A Tyranny of Petticoats (5 page)

My eyes blurred until the fire was a glowing, shapeless mass of gold. The fire’s crackle hid the sounds of my sniffling. Tears ran down my face, freezing at the edges of my cheeks and chin, so that when I reached up to brush them away, I instead found myself flaking away salty ice crystals. Ataneq’s eyes glowed in the night. He pressed his muzzle gently against the side of my leg and uttered a low, mournful whine.

“Why did they come?” I whispered, burying my hand in Ataneq’s thick fur. My words disappeared into the void of the tundra.

Father had never taught me how to get to the next village. Without his guidance, how could I possibly complete the delivery route? How could I find my way there? What if I was caught in a storm?

My dogs and I would die alone out here, buried in snow, never to be found again.

Stop trembling.
I pulled my knees up to my chin and wrapped my arms around my legs. Ataneq’s warm muzzle left my leg, letting the cold seep in. I paused in my thoughts to look at him. He tilted his head and let out a series of low barks. The other dogs stirred.

I turned my head up to see what had caught his attention.

It was the red aurora — sheets upon glittering sheets of crimson and scarlet that painted the night sky and hid swaths of stars.
Blood,
some in my village called it.
Good fortune,
my mother insisted.
Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps I’m not.
All I could think about was the feeling in my stomach as the hunters returned without my father, and the memory of my mother lying in the snow, red spilling across her furs.

I would not find the village. I would not deliver this
maktak,
and those villagers would be left wondering what had happened. I would join my parents’ spirits in the sky.

Perhaps I am cursed.

A flicker of light in the sky drew my attention. There. In the midst of the red aurora, a bright, searing line sliced its way across the sky. It streaked past us, then disappeared beyond the horizon in a glittering trail.

My heart caught in my throat. My hand buried deeper in Ataneq’s fur, and a dot of excitement lit up my sorrow.
A falling star.

Never in my life had I seen one as bright as this, like a white-gold fire against the night. I searched the sky, half-expecting another to come. But the rest of the stars stayed where they were, and the tundra fell back into stillness. Wind gusted past me, and I huddled against the thickness of my furs. My eyes lingered on the horizon where the falling star had disappeared.

Slowly, my thoughts began to flow into a river of calm, and the calm brought me focus. My mother’s voice came to me.

When hunters are lost at sea,
the Seal King turns them into seals. When sledders are lost in the tundra, Nanuk the Great White Bear takes them in and turns them into her cubs. Their spirits stay protected in the animals’ bodies until the night a falling star comes to take them away into the sky.

Then, my father’s voice.

The spirits will guide you, if you take only what you need and respect them in their domain. Even in the darkest night. Remember that, Yakone, and you will never be lost.

I remembered. I raised one hand and traced the line that my father had traced that evening, connecting the stars of the First Ones to the Caribou. It was the same path that the falling star had followed, as surely as if my father had drawn it himself.

It would not be an easy journey. Following the coastline would take far too long, so we would have to head into the tundra and rely on the constellations. This was a risk in itself. If a blizzard caught us, it would bury us. With nothing but the same white expanse in all directions and a sky shrouded by clouds, even the greatest tracker could lose himself and freeze to death.

But Father had taught me what he would have taught a son, and Mother had taught me what a daughter should know. The thought kept me warm, even as I looked to the bleak trek ahead.

I looked down at Ataneq. “We will follow the falling star and find the village,” I murmured. His ears flicked forward at my voice. “And when we complete the star’s path, my parents’ spirits will be free to rest.”

I jerked awake, not because of the weak light but because the dogs were barking.

I scrambled out from the warmth of my furs to see Ataneq facing the way we’d come, his hackles up and his bark punctuated by growls. The other dogs, restless because of their leader, did the same. I saw what unsettled them. Far along the horizon, a band of dark clouds crouched . . . and as I looked on, they crept forward, bit by bit, headed in our direction.

Fear jabbed at me. A winter storm, just as I’d feared. If we couldn’t outrace it, it would blot out what little sun we had, it would hide the stars, and it would freeze us where we stood. It would kill us. I whirled to face Ataneq.

“Let’s go,” I murmured.

