Watching her body rise and fall, with no tension or effort left in her limbs, I know that her Spirit has left her. I know that I have failed. She is carried away now on another kind of stream, to rejoin the spirit of the Divine.
Eventually, we reach the place where the ravine widens, the sharply angled cliffs crumbling into a mass of boulders that tumble to the floor of the valley below. The stream splits, and Lo’s body catches on a rock. Here the water turns suddenly shallow and the current calm, and I clamber up onto rocks beside her. I bend, wrap an arm around her waist, slippery with blood, and lift her from the water.
I don’t hear her approach, but all at once, Mya appears beside me. She crouches, and with fingers white as ice, she turns Lo’s head and brushes her hair aside, revealing the bloodless, blue lips and wide, white eyes of a drowned girl.
Beyond us, the water drops over a jumble of sharply angled rocks, dividing into three wispy waterfalls that spill to the valley floor below, pooling and rippling into creeks that disappear into the distant tree line.
Mya stays silent, but I notice the sound of my own breath. It rushes fast and desperate in and out of my lungs, reminding me I’m alive.
THIRTY-ONE
By 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.