White Hunt, White Hunt. Fear no pity by the Hunt.
Flee horn of ice, flee sight of wings, flee that name.
Flee in snow, flee in stone, the Hunt finds you again.
Prey once sought will die a plaything in their game.
A name once spoke by them is hunted until slain.
White Hunt, White Hunt. Fear no pity by the Hunt.
—
We weren't a proper crew like some lowlanders call it, the sort you see on the odd piece of vidd news tearing up tracks and teaming up on factory work, or like the trader lots, or even like the good-for-nothing piercefreaks in the Citadel ruins. Just the eight of us rooming: Inge and Cel and Aardal and me the two-legs, and Pak and Mauja and Hemlock and Thane bringing up the dragon side of it all. Inge and Mauja had met Pak and me at the low marker back in front of a rough shelter, a few longears slung across Mauja's back and Inge toying with a new gearpak as usual, her shorter auxobow sheathed on her saddle.
"Y' got much?" Inge said, doing something with the circuits that made it spark blue. She pressed a button and got back her viewscreen that showed her seisgraphs, lines shaping the topology of it all and our markers blinking yellow. My cliff had shifted back to rest and the marker on it glowed steady.
"Plenty alinak and a felinous on the way. Something for Cat, too." I tossed Inge the small stone: she and Cel sometimes knew a little more than I did about what to read from those things, and they handled most of our trade.
"My nose's turning into little particles of icy nose, and Mauja's blue nose isn't just that way out of genetics. Head back?" Inge said.
It was dark by the time we rode in. We'd expect to see Cel cooking something up or getting on with some tanning; Hemlock sitting around with his big head on his foreclaws; and Aardal and Thane getting into things they shouldn't as usual. The cave on the outskirts of Ikiaq Squattown wasn't much, but we'd fixed it up with tuktural skin keeping the heat in and some expansions courtesy of Mauja and Pak's thick heads and digging. And a few devices from Inge that kept us safe.
"Hey, Cel, better get those birds draining before they go off." He was reconstituting some soup over a pot on our stovepit; Hemlock was clumped around him for warmth in that half of our cave. I set up the arrows needing charging in the shelf holder on the side Inge used for her work. Three pulse ones and two stilodart were still waiting, and if we couldn't scrape up the scrip to fix them we'd be low on hunting. There was always the old-fashioned ice spear to fall back on.
"Nujalikan ike?" Cel asked me, looking at the open paper herbal he'd balanced on the shelf above the pot. Good hunting, in one of the old languages of the white mountains—the one he and I probably came from by mother's mother's mother's. Lowlanders say we have fifty or eighty or nine hundred and eighty-nine separate words for snow, whichever the speaker thinks is the most impressive, but the truth is that we have one word for it and a lot of different descriptions you can add on to clear up the kind it is, like any other language. But we're more precise about the things we know best: hunting, snow, meat, and clan.
"Nujal." Good enough. I set about untying Pak's saddle and hanging it up on our roof, rubbing him down. His scales were colder than usual, and it took a while before I was sure. I still dripped from the melting ice. I took out the egg case and saw two were still alive by the readings, which wasn't bad out of six. I put them carefully on the shelf above the warmth.
"Sednasednasednasedna! You're home!" I was tackled from behind and fell to the floor. Aardal jumped on top with his dragon Thane, playwrestling: we rolled around dangerously close to Mauja's tail and overturning Cel's dinner before I gave in. Pakak added himself on top of the three of us. "Can we go on the next hunting trip? Can we can we can we? Can we keep a baby alinak as a pet if we get an egg? Can you come and see how I got three bullseyes with my sling? I'm going to be a great hunter someday and earn my keep too!" The boy looked anxiously down at me through his bowl-like dark fringe.
"Come 'fore dawn to check the traps," I promised, "then we'll go fishing on the lake." There'd been a large black walga who ought to have a knotted scar on his face now that'd gotten away from me the last time. They looked slow and waddly landwalking, but they were near three thousand pounds of muscle below the blubber—and their tusks were four-foot-long bone spears. In the water they could swim faster than even a seaborn dragon, and on land your chances were low if they got on top of you. Aardal would hunt only fish, of course.
