The Dog Master (46 page)

A bear had taken the wounded reindeer. Its chuffing sounded mocking and triumphant as it tore at the kill. Mal put his hand on Dog's snout, willing her not to growl at the sight, and he did not linger, but turned and walked away immediately, lest the bear's bloodlust find them and decide to add man and wolf to the dinner.

“We will find some worms along the stream,” Mal murmured to Dog. “Do not worry, we will eat something.”

They found very little before the darkness forced them to retreat to their cave. They entered through the back way, Mal moving aside the heavy stone he had put in place to keep other animals out, returning it to its position once they were inside.

They settled on the wolf fur, Dog curling up and putting her head on his chest. He ran his hands over her soft fur, grinning with the pleasure of it.

As he fell asleep, his empty stomach growling angrily, Mal remembered something: the bones of an elk leg, thrusting up out of the wet, white ice far upstream. The meat had long ago been stripped off by birds and the eroding forces of sun and wind, but the bones might contain marrow. It would certainly be better tasting than the fat purple worms he had just eaten. He could break the bones and see, anyway.

Tomorrow,
Mal thought to himself. He would go tomorrow.

*   *   *

Some days Silex's conscience would disturb his peace, forcing him into uneasy wanderings close to the gathering site. He did not know what he would do if his secrets were revealed, nor what the Wolfen would do. He felt shame and anguish and yet could not even contemplate being without Denix.

The air was dry and cool and Silex carried his spear with him when he came upon the hyena. It was on the other side of a field, just on the edge of the woods. Silex sucked in a breath, staring, feeling his heart rate increase.

The spiritual opposite of the beautiful wolf, the hyena was an evil canid, ugly and sly, who made humanlike sounds and fed on rotting meat. They were fortunately extremely rare and Silex had never laid eyes on one, though the day many years ago, when his father had stumbled and shattered his ankle, on that black day, his father claimed to have seen a pack of the beasts stripping the flesh off a dead bison.

And now Silex had stumbled upon one, a hundred paces away—just one. What did it mean, to see a lone hyena? No campfire stories ever told of the predators as anything but pack animals. What horrible thing did its appearance portend?

The hideous beast was feeding on what looked to be a dead marmot. It was aware of Silex and kept shooting him baleful glances. Silex tightened his grip on his spear. Should he try to kill it?

There was something wrong with its front leg, Silex realized. It limped as it moved, not letting the right foot touch the ground. Was that why it was hunting alone?

Silex realized he had no choice. He needed to kill this hyena, because if he did not, surely he would return to the gathering site and find his tribe standing in condemnation against his adultery. That had to be the message that the canid was here to deliver. The tribe might even demand Denix be punished, though none of this was her fault—it was all his weakness that kept him returning to her bed.

Without a sound, Silex charged across the field.

The hyena snarled, making its grotesque, snuffling noises. Silex raised his spear, still too far away, and the beast picked up the marmot in its bloody jaws and turned, dashing for the woods in an awkward three-legged gait.

Silex followed into the woods and stopped, panting, looking about in disbelief. The hyena had vanished as if swallowed by the trees.

This was truly a grim adumbration, far worse than if the ugly animal had merely gotten away.

Dismally, Silex turned back toward the gathering site. He knew he would tell no one about what he had just seen, not even Denix.

*   *   *

Mal tied Dog to a tree near the base of the wall of white ice, and then stood looking uncertainly at the leg bones poking forlornly at the sky. He had no idea what it meant that the bones were there, nor any good plan for breaking them out. The ice was hard and coated with a thin layer of water, making climbing all but impossible.

The ice lay against a steep, rocky hill. Clutching his club, Mal gingerly worked his way upward, rock to rock, testing each move before he made it.

Below him, Dog yipped, and when Mal glanced down the wolf spun in a frustrated circle. “No Dog, all is good. Stay quiet,” Mal told her.

When he was a little more than four men high, Mal was parallel to the bones. He was able to slide sideways along the rock wall until he was right next to them. This close, he could see a dark shadow inside the ice just below where the bones tilted skyward. The knee was just visible in the ice.

