I will die up here in the high mountains, she thought. And be like Solanda, Mother's old friend, who vanished as the deer vanish. (A demon tricked me by looking like a boy). "You climb too high," the hunter said, squatting down on his haunches and leaning against a boulder. "Nothing eat up here." Mira finally got her voice: "Why are you here?" "I follow you." He smiled. Mira stared down the great mountain, knowing she was trapped, that she had climbed too high where monsters are. He had stalked her like a deer. And she had been as foolish as a deer. "To kill me?" He gave her a surprised, then puzzled look. "Why I want to kill you?" "To give the gods their sacrifice." He looked at her for a long time, and Mira felt strange. He was handsome, his hair and beard night-black, his blue eyes arrogant, confident. A smile that was very close to a smirk. He was a savage-looking boy, but she saw that he was a boy, not two seasons older than her. His deerskin leggings were well-used and torn ragged, made by skillful hands, but not any of the river tribes. Slung over his back was a very ornate spear thrower. A brace of feathered arrows in a wolfskin pouch flared out of his back. His right fist gripped a long spear crowned with a tooth of flint. Rawhide thongs belted his leggings; on his waistbelt a stone hatchet and long stone knife were strapped. His arms and legs rippled with savage muscles. Mira clutched her little pointed stick. She edged down the mountain slope, to see what he would do. "Why did you follow me?" He was a shadow now, against the boulder, but she could see his white teeth grinning. "You are very pretty," he called out of the evening. He didn't follow her. He wasn't going to hurt her. She scuttered down the slope, grinning now, heart pounding and sudden blood in her face. What he said to me...! "You climb too high, Pretty One!" his voice echoed behind her, making a crazy thrill in her stomach. "Run home before it gets dark." Her face burned red. "Why!" she called, grinning over her shoulder. "Because a knife-tooth has come to this mountain."

The Cold Days

Part OneBy James Howerton

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 James Howerton
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-0250-4

Chapter One

One night a fire glowed on the Hill of Skeletons and Haldana, the tribe's shaman, pronounced that a demon may have come there.

The tribe sat outside their mountain caves in the cool summer night watching the firelight on the hill, the light of the demon, and made their prayers against the future. It was death to challenge the gods and to live on sacred ground—only a demon could do it. Forever the sacred ground where the dead were taken to rest in the Cave of Bones had been dark and empty of men. Now something was there making fire and sending smoke into the world. Only the shaman, following the Ceremony of the Dead and with the proper prayers, could carry a dead one over the white stones and place it in the cave; all others would be struck down by the gods. Yet something made a fire up there, on the hill far above the river caves where the tribe lived.

Nights passed and the fire did not go away. Most in the mountain tribe, called the Tolai, feared now to even look at it. Keane, the old spear-maker, had proclaimed that the world was changing, that a starving time would now begin. Had a demon come to curse the Tolai, to make the mountains bare of game and the great river barren of fish?

"Will the demon come down to our village?" many asked. "What does this demon want?"

Shaman Haldana could not know: "No dreams have come to me. Something makes fire on the Sacred Hill; that is all the signs will tell me. It makes fire and it does not fear the gods."

"Why haven't the gods destroyed this thing? It camps on the Sacred Hill!"

"The demon is there for a reason," Shaman said.

He stared at the faraway campfire that sputtered yellow and red in the night. He smelled the smoke of mountain wood. He wondered what thing could live up there in violation of the gods. "It has not come down to worry us," he said. "It defies the gods, and yet it lives."

Chieftain Etain said that it would be best to prepare: "If it comes down from the hill, we should know quick."

"How can you prepare for a demon?" Shaman demanded.

"Still," Etain said. "I will have some of the hunters stand guard."

Mira, daughter of the chieftain, was cursed with the need to know. She feared the unknown, but could not take her eyes off the fire in the distance. Something had come onto the sacred ground of her people and defiled it with fire and smoke. Mira stared at the yellow flame on Sacred Hill. Already in early summer the tribe spoke darkly of a starving time, and Mira wondered how many would live through the great white winter to come, whether she herself would live to see her time of womanhood in the next spring. Now something had come and was making fire inside the white stone border that could not be crossed.

