Wolf Road, page 9
She remembered the triumph of catching her first fish and carrying it back to the camp as it thrashed out the last of its strength. And that sweet, satisfying taste, as they shared their catch with their friends, hands covered in fresh blood and shining scales. At night, they would dream of fish, merging with the hunted – as though by consuming their flesh, they’d also consumed their spirits. And then when they woke, they would swim in the cold river, diving into its weedy depths, pushing themselves to the edge of shivering exhaustion, returning to disapproving parents beside the campfire. And now – now the river had finally taken his life, her reindeer-cousin. It had enfolded him in its icy depths. She was lucky to have escaped. Or perhaps the river had let her go, having claimed its blood sacrifice.
Tuuli felt desperately sad again. She wondered how Kussa had broken the news to Garan. It was better that he wasn’t right there with them. She didn’t want to see him, certainly. He may have lost his son, but he was to blame.
Alongside the weight of this terrible sadness, this heavy loss, and this anger, was yesterday’s encounter with the strange boy. It almost seemed like a dream now, though she knew it was real. She was desperate to tell Wren, but there were just too many other people around. She’d have to keep the secret to herself for a little longer. Am I doing the right thing? she asked herself. She was sure that Andar didn’t represent a threat, to any of them. But at the same time, she wasn’t sure the adults would see it that way. Wren will understand, she thought.
A sharp pain in her ankle woke Tuuli from her reverie. Aski had been busy digging a pit into the silty sand near the fire, lining it with a skin and filling it with water. But she saw Tuuli wince and came over.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘Do you want me to take a look?’
Aski was their spirit-mother, shaman and healer, so Tuuli agreed. She shifted sideways and extended her right leg so that Aski could see her ankle. Aski felt over the bandages then removed the moccasin and started to unwrap the long strip of skin. It had left grooves on Tuuli’s swollen ankle. Aski fetched a skin of water and bathed Tuuli’s foot, examining the cuts closely. Then she held Tuuli’s foot in one hand, supporting her calf with the other, and moved her ankle around. As she gently twisted the foot inwards, Tuuli gasped and pulled back.
‘Sorry, little hawk,’ said Aski. ‘I think you’ve torn things deep inside. I’ll strap it back up and you must rest your foot as much as you can in these coming days. Don’t do too much walking. It will take a while, but it will get better on its own. I can help you with the pain, though. I’m making some tea. Would you like some?’
Tuuli nodded. ‘Just a little.’
Aski re-dressed Tuuli’s ankle, wrapping the strip of hide even more tightly around it, then turned back to her skin-lined, water-filled pit. She used sticks to take hot stones from the fire and transfer them into her pit-kettle. Then, from the pouch she always kept tucked inside her tunic for safety, she added a pinch of dried dream-mushrooms and herbs. Just a little, enough to dull pain but not enough to send anyone on a spirit journey. Now she took a carved wooden cup with a handle, dipped it into the tea and delivered it to Tuuli.
Tuuli swung her legs back round so she could sit and stare into the fire. She cupped the tea in her hands, held the cup up to her face, and inhaled the magical aroma of summer reawakened by the hot water. She took tiny sips of the warming drink.
Wren came back over to sit with her.
‘How are you feeling?’ she enquired.
‘Mmm, better for some fish and tea,’ replied Tuuli.
They both looked at the fire and the blue smoke curling up and listened to the gentle murmur of the camp, pierced through occasionally by laughter, or the sound of a baby crying. They could just catch the sound of someone playing a bone flute on the other side of the camp. There was a peace here, despite all the troubles. Life, and the cycle of the seasons, continued.
‘I’m sorry I got angry earlier,’ Wren said.
Tuuli took another sip of tea, peered at Wren from under her eyelashes and smiled her acceptance.
‘I’m angry too,’ said Tuuli. ‘Angry and sad.’
‘It’s so difficult,’ said Wren. ‘But we need to look after each other.’
She reached over and squeezed Tuuli’s left hand. ‘How’s the foot?’
