Breakaway: Clan of the Ice Mountains (5 page)

Attu set Elder Nuanu down gently, embarrassed at the way he’d hauled her to safety like a dead nuknuk pup flung across his back. She slumped to the ground and was immediately surrounded by the other women of the clan, who popped their lips in amazement at her rescue and half-carried her to a pile of furs.

Attu continued staring after the women until he felt a touch on his shoulder.

“You... have saved... the clan,” his father said between gasps as he tried to catch his breath.

“I did what you taught me to do, Father, no more. Do you think Elder Nuanu will be all right?”

“She is... as tough as... old dried meat.” His father smiled as he continued to huff great breaths of air. “She will... be fine.”

Attu felt his face flush as he saw the pride on his father’s face. He looked away.

Moolnik stood a few feet behind Attu’s father, among the group of exhausted hunters. Before he could stop himself, Attu let his eyes meet Moolnik’s, the truth evident in them. Moolnik’s eyes widened as he realized Attu had not been fooled. Attu continued to look steadily at Moolnik, daring him to look away first.

Moolnik’s face grew increasingly ashen in the fading light. Suddenly, he turned away and began rummaging through his pack as if nothing had happened between them.
But it has,
Attu thought.
He knows I know he is a coward. What will he do about it?

“What’s wrong, Attu?” His father said, concern in his voice as he looked at his son.

“Nothing, Father,” Attu replied, forcing a smile. “Nothing at all.”

This is not my father’s problem. It is a problem of honor between two hunters. I will never forget what Moolnik did, and someday...

“It’s growing dark,” his father said, looking off toward the south and west where the sun had already set. The fire-color was fading from the sky.

“Are we far enough away from the open water?” Attu asked.

“Who knows? No one’s ever seen anything like this before,” His father replied. “But our people can’t run any farther.”

Attu agreed. He was too tired to even consider trying to move any farther away from possible danger tonight. He grabbed a hide and handed it to Ubantu, who was setting up their shelter.

As they worked, Attu noticed hands reaching for amulets and spirit necklaces as the men and women, even in their exhausted state, worked quickly in the gloom of twilight to erect tents and get under cover before the long frigid night set in. Nuknuk lamps soon glimmered within the shelters, giving off much needed heat, and mothers spread out packs with furs on top to provide sleeping spaces for their families above the icy surface of the Great Frozen.

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T
he Great Frozen,
Attu thought as he started drifting off to sleep a short while later, comfortable in his raised bed of furs.
So much for trusting that it will stay that way...
and with the sudden realization that he was, right now, resting on top of ice that could no longer be trusted to remain secure underneath him, Attu’s whole body stiffened in sudden fear.

He lay for ages, his breath quick and shallow, as his mind created all sorts of imaginary scenarios of falling into the unfrozen water, down into the depths, down to Attuanin’s kingdom, never to return. His fear held until the sheer exhaustion of the day and of his flight across the ice with Elder Nuanu on his back forced his mind to shut down as his body demanded rest. But his dreams turned into nightmares, as one watery crack opened after another, and his body fell into them, down and down...

I
t took three days to get around the open water. The morning after the crack had forced them to flee for their lives, the clan began the long trek around the huge expanse of water and floating ice hunks. The hunters decided to head east around the water, since that was the direction they’d need to head eventually.

“Perhaps some time can be saved by this choice,” Elder Nuanu said as she walked behind Attu and Meavu on the second day of their journey. A fresh wind blew at their backs, making it easier to walk. Loose snow raced across their foot miks, and the edge of the eastern horizon was hazy with its blowing. North of them, the open water gleamed in the distance whenever the wind lessened, and its moving ice chunks seemed to float either on water or on the layer of drifting snow when the wind blew. Both seemed equally impossible.

Attu pulled his eyes away from the floating chunks and glanced over his shoulder at Elder Nuanu.
She seems fine after her rescue. She is tough, like Father said
.

Elder Nuanu began humming.

“What song is that, Elder Nuanu?” Meavu asked. “I haven’t heard it before.”

