EPILOGUE
The
Steps to God
YOU COULD NOT climb
the Steps to God in a dog cart. The mountains men stubbornly called
the Coastal Ranges were too high and treacherous for sleds.
Glaciers and crevasses ate anything with two runners or four legs.
And just because they could wait years for a meal didn’t mean you
should forget and tempt them with something tasty like nine dogs
and a loaded sled. Fools had been dying that way for centuries,
dragged down into great holes in the ice with all their possessions
plummeting around them along with their own good
sense.
Sadaluk No Ears,
Listener of the Ice Trappers, wasn’t about to fall into that trap.
He and Nolo had gone north instead of east, along the great ice
ledges of the continent, across the Bay of Auks, the wastes of the
Wrecking Sea and the Bay of Whales. Others lived here, not
Trappers, but men and women who had the old dark blood in their
veins and knew how to exist in the bear days of winter when the sun
barely cracked the horizon and the skies were so empty they robbed
your breath, warmth and life in that order if you spent too long
looking up.
Winter was done here,
though, and the hare days of spring had begun. The sun spent hours
in the southern sky, giving off a brilliant white light, but it
melted only a small portion of the ice. Travel was harder because
of it, for ice-melts were fickle things and if you thought you
could predict their location, length and depth you were wrong. Nolo
had good eyes but he still had much to learn. Sadaluk had little to
learn but poor eyes. Together they managed. They spotted telltale
slicks above the ice and the warning darkness of water below it.
They sniffed for salt and the green scent of multiplying algae. Any
Ice Trapper worth his sealskins knew it wasn’t sufficient to look
and smell, but Sadaluk’s days of listening for weaknesses in the
ice—cracks, whirrs, soft plops and even softer ticks—were gone and
would never return.
Nolo listened, but it
wasn’t the same.
Sadaluk was glad when
they reached the Lake of Lost Men and could turn east. The inland
sea was shrouded in mist and the sun rarely touched it. Even if it
had, the Listener did not think there was enough power in the
heavens to melt these frozen waters. The ice was old here and it
had sunk its taproots deep. It made its own weather and dictated
the length of its own days. Sadaluk had gone on a journey once,
traveling south and east to meet people who shared interests with
the Ice Trappers and to see something of the world for himself.
What struck him was people’s misconceptions about frozen lakes.
They thought them as smooth as glass, imagined that Sadaluk could
climb onto his sled and skate into the sunset with barely a push
from his dogs. “It is rock,” he had told them impatiently. “Ice
makes cliffs and boulders.”
He did not think they
believed him. Either that or his language skills had not been up to
the task. He would have liked to have shown them the Lake of Lost
Men and said, “See. Here ice and land behave the
same.”
The lake was tough
going and there were many days where he and Nolo had to carry the
sled. You’d think the dogs would be grateful for the rest, yet they
wasted their energy scrapping with one another with such fierce
relentlessness that Sadaluk had to break up the fights. He was not
gentle with his stick. You could not afford to be, this far
north.
No one lived east of
the Bay of Whales. The world was empty here. Two men and nine dogs
did not fill even its smallest cracks.
It took them thirty
days to traverse the lake. One night before they reached the
eastern shore, Sadaluk had looked at the dogs and the remaining
supply of frozen seal meat and perceived a shortfall. No Ice
Trapper would keep a dog alive at a human’s expense, yet Nolo had
argued for only a partial culling. He bit off his gloves and held
out four fingers and wagged his head toward the sled. Who will pull it?
Sadaluk had frowned
until Nolo held out his thumb.
They had four dogs
now. Nolo had modified the sled so that it wasn’t much bigger than
a child’s toy. Both he and Sadaluk worked it each day, pushing or
pulling as the frozen waste rose and fell.
Every day after they
left the lake, Sadaluk woke in the morning and asked himself,
Am I in the Want?
He had never entered
the great white desert at the heart of the continent. He was an old
man. What did he know?
The river they took
east from the lake narrowed and branched and eventually failed.
Nolo broke down the sled and used the runners to make stiff
backpacks for himself, Sadaluk and the remaining dogs. The dogs,
not realizing their own luck, fought the packs, yanking their heads
to bite at them, and dragging themselves belly-up along the ground.
They were sled dogs, not carrier dogs. The Listener could not fault
them.
Nolo slaughtered them
and cached the meat. Sadaluk was not a man given to sadness, but
the sight of Nolo building a pyramid of stone to mark the cache
site gave him pause.
He did not think
either of them would be coming back.
The Listener did not
say anything—what good would be done?—but he did spare a thought
for Nolo’s young wife, Sila. He thought about all the people he
himself had left behind. He recalled the time many years ago when a
great ledge of ice had sheared from the sea and slammed into the
village. No one had seen it coming. No one had imagined such a
thing could happen.
Yet the ice had
always been there in plain sight.
Sadaluk knew that
from now on he must be the one to watch the ice. When it moved,
when it broke open, he had to try and block it. The white bear had
bound him to this task. Could one man do such a thing, halt a force
of pure destruction?
The Listener did not
know. But one man—two men—were better
than none and that was why he had undertaken this
journey.
Loading their
possessions on their backs, they left the cache site and hiked
through a land of frozen, mounded gravel and dwarf trees. The sun
moved exactly as it was supposed to, keeping to the south, and they
did not realize they had entered the Great Want until the stars
went missing that night.
Sadaluk No Ears, son
of Odo Many Fish, heard the sound of extinction in their absence.
He stayed awake, listening, and at dawn he got his
answer.
Soon.
He woke Nolo and they
headed Want-east.