle into the placid water, I remember Yano’s grave expression, his usually bright eyes shadowed with concern, as
he asked me how it could be that I didn’t remember the cause of a wound so deep.

“I fell too many times. Any number of falls could’ve given me a wound like this.”

“It was in the stream,” Mya offered. “I saw it. Your arm tore across a jagged rock when you tried to save Lo.”

When you tried to save Lo.
I remember these words of Mya’s so clearly, because they were the last words she said to me.
Once we returned to the Olen camp—once our wounds had been bandaged and she had offered this explanation for my cut—Mya withdrew to her hut and stayed there. Ela carried food in, but brought nothing back out. No message for me. No explanation for her silence.

“When you tried to save Lo” is the only explanation I have.

Does Mya blame me for failing to save Lo, for letting Lo die? Is that her
reason for avoiding me? Or does she worry what horrors will come back to her, the next time she sees my face? Will she see Lo’s lifeless body as I pulled her from the stream?

Whatever her reasons, it was clear she didn’t want to see me. So I decided to leave quietly.

The last thing I want right now is a confrontation.

The sun hangs high overhead, dipping only slightly to the west, when I drag
my kayak up onto my own clan’s beach. My aunt Ama and two of her boys are far out in the bay, fishing. They don’t see me, but the sight of them out in their boats comforts me with its normalcy.

Pulling the kayak into the tall grass, I notice the thick, slightly sweet smell of burned fur mixing with the salt in the air. Hides are spread across the beach—hides with charred and singed edges. These
must have been pulled down from damaged huts and judged to be salvageable. They are damp, bleeding dark puddles of water into the sand around them. I imagine they were washed in the sea and spread out to dry in the sun.

A tight knot forms in my stomach. I’d hoped that I could come home, really
come home
—that I could silence the echoes of the horrors of the last few days. But as I hike up the
trail, I realize my home is no longer the safe refuge I remember.

The huts stand like half-dressed skeletons against the bright blue sky. Some are stripped of hides completely, leaving only the frame of bare mammoth bones hunched over like bending backs. Others have holes ripped open, gaping like fresh wounds—a gap in a wall or a roof torn away. I find my mother and father with several other
elders in the gathering place, studying hides scattered on the ground, deciding which should be used and which should be rejected. I notice a pile of sealskin pelts beneath my mother’s hands. These are her own, tanned for her as a gift from Pek. Her plan was to stitch them together, to make a luxurious blanket for her bed.

She looks up, her eyes hazy with thought, but when she
sees me the haze
clears and she jumps to her feet. Then she’s hugging me, kissing my cheek, while at the same time repeating my name over and over, scolding me for leaving without letting anyone know.

“Pek knew,” I say.

“Pek doesn’t count. You need to tell someone with sense.”

My father comes up and lays a hand on my shoulder. Turning toward him, I catch a glimpse of something in his eyes, something I’ve rarely
seen there—the fading shadow of fear. His hand clamps down tight and the shadow fades, so swiftly it’s almost easy to believe it was never there at all, but his other hand clasps me on the opposite shoulder and I am sure.

What had they thought when Pek told them I had headed south, alone in a small boat in that storm? All at once it rushes back to me—my confusion on the water, my soaked and freezing
clothes, how close I was to death when Mya found me.

Tears spring to my eyes. I draw my father into an awkward embrace to hide my face from him.

“I want to help,” I say when I feel collected enough to speak. “With the huts. I want to help—”

“You need to rest,” my mother says, not letting me get the words out. “Look at your ankle. This wound on your arm. What happened to you? What happened .
. .” She trails
off. Is she afraid to know the answer?

“Chev was injured,” I say. I know I need to tell them everything, but I also know I don’t have the strength or the will to tell them everything now. “He survived. He’s healing. But Lo . . .” I look down, draw in a deep breath, then look back at their expectant faces. The words stick in the back of my throat. I have to spit them through my
lips. “Lo died. It was an accident. She drowned.”

