many-colored under a sparkling sky.
Snow dappled its flanks, ice glistened where pools had been. The air was
a riot of odors, salt, iodine, clean decomposition and fresh growth, and
was crisp and windy and cool, cool.
Day after day the pack fattened itself, until blubber sleeked out the
bulges of ribs and muscles. The receding waters had left a rich stratum
of dead plants and animals. In it sprouted last year’s saprophyte seeds,
salt and alcohol in their tissues to prevent freezing, and covered the
rocks with ocherous and purple patches. Marine animals swarmed between;
flying creatures shrieked and whirled above by the hundred thousand; big
game wandered down from the interior to feed. Rrinn’s males chipped hand
axes to supplement their fangs; females prepared lariats of gut and
sinew; beasts were caught and torn asunder.
Yet Wirrda’s were ceasing to be only hunters. They crooned snatches of
song, they trod bits of dance, they spoke haltingly. Many an individual
would sit alone, hours on end, staring at sunset and stars while memory
drifted up from the depths. And one day Rrinn, making his way through a
whiteout, met a female who had kept close to him. They stopped in the
wind-shrill blankness, the sea clashing at their feet, and looked eye
into eye. She was sinuous and splendid. He exclaimed in delight, “But
you are Cuwarra.”
“And you are Rrinn,” she cried. Male and wife, they came to each other’s
arms.
While ovulation was seasonal among the People, the erotic urge persisted
throughout winter. Hence the young had fathers who helped care for them
during their initial months of existence. That relationship was broken
by the Little Death–older cubs were raised in casual communal
fashion–but most couples stayed mated for life.
Working inland, Wirrda’s encountered Brrao’s and Hrrouf’s. They did
every year. The ferocious territoriality which the People had for their
homes ashore did not extend to the shelf; packs simply made landfall at
points convenient to their ultimate destinations. These three mingled
cheerfully. Games were played, stories told, ceremonies put on,
marriages arranged, joint hunts carried out. Meanwhile brains came
wholly active, lungs reached full development, gills dried and stopped
functioning.
Likewise did the shelflands. Theirs was a brief florescence, an
aftermath of summer’s furious fertility. Plants died off, animals moved
away, pickings got lean. Rrinn thought about Wirrda’s, high in the
foothills beyond the tundra, where hot springs boiled and one river did
not freeze. He mounted a rock and roared. Other males of his pack passed
it on, and before long everyone was assembled beneath him. He said: “We
will go home now.”
Various youths and maidens complained, their courtships among Brrao’s or
Hrrouf’s being unfinished. A few hasty weddings were celebrated and
numerous dates were made. (In the ringing cold of midwinter, the People
traveled widely, by foot, sled, ski and iceboat. Though hunting grounds
were defended to the death, peaceful guests were welcomed. Certain packs
got together at set times for trade fairs.) On the first calm day after
his announcement, Rrinn led the exodus.
He did not start north at once. With full mentality regained, Wirrda’s
could use proper tools and weapons. The best were stored at
Wirrda’s–among the People, no real distinction existed among place
names, possessives, and eponyms–but some had been left last spring at
the accustomed site to aid this trek.
Rrinn’s line of march brought his group onto the permanent littoral. It
was a barren stretch of drifts. His Merseian acquaintances had shown him
moving pictures of it during hot weather: flooded in spring, pullulating
swamp in earth summer, later baked dry and seamed with cracks. Now that
the shelf was exhausted, large flesheaters were no longer crossing these
white sastrugi to see what they could scoop out of the water. Rrinn
pushed his folk unmercifully.
They did not mind the cold. Indeed, to them the land still was warmer
than they preferred. Fur and blubber insulated them, the latter
additionally a biological reserve. Theirs was a high homeothermic
metabolism, with corresponding energy demands. The People needed a large
intake of food. Rrinn took them over the wastelands because it would be
slower and more exhausting to climb among the ice masses that choked