The sun moved, and we moved. Afternoon lengthened into an early evening, and the sun set a little earlier than it had the day before. We ran through the lengthening darkness, following the stars, until I stopped us in exhaustion. Hurriedly, I gathered what little dried moss I could, then started a fire. The warmth reassured me somewhat as I wiggled my frozen fingers and toes before it. Behind us, the band of dark clouds loomed, closer now than it had been this morning. A part of me wanted to jump up and force the dogs onward — force us on through the entire night. But that was impossible. We needed to rest. I untied one of the
maktak
packages from the sled, thawed it out before the fire, and sliced it up for the dogs. I kept a piece for myself. My eyes closed as I savored the rich fat. I would have to be careful with our portions. I finished mine, then crawled into my furs. The clouds loomed in the back of my thoughts, haunting me. If we couldn’t beat the storm, all the food supplies in the world wouldn’t save us.

A strange noise woke me this time. It was the sound of a splash.

I opened my eyes and looked over at the dogs, but they did not stir. The fire had burned low, and the embers glowed red in the night. Ice crystals flaked from my lashes. I shivered. Perhaps I had been dreaming.

Then the splash came again, some distance into the tundra. I glanced behind me. Water? But we’d left the coast behind yesterday. Were we headed in the wrong direction?

I crawled out of my furs. I listened a moment longer, then started to head toward the splashing sound. Behind me, Ataneq woke and watched me go with a curious tilt of his head. He whined, but I held a hand up, reassuring him that I was all right. I cut the strings from last night’s
maktak
package into short pieces. I tied these to tiny patches of dry grass and lichen as I went, so that I would remember my path back. The splashing grew louder. Finally, something appeared ahead, a black patch that stood out solidly against the snow. I furrowed my brows. It was a hole in the ground, and the darkness was water.

I swallowed hard, then backtracked a few steps. It was hard to tell, but I had made my way onto the edge of an enormous frozen lake, hidden under the snow. The ice trembled slightly under my weight. A death trap. We would have headed this way come morning. We could have ended up in the water.

Another splash came from the hole in the ice. When I looked closer, I saw a faint white cloud of mist floating in the air. I squinted at the source of the spray.

The largest seal I had ever seen poked its head out of the water.

I gasped. The beast turned its head toward me, its huge eyes gleaming gold in the night. The water around it glowed a faint sapphire, as if lit by something from the depths, and the surface of the water glittered with a thousand tiny lights, as if the stars had shattered into the sea. They lit the seal, outlining its dark silhouette beneath the waves and adding a blue hue to its stormy-gray hide.

“The Seal King rose from the depths,” I whispered, “to claim the hearts of drowning hunters.” And now it seemed as if it had woken me to tell me about the lake.

The seal did not swim away. Instead, it stared back at me with unblinking eyes. I felt, for a moment, as if I looked into the face of my father. There was something wise there, something
human.
My lips trembled.

“Thank you,” I whispered. “For the warning.”

The seal only blinked once at me. Then it submerged, and when it did not come up again, I shook my head and followed my trail of strings back to camp.

I dreamed of fish. I dreamed that the Seal King came to bless us, that he turned into my father, and that when I woke and headed to the lake, the waters were teeming with fish. I grabbed at them as they leaped out of the water, their scales glittering in the sun. They piled along the shore in rows.

I woke with a start. The sun was very low today. A new chill in the wind reminded me of the approaching blizzard, and I looked to the horizon. The clouds were close enough this morning for me to see their bumps and bruises, their angry curves. Overhead, a lone tern glided, separated from its flock.

We had to move faster.

I rode my dogs hard, even as the sky turned darker and the clouds grew thicker behind us. Only when Ataneq slowed in protest, his panting heavy, did I finally snap out of my stupor and let the team rest. I inspected their bright eyes, their frosty noses, and their ice-crusted coats; I watched them chew snow off of their paws.
There are no boundaries between the animals’ spirits and ours,
my father had told me. I had no right to treat them so.

Still, we had no choice. I pushed them on.

