Evolution

This land was Jahna’s home, as it was Rood’s, and his mother, Jahna’s, before him. Her people owned it — but not as property that could be disposed of; they owned it as they owned their own bodies. Jahna’s ancestors had always lived here, back through the generations, into the unending mists of time, when, so it was said, humans had sprung into existence from fire and trickery. Jahna could imagine living no place else.

At the precise midpoint of the journey, the party stopped.

Snow had drifted in the shelter of a sandstone bluff. Rood briskly cleared the snow with sweeps of his arms, and he dug out a large slice of narwhal skin, with subcutaneous fat still clinging to it. The meat had been there since last autumn, and much of it had been devoured by passing foxes, gulls, and ravens. But Rood cut off chunks with a fine stone knife, and soon they were all chewing. The tough, partially decomposed meat was a luxury. It had a name of its own, meaning something like meat-of-dead. It had been left here as an emergency cache in case a traveling party should find itself stranded.

The two bonehead bucks, panting, their hips and clumsy knees obviously aching, were allowed to rest awhile, chewing on bits of meat.

The hunters began to talk of the shaman’s prophecies. Little Millo piped up. "I had a dream. I dreamed I was a big gull. I dreamed I fell in the sea. It was cold. A big fish came and ate me. It was dark. And then, and then—"

The hunters listened gravely, nodding.

Dreams were important. Each day the people faced decisions about what kind of gathering or hunting to attempt, what kind of animals to pursue, how the weather might behave. It was essential to make the correct call; a run of bad guesses could quickly starve your family. But their heads were crammed full of specific knowledge, about the land, the seasons, the plants, the behavior of animals, acquired over a lifetime and distilled from the experience of generations. On top of that there was a mass of daily data to absorb, on weather, animal marks. All this voluminous, tentative, fast-changing data had to be processed to support rapid, firm decision making.

The hunters’ thinking was as a result much more intuitive than systematic and deductive. Dreams, in which the unconscious mind had a chance to sort and explore all the data available to it, were an essential part of that processing. And with their chants and dances, trances and rituals, the shamans were the most intense dreamers of all.

The convergence of the shaman’s visions and fortune-telling and the dreams of Rood and Millo was reassuring, a valid piece of information to guide the hunters. It showed that their deep intuition about the nature of the world was in accord.

Still, Jahna thought, Rood looked troubled. As he kicked the boneheads to their feet she approached him. "Father? Your face is long."

He glanced down at her, frowning. "It was just that dream of Millo’s. The water, the cold, the dark. Yes, it may be that he dreamed of hunting in the sea, of catching fish. But…" He raised his head, sniffing the air. "Millo’s nose is smarter than yours or mine, daughter. Perhaps he smells something we don’t. But we are committed. Let us go and raid the sea."

With a smart slap on the buttocks of one of the buck boneheads, he launched the sled off across the frozen ground once more. Millo, perched on a pile of sleeping bags, squealed with joy.

When they reached the coast, Rood released the two boneheads and let them forage on the cold ground. They wouldn’t have the energy to run off, or even the wit to imagine escape.

The ocean was frozen.

At this time of year only the coastal fringe was completely free of pack ice. But the ice was broken by leads, huge open channels of black water that radiated out from the tip of a headland. The hunters knew the leads formed in this place every year because of the shape of the coast — and that was why they had come here.

Eagerly, the hunters clambered on to the sea ice. Their bone harpoons in their mittened hands, Jahna and Millo hurried ahead of the others, hoping to be the first to get to the seals.

Jahna found herself surrounded by miniature mountain ranges, hillocks of ice pushing four or five meters into the air. Wisps of ice crystals blew languidly, and gulls wheeled, seeking fish. As the sea swelled impatiently, its skin of ice groaned and cracked; the air was full of sharp noise. But the ice was rough: autumn storms and the tides around the headland had piled up heaps of huge fractured slabs.

Rood and a number of the others had gathered around the open water, and were calling excitedly. A narwhal had come up to breathe, and perhaps the hunters would make a spectacular kill.

But Millo, cawing like a gull, hurried ahead through the maze of ice. Jahna scampered after him. They came to a place where the water was crusted over by grayish new ice. But the ice was broken by circular holes, a pace or two across.