He swung his stone-headed club, which bounced off the ice wall with a spray of particles. He wanted to hit the knee, to sever the leg cleanly, but his awkward position made it difficult to swing accurately. He shifted his good leg and tried again, giving it several hard whacks.

He did hit the knee, but mostly he hit the ice. He stopped, frowning. He had exposed something near the knee with his errant club strikes. He leaned closer, wiping irritably at a trickle of cold water that dripped onto his forehead.

It was elk hide.

Mal stood, considering. Could there be more elk beneath the frozen water? How was that possible?

He threw himself into an attack on the ice, grunting as he bashed the hard, slick surface, which yielded grudgingly. When he fatigued, he leaned forward and wiped away the accumulated crystals and water. He had exposed a little less than half a finger length's worth of elk, but it was enough to see that under the ice, there was more than just bone.

“Meat!” Mal called down to Dog. “I have found us meat!”

He began bashing away with abandon, throwing all his strength into it, and was rewarded by a cracking sound and tremors traveling up and down the frozen surface. What if there was not just a leg, but an entire elk in there?

Suddenly there was a bang as loud as thunder and the ice fell away, striking Mal on the back. He toppled forward, hitting the cold, hard surface, and tumbled with it, sliding and bouncing and shouting. There was no way to stop—his club fell from his hands and he cried out, digging for purchase, tumbling toward the ground.

*   *   *

Dog did not understand. She was frantic to follow the man, who was above her, playing with a heavy stick. Loud thumps sounded each time he swung the branch, releasing a spray of wet drops that brought his scent cascading to the ground.

She had grown accustomed to the leather strap and even had come to regard it as something that attached her to the man, but now it restrained her attempts to get to him.

When, with a loud crack, the ground fell away and the man slipped, she could sense the fear in his voice. His slide stopped at her feet and she jumped on him, licking his cheeks. “Dog!” he laughed. He sat up and reached for her, and she nuzzled him in relief. She did not like this game, but she craved being hugged by him. “I love you, Dog,” he said.

The warmth that flowed through her at his embrace was reminiscent of the sensation of nursing from her mother.

*   *   *

Mal retrieved his club and surveyed what he had done. In his fall he had imagined the entire wall of ice collapsing, but from his perspective now he could see that he had only managed to dislodge a chunk the size of a few men.

His elk had fallen with the avalanche and would be much easier to access now, but that was not what drew Mal's astonished stare. Instead he was looking up where he had just been, focused on a dark shadow that appeared close to the surface of the translucent ice, entirely visible and identifiable as belonging to an elk.

There was another one.

The ground around the ice wall was frozen—Mal used a stone to smash a hole, filled the evacuation with chunks of ice, and stored his frozen bounty there, planning to return to hack off pieces and thaw them for cooking as needed. Meanwhile the wall itself yielded up more than just another elk; chipping away, Mal found a young reindeer. For some reason, the animals up top were venturing too close to the edge and sliding off to their deaths, eventually being buried in the steady accumulation of frozen water. The white wall was actually nothing other than a huge number of ice tongues, many as thick as a man's chest, but many thin and breakable. When he threw these to Dog, she pounced and crunched them up as if they were bones.

With food in hand, Mal and Dog worked on the commands that would keep her safe. “Dog! To me, Dog!” he called to her many times a day. They also worked on “remain,” which seemed to go against Dog's nature. With frequent repetition, though, she came to understand both the word and the accompanying gestures, and also to obey the command “away.”

Now he could have her run away if there was danger, and call her back to him when the threat had passed. When they hunted, he would be able to control her, keep her from harm.

She was gaining weight, though Mal could still easily pick her up. Her feet were ridiculously large for her body and she seemed to trip over them when she ran, but standing on all fours her head was above Mal's knees. She followed him everywhere, so he knew she would be upset when he walled her in the cave one morning. “I will be back before sunset,” he promised her. Dog curled up on her mother's fur and watched alertly as Mal wrestled a heavy rock over to block the back exit, but sprang to her feet and whimpered when he climbed up the narrow crevice, yipping at him, heartbroken, when he pulled himself up at the top.

