Overwinter Page 21

  “It happened more than ten thousand years ago. There were people here then, though they left no traces that remain today. Archaeologists speak of the ancestors of the Inuit, called the Thule people. Before the Thule they speak of the Dorset culture. Inuit today retain stories of people even older than that—the Tunlit, a name that means ‘the first people.’ The Tunlit were giants, they say, but feeble-minded giants, simple people who spoke a language no more complex than that of infants. The Tunlit were docile and were easy to drive off their lands, and the Inuit erased all sign of them. But even before the Tunlit there were people here—the Neanderthals, who first told stories of animal spirits, and who summoned Musquash and Raven and Polar Bear and all the others with their songs.

  “They did not call themselves Neanderthals, of course. They called themselves the Sivullir, a word that means ‘people with red hair.’ The Sivullir all had red hair and brown eyes. They looked much as you do, though their brows were a little more prominent, their jaws a little more square. They were a little shorter than people are now, but everyone was shorter back then.

  “They lived on average for thirty years. By the age of twenty a Sivullir looked very old. They had homes they carved out of the ice, whole warrens connected by wide passages. They wore fur parkas that they never removed, as anyone must who lives in this land. Especially in that time.

  “This was during the ice age, when the ocean was lost beneath great glaciers, and the valleys between massive mountain ranges of ice were always filled with snow. It was a time when there was only winter, and the sun was dimmer than it is today.

  “It was a harsh time, a brutal time. The Sivullir were tough people. They had to be to survive. Their ways would seem drastic to you, or even to modern Inuit. They lived on what meat they could catch, and they kept their numbers small enough that they could survive each vicious season. They had very strict laws about this. When someone had grown so old they could no longer perform useful work, or when they had lost all their teeth and could no longer chew meat, they were expected to hang themselves so as not to become a burden to others. When too many babies were born to a family, the mother would smear the bile of a bear on her nipples, and let the newborns suck. Bear bile contains massive amounts of vitamin A, and death would follow within minutes.”

  “That’s horrible,” Chey said.

  “That’s survival,” Raven told her. “Always these people tottered on a thin edge between life and extinction. They had only the crudest of tools, and only what metal the glaciers gave them, which was very little. They could not have survived very long, if it hadn’t been for their one great advantage: us.

  “They were the ones who created us. Among the Sivullir there were shamans—the word will probably make you think of New Age nonsense, but back then they acted more as doctors, and psychiatrists, and especially as musicians. The Sivullir had such wonderful music. They made bone flutes and drums out of animal hides and they played such songs that we were compelled to leave our animal bodies behind just to come closer and listen. Their songs made us immortal, and gave us power over the environment, and over the animals we represented. In exchange we interceded on behalf of the Sivullir, making sure their hunts were successful and leading them home when they got lost out on the ice. These shamans knew how to talk to us, and how to make bargains with us, and sometimes how to fool us into doing what they wanted.

  “With our aid the Sivullir survived, long after they should have died out. By the time of my story they were the last of their kind. Yet they had no sense of the passage of time, nor any way to know they had outlived their own history. Their world was one of constant change as the ice groaned and shifted and spilled over into new valleys, or cracked and split open to reveal brief rivers that had been buried for millions of years. We helped the Sivullir anticipate those changes, but there was a change coming even we could not predict. A threat to their very way of life.”

  Raven fell silent as he pulled a strip of meat off the seal carcass and stuffed it in his mouth.

  “What was the threat?” Powell asked finally, as if urging the spirit to continue his story.

  Raven swallowed noisily. “Global warming,” he said.

  63.

  “The Earth was warming back up as it crawled out of the last ice age. With each year that passed, there was a little less snow, and the air was a little warmer. Exposed water didn’t freeze as quickly. Animals changed their migration patterns. It was the little things like this that told us the world was about to end. The world as they knew it, anyway.”

  Raven shrugged. “Over the centuries, as the ice thawed in the valleys, new passes were opened through the glaciers. There were reports of new animals seen by the hunters, animals that had never stalked the ice before. And then there came the new people, from the east.”

  “From across the land bridge?” Chey asked, remembering what she’d learned in school.

  “Originally, yes. The newcomers had traveled from Russia across the land called Beringia, which was a thick isthmus connecting Asia and North America, a dry strip of land that the ice never got a hold on. By this time, however, the land bridge had sunk back into the sea. The newcomers were as much Alaskans as they had ever been Russians, by the time my story begins. They weren’t Neanderthals, these new people. They were Cro-Magnons. They were short and stocky and very hairy, but genetically they were indistinguishable from you modern humans. These called themselves the Bear People, because they worshipped a giant bear. Everywhere they went they left their shrines, which were caves wherein lay the skull of their god. They lived in small huts made of mammoth bones, which could be packed up and moved very quickly. They practiced ritual scarification, cutting elaborate spiral patterns in their cheeks and foreheads with flint knives. They came from a more pleasant land, where wood was plentiful, and they had better tools and weapons than the Sivullir.