‘All right… a bit better. I think the dream-mushrooms are starting to kick in.’
Garan was drinking tea, too, Tuuli noticed. She had her own pain which needed to be dulled.
Wren and Tuuli sat quietly again, watching the others spit-roasting pieces of salmon over the fire.
That afternoon, Tuuli was overwhelmed with tiredness – the physical and emotional exhaustion of the previous day, together with the warmth of the fire, a belly full of salmon and the soporific effect of Aski’s tea combined to make her eyelids heavy. Wren fetched the white hare blanket that Tuuli had left in her tipi and pressed it into the arms of her yawning cousin.
‘Early bedtime for you, I think!’ she said.
Even though the sun was still high in the sky, Tuuli was more than happy to acquiesce, and she crawled into her tent, wrapped herself up in the wonderfully soft blanket, and sank immediately into a deep, welcome sleep.
And this time, she sank straight into a dreamworld. She was small and swimming in the river again with Poz, laughing and splashing on a sunny spring day. The water was cool and they dived down and up again, breaching the surface like otters. But then she watched as Poz’s brown body became silvery and suddenly he was a salmon, darting and weaving in the current. Then she felt her legs fusing together and her arms disappeared. Now she was bending her body from side to side to swim upstream – she’d transformed into a fish too. Shafts of amber sunlight struck down through the water. A shimmering ray of sun almost touched her and she rushed away from it, and then the shafts were not sunlight at all but harpoons slicing down, striking through the water, aimed at their silvery, scaly bodies.
They swam faster and faster to get past the hunters in this treacherous, death-heavy bend of the river. Poz-salmon was streaking away ahead of her and she powered forward with all the close-stacked muscles of her body and tail, watching as he leaped right out of the water. Then he splashed back down into their underwater world, and a harpoon tip flashed down so quickly that he couldn’t escape, and it pierced him through and his red blood flowed in billowing clouds into the water all around her. Inside the redness was a glimmer, a silver sparkle that surrounded her and she could see then it was all his scales that had fallen from him in an instant as he left the water. She was still swimming hard, and kicking now – back to her human form. The river was growing colder and she was gripped by it, feeling her limbs slow and become so heavy.
She was being dragged under; there were sinews wrapped around her waist and she knew these were tied to the laden pulk and it was being swept away by the river, gripped in the current. She was up and gasping for air and saw that the river was full of rafting ice, and her pulk was pulling, pulling. As she reached for the knife and cut it away, she rose out of the water and hovered above the river, looking down on it from her hawk’s-eye view. And she could see the pulk with its soaked brown bundles tied to it, being swept downstream. But then it wasn’t a sled, but a body. A limp, lifeless, brown body rushing with the current, disappearing under the ice.
She stirred in her sleep. It was evening now, and soon Remi and Jutsa, carrying Ketki, came into the tipi and started to settle in for the night. Maatu turned in a little later. Tuuli half-woke, turned over and fell back asleep.
Now Tuuli was dreaming again, and she was lying on the scratchy, springy, stunted willow at the water’s edge. Her ankle was twisted and hot. Her head was resting on her arms, and she knew that if she looked up she would see the mysterious boy. So she raised her head a little and peered through her eyelashes. And there he was, staring right back at her with his startlingly blue eyes.
They walked into the woods where sunlight was filtering through, hazy and greenish. It was summer and clouds of small insects hung in the air. Birds were singing all around them. And Tuuli was happy.
CONFESSION
Tuuli hated being out of action. She could escape into dreams at night, but during the day she felt trapped.
She hated not being able to move around easily, not being able to put her weight on her bad ankle, and not being able to escape from the camp and look for the strange boy. Remi and Jutsa had encouraged her to stay in and among their tipis, resting. Aski would occasionally bring her more tea and sweet birch sap, tapped from the trees up in the hills. Various cousins from other tribes popped in to see her and bring her fresh and roasted salmon to eat. But it was all so monotonous and frustrating.