Elder Nuanu nodded at Meavu but continued to hum softly for a few more moments.

“I think I’ve got it now,” Elder Nuanu said and tucking a loose grey braid back into her parka hood, she pulled the hood back slightly so they could hear her better.

“Listen,” she said, and Elder Nuanu began to sing, her high voice carrying in the stillness of the cold air.

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“S
kim the water, slip and slide

In my skin boat I glide, I glide,

Huna, Hina, see it glide.

Past the ice hills

Past the frozen boats of ice.

See them on the water floating

Do not glide too close!

Skim the water, slip and slide

My skin boat glides, it glides.

Huna, Hina, Huna, He-ee, see it glide!”

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E
lder Nuanu paused, looking to the left horizon, where indeed the floating ice did look like hills in the distance, slowly moving.

“I always thought that song of my grandmother’s was nonsense.” Elder Nuanu shook her head. “Now, I’m not so sure.”

“What are
skin boats
?” Attu asked. “What could glide on the water with a person in it and not sink? Is it some sort of magic, something of the spirit world?”

“Grandmother said that in the time of the last Warming, before the Cooling came to Nuvikuan-na again and the People began to walk north and west across the Great Frozen, the world had much unfrozen water. A man could sit in a skin boat, which was like a skin-covered pack frame, only two or three spear lengths long, made of the bones of the giant whale fish.”

“But, Elder Nuanu,” Attu protested, “the whale fish is a spirit creature. It’s not real.”

“I’m simply telling you what my grandmother told me,” Elder Nuanu replied. “The skin boat was made of giant whale fish bone and covered with nuknuk skin. The skin was made watertight the same way we make our water pouches, by sealing the seams with fat.”

“An old woman’s tale, an old woman’s song,” Attu said. “It’s not real.”

“I know, Attu. That’s what the clan thought whenever she told her tales.”

Elder Nuanu stared out at the open water with its large masses of floating ice moving along in the wind. “And until the sun before this one, I thought such an expanse of open water could not exist, either. But, there it is.”

She motioned with her mik toward the expanse of dark water in the distance. The wind had calmed so it was now reflecting the blue of the sky above them.

“Maybe giant whale fishes are real, too, and they live down in the deep water, and not in the Between,” Meavu whispered. She had stopped walking and was looking down, as if she could see through the ice to the watery depths below. She looked terrified.

Attu knew Meavu had suddenly realized the Great Frozen was no longer the secure place she’d always thought it was.
I know that feeling,
he thought, as he remembered his own fear the night before.

“Perhaps there are giant whale fishes under us, right now,” Meavu continued, her voice rising with her growing hysteria, “and they will crash through the ice and-”

“Nonsense, Kip,” Attu interrupted her. “It’s all just stories.” He couldn’t stand to see his sister so afraid.

“You’re right, Attu, I suppose,” Elder Nuanu said. She was watching Meavu closely as she spoke. “Nothing but stories and songs to entertain children. That’s all.”

“Attu!” Yural called from many spear lengths ahead of them. “Are you all right?”

Attu looked ahead and realized they’d fallen behind the rest.

“We’re fine!” Attu shouted back, and Attu, Elder Nuanu, and Meavu picked up their pace.

But until the sun before this one, I thought such an expanse of open water could not exist, either...

Try as he might to think of other things, Elder Nuanu’s words kept echoing in Attu’s mind, long after their conversation had ended.

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T
he days began to blur together. The weather grew a bit warmer, and the ice under their feet often felt grainy, like small pebbles on the edge of windswept land. The clan moved forward with even greater caution now, watching the signs of changing weather and temperature, monitoring the ice under their feet as they walked. One day Ubantu was first to notice a change in the clouds, and the clan got their tents erected just as the first stinging ice fell. As the storm rolled by, Attu, Suka, and some of the other young hunters spent the afternoon playing games in one of the tents as if they were children again. But most of the days were long treks, wearying travel over the flat ice in the never-ending glare of the sun slanting through deep blue sky.