She feared the gods and what they would do, but her eyes could not avoid the Hill of Skeletons that wore grey and green boulders and rose halfway up the mountains towering over the river valley.

Her dog, Wolf, growled against her. She petted him on the back and rubbed at his rough fur. Five seasons ago her father Etain had killed a she-wolf and managed to find the den and gather up her pup. He gave it to his daughter, and now it was a powerful full grown wolf, her best friend and companion.

"It's nothing, Wolf," she said to the dog. "It's not a demon, no matter what they say."

Wolf stared at the hill and howled. Mira petted him. "It is not a demon, Wolf. It is something else."

Fire and the faint smoke of pine-wood; a flickering yellow light that made a beacon on the Sacred Hill where always before there had been solemn darkness. The tribe prayed against it, feared the signs. Something was on the Sacred Hill; some magic thing made fire and smoke. Mira stared up into the dark, into the hateful devil light that mocked the gods. She knew that she had to go up to see. Something told her that it was not a demon, but she had to see. Shaman often said that she was cursed with the need to see.

Wolf will be with me. She petted the great dog. Wolf will protect me.

She must not be seen to wander up there, however. Mira spent the fifth day of the demon fire tediously scraping a deer hide, while her mother, squatting next to her by the river, pounded berries and dry meat into pemmican. The day was blazing hot, and they did their work near the river in order to get the cool breeze off the moving water.

The mountain tribe went about their usual day: women in loose deer hide dresses squatted along the banks of the river making pemmican and hanging fish onto aspen wood racks where the meat could dry in the sun and wind. The old ones practiced their skills up under the shade of a great tree, the flint and chert workers and spear makers, the makers of the stone knives and tools, the shapers of the clay and wood bowls, the hide tanners and bone workers. Some men too crippled to be hunters, too old or too young, waded in the shallows of the great river hoping to spear fish. Young apprentices squatted next to the old ones, learning the skills of working the sparkling flint. Mira could see nothing out of the ordinary, it was the same picture she had known since her birth; but she sensed a deep worry. Her mountain people kept fears to themselves, but the fears were in the air. It was a terribly hot day, yet the Long Sun had passed, and now it fell earlier each day, and the specter of snow and ice and freezing cold just reminded the wind at night.

The hunters were in the tall mountains, in their desperate search for game; it was going to be a time of starving, what the old ones called The Cold Days, their eyes calm but troubled, knowing that in the starvation time of the cold days the very young and very old would die.

Mira pushed that thought away. She looked up at the caves of her people, where they had always escaped the cold days. The family caves were above the twisting river beyond a stretch of pebbled and moss-stained flatland. Slabs of flat granite looked out from the side of the mountain, and below them rounded boulders. Within the caverns of granite were the homes of the mountain people. Mira loved the caves; they were the dark safeness against the murderous gods of the earth and the bristled monsters that roamed the mountains, the slinking wolves and crafty knife-tooth and the great bears that stood so tall they darkened the sun. Mira had seen wolves, and had one for a companion, but she had only heard tales of the other muscled killers that roamed the high mountains. During the long time of winter, in the flickering yellow of the tribal fire, Mira had sat fascinated listening to the tales of the old hunters—of fanged monsters and clawed creatures beyond any human size, of the white-bearded goats that sprang down the sides of the high peaks, of the evil hyenas and the fearless cave lions and the stately giant-crowned elk.

The caves of the Tolai were like a warm fur that she could curl up in and listen to the wind outside, the storms and blizzards and all the other monsters of the world: The bright bellowing spears that gods hurl at one another when in their anger the sky attacks the land, the white snow-wind of the North-God, the wet sheets of the god of rain that made the river swell and rage. It was safe in the caves, in the family place; safe in the dark stone sanctuary.

She glanced again at the Sacred Hill far above the caves, the home of the spirits of her people. This time...