My mind clogs with questions, but before I can ask Pek a single one, the five of you stop in front of us.
“Son,” my father starts. There’s tension in his voice. A stranger might not notice, but I can tell. “This day has brought us good fortune. These are our neighbors from the south, from the clan of Olen. They visited us once several years ago, when they were traveling from their former home north and west of here, to the place they now call home.”
I remember this, of course. Our clan has such infrequent contact with outsiders that when a group passes through, I don’t forget. It was five years ago; I was twelve. I remember young girls of about my age. I realize, standing here now, that I remember you.
You were traveling by boat, a small clan moving south in kayaks made of sealskin stretched over a frame of mammoth bones, just like the kayaks my own clan uses to fish and gather kelp and mollusks.
I think of the boat Pek described—a canoe dug out of the trunk of a single tree. I’ve never even seen a canoe, though I’ve heard stories of them—open boats made of wood instead of hide and bone like our kayaks, long enough to carry several people at once. My own father tells of wooden canoes he saw with his own eyes, on a scouting trip he made south of the mountains, long before I was born.
But I’ve never heard of a canoe made of the trunk of a single tree. I’ve never even imagined a tree that big.
Not until today.
There has already been talk of the need for our clan to attempt a move farther south. Our herds have been steadily dwindling—some have completely stopped returning from the south in the spring. Others, like the mammoths, have moved north, following the Great Ice as it slides away from the sea.
Yet there has been one insurmountable obstacle to any plan for a southerly move. When your clan departed our shores five years ago, you did not leave as friends, but as enemies.
Even now, with the years stretching out between that day and this one, I can remember the bitterness of your clan’s departure. I remember the murmurs of a possible war. The fears that kept me awake as a twelve-year-old boy—fears that my father could head south to fight and never return. As I stand here today, with the intervening years to dim the memories, bitterness still takes its place like an eighth figure in this circle of seven.
Still, whether you brought the bitterness with you or it joined us, uninvited, the three of you are here, and that suggests new prospects. Could our two clans—enemies for five years—become friends, even allies? My mother must believe so. Nothing else would explain her presence out here in the meadow, since she so rarely hikes this far outside camp anymore. It would also explain the smile on my mother’s face.
She knows opportunity when it lands on her shore.
“Father invited our guests to hunt with us,” Pek says, raising his eyebrows while giving me a small nod—two things I think are supposed to hold some kind of veiled meaning. All I can guess is that he’s warning me to keep calm and not try to back off from my role as a leader in the hunt.
Pek knows that I hate to hunt mammoths. Not because they are so dangerously immense, or because they are so difficult to bring down. Each kind of prey presents its own difficulties and dangers. No, I hate to hunt mammoths because their intelligence is impossible to ignore. They have more than a sense of fear; they have an understanding of death. They don’t run just because they are being chased; they run to avoid being killed.
They know that I am trying to kill them.
I didn’t always feel this way. Just a year ago, when I was Pek’s age, I begged our father before every hunt to let me take the lead. Finally, he let me try. I went ahead of the rest of the hunting party. I gave the command when it was time to swarm the herd. And I threw the first strike that landed deep in the animal’s side.
It was a clean strike, and as the mammoth ran, blood poured from his wound, leaving a bright red trail in the frost under our feet. That moment is forever fixed in my mind—as the blood dripped down, I believed I could feel the energy running out of the animal and flowing into me. I felt invincible. Pek landed a strike in the animal’s throat, just below his jaw. That weakened him quickly. Blood flowed from both wounds as he staggered and fell to four knees. I ran up alongside him, ready to celebrate the success of the kill.
But when I came up beside the wounded mammoth, he wasn’t ready to give in, wasn’t ready to let go of the Spirit that dwelled within him. He struggled to raise himself once more, planting his left front foot and trying to stand.