Aur Child

Alai-Tiul waited patiently for Sann-Na at the agreed location beyond the limits of Dragon’s Snout. He stood slightly off the trail, shivering in the cold, unsure about what “sundown” meant in this endlessly overcast, dreary world. When Sann-Na arrived, she appeared like an illusion, gliding over the snow with hardly any movement in her legs, her arms swaying forward and behind. It wasn’t until she skidded to a stop that Alai noticed the long narrow boards attached to her feet.

“Hello, Sann-Na,” he said to her.

“We must get off this trail before we fit your equipment,” she said with a nod to the skis poking out of her pulk’s covering blankets. “There is a dark place a few minutes ahead that is more protected.”

Alai began to walk in the indicated direction away from the village. Sann-Na slid silently beside him, jabbing at the white ground occasionally and thrusting herself forward with a soft swish. The pulk scratched feistily behind her over the well-packed trail. Alai tried not to stare too much at this spectacle of locomotion. To him, her movements seemed effortless. But this marvel faded as he realized that he, too, would be expected to travel this way. It was not clear how he would learn to slide rather than walk along the snow.

In the darkness of the hollow Sann-Na had selected, they began the process of preparing Alai for the journey. They swapped the Aur boule from his pack with basic survival gear: a cooking pot, axe, foodstuffs.

“This box is the Aur boule?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The Aur boule, wrapped in the mesh shroud given to Alai by Calliope, was placed in a rough sack and positioned low in the center of the pulk, indistinguishable amongst the odd collection of other packages Sann-Na stuffed around and over it. She placed the skis beside Alai and planted the poles into the ground. She helped him fit the straps to his boots and then steadied him as he stepped into the tightened bindings. In these actions, her eyes glided to her sister’s puukko several times.

“I’ll pull all the gear for the first day or two, until you get familiar with these,” Sann-Na advised him as she packed up the pulk and double checked his fittings. “Just drag your feet forward slightly at first. We’re in no hurry. That’s it. Focus on the sliding.”

He moved forward but fell often, with poles flailing in the air. His feet slid backwards instead of forward. He was sweating profusely and slipped sideways instead of keeping momentum in one direction. Despite his concentration, the humiliation mounted. He refused to speak. He couldn’t even look at her. This excruciating initiation lasted for nearly half an hour. But after that time, he was holding his own, albeit slowly, slipping backwards much less.

“Better,” she said.

They stopped several times for Alai to adjust his clothing. Sweat wicked through his wool layers and froze on the outer surface. During those first slow kilometers, Sann-Na used the pace to explain the plan as well as she could between Alai’s stumbling.

“Travel by night to stay warm,” she said. “Cross lakes to shorten the journey.”

“Across lakes?” Alai exclaimed with a wobble to his glide.

“Frozen lakes.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” he asked, the trees passing them by on both sides.

“The ice is thicker than you are tall.”

Alai focused on his feeble balance.

“The moon will be full in six days,” Sann-Na continued. “With clouds, we can cross without notice. On clear nights, the moon will help us keep to the trails.”

In two hours, Alai was already exhausted. His legs shook in agony. His arms had been sapped from supporting his weight in so many slips. His head was pounding with the pulse of a jerky rhythm.

“Let’s set our camp behind those rocks,” she suggested with a point of her pole. She slid off the trail and down towards the destination she had identified. Alai could do nothing more but sigh in relief. He knew from several previous downhill sections that to follow safely was impossible. He trembled at the sight of the trees and the large rock at the end of the thirty meters. While Sann-Na began preparations at the campsite, Alai tumbled along the slight declivity, intercepted by trees and eventually the large rock. He wasted no time removing the skis.

“Don’t rest yet or you’ll get too cold. Stamp down this area until it’s flattened. Then, trek over there where you should be able to find some branches like this….and this. That’s what we need. As many of those as you can gather. I’ll process the larger wood.”

Following these instructions, he kept an eye on Sann-Na’s movements. She worked a chunk of horse hoof fungus and strips of birch bark to produce a flame. Within minutes, she had a small fire burning on a raft of wood. She fed clumps of snow and pine needles into a pot until the water boiled. Alai greedily accepted the wooden cup of hot tea as she reconstituted a thick stew.

The fire’s flames licked up into the night, sending small embers several meters into the overhanging branches. He observed how compact and discreet the fire was in the little pit they had created, and how well it warmed him despite its size. His face and hands, the only skin exposed to the air, warmed in its glow. He could have enjoyed the moment if his body didn’t ache with exhaustion. Sann-Na seemed uninterested in making any more noise than what was required to occasionally tend the fire.

After eating, she instructed Alai to fold the ends of his cape fanlike and suspend it between two trees in the form of a hammock. The blanket could be wrapped over and beneath him in the hammock, creating a pocket of trapped warm air.

“Keeps you off the cold ground. Get in and try to sleep. Lie still, you won’t disrupt the air.”

Alai needed no further encouragement. He was dead tired and yearned for sleep in any kind of bed. The heavy meal sat in his belly, warming his insides. Despite his skepticism, he found the hammock surprisingly comfortable for what it was. He tried to listen to the movements of Sann-Na tending to her own hammock, but within minutes, he was asleep.

When he woke several hours later, Sann-Na was again tending the camp kitchen.

“Good morning, Sann-Na,” he said.

“You say it wrong. Better to use ‘Sanna’.”

“Ok, Sanna.”

“But you need not always say it. I know it.”

“Oh.”

“Here is tea. After porridge, we must depart.”

