My mind goes back, reeling to the moment in the canyon, as the mammoth herd thundered by. My cheek braces against the cold sand, and I bite the inside of my lip. My mouth fills with the taste of bile and blood.
Then everything stills. Just as I begin to believe the foot of the Divine will appear on the sand in front of my eyes, the shaking stops.
The stillness stretches. Could the feet of the Divine have passed over these islands like stepping-stones? Could this be our punishment for having traveled beyond the horizon?
If so, she has moved on, at least for now.
I find the strength to lift my head, and my eyes meet Lees’s.
Her gaping gaze darts from my face to the ground to the sea and back again. Her hands, clutched to her chest, shake as if the ground were still moving. “Do you think that’s my fault?” she asks. “Because Roon and I angered the Divine?”
Her sweet self-reproach overcomes my anxiety, and I sit up. “No,” I say. “I don’t think anything you’ve ever done could anger the Divine that much.”
“But you said—”
“I said if you and Roon ran away and he didn’t attend his father’s burial—”
“Then what? What could have brought that on?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s stopped for now. Whatever brought it on, let’s hope it’s over.”
We pull the boat far enough up away from the water that we are sure high tide won’t reach it, but I tell Lees to leave it right there—right in the wide-open space, away from trees and cliffs. The sky is finally black, the stars finally shining. I don’t dare trek back under cover. Not after that quake. Instead I ask Lees to dig out something for us to eat while I spread the mammoth hide across the cold ground.
“We’ll sleep right here,” I say. Even though I know it’s the only choice, the chilled air that swept in with the dark sky sends a shiver through me. “It won’t be cozy, but at least nothing will fall on us.”
Lees spreads out a piece of caribou hide and places on it a full skin of water and two piles of dried mammoth meat and berries. It’s nothing grand, but it fills our stomachs. Fear had soaked into every bone of my body during the quake, but it finally drains away, replaced by a deep ache. Dragging ourselves despite our fatigue, Lees and I stash the packs of food and other supplies beneath the overturned kayak. When we’re done, we wrap ourselves between the folded halves of the mammoth hide. Before I can say a single word to Lees, she drops her head against my shoulder. “In the morning, we’ll scout around to find a better site,” I say, but her body has already gone heavy and still with sleep.
I lie awake a long time, listening as the waves lap the shore to my right and the wind stirs the dune grass to my left. I feel like I will never relax enough to drop off, but I must. I wake with a start as something thuds against the ground.
Lees is curled away from me. Her long hair, all loose from her braid, covers her face. She is definitely asleep. I sit up and run my hands through the sand—cold and damp with morning mist.
I swivel in place, sweeping my eyes across the tops of the dunes. Nothing stirs. My gaze scans the horizon, but nothing breaks the line of the sea except for an occasional gull diving for its morning meal. But then I notice faint footprints that mark the surface of the sand. Human footprints. Two lines overlapping—one leading to the overturned kayak, one leading back toward the dunes. My eyes trace the tracks back toward the tall grass and this time I notice movement. A figure—a person hunched over and moving fast—disappears up the trail toward the cliffs.
I jostle Lees’s shoulder until she opens her eyes. “Someone’s here. Someone was near the boat.”
Lees sheds her sleepiness as soon as she understands the threat. “Did they get anything?” she asks.
If we lose our food, we won’t have a thing to eat until we’ve successfully hunted. And if we lose our food and our weapons, what will we do then? Without a means of bringing in game, we’d almost certainly have to go home. Even the best toolmaker—even Kol’s father—would struggle to make proper hunting tools from the limited resources on this island. Though I hope it will be only days until Chev relents and sends for us, I can’t be certain we won’t be here long enough for the food we’ve brought to run out.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see if she carried anything—”
“She?”
“It might’ve been a girl. The person was moving fast and I only saw her back, but something made me think of a girl.”
While Lees checks on the supplies, I run through the possibilities of who might be on this island. Could a clan have landed here after having become lost? We’re so far from shore, I can’t imagine anyone landing here without being lost.
“They got just one thing,” Lees says. I turn to her, hopeful, ready to calm down and understand that this is not a tragedy. We are not in danger. But then I see her teeth pressing into her bottom lip. “They got the pack of food.”
We have no choice but to go after it. We can hunt, but we don’t know what game we’ll find. Even fishing—usually the shortest path to food—is harder when you don’t know the waters.
Lees and I drag the kayak and the rest of the supplies to the tallest grasses and try to stash it all out of sight. Before we hike away, I grab the most valuable items—the waterskin, a net, the atlatls, the darts. I toss it all into a pack that I sling over my shoulder, grab my spear, and lead Lees up the path to the cliffs.
We stay low, hiding behind the tall grass. The dunes rise to the base of a towering wall of rock—the cliffs we saw from the sea. From a gap in the dunes, I notice the mouth of a cave, partially blocked by large boulders that must have fallen during last night’s quake. A woman lies beside the rocks, so close I worry she might be pinned. My eyes scan the area around her. She’s alone. Whatever I hoped to gain by staying out of sight, I throw it away when I rush to the woman’s side. Lees calls my name as I dart into the open.