  “What they did not have was us. They knew no spirits from their old land. Here their god forbade them from even speaking with us, much less propitiating us for our assistance. So it was a long while before they were able to make a life here, even when the ice began to shrink.

  “The Sivullir did not hate the Bear People on first meeting them. There was no precedent for their arrival. The Sivullir had always believed themselves to be the only people in the world—but rather than reacting with fear on meeting the newcomers, they welcomed the Bear People into their ice warrens, and gave them food, and saved them from death when they were found stranded on the ice. In return the Bear People offered the Sivullir the great revelations of their bear god. The Sivullir were largely uninterested, but they did not try to stop the Bear People from practicing their religion.

  “Not at first, anyway.

  “The world was changing faster and faster. The ice was receding and suddenly there was a new season in the year, something you would be hard pressed to call summer, but that is what they called it back then. A time when some of the valleys were clear altogether of ice and snow, and plant life began to take hold. Some of the animals the Sivullir relied on for sustenance flourished. Others migrated even farther north, to keep up with the withdrawing glaciers. The diet of the Sivullir changed and this brought diseases. Other sicknesses came with the Bear People, though no one made that connection at the time. What they did know was that people were living shorter lives and more children were dying every year.

  “The Bear People took advantage of this tragedy. They had never practiced the strict child laws of the Sivullir. They encouraged their people to have large families, with lots of children. Many sons made the hunt easier, and spare daughters, they believed, could be sold to other tribes.”

  “Ugh,” Chey said. “I take it this was before feminism was invented.”

  Raven shrugged. “I’m not a mortal, so I can’t judge them. At the time I was as horrified as any of the Sivullir when I saw Bear People families with seven or even more children. The Bear People were breeding the Sivullir out of their own lands.

  �
��It seemed the Sivullir would vanish from the Earth, swallowed up by these interlopers. The shamans, who were the last defenders of the old ways of the ice age, knew that something had to be done if those ways were not to be lost forever.

  “So they did what they had always done before, in times of crisis. They turned to us, their cousins. They asked for our help.”

  “That’s where we come in, I imagine,” Powell said, his voice a growl.

  64.

  Raven chewed quietly for a while. He asked for a drink of water before he went on. “Don’t give him anything. That wasn’t part of the bargain,” Dzo insisted.

  Raven shrugged. “This paranoia doesn’t become you, Musquash,” he said. “I liked you better when you trusted everybody.”

  “Sure. Because that made it easier for you to take my skin.”

  Raven laughed. “Believe me, if I wanted it now, I could have it.” He turned to face the werewolves again. “I was always the smartest of the spirits, you see,” he explained. “That was why the shamans of the Sivullir came to me when they knew they had no other hope. There were six of them at the time—all that remained of their number. I was shocked when I saw them. Three of the shamans were withered old men, maybe thirty-five years old. They should have hanged themselves long before they grew so old. One was a boy, barely a teenager, who looked terrified, as if he’d never seen a spirit before. I was told he’d been chosen as a replacement at the last minute by a shaman dying of some fast-acting pox. The other two were no less strange. One was a woman. That had been unheard of, until right before the end, when there weren’t enough shamans to go around. She was middle-aged and fat and she smiled a lot but she never spoke to me. The last one, the shaman who addressed me by name when I came into the cave, had white hair and white skin. His name was Vull. It was a common name among the Sivullir, but it seemed particularly appropriate in this case, since it was also their word for freshly fallen snow before anyone steps on it.

  “Vull tried to flatter me with compliments and by regaling the others with some of my best stories. He was trying to distract me, of course, so I wouldn’t notice as the others placed a ring of small black stones around my feet.”

  “Pitchblende,” Dzo said, as if it were a profanity.

  Raven nodded. “Everything that is supernatural in this world has a weakness, some substance it cannot abide. Pitchblende—and similar minerals—is ours. In its presence we weaken and suffer. The Sivullir used to wear necklaces of the stuff for protection from the less friendly spirits, but never before had they thought to use it like this. Encircled by poison, I was trapped, unable to fly away. When it was accomplished, Vull apologized profusely. He knew this would anger me. He was quite correct in that. He explained, however, that he had no choice. Something had to be done to drive away the Bear People before the Sivullir were wiped out. They intended to use the one weapon they had left at their disposal, the power of the spirits, to achieve this, though he admitted he was not sure how it could be done. He thought I might have some ideas.

  “I was being given a chance to save myself. I curbed my anger, and instead I praised him for his clever trick. I said it made sense he should choose me, the most intelligent of spirits, and that I understood what he had done. But I suggested that perhaps what was needed in this case was not intelligence, but fear. The Bear People were afraid of certain animals. I suggested that the spirit of the dire wolf—Amuruq, though that was not the name she had then—would be far more likely to terrify the Bear People than myself. I also suggested a way her power could be used to best effect, and Vull agreed it was a very cunning plan.