"Yes! Yes, subzero awesome!" Thane licked the side of my face while Aardal cheered. Pak let out a bark.
"Go to sleep." I slid out and under and beyond the cave's doorflap to help Cel; it was already dark and we'd had a good catch. He passed along spare skinning knife and bonecrusher, where he'd already hung three alinaks with slit throats on our lines to drain into our trough. Cel's too short-sighted to be any good with a bow, and he's not much better with a spear either: but he's a fair tanner, and while he can act like a softling lowlander he can take an alinak hide off in one piece with a single cut nine times out of ten.
I'm not quite that good, so mostly I'm on feather-picking duty. Nothing gets wasted: feathers sold for stuffing bedding and coats, scaly hides for insulation, intestines and ground bones for dragon chow, blood turned into what some folk consider a spicy delicacy, and the meat gets treated and dried and saved for food. I picked out the feathers between the scales and passed the birds onto Cel's spot in our assembly line of two, then he ripped away the breastbone and intestines, pulled the hide off like a glove, snipped away the wings with shears and sometimes the bonecrusher, and pinned it up to drain. Inge's heating coil on the side of the trough set the blood flowing up and down, keeping it fresh.
"Have you ever seen a light grey plant growing on top of the snow with three leaves in a double-vee sort of shape, Sedna?" he asked me, pinning up another bird with slit throat. "The middle leaf is longest and has a ragged edge above its head."
"Sounds like greyweed, but that's only got two." You have to know what's on the ground like the lines on your palms to follow what you're hunting. There aren't many plants above the snow, but there's the drozhemoss and black aguta, lichenkinds and cold nagoonberry, enough for the alinaks and toothy longears up there. Enough to keep you alive a little longer if you're desperate.
"Maybe. It's an old book," Cel said, throwing intestines into the bucket with his bloodied gloves. "Says it's got properties for weapon wounds and...I haven't translated it. The root word might be something to do with arrow, like the Archer Maid, or it could be grey or shadow or even night—and they praise the name of a god for its gifts—"
Cel got excited many a time about some old paper he'd found in the depths of trader junk and what he thought was the latest thing in old herbal messes. I'd seen him like this before and I'd see him like it again. Feathers swirled down into my bucket and I passed my female alinak on. "Maybe it's extinct or grown into something else."
"Maybe greyweed would do when I finish the translation." Cel slipped his knife into that particular cranny on the alinak's hindquarters and did his trick of unrolling it all in one piece, the slippery underside of the red-and-white scales and the reddened flesh of the bird. "Next time you slip and cut yourself, Sedna, I'll try out this new tincture on you."
"Stick to packing me with dry moss. And I don't slip and cut myself." I shook more feathers loose; nearly done with these.
"Eeyeekaldukan illik." Be healthy and well, and he always sounded like he meant it. Cel's skinning knife flashed through the air.
—
I woke myself before the sun in the old trick my mother's mother taught me, and woke Aardal and Thane while stepping over the others.
"Time now, makotok—little child. We hunt."
"We're not little! We're going to hunt well!" Aardal whispered fiercely. He'd already laid out what baitfish we had left, the rod and the tackle box we used to fix our traps. I didn't thank him for it but I let him know I was pleased by a nod. Pak had already bounded up, the first out the door and past the line of bloodless alinak. I buckled my parka and took up spear and knife. Then I added auxobow and the last pulse shot over my back, just in case.
One small longear in the traps we baited on the outskirts of Ikiaq's plain brown rock. Aardal reset them, working carefully; he was starting to learn the times you have to be slow. Down the road that led from Ikiaq's plain brown rock to the start of the snowline again, then Aardal got both dragons shod with long treads of sledding gear to take the easy road to the icy lake. We skidded through the long snow trail at top speed, nobody to get in our way this time of the morning. Snow had fallen overnight: the land was turning to the cold season, and there wouldn't be many chances for walga or selky or fish before they all went. Ice lined Itigaituk's edge, thinning closer to where the water flowed from the upland river and down again where the lake widened.