“Stay there,” I say. “Stay out of sight. I just want to see if I can help.”
From up close, I can see that the woman’s arm isn’t pinned under the rock she lies beside, as I’d feared. Instead, it’s propped against it to elevate a bloody wound on her wrist that’s bound and wrapped with leaves of a plant I don’t recognize. These unfamiliar leaves lie across the woman’s face and neck, blood caking where it seeped around the edges. I lean over her chest, watching for any indication of the rise and fall of breath.
As my hand hovers over her, a stone cracks against my wrist. It bounces away, but before I can look up to see where it came from, another lands hard against my head, just above my left ear. White light sears across my vision and I drop to one knee, slumped over the woman on the ground.
“Don’t touch her!” The voice is young and female, and comes from a ledge partway up the cliff. I look up and see the girl—small and skinny—and I think it must be the same person I saw running away with our food. Her eyes wide like a startled deer, she picks up another sharp rock and cocks her arm back. I jump to my feet. I don’t know what she thinks I will do—what she hopes I will do. Whatever it is, she doesn’t expect me to pull the sling from around my waist and load it with the rock she just threw at me.
She doesn’t wait for me to take the shot. Before I can rotate the sling even once around my head, the girl is racing toward me, tackling me to the ground.
“Stay away from my mother!” She scratches and snarls at me, pulling my hair and slamming my head against the ground, but she’s small and I easily throw her from my chest. Before I can get to my feet, though, Lees has emerged. She grabs my spear from the spot where I dropped it and points it at the girl on the ground.
“It’s all right,” I say, thinking the spear might terrorize this child—she can’t be older than Lees and Roon—but she ignores it. Instead she scrambles over the ground to the woman’s side.
“Don’t worry,” she whispers. “I have more for you.” Her hands clutch at something on the ground around her—more leaves, apparently dropped when she fell. She scoops them up and presses them to the woman’s face. Folding the woman’s limp arms across her chest, she drapes the leaves on the woman’s hands and adds more to her wrist. The leaves are dry and wilted, and when an arm slides to the woman’s side, they float up on a current of air before wafting back down to the ground. “Mother,” the girl mutters, clutching at the leaves. “Hold still. You have to let me help you.”
I’m not sure what’s worse. That the girl’s mother has died, or that the girl stubbornly refuses to let it be so. I watch her working, peeling back a blood-soaked leaf from the woman’s face and smoothing another in its place.
I come up behind her and set a hand on the girl’s shoulder. I notice her knee protruding through a tear in her pants. An angry abrasion covers the bottom of her exposed thigh. She must have been with her mother when the cave collapsed. I wonder how bad her own injuries are.
“It’s too late,” I say. But she tugs her shoulder from my grasp.
“It’s not. I can save her. I can save her. . . .” Slumped over the body of her mother, her voice becomes a jumble of murmured words of comfort for the dead woman on the ground.
“It is,” I say again. “There’s nothing more that can be done.”
The child never looks up, so dedicated is she to her work. I watch her, and an unbidden memory comes to me like something long forgotten rising from the bottom of a dark lake.
I see a girl, climbing from a kayak steered by her brother as it docks on a strange beach. The boy calls to the girl, but she won’t listen. Instead, she runs headlong into the water toward a kayak that is coming in behind them from the sea. Other boats are there—her clan climbs to the shore, shaking with exhaustion, but she notices no one. Her eyes are on one boat—one double kayak—where her mother lies in the rear seat as if she’s sleeping.
The girl reaches her mother’s side. She runs a cold wet hand across the woman’s cold wet face. A sudden flash of fear burns through her as someone lifts her from behind.
Her brother carries her, kicking and flailing, to land. He drops her on the sand and orders her not to move. “Watch your sisters,” he says. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
The rest . . . That’s what Chev had called her. But I knew what he meant. He meant our mother. He meant he would take care of our mother, because she was dead.
The girl still crouches in front of me, but her edges smear as my vision blurs. Hot tears run down my face.
An arm drapes around my shoulder. Lees tugs me to her side. “She’s dead,” I say. The words come out in a shudder of pain that’s been held like a clenched fist for too long.
“I know.” I’m not sure, but I think Lees knows I’m not talking about the woman on the ground.
I don’t notice at first, but at some point the little girl stops leaning over her mother and turns her attention to me. She begins to say something, but her voice cuts off. A sound comes from the cave—rock falling, and after, a faint sound like an animal in pain.
Lees looks up—she’s heard it too—and she hurries to the mouth of the cave. The girl is right behind her.
“What are you doing?” I call. “You can’t go in there!” I jump to my feet, hurrying to grab them and hold them both back. Lees turns her ear to the cave and closes her eyes, listening.
“Did you hear that? Someone’s alive in there. We need to—”
But before Lees can say what we need to do, the quiet of the clearing is split in two by the long, high howl of a wolf. The howl of a wolf coming from inside the cave.
“It’s Black Dog!”
The girl turns her dirt-smeared face toward me, her tired, red-rimmed eyes wide and bright again. “Black Dog is alive!”
Before I can reach out to stop her, the girl scrambles over the rocks that fill the opening of the cave and disappears from view.