Kuba came round on his own one morning, poking his head in at the flap of the tipi.
‘How are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Oh, all right,’ Tuuli sighed, putting a brave face on it. ‘I’m just having to rest my foot. And it’s a bit boring. How are you?’
Kuba came in and sat down.
‘Really sad,’ he said. And then, quietly. ‘I can’t believe he’s not here.’
‘Oh, Kuba,’ said Tuuli. ‘It is very sad. Poor Poz.’
‘Do you think he really is gone?’ he asked, with the tiniest hint of hope in his voice. ‘Numil thinks he might… he might have got out somewhere.’
Tuuli shook her head.
‘I don’t think so, Kuba. He went under the ice. And they saw him being carried away by the river.’
Kuba bit his lip and his eyes welled up with tears.
‘It’s okay to cry,’ said Tuuli. ‘Come here.’
Kuba came to her for a hug.
‘Just don’t sit on my ankle,’ said Tuuli, squeezing her cousin.
Kuba wiped his eyes with his sleeve and got up, sniffing.
‘I’m going fishing,’ he said. ‘Do you want anything?’
‘No, I’m fine. I’m full of food. But if you could get me a bit of antler, I could do some carving.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘See you later.’
‘If you see Wren, can you tell her I want to…’ Tuuli started, but Kuba had already left the tipi.
* * *
Later that day, Aski came into the tipi with armfuls of nettle and milkweed fibres that she’d processed.
‘Here’s something to keep you busy,’ she said.
‘Thank you so much,’ said Tuuli, genuinely grateful.
She spent the rest of that day and much of the next weaving nettle-fibre mats for the tipi and making some baskets. Kuba eventually remembered to bring her some antler and she carved a handful of toggles, too. Jutsa looked in on her occasionally, sometimes leaving Ketki to snooze among the furs and new baskets. Wren came to check up on her from time to time, but never alone. So Tuuli still couldn’t confide in her about the boy in the woods. And all the while she was working on baskets and toggles, she was thinking – going over and over the meeting with the boy in her mind.
With twelve winters behind her, Tuuli felt quite satisfied that she understood her place in the world. She could map out the geography of the valleys in her head, holding the landscape that stretched from winter through Spring Camp to Summer Camp, and then back again, as a series of pictures in her mind, enriched by memories through the years. She knew that many other talos existed in the reindeer lands, and understood that each of the tribes they regularly overlapped with had their own valleys, their own journeys. She knew the world went further still – occasionally travellers would turn up from distant places, beyond the mountains of the sun, or from the even icier lands of the north. So she knew that the world was larger than the bounds of her own experience.
She knew how to hunt and fish, how to roast meat and make broth, how to make a tent. She knew that the spirit of Hern was in all living animals, and it was by his grace that they could hunt and eat. She knew that the spirit of Ama was in the earth, the river, the moss, flowers and larches. That when people died, their flesh became food and their bones were scattered but their souls went back to Ama.
She knew what humans were: they were animals made of bone and flesh and blood. But at the same time, she felt that people were different from all the other animals. Jutsa always accentuated the links, the commonalities. She would say that building a tipi or cave-shelter was just the same as a fox making its den, that using a knife was just like a raven using a stone to smash a snail shell, that birds and animals could speak to each other, within their own kinds, just as humans could.
But Remi had pointed out the differences to Tuuli. She remembered him making her a beautiful, fluted spear point, when she was just nine winters old and starting to go hunting on her own. He had placed it in her hand, saying, ‘Look at that, my daughter, my nita. No other animal makes anything like this. It was an idea in my head. A perfect shape. And I have made it real for you.’ And he thought that human language was special. ‘Of course reindeer and ravens can speak among themselves,’ he once said, ‘but these are languages far apart from ours. I don’t think they have words as we do. We can describe everything in great detail. We don’t just say “tree”, we can say “larch” or “pine” or “willow”. We can use words to describe things we’ve never seen. We can see with our eyes and then speak of how beautiful a sunset was even when it’s gone dark. I don’t know, but I don’t think the reindeer or even the ravens are doing that.’