The light in my mother’s eyes dims. She shoots a fleeting glance at my father. “And the others? From the Olen?” She doesn’t have to ask—I know what’s on her mind. Lo’s goal was to kill Chev’s whole family. She wants to know if she had any success before she died.

“There were many injuries,” I say, remembering the horror of the scene under the
canopy, “but everyone from the Olen clan survived.”

My mother’s eyes brighten, and the tension at the corners of her mouth softens. “Pek will be so relieved to know Seeri is all right.”

I learn that both Pek and Kesh are in our family’s hut. Urar has dressed their wounds with cool wraps and offered up countless prayers and chants, but their burns are extensive and healing will be slow. “Seeing
you safe will help their pain,” my mother says. Her words send a shiver of dread through me, and I hurry to find them.

When I duck under the charred pelt that forms the door
I find Urar sitting on the floor, chanting softly, his voice barely above a whisper. My brothers Pek and Kesh are both in bed, both apparently sleeping. A tangle of scents hangs in the room—the sweetness of mead mixing with
a heavy, darker odor, like mud from the bottom of a pond. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I couldn’t hear you from outside.”

Urar flinches at the intrusion, but then a small sound, not more than a gasp, escapes his lips and he gets to his feet. He holds me at arm’s length; his brow, wet with sweat, furrows as he squints through the dim light at the long cut that runs along my forearm. “Rest,” he says. “That
is first. Later, when you wake, I will treat that with oil and herbs.”

“Yes,” I say. He hesitates, perhaps waiting for me to follow his direction and lie on my bed, but I stand still, nodding in agreement, not wanting to hobble and let him see that my ankle is splinted. Finally, he nods in reply and squeezes my hands. With a hint of a smile—something quite rare from Urar—he ducks out through
the door.

I collapse onto my bed, but it’s not the bed I had before the fire. The thick stack of pelts and hides I’ve always slept between has been thinned considerably, as have the other stacks of pelts that form the beds around the room. Patches of dirt, once hidden completely by soft rugs, peek through the hides that remain on the floor, scattered about in an artful effort to cover as much
of the ground as possible.

How many pelts were destroyed in the fire? The hides
and furs that filled this hut were the reward of many lives spent hunting—my life, my parents’ lives, my grandparents’ lives. How long will it take to rebuild what was destroyed?

Stretching out, I unwrap my ankle and discard the unnecessary splint. Restlessness grips me. I’m up on my feet, pacing, trying to get used
to the changes in the hut, to the overwhelming strangeness I feel in this place where I once felt at home.

Home
. . . it’s a word I don’t understand anymore. I don’t feel right in this hut. It floods me with longing for a time that will never come back. A time when I still felt trust—trust in neighboring clans, trust even in strangers.

My brothers sleep on, their breaths coming in even rhythms
almost in time with each other, filling me with the creeping sense that the air in the room is being devoured. I’m forced to leave this strange hut and head out into the strange sunlight. Nothing feels right. Nothing feels familiar. I can’t imagine that it ever will again.

Like the morning of the day I met Mya, I’m driven by a desire to get away, a need to escape the confines of camp and be alone
for a while. I think first of the meadow, but then reconsider, knowing the meadow would be the first place Pek or anyone else would look for me. Instead, I decide to head for the trail that leads over the hills to the western side of the bay. I know that near the summit that path divides—a seldom-used, nearly forgotten trail splits off and descends
north and east to the far edge of the meadow.
It will be a longer trek, giving me more time alone.

I start up the trail from its mouth near the beach. Even the slant of light seems strange. Unfamiliar songs of unfamiliar birds fill the air.

I climb quickly, not pausing until I reach the summit. A breeze stirs the lower branches of the trees with a whisper, like ghosts shuffling by, and I shudder. After a bit of searching, I locate the overgrown
path that winds east toward the meadow. At the first switchback, a gap in the trees opens on a wide view to the northwest, and I stop.

