After the End(4)

I am securing the caribou with hemp ropes when I hear something strange: a loud flapping noise, like the beat of a thousand eagles’ wings synchronized into multiple steady pulses.

I’ve heard this sound before, but only from the safety of an emergency shelter. It’s a flying machine. Which only means one thing: brigands. My heart skips a beat, and I freeze, scanning the sky.

Why didn’t Whit foresee this and hide the clan? They must not be coming close enough to us to be any danger. But in my mind, close enough to hear is close enough to hide. My stomach twists as I think of what I would do if I were the Sage.

The burden of being Whit’s successor is already beginning to weigh upon me. Like him, I will protect the clan. Predict storms or natural catastrophes. Conjure healthy crops and Read where food can be found in the lean years. Read when predators or even brigands are near and Conjure camouflage to hide the village.

I can’t see where the noise is coming from. Before me looms Mount Denali. The noise of the flying machine echoes off its foothills and is quickly absorbed by the snow-drenched valley sprawling at its feet. I hope it isn’t behind the mountain, where my village is. Surely not. Whit would have Read it.

A talon of worry scrapes at my belly. I rush to detach the huskies from the puller and clip them back to the sled. “Hike!” I yell, and we begin racing toward Denali, toward home. The noise has stopped. The machine must be gone. It was probably far away, and the valley’s echoes made it sound close, I tell myself, but I don’t cut the huskies’ pace.

Ten minutes pass and all I can hear is the hiss of my sled’s blades through the snow as we fly over the open field toward the track leading around the base of the mountain. The cold wind burns my cheeks, and I tighten the strings of my coat’s fur collar around my face.

We still have another twenty minutes before we reach the foothills. I was almost to the boundary when I found the bull caribou I had Read in my vision. It’s a good thing the animal stopped when it did, because I would never venture outside. Even a kill this size wouldn’t be worth the risk.

Suddenly, out of the silence comes the flapping sound again, closer and louder than before, confirming that I’m going in the right direction. But the source of the noise is still invisible. The mechanical rhythm of the eagle wings seems to hover and then becomes more distant. It’s got to be behind the mountain, I think, and my worry blooms into panic.

I pull hard on the dogs’ reins, and they come to an abrupt stop. Jumping off the sled, I use my mittened hand to clear the snow, scooping it away until I have a patch of wet ground. Jerking my pendant on its leather thong over my head, I pull my mitten off with my teeth and press my fire opal, still warm from my skin, between my palm and the sodden grass. I close my eyes and picture my father in my mind, and the earth speaks to me.

My mind is frozen by my father’s ice-cold panic. Petrified by his fear. As I feel his emotions, bile rises up my esophagus and burns my throat. I leap up, spitting and wiping my damp hand on my parka.

We must go faster, I think. Pulling my knife from my belt, I cut the caribou free. “Hike!” I yell. The dogs hear the fear in my voice and run like they never have before. The deer shifts and then slides off the back of the sled onto the ground, and, freed of its weight, we are off like an arrow across the snow.

Almost an hour later we finally pull over the hill into my village’s valley. My throat has been clenched so tightly that it’s been hard to breathe, but upon seeing the yurts safe and sound, smoke puffing out of the chimney holes, my breath spills out of me. I feel dizzy as oxygen floods my brain.

But as I survey the scene more carefully I see no movement in the camp. I lift my fingers to my lips and whistle the note that everyone knows is mine. The one that always wins me cries of “It’s Juneau! She’s back!” from the children who run to see what I have brought from a hunt. But this time I am greeted by silence. And then I notice the disorder of the camp.

Tools and weapons are scattered around the ground. The clothes drying on the line have all been blown to the mouth of the woods and are hanging in the trees, flapping around like flags. Baskets are overturned, grain and beans spilled over the hard-packed ground. The sides of the two closest yurts have been ripped from their posts, and the canvases are snapping back and forth in the breeze. It looks like a great wind has passed through.

Beckett and Neruda begin to growl, the fur on their backs bristling. I unclip them, and they race for our yurt. They disappear through the flaps and are back out a second later, puffing and barking frantically. As they begin sniffing around the empty camp, I plunge through our entrance to see my father’s desk knocked upside down and his books and papers scattered over the floor.