Tuuli’s conception of humanity brought together these ideas – she felt that humans were special, as Remi did, but still firmly, fundamentally part of the natural world, connected with all other living things. Animals, just with words and art and clothes. And under those clothes, all humans looked quite similar: they all had dark brown skin and dark hair.
And then she’d met Andar. He looked different to any other human she’d seen. The paleness of his skin and hair, his blue eyes, his rugged features. He seemed to be a completely different sort of human. He was a challenge to the picture of the world that she’d built up in her head. She’d thought it complete, and that she would perhaps add more details to it as she grew in age and experience. But Andar was completely unexpected. His existence shook her confidence – just how much was there about the world that she didn’t know? Now it seemed possible that she’d only seen a tiny fraction of what existed. And it made her feel somehow small, set adrift, unsettled.
Four days went by like this, in a haze. Her ankle was gradually starting to feel a little better, though it was still swollen and tender.
On the morning of the fifth day, Tuuli was alone in the tipi, dozing, when she heard a strange sniffing, snuffling sound just outside. She sat up, holding her breath and listening.
The snuffling moved around the outside of the tipi, eventually reaching the opening, and the hide flap moved. Tuuli had her hand on her stout staff. A wet nose pushed through the opening, then a furry snout, then a whole head.
‘Lupa!’ cried Tuuli in delight. ‘Lupa, come!’
The little wolf pushed her way into the tent and crept right up to Tuuli, wriggling in excitement.
‘Come here,’ said Tuuli, hugging the wolf while Lupa licked her face. Tuuli was crying with joy.
‘You came back!’
The two of them emerged from the tipi, Tuuli leaning on her stout staff. Jutsa, Aski and Maatu were sitting by the fire with their babies, roasting salmon over the flames.
‘When did the wolf come back?’ asked Jutsa in surprise.
‘Just now!’ replied Tuuli.
She sat down, taking a stick of skewered salmon, and started to eat the pieces, also feeding some to Lupa, who devoured them greedily.
‘She looks like she hasn’t eaten for a while!’ said Aski.
‘That wolf could eat the river out of salmon!’ remarked Maatu, to no one in particular, but he was smiling, and leaned over to offer Lupa another piece of fish as he said it.
After they’d eaten their fill, Aski offered to look at Tuuli’s ankle. She unwrapped it carefully. The swelling had gone down a lot, but the outer side of the ankle was still puffy. And a bruise was starting to bloom along the side of Tuuli’s foot.
‘It’s healing,’ said Aski. ‘I think you can try walking a bit on it, now. Hang on while I get some tallow,’ said Aski, disappearing into her tipi and coming back with a small wooden pot of the white grease. She dipped her fingers into it and then rubbed Tuuli’s foot.
‘Hey, stop licking my toes!’ Tuuli cried, pushing Lupa away.
Aski laughed.
‘Do you want me to look at Lupa’s leg too?’ Aski asked.
‘Yes, please,’ replied Tuuli.
Aski stroked Lupa then gently unwound the dirty strip of hide still tied around the little wolf’s leg. Lupa turned to nip her with sharp teeth, but Aski spoke to the wolf calmly, as though she were casting a spell, and it seemed to work. Tuuli fed Lupa more morsels of salmon, and the little wolf let Aski examine her leg.
‘That’s been well splinted,’ said Aski. ‘It should heal.’ She found a fresh strip of hide to bind it back up.
Tuuli got up and limped around the wider camp, leaning on her stick, with Lupa trotting at her heels. Finally she was free to wander – and catch up properly with friends and cousins. There were so many people she hadn’t seen since last leaf-fall. She stayed away from the Fulmars’ area of the camp, having no desire to bump into the three deserters. But luckily, some of the Fulmar kids were hanging out by the river, including her old friend Petrel.
‘Hi, Petrel!’ Tuuli called.