The second day ended, and the third day began. I set snares in the snow. They caught a few fat lemmings, and I divided the fresh meat among the dogs, saving only a little for myself. Our
maktak
had to last, and the dogs were ravenous. The third day bled into the fourth. The days turned darker, and the nearing storm promised snow. The dogs ran more slowly.

That night, I watched the dogs shift uneasily in their sleep. Ataneq looked exhausted, but we could rest only a few hours before I had to force the team onward again. I stared up at the night sky, followed the line of the constellations, and tried to believe that I could find our way if the stars disappeared behind the storm.

I didn’t sleep that night.

An hour before dawn, I looked up into a gray sky. The sun was gone, hidden behind the clouds. A few fat flurries drifted onto my face. The storm had arrived, shrouding the guiding sky, and the snow was already starting to come fast. I jumped up and started folding my furs away.

My eyes paused on giant paw prints circling our camp.

They were enormous, a dozen times larger than Ataneq’s prints, larger than any wolf’s, pushed deeply into the snow and frozen in sculpture. I stared, startled, into the darkness of the open tundra.

The Great White Bear? Nanuk has come to warn us about the storm.
I squinted and tried to imagine my mother’s spirit looking back, but all I saw was emptiness. I shook my head. Believing in old folktales. I was deluding myself, trying to take comfort in anything. I walked over to Ataneq, who did not want to rise.

“
Aahali
, poor thing,” I whispered, stroking his head. “We have to keep going.” He looked at me but did not uncurl himself. The other dogs did not want to stir either. I went down the line, checking each of them with a sinking heart. They were exhausted. Even though I knew that they would run if I commanded it of them, they would not be able to go much farther. They would run themselves to death out of loyalty.

Suddenly, Ataneq’s ears pricked up. He lifted his head and pointed it in the direction of the bleak tundra, and the hackles on his neck rose. A low growl rumbled from his throat.

“Ataneq?” I whispered.

Then he leaped to his feet. He began to bark. The other dogs lifted their heads too.

My eyes followed Ataneq’s line of sight. There, from the mist of falling snowflakes, came a flash of light. Then the howling of other dogs.

A faint shout drifted over to us.

It was a language I did not know.

The memory of the
gusaks
came back to me.
They have come to finish me off.

I rushed to the sled and grabbed the handlebar. The dogs were already restless, anxious to be on the move. I called out a command and the entire line lurched forward, the dogs throwing all their strength into the run. My head jerked back. As icy snow flew in my face, I glanced over the back of the sled to see our pursuers.

The light gleamed again.

We charged on. But my dogs were traveling across the frozen tundra at a slower pace than yesterday. The snow turned thicker, so that the light behind us was shrouded now and then from view. But the storm slowed us down too, painting the entire landscape an eerie white. My breaths came in ragged gasps. I hoped Ataneq could sense where he was leading us.

Behind us, the light suddenly grew brighter. Our pursuers were gaining on us. Now I could hear more faint shouts floating from somewhere behind us. I caught a few clear words.

The
gusak
tongue. “We must go faster!” I shouted to Ataneq, but the wind drowned out my words. There was little we could do. Ataneq could not push the other dogs any faster.

The ground beneath us suddenly changed from soft snow to hard ice.
We shouldn’t be on the ice,
I thought frantically, remembering the Seal King’s warning. At the same time, Ataneq seemed to realize the sudden shift beneath his paws, and he tried immediately to turn us.

When I looked back again, I could see our pursuers’ dogs, dark specks against the fury of falling snow, their sledder wearing a thick fur hat. A strange sense of calm washed over me at the sight. Perhaps this would be where they caught me and killed me as they had killed Mother. Or perhaps this would be where I stood my ground. If I died here, I would die fighting.

The
gusak
sledder shouted something at me, but I couldn’t understand what he said. Instead, I gritted my teeth and braced myself.

Abruptly, Ataneq slid to a halt. The other dogs stumbled in their haste to stop, and the team slid across the icy surface. The sled’s runners cracked the ice. I only had time to shout before the ice gave way with a thunderous series of cracks. Then the world swallowed me whole. The icy water knocked all the breath from my lungs. Panic clogged my mind. I floundered blindly. The world flashed in and out — the water stabbed at me. I reached out, hoping for something to hang on to. I called for my dogs.