Ivory and Bone(34)

This boat was not built by anyone I know.

This boat brought strangers to our shore.





THIRTEEN


My mother does not appear to notice anything out of place—she’s too distracted by her social obligations to the oarsmen.

“The midday meal has already been eaten, I’m sure,” she says, stumbling out of the canoe, not willing to wait for someone to help her. She must be as anxious as I am to feel our own land under her feet again. “But come with me. I’ll make sure that you are well fed and rested before you return home.” My brothers and I drag the boats up and ground them on the rocks not far from the strange kayak. As we do, Roon lets out a yelp.

“This boat! I’ve seen this boat before!” Standing on our beach now, with the sun high in its arc overhead, Roon points to a thin wisp of smoke rising from the far western edge of our bay. Before I can ask him what he’s thinking, he dashes up the trail and disappears from my view.

Pek throws me a glance full of caution and questions before hurrying after Roon.

Kesh shrugs. “And I thought the adventure was over.”

As we climb the trail behind Roon and Pek, music reaches my ears. A drumbeat and a voice. “The song of friendship,” says Kesh. I recognize the voice of the singer—my father’s brother, Reeth, one of the elders of the clan.

We reach the circle of huts and there she is—the person who brought the boat. Sitting on the ground in the center of the gathering place, directly beside my uncle and his wife, is a girl with a long braid on either side of her face, her dark, deep-set eyes presiding over round cheeks and a wide smile. Hers is a face I know well—a face I grew up with.

This is Shava, the very same girl who once cooked every kill my brother Pek brought in.

She had wanted to be betrothed to my brother, but he had convinced our parents to decline. “There’s nothing wrong with her,” Pek had said when my parents had pressed him. “Can’t I like her for a friend, but not for a wife?”

Two years ago, my parents agreed not to force the matter. I think they would have changed their minds by now, if she and her mother hadn’t left the Manu. But when her mother’s native clan—the Bosha—passed through our land two years ago, they rejoined them.

So the Bosha must be the clan camping on our western shore.

My eyes scan the group. Kesh and Roon stand at the edge of the meeting place with my parents and the oarsmen, listening to the song, but Pek is nowhere to be seen.

Though it was just a little over two years ago that I last saw Shava, it feels like a different lifetime. Back before fear about the lack of females in our clan really took root, when we still had intermittent contact with other clans. Back before the sight of smoke rising from camps to the west or north disappeared completely.

But even then, panic over the lack of prospective wives for me and my three younger brothers didn’t develop overnight. Two years ago I was fifteen—old enough to marry but certainly not old enough to worry. The clans that crossed our path were more transient than we were, and my father and mother frequently mentioned that they suspected they had followed herds to the west or even inland, far to the east, along the southern edge of the Great Ice. Still, everyone spoke with confidence about the coming day when another clan—one with many young women—would camp nearby.

A clan would arrive in the summer, when the days got longer. That was my mother’s constant refrain. When summer was half over without a sign of anyone, my father said that the fall would bring a wandering clan to our bay, where the fishing was easy. Fish helped feed a clan into the winter when hunting got more difficult and the game harder to find. Even once the harbor froze over, fishing was still possible, especially from a bay like ours, bordered by points that extended beyond the ice to the open sea. Of course a clan would come—maybe more than one.

Then fall came, then winter, then spring, then summer again. When a year had passed since we’d seen signs of another clan, worry began to grow. Like a vine, it sprang up and sent out shoots into every part of my clan. It sprouted in the thoughts of my mother and father, its tendrils binding all of us so that the more the worry grew the more it restricted us. We stopped talking about the other clans. We stopped planning for one to arrive. Only Roon, when he was just eleven years old, was bold enough to face down the fear. He would take off and search, wandering the shoreline, looking for any sign. After two years of no contact from outside, my clan hadn’t given up all hope, but it was close.

As hope faded and fear grew, the prospect of a move south became the focus of our elders’ plans. And then you arrived, and everyone believed we were saved. All our fears were banished when Chev came to shore with a beautiful boat and two beautiful sisters.

Your arrival was so captivating to all of us—so amazing and wonderful—that when another clan finally camped nearby, no one except Roon even cared.

But this afternoon, finding the strange kayak on the beach and Shava sitting in the center of my camp, knowing everything I’ve come to know about you and your clan and the impossibility that betrothals could ever take place—the arrival of another clan is very welcome indeed.

The friendship song comes to a halt as our clanspeople rush over to welcome us home. Shava springs to her feet as my extended family peppers me with questions about what I’ve been through. It seems the oarsmen who came to camp two days ago to bring my family south told the tale of the cat I had killed and—outside my family’s hearing—shared a gruesome description of my injuries. Everyone wants me to take off my parka and show my wounds.