"Six inches thick or don't step. Thane doesn't step more than four feet from the edge or anywhere you can spot flowing water underfoot. Brown ice breaks, blue ice stays. Test before treading." Aardal raised a split-finger hand to agree. "Set up the rod and bucket about ten feet from that edge. I'll be back."
Walga need to come up from the water every so often. So you look for broken ice; and there you'll find them among the shore rocks breathing in air. Pak sniffed, put his head down, and we tracked. Old Scarface—I'd cut a chunk out of his face last time—had been big, and then there was no mistaking the wide trail between the jagged rocks up from the lake. I unclipped my spear from my back and got in there where the track was still moist. Pak crept behind me.
Walga eat sea dragons, and that's all you need to know about how sharp and fast and heavy those tusks can get.
Shadow there. Walga don't like it out in full sunlight. I took note of the rocks on either side. A human's strength can't take down a walga; arrows get stuck in their blubber; even pulse shots can't get through that thick blue-grey skin. That's when you brace your spear against dry rock or ground and let a human's brains do it for you. It's said a finegrained dragon can add a magpush on just the spear, but that wasn't Pak or any dragon I'd ever met. I went in. Pak was stuck behind, just where it got too narrow for him to move. His teeth and claws were my backup. He smelt walga.
Pak squealed. I whipped up. "Akka!" I yelled, and he jumped up to the rocks to protect himself. His forelegs were bloody. He couldn't move fast enough here.
Bloody walga!
It wasn't where I'd thought. Tracked back on itself and used what brain it had behind those small fat close black eyes to wait for us. His flippers were coming back to me now, taking on that burst of speed they can get even on land, tusks out and angled.
I braced the spear, but there wasn't time. Pierced the walga's side, tried to drive it in. Then he kept coming up past the spearhead. The tusks slashed. I followed Pak and jumped. I braced myself against the rock and ripped the spear back out, and then there was a slashing pain over my shins. I flung myself back above. The spear was loose in my hands and I was up and away where it couldn't reach.
—Wasn't going to let a walga get the better of me—
The cuts on my shin were shallow but bleeding. Those tusks can shear through human bone like milk if you're too slow. Pak's were more serious in the ambush. I got him calmed down and got a makeshift bandage on both of us. Then I followed that walga's trail. Know them by the water and silkgrey trail they leave behind. He'd gotten a five-minute head start.
I picked up the trail and the pace. Definitely a walga on its way back. Close to the ice, still between sharp shore rocks. There was another way of spear-hunting: let gravity and precision do the work. I angled for a perfect shot above; I was downwind and quiet in spite of the throbbing in my legs and the walga didn't move once.
Perfect.
I jumped and the spear point went through that sweet spot on the back of a walga's skull that's so hard to reach when they're moving. Its dark blood fountained out and I kept my footing through its death song. After one long low howl of pain and shaking it was over. Quick is merciful.
Then I saw she was a lady walga, and not Old Scarface at all. Maybe his mate. Then I managed to slip and fall from her blubbery skin.
It's not good to tumble around on shore rocks with cuts on your skin if you're human. The ferrdeny mining left a lot of bad scuttle running down to the lake, and while stuff in the water gets washed out by the river and snowmelts, the stuff on the land's poison if you've open cuts. Especially if you're smaller than dragon or walga. I needed to fix my bandages; I hauled up the female walga. I'd been a fool about tracking too soon and I'd paid for it. She'd be good enough meat. Small-sized tusks, but the blubber's good eating and you can use the gut linings on waterproof parkas. I gave Pak the culla whistle we used and loaded up the results of our walga hunt.
Aardal'd caught a few fish already and I sat with him and Thane by the waterhole until it was time to head back.
