People of the Wolf(5)

Runs In Light smiled, opening his arms so Father Sun could beat life into his veins. Below him, Grandfather Brown Bear rolled on his back in the grass, grabbing his toes before tumbling sideways to shake his silky coat in the brilliant light. Long-horned buffalo grazed, tails flipping nervously on their short-haired rumps. Moose stood in the wallows, moss hanging from antlers as he ducked his head to search for tender water plants.

"This is the land of the People," Runs In Light whispered. "This is- where Father Sun lives. His home in the south. Wolf, bless you for showing me this way. I will bring the People here . . . and together, we will sing our thanks to you."

He turned, reluctant to leave such a land behind him. The climb down into the blue shadow behind the ridge sucked up his energy, leaving him cold and tired by the time he reached bottom.





Chapter 2



A strong gust of wind battered the rock cairn, lancing through the frozen black rock. Ice Fire huddled in his double-layered caribou-hide parkas, arms crossed where he squatted in the protection of the rock pile.

Despite the wind-spawned ground blizzard that obscured the land in a white haze, he could see up through the wispy tendrils of snow, clearing his mind, letting his eyes catalog the myriad of stars. Snow rustled over the rock, sifting down around his long-booted feet in a fine powder.

Ice Fire, Most Respected Elder of the Mammoth People, ran his tongue over the remains of his teeth. The new gap was unfamiliar where the first upper left molar had fallen out. Only the right side of his mouth could still chew. He traced the ridges on the backs of his upper incisors and watched the stars.

"So many years," he whispered to the sky, "I've been alone. Why have you taken all I ever loved? Great Mystery above, what do you want from me?"

Only the ceaseless wind whistled and hissed. He listened, hoping for a voice, for a vision to form from the blowing snow rippling out of the endless plains, blotting out this terrible year.

He shuffled, an angle of rock cutting into his back as he looked to the north. The drawing unease still nagged at him. How long ago? Almost two tens of fingers since he'd first traveled there, following the call. Now it had begun again, only calling him south this time, leaving him sleepless, like this-night. A subtle tugging, it worried the fringes of his thoughts, driving him to leave the warm mammoth-hide lodges of the White Tusk Clan to climb the heights and sit, and watch, and wonder while he waited.

The Enemy lay there. The Enemy whose land they now hunted. The Enemy who never fought—but abandoned their possessions and fled ever south. He sniffed. Where did a warrior find honor in such as them? How would the White Tusk Clan ever gain the distinction of cherishing and protecting the Sacred White Hide, his tribe's power totem, while war raged among the other clans in the far west?

"We must force these cowards to fight us."

Ice Fire rubbed an ice-encrusted mitten across his nose, leaning his head back to look up at the snow-misted stars. The Hide was the most valued sacred object of the Mammoth People. It had been taken long ago: the skin of a white mammoth calf, carefully tanned. The history of the clans, the symbolism of the directions, and the ways of earth and air and water and light had been delicately drawn around the Hide's symbolic heart area. The picture had been drawn with blood ritually poured from the heart of a freshly killed mammoth. Without the Hide, the people would starve; Mammoth would no longer hear them. They would die, blown away like so much down from a snow goose's breast.

Weary, Ice Fire let himself relax, warm in his robes, comfortable but for the cramp in his aging knees and the rock gouging his back.

As always on lonely nights such as this, the memory of the woman on the beach returned to haunt him. Such a beauty.

He'd been so sure she'd called him to that lonely place—part of the vision, of the Dream of pain left by the death of his wife. Perhaps she had. In the vision, she'd given herself to him, led him to love her, to Jose himself in the embrace of her soul. Then the Watcher had interfered, changed it all. The vision had been jerked away—leaving him to stare in horror at what he'd done. Power had been misused. Future and past sundered. What might have been good had changed into something terrible. The Watcher had been there, her presence as tangible as hunger or thirst ... or pain.

He'd run then, appalled at what he'd done to the woman he'd sought to love. In vain, he'd climbed the high places, seeking the Great Mystery's explanation, calling angrily into the night to confront the Watcher—all to no end.

"I am only your tool!" he hissed to the sky. "Why have you used me so, Great Mystery above? What am I to you, when I would only be a man? Why have you cursed me? Left me childless when all I wanted were sons?"