They saw no more bears, but at one point Beck did see something else through the trees – a fleeting shadow, hugging the ground, loping along easily, parallel to their route. He almost laughed. ‘So you made it too . . .’ he murmured to himself.
Their old friend the wolf phantom had rejoined them.
Or was it their old friend? Maybe this part of Alaska was just full of wolves that liked to trot along on their own. It didn’t seem likely, though it was more probable than a wolf following them all the way from the plane crash – including fording the river, crossing the mountains, spending the night in a blizzard and following them on a raft. But Beck couldn’t shake off the feeling that the wolf was making a journey too.
‘Say again,’ Tikaani responded.
Beck decided his friend was hardened enough to the wilderness, so he pointed. ‘I could have sworn—’
He stopped. The wolf had gone and Tikaani was looking at him very strangely.
‘Nothing,’ Beck muttered. ‘How much further to Anakat?’
‘We’re here,’ Tikaani said, and without any warning the trees parted.
It took a moment to sink in.
They were beside an inlet that wound its way in from the sea, with steep slopes of earth and rock. It opened out into a wider bay, and there, further down the slope, on the shore, was Anakat.
Beck wasn’t quite sure what he had expected. The way Tikaani spoke of it, he had almost imagined a community of traditional caribou-skin tents and campfires. Anakat wasn’t quite that far behind. You could keep to traditional ways, Beck reckoned, and still have a reasonable degree of comfort. If a wooden house kept you warmer than a skin tent or an igloo, then you lived in a wooden house. If electric lights were easier to see by than burning oil lamps, then you used electric lights. The Anak picked and chose from the modern world, but they didn’t let it rule them. They took only what would best help them live their traditional life at this high, cold latitude.
Anakat was a scattering of wooden buildings. They looked a little like giant toy houses – simple rectangles with steep, pointed roofs to shed the snow in winter. They were built on low stone pilings to keep them off the cold ground and painted in weathered shades of red and green and blue. That was the only ornamentation. This wasn’t the kind of village where you bothered to keep up with the neighbours. The roads between them were dirt and gravel. By the water’s edge, Beck could make out the dark silver forms of fish hung up on smoking racks. The community’s boats bobbed at a small jetty and Beck could see a couple of canoes cutting their way through the waves.
The boys trudged down the slope towards the village. A strange roaring in Beck’s ears made him put his head on one side thoughtfully. What was that? It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the sea lapping against the rocks. It wasn’t any mechanical sound, or any sound of the modern world . . .
And then, as they approached Anakat, he realized. It wasn’t any modern sound. It wasn’t any sound at all. No motor cars. No music. No aircraft. It had been just the same in the wilderness, of course, but Beck was used to leaving all that behind when he returned to civilization.
Not this time. Anakat was a scene of timeless peace. Apart from the battered station wagon parked outside one house – and the satellite dish on the side – it could have been any time in the last two hundred years.
‘That’s the airstrip,’ Tikaani said, pointing across the inlet. On the far side, at the end of a wooden bridge, the land was flat and an orange windsock billowed in the breeze. ‘Where we would have arrived. And this . . . is home.’
Home was the house with the wagon and the dish. It was another of the giant toy houses, plain and unadorned – no kind of porch or balcony. The steps that led up to the entrance were a pair of concrete blocks. The door was firmly shut and the windows sat squarely in their frames. It might have been made of wood, using techniques a couple of centuries old, but Beck was prepared to bet the house was less draughty and more snug than many modern homes further south.
The door opened and a woman stepped out. She wore jeans and a red check coat. She was talking frantically to someone behind her, still in the house, and not looking where she was going.
‘Tell him to keep trying on the radio . . .’
She turned round and stopped when she saw them, shock stamped onto her broad face.
‘Hey.’ Tikaani suddenly seemed abashed. His hand twitched in a half-wave. ‘Hi, Mom.’