Looking out, I can see to the horizon, a line so flat it could be water, though the ground is the golden yellow and green of the grasslands. I look as far out as I can, as if I can look back into the past, back to the day a family left their camp on a gathering
trip, and a girl became lost.

My eyes search the land in front of me as if I might see that day—as if that day were a bend in a river that flows from the past to the place I stand right now.

But that day is not a place where the river bends, I realize. It’s the place where the river splits. On that day the Divine dropped a stone in the river, diverting it into two streams. One clan continued
west. Another clan turned south. Separate courses, both leading toward death.

The death of Mya’s father, Mya’s mother, Mya’s betrothed.

The death of Lo’s father.

The death of Lo.

Wind blows across the peak from the bay and the scent of seawater brings me back to the present.

I hurry downhill, and when I reach the meadow—the first place that truly feels like home—I drop down onto my back.
Though I felt only restlessness in the hut, now I feel nothing but exhaustion. The hike brought back fatigue to every sore muscle in my body. Warmth surrounds me. A whisper in the grass quiets my thrumming thoughts:
shhhhh
. . .
shhhhhh
.

Sleep swoops down on me with wide-stretched arms, wrapping me in an embrace, pulling me up, and carrying me away before I have a chance to resist.

I wake with
a start, as if summoned by a voice. I sit up, noticing the sun far off in the west. It’s almost time for the evening meal.

What questions will I be asked tonight? I expect I will have to tell about the attack on Chev, my fight with the boy, the death of Lo.

How will my mother react when she hears that I may have killed Orn? That I let Lo die?

These questions darken my thoughts as I climb the
trail back toward my camp, which suddenly seems so far away. I think of Manu, lost, far from family and clan.

When I reach the summit, my steps quicken. I’m
propelled forward by the knowledge that around the next bend, the trail turns toward home.

I reach the overlook and sweep my gaze over the familiar scene in front of me—the sea to my right, the sloping plains to my left, and the eastern
mountains in the far distance. And directly below me, a view of my own clan’s camp.

Even run-down and blighted by half-stripped huts, this is the place of the people I love.

But as I look down on the camp, confusion rises in me, and I have to question what I see. How could this be the same camp I stepped away from earlier today?

Every hut is complete; every structure neatly covered in smooth,
fine pelts. Sun glints off the roof of the kitchen, newly covered in a dark hide of glossy bearskin. And draped across the doorway of my family’s hut hangs something new—pelts stitched to create a sort of banner of contrasting colors, pieced together in an intricate design—a field of dark fur as a background, dotted with lighter pieces to suggest stars in a night sky.

I’ve seen pelts stitched
in patterns like this only once before, in Mya’s hut. This,
all this
, I think, my eyes moving from one repaired hut to another, could have come only from the south, from Mya and her people.

I tear my eyes from the view and race farther down the trail, wondering if I will find Mya herself in my camp. But as the trail draws close to the bottom of the hill, I
catch a glimpse out over the bay.

Boats.

Three intricately carved canoes float just a short distance from shore. Two rowers sit in each one, as if waiting to push out. And in two of the three canoes, a body lies between the seated oarsmen. The canoe closest to shore bears the body of a young girl, lying as if asleep, covered all over in red ocher—the color of blood, the color of the dead.

This is Lo, making her final journey
home.

The second canoe is farther out in the bay. Bright red ocher covers the length of the body that lies in the hull, standing out against the gray water, but it floats too far away for me to see the person’s face.

It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to see his face to know that it’s Orn, the boy I let fall from the cliff, the boy Chev called Dora’s son. I had been afraid to look down, to know
if he had lived or died.

But now I know. Now I know he is dead.

I hear voices coming from the beach, though my view is obscured by the trees. A man speaks in a steady, commanding voice. Chev. He is answered by the voices of my father and mother. They are thanking him for the gift of the pelts. They wish him blessings as he heads across the bay. “As you return the dead to the Bosha,” says my
mother, “may the Divine protect you.”