Against the pastel blaze of sunset, Wolf Dreamer ran, his actions repeated in vast amorphous shadows on the towering gray stone wall at his side. Down on the distant plain, he could see Heron’s hot springs throwing steam high in the air. The mist glowed softly yellow in the evening light.
“Run. Run,” he repeated over and over, trying to center his mind.
As his breath puffed white before him, his feet thudded into the thin crust of snow. His heels transmitted the shock, gravel crunching, as he vaulted smaller boulders and zigzagged around the bigger ones. A continuous cold wind blew off the ice to the south, chilling his face. Breath tore in and out of his heaving lungs, the dull pain in his chest barely masked by his burning legs.
Clear your mind. Run, Wolf Dreamer, run until your body is oblivious, until you are outside your mind, looking in. Dance … Dance.
He drifted in and out at first, tendrils of the feeling of freedom, of floating, barely perceptible. Then he was free, soaring beyond his flesh. In his joy at the accomplishment, the bubble burst and he was back, sensation crawling over his body like a swarm of insects.
He plodded to a stop, bending over, coughing, as his lungs bellowed for air. Sweat trickled down his face, steaming in the glacial breeze. Vaguely aware, he took one slow wobbly step after another, trying to still his lungs, rest the ache that knotted his legs. Like a bleached bone, the tongue in his mouth had gone dry. It stuck to the back of his throat.
He straightened, scooping the dusting of crystal snow from
a hummock of grass, letting the cool moisture seep through his mouth, trickle down his throat.
A line of white etched the eastern horizon. The Big Ice. He gasped, blowing hard as he walked, feeling the fire in his legs. Around him, glacial rubble piled high, the haunts of the frozen ghosts. The gravel underfoot insulated layers of ice. Water had pooled here and there, freezing into slick snow-covered traps. To the west the giant mountains shot up in icy splendor. To the east, the Big Ice had fractured, tilted, and crumpled, a jagged landscape of fissures and edges impossible to traverse. Only to the south did the ice flatten out. Overhead, the clouds streaked mauve, the coming of night imminent not just for this day—but for all of the Long Light as well.
The ice to the south drew him. Unlike the Dream, it didn’t loom up like a massive wall, rather it had been broken, cracked and tumbled, sun-rotted and wind-buckled. Gray-white outcrops canted, angles rounded while weird shapes and spears of blue crystal jutted into sharp lances. Layers of sand and gravel streaked the mass, lining the white blue with black smears. Not so broken as the eastern ice, it still sent a chill down his spine.
“Can I cross it?”
He forced his weary muscles to climb a promontory. The lee side of the rock stretched out in a fan of ice, the cap rock polished, striated, and scoured.
To the south, the ice rose, white, sullen, to mix with the grayish clouds. His heart pounded in his breast. At the edges of his exhausted mind, a whispering of desire called, taunting, drawing. A high-pitched wail came faintly to his ears, drifting down over the southern ice. Ghosts? He strained to listen, but the blood rushing in his veins, the rasping breath in his windpipe, blotted the sound.
Below him, an undulating plain of snow-topped moraines and eskers mounded and rolled—tumbled waves of rock left by the retreating ice.
The stiffness out of his legs, he settled on a snow-encrusted rock, studying the gash cut by the Big River. Even now, when the Long Dark closed its freezing grip on the land, water roared and pitched, an incessant outpouring.
“So much.”
The words died in his throat as something black and twisted rolled out, swirling in an eddy, catching on the rapids-washed rock. Curious, Wolf Dreamer worked his way down the polished top of the ridge, carefully moving along the piled boulders. Father Sun had dipped below the ragged mountain wall to the west by the time he picked his way through the treacherous rocks, some larger than a bull mammoth.
The dark spot swirled, battered, one horn broken off even with the skull. A leg had been violently ripped from the body. The reality remained.
“Buffalo! Did you come through underneath?” A giddy rush swept him as hopes taunted. “Somewhere, on the other side, there’s a place where buffalo live.” He swallowed hard, feeling tendrils of Wolf’s promise twine through him.
Balancing, he leapt from rock to rock until he made it to the snagged buffalo. Grasping a torn hoof, he dragged the animal back, slipping and splashing in the frigid water.
“Maybe you didn’t come underneath,” he lamented, struggling to be realistic. “You could’ve been frozen here for hundreds of Long Darks.”
While the cold water lapped his feet, he dragged the animal as far as he could toward shore, as far as the beast’s dead weight could float. He wedged it against the current, snagging the gouged hide on a spike of wave-lapped rock.
Twilight glimmered brassy from the white crests of water rushing around his feet.
Heart beating, light failing, Wolf Dreamer used a chert flake from his pouch to cut open the gut cavity. Entrails bulged out in blue-gray ropes. He sliced open the paunch, green matter spilling into the water. A tapeworm twisted and wiggled before it disappeared in the sandy wash of icy water.
He dove for the worm, missing. “How long does a tapeworm live when it’s frozen?” Fishing around in the paunch, he found a second, carefully catching it up. “Think,” he gasped to himself, turning in the darkness. “Think how to find out.”
He laid the parasite on the fresh dusting of snow, turning, dismembering the huge buffalo while his feet went numb in the cold water. Satisfied, he poked and prodded, finding none of the deep joints frozen. They numbed his fingers, but still weren’t as cold as they should have been had they been
trapped in the water under the ice. The gut, he thought, carried a slight trace of heat.
In the blackness, he turned back to the tapeworm. It had stuck to the snow, breaking in two as he lifted it. With some of the thin hide from the buffalo’s groin, he bound up the parasite and turned his tracks for Heron’s.
In his own mind, no doubt remained. In all their talks, Heron had never mentioned long-horned buffalo in the valley. No, this beast came from somewhere else … beyond the ice.
Sitting beside a crackling fire in Heron’s shelter, Wolf Dreamer stared at the tapeworm he’d thawed. He prodded it. Dead. His eyes raised to stare absently at one of the drawings on the rock. Beneath the soot stains and dust, he could make out the effigy. A web drawn in a spiral. A fist knotted in his gut, a curious shimmering hazing the edges of his vision.
Why did Heron draw that in red all those years ago? What does it mean? Why a web? He shook his head vigorously, snapping his concentration back to the dead tapeworm.
Heron stretched out on her side across the fire, head propped on one hand, dark eyes watching him. Her long hair fell across her tan dress in silver and black strands that shimmered in the firelight. “What are you thinking?”
“That tapeworms don’t live after they’ve been frozen.”
“Then?”
“Then there’s no way the buffalo could have been frozen.”
“What else did you notice?”
He frowned at her, meeting and holding her probing eyes. Was this another test? “His paunch was full of green stuff, grass, plants, a couple of late-blooming flowers. His summer coat was just beginning to thicken … . and the tapeworms were alive.”
“What do you think that means?”
“There’s a place on the other side of the ice where buffalo live.”
“You say he felt warm?”
“Maybe. My fingers were cold. I couldn’t really tell, but the gut seemed to feel warmer. How long would a buffalo take to go cold? He had to have been under there for a while;
the body was all ripped up—like it had been caught and pulled loose a dozen times.”
“Caught under there?” She tapped her fingers, looking up at the gray-mottled rock walls over their heads. “So he came through a …”
“ … hole,” he breathed. In the firelight, the muscles of his smooth jaw quivered.