Ivory and Bone (Ivory and Bone #1) - Julie Eshbaugh Page 0,2
the sunlight. Your hood is back and your head is uncovered, letting your black hair, loose and unbraided, roll like a river on the wind behind you.
You come closer, and I’m struck by the beauty in the balance of your features. I notice the strong lines of your eyebrows and cheekbones tilting up and away from the softer lines of your mouth. Your eyes—dark and wide set—scan the meadow, and I’m startled by the way my heart pounds as I wait for them to fall on me.
This may be the most startling and marvelous day of my life.
As the group advances, however, I notice you drop back. The closer you come, the more certain I am that you are miserable. Your expression—tense jaw, pursed lips—makes your annoyance plain. I imagine you’ve been dragged along on this journey. Your head pivots, your eyes sweep from side to side, taking in what must appear to you to be no more than a wind-beaten wasteland. To me, the meadow is like the sea, life teeming below the surface. But to most people—to you, clearly—it’s just empty grassland.
My mind clogs with questions, but before I can ask Pek a single one, the five of you stop in front of us.
“Son,” my father starts. There’s tension in his voice. A stranger might not notice, but I can tell. “This day has brought us good fortune. These are our neighbors from the south, from the clan of Olen. They visited us once several years ago, when they were traveling from their former home north and west of here, to the place they now call home.”
I remember this, of course. Our clan has such infrequent contact with outsiders that when a group passes through, I don’t forget. It was five years ago; I was twelve. I remember young girls of about my age. I realize, standing here now, that I remember you.
You were traveling by boat, a small clan moving south in kayaks made of sealskin stretched over a frame of mammoth bones, just like the kayaks my own clan uses to fish and gather kelp and mollusks.
I think of the boat Pek described—a canoe dug out of the trunk of a single tree. I’ve never even seen a canoe, though I’ve heard stories of them—open boats made of wood instead of hide and bone like our kayaks, long enough to carry several people at once. My own father tells of wooden canoes he saw with his own eyes, on a scouting trip he made south of the mountains, long before I was born.
But I’ve never heard of a canoe made of the trunk of a single tree. I’ve never even imagined a tree that big.
Not until today.
There has already been talk of the need for our clan to attempt a move farther south. Our herds have been steadily dwindling—some have completely stopped returning from the south in the spring. Others, like the mammoths, have moved north, following the Great Ice as it slides away from the sea.
Yet there has been one insurmountable obstacle to any plan for a southerly move. When your clan departed our shores five years ago, you did not leave as friends, but as enemies.
Even now, with the years stretching out between that day and this one, I can remember the bitterness of your clan’s departure. I remember the murmurs of a possible war. The fears that kept me awake as a twelve-year-old boy—fears that my father could head south to fight and never return. As I stand here today, with the intervening years to dim the memories, bitterness still takes its place like an eighth figure in this circle of seven.
Still, whether you brought the bitterness with you or it joined us, uninvited, the three of you are here, and that suggests new prospects. Could our two clans—enemies for five years—become friends, even allies? My mother must believe so. Nothing else would explain her presence out here in the meadow, since she so rarely hikes this far outside camp anymore. It would also explain the smile on my mother’s face.
She knows opportunity when it lands on her shore.
“Father invited our guests to hunt with us,” Pek says, raising his eyebrows while giving me a small nod—two things I think are supposed to hold some kind of veiled meaning. All I can guess is that he’s warning me to keep calm and not try to back off from my role as a leader in the hunt.