Ivory and Bone(40)

We walk a bit farther in silence. My heart quickens, but I can’t be sure if it’s reacting to the climb or to what Lo said. The path turns away from the coast a bit and rises to a rocky slope. I let Lo go ahead of me, but that denies me the benefit of watching her face. I feel that if I could see her face as she spoke I might decipher some sort of mystery. Not just a mystery about the cold reunion I’d witnessed, but a mystery about you—about what experiences in your past have made you so rude and arrogant.

Not that it ultimately makes a difference to me. If you choose to be unfriendly and superior, I can only feel fortunate not to have been matched to you.

In this stretch of the trail, the ground is eroded to the rock bed below. Boulders stand out at angles, allowing us footholds, but the steepness makes my heart pound harder and my breath come quicker.

“So, when did you meet Mya and Seeri? Do you know them from before they moved south? Did they visit your clan as they passed through five years ago?”

“Five years ago . . .” Each word crackles from Lo’s lips like new wood hissing in the flame. Finally, she stops and looks back at me. Even from a distance, her eyes are like fresh-cut obsidian, hard and dark, but with a glow deep inside. “They didn’t pass through my clan.” The whispering in the trees falls silent. “They are my clan.”





SIXTEEN


My pulse quickens, drumming in my temples. I hurry to catch up to Lo, leaving the trail and scrambling over a steeper section of rock, so that I reach the crest at the same moment she does. I take in the hardened angles of her usually rounded face—the tight lines drawn around the edges of her mouth—before she hurries ahead again.

“They are your clan? How is that possible? You’re from the Bosha clan. They call themselves the Olen. . . .”

She doesn’t reply, doesn’t speak at all. The thrumming in my head grows louder, making it hard for me to think.

Lo continues to climb, though she slows her pace. I stay as close as I can; I don’t want to miss a whispered word of her answer. Finally, without looking at me, she speaks. “Until five years ago, we were all one clan. They were part of the Bosha. Their father, Olen, was our High Elder. But there was a rift and they abandoned their own people. They left us—Chev, his sisters, and about half the clan.

“Before the split, their father and mother were trusted in every way. People went where Olen said to go, whether it was an order to follow the herd, to take kayaks out to fish, or to go on a gathering trip that would take days.”

The slope of the trail turns downhill as we navigate a tight bend that reveals the open sea below us. The view from this spot looks over the section of the shore where Lo’s clan is camped—the remnant of your clan. The people you left behind. I think of the fighting that took place between your clan and mine when you visited us five years ago. If what Lo says is true, that must’ve been right after you and your family had torn away from your own people.

We continue down the trail and the smoke from the hearthfires of Lo’s camp disappears behind a wall of trees. From here, the path descends sharply; it won’t be long and this walk will be over.

“So what happened to end that trust?” I ask. I’m not sure if I’m pushing too hard or asking the wrong questions, but I want to keep Lo talking.

“All right.” Lo stops beside a fallen tree that looks as if the last bad storm uprooted it. Its trunk crosses the path. Leaves, still green, sprout from branches that fan across the sloping ground like the spread fingers of a hand of the Divine. She sits down and pulls her legs up, perching her chin on her knees. I sit opposite her, in a patch of ferns that edge the path. “Olen began to lose the clan’s trust when he turned us away from the ways the Divine had ordained for us as mammoth-hunters—the ways of our ancestor, Bosha. Do you know her story?”

Bosha . . . The ancestor Lo’s clan—your clan—is named for. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I may have heard it when I was a boy, but I don’t remember.”

“I’m happy to tell you,” Lo says. “It’s a story I love to tell.

“Bosha lived a long time ago. She was a great hunter. With her husband she had two children—twins—one boy and one girl. One day, while Bosha was out hunting alone, she brought down a mammoth. The mammoth did not die quickly, though, and while it still had strength, it began to crush her. Knowing that her death would mean hunger and suffering for her family, Bosha pleaded with the mammoth. She didn’t beg for her own life, but for the lives of her husband and children. She asked the mammoth to use its dying strength to travel to the door of her family’s hut so that, when the mammoth died, they would have food to survive. The Spirit of the mammoth was so impressed by Bosha’s love for her family, it honored her request.

“After Bosha’s death, her husband grieved her deeply. In memory of her and her great skill as a hunter, he promised the Divine that he and his family would eat only mammoth and other herd animals for the rest of their lives.

“The Divine was moved by the sacrifices of Bosha and her husband, and she brought a great clan out of their offspring. Since then, the Bosha have always lived off the herds.

“But Olen turned us toward a new way of life. We built kayaks to hunt on the sea and we gathered more greens and berries. Some people murmured that Olen was forgetting the old ways. But there was still balance. We still relied on the herds.