“I'll be back, I promise,” he told her. “Remain!”

 

FIFTY-FOUR

Lyra had spent the better part of the morning in her cave, working on the project that had consumed her that summer—painting a herd of reindeer, one animal at a time. Her fingers were black from the carbon she extracted from fires and ground up into a paste with a little water, and her nails were red from the rouge, an effect she found she actually liked. Now she squatted by the stream, lightly singing to herself as she patiently washed her hands, trying to rinse enough off so that her hands merely appeared dirty.

She stood abruptly when she heard something approaching from the north. Should she run, or hide? Frozen in indecision, her legs tense, she held her breath.

“Lyra,” someone called.

Kindred. A male. She sighed the tension out of her lungs. “Here,” she called back. She waited by the stream and was shocked at who emerged from the bushes. “Mal!”

He grinned at her. “Good summer! I hoped I would find you here. It was not easy; I had to make a long path to avoid the Kindred camp.”

She looked around wildly. Her expression was anything but welcoming. “You should not be here!”

He blinked past his hurt. “What do you mean?”

“Grat and Vinco often wander down here looking for me.”

“Oh.” Mal shrugged. “I am not afraid of them,” he claimed, prevaricating only a little bit. He did not want to talk about Grat or Vinco, he wanted to talk about himself and Lyra. His heart was beating a little, thinking of what he might say to her.

Lyra came up to him, her eyes searching his face. “You have gotten taller.”

Mal drew himself up. “I have?”

“Yes, and bigger.” She gestured to her own shoulders.

“What happened to your hair?” he asked. Somehow, her hair was both short and blunt, ending in an outlandishly uniform fashion.

Now it was her turn to look hurt. “You do not like it?”

“I have just never seen this. What do you call it?”

“I do not call it anything, it is just my hair. I lay down on a flat rock and Felka poured wet sand around my head. Then she laid a flaming stick on the dry hair and burned it off. See? It is not as long and I like that the ends are all even.”

“Do all the women do this now?”

“Why would that matter?”

He frowned. She seemed angry at him. “I think it is very beautiful,” he finally said.

A smile twitched onto her lips. “Thank you. My mother is not happy with it, though.”

“Well. You do not often seem to care what your mother thinks.”

Her smile grew broader. “And you look … well, you look well. Mal, I have been so very worried about you. How are you able to eat?”

“I, uh, hunt.” Mal surprised himself by lying. “I killed a lion, too.” Doubt crept into Lyra's eyes as she sensed duplicity, and Mal was angry at himself. Obviously she thought he was untruthful about the lion and honest about hunting, when the reverse was true. But to explain would be to waste time. “I wanted to see you,” he said simply.

Her look softened. “I wanted to see you, too. But the women's council has decided we cannot.” Lyra glanced involuntarily at Mal's leg.

“Yes, I know. The curse,” Mal agreed flatly. “But I think of you, Lyra, I think of you often, and I, I…” Words fled from his mouth and he stood there unable to say more.

“It is so strange to contemplate you living by yourself. But I believe your mother did the right thing—Albi is an awful woman with a powerful obsession.”

“Do you believe I am a curse?”

“I do not, no.”

“Then perhaps I do not need to live by myself,” he suggested boldly.

He hated the look in her eyes, read it as pity, as a woman telling a man that his affections were hopeless and unrequited. He glanced away. “I suppose I should leave. Good summer, Lyra.”

“Wait.”

He turned to her. Her eyes were grave. “Think of what you are suggesting, Mal. Are you telling me that this is what you would want for me? That I would leave my family, my parents, and the Kindred? That I would be safe and happy?”

Mal sighed deeply. “You have always been so forthright, Lyra. I admire you for it. No, I cannot promise any of those things. But I will not always be banished. I will think of a way to return.”

“What you should do is follow us a day behind when we migrate.”