Once or twice Thorn led them on traverses down slopes, and she tried to follow, but the sled was always hanging straight downslope from her, so she had to stomp her snowshoes down several times, balancing just so, then stride down and stomp the next step down, leaning back fast if the snow gave way. Loon was frequently astonished by the fluid balance and power of her moves; he did not think he could do what she was doing, even if his leg were fine. Suddenly he saw that she was an ice woman, had grown up in snow. His wife came from a different world, just as Thorn had suggested by the fire with his talk about the swan wife story. She stood there huffing and puffing in the difficult moments, face red, eyes squinted to slits, but her moves were sure. And she kept on making them.
Thorn too saw the difficulty the sled gave her on traverses, and he began to range ahead, glissading down slopes first to get a look around points of stone, then gesturing up to her to follow, or trudging painfully back up to them to continue in a different direction.
The valley they were in trended south, and it became clear that Thorn wanted to head east. At midday he stopped for a rest, and while Loon and Elga sat on a log by the sled, he stuck a stick in a flat spot in the snow, and broke other sticks to measure how long the stick’s shadow was at midday. It was the middle of the sixth month; Loon wasn’t exactly sure which day, the moon had been so long hidden by the storm. But Thorn knew. And he also knew, as he explained to them while he broke sticks into different lengths, how long the shadow of a stick would be relative to its height, at midsummer noon in their home camp. Which meant he might be able to see whether they were north or south of their camp, by how much longer or shorter the shadow was than it would be at home. At home the shadow was one-sixth the length of the stick.
Here, about the same. And because the shadow was close to the same length, he decided, after a close inspection, accompanied by a great deal of muttering, that all they had to do was head east and they would reach home. Because he was quite sure they were west of their camp.
— We’re lucky I know that, he added, — because there’s no way of telling whether you are east or west of a place, only north or south. Old Pika taught me the trick, and he said his raven taught it to him, and that he was the first human to know it. He was always saying that, but I never heard any other shaman talk about this trick, at the eight eight or anywhere else.
— If we were east of camp we would be in the big mountains, Elga pointed out.
— True.
So. They were to head east when possible. But the valleys in this region were trending south. So it was hard.
Eventually they climbed over into a narrow but smoothed-floored valley that curved east, and Thorn led them up its floor, somewhat away from the creekbed, on the hardest snow he could find. On they went for the whole of that afternoon. When the sun was low behind them, such that their shadows stretched away in front of them far up the valley, Thorn stopped by a copse of trees where a little snowed-over tributary met the valley’s creek. There was an open lead in the snow where the two creeks met, and this water gurgled happily at them, almost the only sound in the landscape aside from their breathing.
It was windless at last. Clouds were visible over the horizon to the south. It was going to be cold that night, and Thorn stomped down an area for their fire ring. He had carried another ember in a mass of pine needles, tucked in a burl in his belt; with it he coaxed more of his duff supply into flame. It was very well done, but he did not bother to congratulate himself this time. He pulled Click away from the fire so that he would stay frozen. Loon hopped around on Goodleg and his poles and collected firewood. In this task especially they missed Click’s help, as he could break off branches none of them could. It was almost dark before they had a sufficient supply for the night.
Once again Thorn squeaked off over the hardening snow, blade in hand. The sky in the west was a rich pure blue, cut off sharply by the hilly black horizon. The lightest part of the blue lay right on the black of the hills, and pulsed and crackled redly in Loon’s eyes. If he opened his mouth he could hear his heart tocking at the back of his throat. He was hungry again.
Thorn came back as he had the night before, his leather patch wrapped around a lump which he carried farther out from his body than was normal. He flame-seared and then roasted the chunks. Once again Loon’s mouth ran with saliva, and he hadn’t even been walking that day. Elga’s eyes were fixed on the meat such that the whites of her eyes were visible all the way round.
They ate in silence, then wrapped themselves up by the fire and built it up to burn a big bed of embers. They went out under the starry sky to relieve themselves one last time, and Thorn moved Click back in a bit closer to the fire, so that night scavengers would keep their distance. One didn’t have to be very far from the fire to be in freezing air; it was going to be another cold night, maybe the coldest of their trek so far. The end of a storm is its coldest part.
They bundled tightly into their furs and lay around the fire so close that the smell of singeing fur filled their nostrils from time to time. After midnight it got so cold that without discussing it they pressed together like horses in a storm, with Elga between the two men at first, but then as the night crept on at the slow pace of the stars’ creep, the one farthest from the fire moved inside the one closest to it, and pressed back against them. The coldest part of the three of them was thus pressed into the warmest, and the person newly on the outside huddled against the back of the one in the middle. Round and round, fist after fist, like kits in a litter. Finally the moon set, breath by breath, the only time when you could easily see the sky rolling. After that there were only a couple of fists of the night left to endure.
In the first graying of the eastern sky Loon woke to find himself next to the embers, pressed back into Thorn. Some movement across the fire caused him to lift his head. It was Click. He was standing on his knees, because of course Thorn had removed and cooked his shanks. On Click’s face there was an expression Loon couldn’t quite understand, some odd mix of pride and longing, disappointment and grief. Loon shaped his lips to say roop, but he didn’t want to speak, for fear of waking Thorn and Elga. He realized that he was still asleep too, that he was dreaming. He mouthed the shapes of the words, and spoke them in the dream:-Thank you; and put his head back down and closed his eyes, thinking, Now Click’s spirit will keep watch over us for the rest of the night. Although only a spirit would be out on such a cold night, so nothing would challenge him.
The next three days were hard. It warmed up a little. Their sled got shorter. Loon got up and walked as much as he could, but each time he did he was forced to get back on the sled long before he wanted to. Elga and Thorn now took turns pulling it. Elga was still losing weight: her breasts were almost completely flat, her eyes sunken deep in her skull, her top ribs sticking far out. It was easy to see the shape of her skull. Thorn, always skin and bones, had turned into a snake’s head, earless, lipless, fleshless. He spoke very little, especially for him, and was always anxious to get up on ridges that might give him a view to the east, walking ahead of the other two frequently. They followed his tracks and found him up on the ridges, gazing east with hand over eyes, searching for a sign, fretting. No one mentioned that they were lost. Every afternoon they stopped and made a fire, successfully using an ember from the night before, and every evening in the blue dusk they ate cooked meat, including kidneys, liver, and the heart itself, tougher even than the tough old muscles they had started with. At night they lay bundled together by the fire. Only one night was close to as cold as the last night of the storm had been, and the morning after that one, Thorn went out and came back with a double handful of starlings, holding them by their feet; he had found them under a knot of black spruce trees, where they had frozen in the night and fallen off their perches. Roasted, they made for a welcome change.