"—Sedna speared a walga, a big one, and I got seven fish—" he boasted to Inge. I carried down the walga and dumped it myself out of pride, then checked Pak's bandages and limped back into the cave. Inge turned a screw into a secondmade comset that looked near done.
"How bad's it?" she asked me.
"Not that bad. Pak'll be right in a day or two." I went for soothecream for him and fresh dressings from Cel's stash. Timewise he worked in the tannery when he'd meat to deliver, any shift here and there. "Dropped a walga and a fair catch."
"Got seven drakkals from Cat for the stone," Inge said, "and she offered ten for a map."
Hunters keep the trails they track. "You didn't, did you?"
Shouldn't have worried. Inge wasn't born here, but she's grown to be Ikiaq to the bone. "Take me for a softlander?"
"I'll comm her back."
Cat's our dealer for the extra stuff we pick up. See, Ikiaq's old as our grandmothers, seventy years or so, but long before the ferrdeny mines there were other settlements. Most of what we picked up was trash: broken-off bit of magsculpt here, stone carving there, curved bit of ornament over there. But Cat paid prompt and we pulled in a few drakkals Boss Turuk'd never know about, so it wasn't much effort to keep a scope eye out.
Soon enough Cat's helmet was up on our screen. I'd never seen her take that thing off: green and with small eyeholes, leaving dark brown mouth and chin bare. Below it she was our age or so. Send a kid to deal with kid stuff. She worked for folk interested in old history, her name was short for Catacomb and not the other thing, and because she was tightlipped as an anklebiter that was all we knew about her.
"Ten drakkals for a leather map of where you found it," she said. At least she knew enough Ikiaq ways to ask that first.
"Hundred and I'll guide you scaleways." That was safest: take the lowlanders yourself and make sure they laid no tracks, and they'd not be able to find your hunting trail again.
Cat snorted below the mask. "Fifteen for travel fee. You spend a full day there, we pay as usual for what you bring back."
I'd thought of offering that one myself, just to test her reaction there. But there was a reason why the history-collecting business was just a sideline, and it involved not getting my feet eaten by anklebiters in dark caves under the snow for much less than I could earn on a good hunt. I didn't let on that she'd done the unexpected. "Only if you made it ninety."
"No deal," Cat said. "Sixteen for the map, then."
"You know the hunter's rule, lowlander."
"We have no wish to rouse the birds or drink blood of another's kill," Cat said, showing a bit of knowledge of us. "I swear to no interest in your prey."
She was interested enough when she scarfed it down in Cel's nagoonberry and drozhe sauce, but I let it pass. "Eighty," I said, setting high but probably not impossible for her resources.
"Twenty. Because I have lost my wits and turned snow-soft."
"I'd be bargaining with my cold heart," I said, "letting softlanders have a route with no trace of how to get back alive."
"You put up markers? Comlink me into them instead. Twenty-two." She wasn't giving much of an inch. I thought again of anklebiters trying to eat my feet, and winced at the cuts on my legs. Walgas take time to boil down, a long time, and if you don't do it yourself you get bonescraped by the tannery and scarce a bite of fat for your troubles.
"That's more trusting and you still might frighten the wildlife. Seventy," I said.
"My interest lies not in that. Twenty-eight."
"Split the difference. Fifty-four." The most she'd ever given in one was forty-five, for a few bits shaped like old draconium gadgets. I wondered if she'd give up if I kept pushing, or settle with me and make me wonder if I could have held out for more.
"Thirty-five," Cat said. Better than a claw in the face, I figured, and I didn't truly doubt she'd keep her word.
"You got a deal. Clear your databanks of the links soon's your done." I pressed the button. She'd have the markers to guide her, I wouldn't have her frozen lowlander blood on my hands from her getting lost on the cliffs, and she'd pay slightly more for the privilege.
"Understood," Cat said. Her image blinked out abruptly as usual. I rubbed at my aching shins. Time to boil down some walga.
—