  “He released me so that I could summon her. She had never been very close to the Sivullir, for they feared her as much as the Bear People did. It was rare for a shaman to call upon her and rarer still that the shaman was not devoured for his efforts. I used this to my advantage. I found her tearing apart a mammoth up in the heights of the glaciers and I spoke with her at length, telling her all about the wonderful gifts the Sivullir had given me, and all the kindness they had shown me.”

  “Nanuq said they tricked her by offering to show her how well they treated their sled dogs,” Chey said, remembering the polar bear spirit’s version of this story.

  “Nanuq is very old, and forgetful. The Sivullir never domesticated the dog,” Raven told her. “My lies had the same effect, however. Amuruq came with me back to the ice warren and there she came before Vull, who had laid out a great feast for her. She was always hungry, and never sated, and she was glad for the bounty. She did not even look at the food before she pounced on it, and so she did not realize it was stuffed full of powdered pitchblende. When she did realize it, it was far too late. As I watched, for the first time I understood fear myself. Her shape began to grow indistinct. As the dust poisoned her she tried to change into her animal form, thinking this would save her. She grew very sick. Her fur fell out in great clumps and her eyes clouded over.

  “While she was halfway between forms, the shamans came upon her with ropes to hold her down. She fought them savagely and two of them were killed, torn apart by her claws and teeth. The boy shaman ran from the cave howling in panic and went quite mad. The others could barely hold her, but they managed to keep her still long enough for Vull to reveal what he hid under his parka. This was the gift of another spirit, the spirit of the giant moles that lived in that time who burrowed under the ground, who had knowledge of stone and metal. That spirit had given him an ulu made of silver.”

  “What’s an ulu?” Chey asked Dzo, quietly.

  “A crescent-shaped knife,” he explained. “The Inuit still use them.”

  “The ulu was unlike any knife the Sivullir had ever possessed before. It was not a piece of sharpened bone or rock, but supernatural metal, and it possessed powers unknown until that moment. Vull used it to carve Amuruq into pieces while she was still changing,” Raven went on. “Her blood stained his skin so that he spent the rest of his life with red hands. He didn’t stop, even when she was dismembered. He ground her bones to powder and burned all her fur. Her eyes and her tongue were placed together in a bag and—”

  “Please,” Chey said. The story was making her queasy. “Maybe we can skip what they did with her eyes and tongue.”

  Raven shrugged. “You wanted the whole story. It was important that everything but her meat was destroyed, you see, because if it wasn’t then she could have just reformed herself from the pieces that remained. The meat was put into a pot and cooked to make a stew. The female shaman spiced it with her own moon blood, which was the last part of the spell they were performing.”

  “By moon blood,” Dzo tried to explain, “he means—”

  “I’ve already figured that one out,” she told him, patting his arm.

  Raven waited for them to be quiet before he went on. “When the stew was finished cooking, they took it out of the ice warren and down to the valley below.”

  “And fed it to their warriors,” Chey said, nodding. “Nanuq told us that, too. So they could fight the Bear People, and defend the ice.”

  Raven laughed. “The Sivullir had no warriors. They were hunters, but they were forbidden to ever kill one of their own kind—or one of the Bear People, either. No, they had no desire to transform themselves.

  “The two of them—Vull and the female shaman—took the stew to a camp of Bear People. They said it was a gift in return for the great gift the newcomers had given them, the gift of the bear god’s revelation. It would have been rude to refuse such a gift. The Bear People of that camp ate it right away, while the shamans watched. The shamans made sure they finished every drop. Then they went back to the warren, to watch and wait for the moon to rise. They knew exactly what they had done, and what would happen next.”

  65.

  Night had fallen as Raven told his story. The fire light flickered across the shiny black feathers of his cloak as he went on.

  “I doubt I need tell you in great detail what happened when the moon rose that night,”
Raven said. “Those of the Bear People who had partaken of Amuruq’s flesh were changed. Awakened by the magic in the female shaman’s moon blood, they transformed—just as we had watched Amuruq transform in her final moments. She was not dead, but only dispersed. Those afflicted by her spirit found themselves consumed by hatred and rage and a desperate need to slay any human being they could find—Amuruq’s rage was unquenchable. We made our curse very carefully, and she had no desire to harm a single Sivullir, but no human was safe. It was a night of horror, as the wolves fell upon those who were truly their own kin, slaughtering and ravening without cease. Bodies were torn apart, cries for mercy went unheeded. Chaos and panic reigned and only when the moon sank below the horizon again did it end. The Bear People had no silver weapons. They could fight against the supernatural wolves that appeared without warning in their camps—but they could not destroy them. Those they killed, the wolves ate, just as Amuruq devoured everything she could find. Those who somehow managed to survive were usually so terribly wounded they were not expected to live through the following day.

  “Yet something occurred which even I had not foreseen. The wounded did survive. Vull and his shamans had thought only to make a demonstration of their power. But the terrible peace of the Bear People camps that day was not to last. That very night, Amuruq emerged again—and this time there were more bodies for her to possess. Those wounded Bear People who had been taken back to their tents to die were transformed as well. The curse we had created was spreading.