“I’ve never seen this many nuknuk holes this far from land,” Attu’s father said as the two of them walked carefully amid the several holes within sight, searching for one that looked most recently used. They were hunting ahead of the clan, and Attu’s father had just marked another thin patch of ice near an old nuknuk hole with one of his message stones and string.

Attu looked down at his own parka. Every Nuvik carried message stones and hide strings. The stones and strings, when set into a small hunk of ice, communicated with other clan members. The message depended on the type of stones used and how the strings were connected to them. Attu had marked so many areas of danger with his round stones in the last few days he had run out and started using flat time stones instead. The clan would understand and avoid these areas of thin ice.

Attu could see by the gleam in his father’s eyes that dangerous as it was, he was enjoying being out on the ice again with his spear in hand. The coiled rope attached to it bounced as Ubantu walked.

“The ice is so thin here,” Attu said. He sidestepped an area that his spear butt had tested as weak. “It should be much thicker. We’re still a day’s journey from that ridge of rock we’ve been walking toward.”

Attu adjusted his slitted goggles and looked out over the ice toward the land they were headed for, a dark outcropping barely visible on the horizon.

“I’m beginning to think we should believe Elder Tovut-”

Ubantu motioned with his hand and Attu froze. His father stared at a hole, larger than the rest, a few spear lengths away and off to one side. A bubble broke on the surface. A nuknuk had just raised its snout above the water line to take in a breath, and might still be hovering just below.

Moving soundlessly across the ice, Attu’s father inched his way closer to the hole, careful to keep his shadow from crossing over the water as he drew near its edge. He slipped into a crablike crouch as he moved still closer. Attu marveled at how his father could move with such stealth even with a bad leg. The walking his father had been forced to do seemed to be strengthening it. Almost without realizing it, Ubantu had become a hunter again. Attu’s breath quickened. He balanced himself, ready to run to his father’s aid if he speared game.

Ubantu stopped so close to the edge of the hole Attu feared his father might crack the ice and fall in. But Attu kept silent. Ubantu raised his spear so slowly the motion was virtually undetectable. Attu knew that herein lay the real power his father had as a hunter: his patience.

Time passed. Attu’s legs began to grow cold and his fingers numb, but he didn’t move. He knew the nuknuk below could see the darkness of his shape through the ice in this bright sunlight, and any movement he made would sound below.

Ubantu held his spear close to his ear, the point aimed at the hole before him, as motionless as the hunks of ice that surrounded him and the rocks far to the distance behind him. Ubantu had become part of the light and shadow of this landscape, and Attu could no longer detect any motion of breathing in the long fur around Ubantu’s parka hood near his mouth. Ubantu had slipped his goggles off, and his eyes were mere slits in his face, steady, blinking only rarely. It was as if his spirit had left his body behind, and it had frozen there.

Attu, like most of his people, could sense when another living creature was near. But somehow his father could make even his spirit blend into the wind and the sky and the ice as if he were part of the Expanse itself. Attu was sure a returning nuknuk wouldn’t be able to sense his father’s presence.

Suddenly, Attu saw the tip of a nuknuk’s snout break the surface of the water just as Ubantu’s spear flashed out. The barbed bone hook at the end bit solidly into the flesh of the animal, and Attu ran forward, catching at the rope his father was pulling in. Both of them heard the crack of ice as the nuknuk was pulled from the water, and instinctively they fell flat on their stomachs to distribute the weight of their bodies over a larger area. But they did not let go of the rope. Instead they pulled, scrabbling backward at the same time.

The ice held. The nuknuk thrashed about as they drew the massive flippered animal forward and away from the hole. As they did, the cracks expanded, flaring out like the wavering lights that often danced in the sky on clear cold nights.

Once they’d pulled the creature far enough away from the hole, Attu’s father stood, and taking the heavy bone club he carried at his waist, he struck the animal dead with a single blow to the head. Then he reached out his hand to Attu, pulled him up, and thumped him on the back. Attu gripped his father and pounded him as well. The smile on Ubantu’s face lit up Attu’s, and the two stood grinning foolishly at each other as the blood from the huge animal’s spear wound reddened the ice.