There was nowhere to camp. No dry land would support a tent. Seeing no choice, the elders of the clan announced that we would turn back.
This was a moment of both relief and horror. Who wouldn’t want to turn back rather than walk steadfastly into the rising sea? But there was no food behind us, and we knew it. No fish swam in the sterile meltwaters. Unless we came upon some seabirds soon, people would begin to succumb.
Just then, Lo called out. From her perch atop her father’s shoulders, she said she could see a mammoth. He was out in the water farther west, and she was determined to make the kill. Before he could stop her, she climbed down from her father’s shoulders and, clutching her spear, she half ran, half swam into the deeper water.
Of course, her father pursued her. By the time he managed to get to her, she was dropping out of sight beneath the surface, her dark head rising and falling like a bird on the water, floating and diving, floating and diving.
But he saved her. He reached her, carried her back, got her to the safety of a warm pelt in a sled that bobbed upon the sea like a makeshift kayak.
The entire clan strove to restore Lo to health. The effort was so total—so all-consuming—not one of us noticed what was happening to her father. Recovering his daughter had exhausted him. His arms and legs were going rigid with cold. But he said nothing. Maybe he was unable to speak. Maybe he didn’t want to distract us from trying to save Lo.
By the time we looked around to tell him how well she was doing, his body had failed him, his legs had given out, and he had slipped away into the cold gray water.
He was gone.
Chev rises from his seat on the floor so abruptly, the spell is broken and my eyes fly open. For a brief moment, the familiar sight of the kitchen surprises me, as I’m thrust from the past back to the present.
Chev paces, circling the room, running his hands over his hair, and speaking in an angry whisper only he can hear. “And yet the rest of you lived,” he says, finally. He sets a hand on a post of the hut and draws in a long, slow breath. “You all survived? How did you make the return trip without food—”
“Lo found us food,” interjects Shava. “I was sitting in the same floating sled that she had been lifted into, was wrapped in the same pelt. She let out a wail when she learned of her father’s death, and she lunged over the side of the boat.
“It was then that she saw it—its head resting just below the surface of the water. A mammoth. The body of a drowned mammoth. Her father must have been standing on it right before his body slid into the sea.
“By dying as he did, he’d led us right to it. And Lo discovered it. She may have crashed into the water after something in her imagination, but the mammoth she found was very real.
“We fashioned cutting knives at the ends of spears to reach down and slice off chunks of meat and ate them raw, right there, floating in the sleds or huddling on the points of ice. Nothing ever tasted so good.
“That meat was our rescue, and the Divine had used Lo as the means of revealing it to us. Ever since that day—ever since that moment—Lo has been the High Elder of the clan.”
TWENTY-THREE
“That’s ridiculous,” you say, the words snapping from your lips like wet wood popping in the flame. Your brother, who a moment ago was lost in thought, looks up as if he’d forgotten you were in the room.
“Did you not hear the tale that I just heard?” Chev asks. “Of how the Divine used Lo to deliver food to the clan—”
“Of course I did—”
“And your response is to call it ridiculous? Did it not fill you with grief at the thought of our own people suffering? Did it not fill you with remorse—”
“Grief, yes. Of course I feel grief.” Your voice breaks under the strain of the words. I think of the ten dead of your former clan, and I cannot doubt the weight of your grief. “But not remorse,” you continue. “I cannot feel remorse for something they brought upon themselves. The Bosha rejected you. We are the Olen clan now.”
Chev kneels down in front of Shava’s mother. “May I ask you? Do you know why your mother, Gita, chose to follow Vosk?”
“She always regretted it,” says Shava’s mother. “But he was her nephew, my cousin . . . blood. She felt she had no choice.”
“You see, Mya? Some of the Bosha had no choice but to follow Vosk. And now they have no choice but to follow your old friend—”
“Don’t call her my old friend. Friendship requires truth, and there is no truth in her. There never has been. She is poison, Chev! She poisoned our own people against us—”