Excerpt: Reindeer Winters

If we had been unsure about the fate of the men before, we were not. The sound of the wind howling came from very far away, as if from far down a tunnel. It was reduced to merely a whistle, the echo of something in pain. Even as I woke, shifting stiff joints between the furs which had kept me alive through the night, I could tell that they had not come home. Nor, I thought, looking for the expression of hope and finding nothing, would they. If I had not seen so much dying in my years—if we all had not—the sorrow might have been too much to bear. But we had buried many, many dead. Though it seemed like the birthing never ceased, our encampment never grew. Geshavvel, goddess of birth and dying, was a harsh mistress.

Across the winter hut, poor mad Annelie nursed her wolf pup. It suckled hungrily, and I turned away in embarrassment for her. Instead I dressed in the warmth of my furs, lacing my shirt carefully before shimmying out of my bed. I rolled it up and placed it against the dirt wall before pulling on a fur coat that went over my hands. It was warm enough this morning from the bone-fed fire that I did not stuff my fingers into mittens, nor flip the hood up to cover my mussed hair.

Ulla handed me a comb as I squatted by the fire, dipping a horn cup into the meltwater bowl for a drink. I smiled and took it, as wordlessly as her, putting some order to my locks before braiding the hair in a single plait, pinning it in a loop with a fishbone pin.

“Will you get some meat?” Ulla asked, softly so as not to awaken those who had fed the fire during the night. I nodded to her, and made to stand up. She put a restraining hand on my shoulder. “Later. Eat first,” she commanded with the force of her many years, passing me a stick piercing a hank of meat. Wrapped inside the meat was grain, possibly the barley I had gathered in the summer, steamed from snow trapped when the mostly-frozen meat had been wrapped around the raw grain and speared, then roasted. I ate dutifully, tasting nothing but the snow. The blizzard turned the air itself to ice, and I watched as flakes of snow drifted down our tiny air hole to melt in the blue smoke of the smoldering bones.

I stared into the fire as I chewed the tough reindeer, watching the play of heat on bone. Those at the center burned the hottest, slowly crumbling into grey ash and splinters of bone which continued to burn. In the summer, we burned grass and dung, but in the winter we burned bone. Wood was too scarce to burn, after all. What little wood we had left after the making of spears was fashioned into jewelry, or saved for when we had to make the bone hot enough to burn. We had burned Kenam’s wooden necklace this autumn when we could not find enough wood. He was out there, now, in the blizzard. Dead? Probably. He would not be buried with his wife’s token. We would likely not even find his body.

Such was winter.