Ivory and Bone(79)

My brothers sleep on, their breaths coming in even rhythms almost in time with each other, filling me with the creeping sense that the air in the room is being devoured. I’m forced to leave this strange hut and head out into the strange sunlight. Nothing feels right. Nothing feels familiar. I can’t imagine that it ever will again.

Like the morning of the day I met Mya, I’m driven by a desire to get away, a need to escape the confines of camp and be alone for a while. I think first of the meadow, but then reconsider, knowing the meadow would be the first place Pek or anyone else would look for me. Instead, I decide to head for the trail that leads over the hills to the western side of the bay. I know that near the summit that path divides—a seldom-used, nearly forgotten trail splits off and descends north and east to the far edge of the meadow. It will be a longer trek, giving me more time alone.

I start up the trail from its mouth near the beach. Even the slant of light seems strange. Unfamiliar songs of unfamiliar birds fill the air.

I climb quickly, not pausing until I reach the summit. A breeze stirs the lower branches of the trees with a whisper, like ghosts shuffling by, and I shudder. After a bit of searching, I locate the overgrown path that winds east toward the meadow. At the first switchback, a gap in the trees opens on a wide view to the northwest, and I stop.

Looking out, I can see to the horizon, a line so flat it could be water, though the ground is the golden yellow and green of the grasslands. I look as far out as I can, as if I can look back into the past, back to the day a family left their camp on a gathering trip, and a girl became lost.

My eyes search the land in front of me as if I might see that day—as if that day were a bend in a river that flows from the past to the place I stand right now.

But that day is not a place where the river bends, I realize. It’s the place where the river splits. On that day the Divine dropped a stone in the river, diverting it into two streams. One clan continued west. Another clan turned south. Separate courses, both leading toward death.

The death of Mya’s father, Mya’s mother, Mya’s betrothed.

The death of Lo’s father.

The death of Lo.

Wind blows across the peak from the bay and the scent of seawater brings me back to the present.

I hurry downhill, and when I reach the meadow—the first place that truly feels like home—I drop down onto my back. Though I felt only restlessness in the hut, now I feel nothing but exhaustion. The hike brought back fatigue to every sore muscle in my body. Warmth surrounds me. A whisper in the grass quiets my thrumming thoughts: shhhhh . . . shhhhhh.

Sleep swoops down on me with wide-stretched arms, wrapping me in an embrace, pulling me up, and carrying me away before I have a chance to resist.

I wake with a start, as if summoned by a voice. I sit up, noticing the sun far off in the west. It’s almost time for the evening meal.

What questions will I be asked tonight? I expect I will have to tell about the attack on Chev, my fight with the boy, the death of Lo.

How will my mother react when she hears that I may have killed Orn? That I let Lo die?

These questions darken my thoughts as I climb the trail back toward my camp, which suddenly seems so far away. I think of Manu, lost, far from family and clan.

When I reach the summit, my steps quicken. I’m propelled forward by the knowledge that around the next bend, the trail turns toward home.

I reach the overlook and sweep my gaze over the familiar scene in front of me—the sea to my right, the sloping plains to my left, and the eastern mountains in the far distance. And directly below me, a view of my own clan’s camp.

Even run-down and blighted by half-stripped huts, this is the place of the people I love.

But as I look down on the camp, confusion rises in me, and I have to question what I see. How could this be the same camp I stepped away from earlier today?

Every hut is complete; every structure neatly covered in smooth, fine pelts. Sun glints off the roof of the kitchen, newly covered in a dark hide of glossy bearskin. And draped across the doorway of my family’s hut hangs something new—pelts stitched to create a sort of banner of contrasting colors, pieced together in an intricate design—a field of dark fur as a background, dotted with lighter pieces to suggest stars in a night sky.

I’ve seen pelts stitched in patterns like this only once before, in Mya’s hut. This, all this, I think, my eyes moving from one repaired hut to another, could have come only from the south, from Mya and her people.

I tear my eyes from the view and race farther down the trail, wondering if I will find Mya herself in my camp. But as the trail draws close to the bottom of the hill, I catch a glimpse out over the bay.

Boats.

Three intricately carved canoes float just a short distance from shore. Two rowers sit in each one, as if waiting to push out. And in two of the three canoes, a body lies between the seated oarsmen. The canoe closest to shore bears the body of a young girl, lying as if asleep, covered all over in red ocher—the color of blood, the color of the dead.

This is Lo, making her final journey home.

The second canoe is farther out in the bay. Bright red ocher covers the length of the body that lies in the hull, standing out against the gray water, but it floats too far away for me to see the person’s face.

It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to see his face to know that it’s Orn, the boy I let fall from the cliff, the boy Chev called Dora’s son. I had been afraid to look down, to know if he had lived or died.