The forest was absent of all sound, the deep snow insulating their noise. Occasionally, a small animal rustled in the brush beside the trail. Alai glimpsed a small creature in white fur dart along a fallen tree into a dark crack between rocks. When back on skis, he followed in the rise and fall along gentle ridges and beside ponds and small lakes. Ghostly white above, deathly white to either side, their active forms contrasted only slightly against the pale backdrop of a solid morning. They glided past countless rocks, evergreens smothered in snow, and birches with spotted black diamonds that appeared as dark eyes spying on them from either side of the trail.

The nights that followed kept this routine: sleep during the brief daylight hours, ski during the extended moonlight. In this way, they encountered few others on the trails. Alai’s proficiency at skiing increased steadily, and so did their speed, even when the trails themselves thinned considerably and the terrain grew steeper and more winding. He learned by mimicking Sanna’s graceful lunges that physical effort could be drastically reduced through better balance and form. He squeezed every last moment out of each glide before transitioning his weight for another kick forward. By learning to control his pace to match the transpiration of sweat through his layers, he could prevent cakes of snow on the outside of his cloak and remain warm and dry within.

The moon waxed towards full, shedding ample light through the treetops onto the paths. To Alai, the forest appeared drearier and denser as they progressed further and further north. The first two hours on the flat expanse of their first lake traverse was a thrilling change from the forest trails. He had seen the river they were skiing along several times during their journey. It wasn’t entirely frozen. Sections flowed with rushes and falls, the sounds reverberating up into the higher land where the trail ran. It surprised him considerably when that noisy river stood still at the lake end from which it flowed silently underneath.

There on the ice, with the snow packed well from Sanna dragging the sled ahead of him, Alai felt the full sensation of unrestrained skiing at an uninterrupted pace. He fell into a trance. His dark lashes swept snowflakes away from his eyes. The moon immersed him in the sparkling plane of opalescent snow. They travelled uninterrupted for hours. Occasionally, a metal edge of the ski or a tip of the pole would glint in the moonlight.

This land was both treacherous and beautiful: a chill breeze that did not penetrate beyond his cheeks, a powerful moon, a sharp sky, a vague fringe of purple hills, the slightly discernible contrast between darker gray shore and lighter gray lake, the vast expanse of flatness around him, the peace defiled only by their rustlings, like a mouse at midnight between the walls, the shadowy silhouette of Sanna ahead with the low pulk trailing between them, the tracks connecting Sanna to himself, the steady working of his poles and skis, the embedded sequence of physical actions required to maintain the flow of his lateral glissade, and the concatenated whoosh of his traverse across the icy field.

At the campfire, he ate ravenously; more than he could remember ever eating. The pangs were so strong that he was forced to break their standard silence.

“Is there more food?”

“This is what’s been cooked. Some jerky is reserved. The apples we keep for rest stops.”

“May I eat some jerky, then? I still feel very hungry.”

She handed him a few strips of air-dried reindeer meat. “Your speed has improved. We require more energy to maintain this pace.”

Alai understood these words but didn’t know what was to be done with them. Not knowing how to prepare for a winter journey in the boreal forest, he had left all the planning and provisioning to Sanna. She confirmed their need for more food but offered no solution. He hesitated to ask anything else, however. A fact had already been clearly stated. Sanna’s tacit acknowledgment was likely enough to prompt a resolution.

Eventually, she stood up and turned to the boulder behind her. Sweeping off the snow, she used her puukko to remove a mat of lichen from the rock and scrape away the small amount of soil at its roots. She dropped it into the pot of boiling water and poked at it a few times with the knife. Then, she lifted it with the same blade and reached over to Alai.

“This will keep you alive,” she said.

He reached for the steaming clump of lichen and struggled to feed it to himself. Although the experience was uncomfortable, he noticed his pangs dissolve and he slept well.

On the fourth night, Sanna slowed her pace until Alai was even with her. As they continued skiing side by side, she turned to him so that the moonlight shone in her eyes and said, “I will ski ahead. Follow my tracks. When you see the pulk, set up camp.”

“Okay,” is all he said to her as she darted ahead faster than he imagined possible, using a technique he had not seen before.

Alai was now utterly alone. The frigid emptiness forced upon him memories of his wife and son. He had been just as cold and alone that day. The white, frothy wake of his boat had been the only connection between him and humanity. Now, the only connection he had was the pair of herringbone tracks before him. He followed them desperately. He clung to their staggered pattern. It was a lifeline.

Left alone, he would not last a day. He had learned much from Sanna on this trek. He had gear in his pack to make camp, even boil water and prepare a meal. But these were marginal preparations for a frozen world with seemingly no shelter or sustenance other than what he carried on his back.

Survival. That word meant something different here. To survive in this land, one must wholly trust in the word of others or trust in no one at all. There is no room for doubt or misunderstanding. Any deviation from what was agreed could be fatal. A solid, frozen kind of fatal. She had given him her word. He must trust it. And since the reciprocal must also be true, he must be careful with his own word. It would be perilous to misunderstand.

With the fire sputtering and smoking to contrast against the silent furnaces that Sanna prepared, Alai attempted to boil pine needle tea. Just before it was ready, Sanna stepped down into the pit that surrounded the fire and stood a bow against the perimeter wall. She removed a satchel and placed it on the ground. After taking a seat across the fire from Alai, she reached into the satchel and removed a smaller leather pouch which she placed on the ground closer to the fire. Alai handed her a steaming cup of tea. She took a sip of the hot liquid and then reached toward the pot that was now nearly empty of boiling water.

Alai watched as she untied the leather straps that kept the small pouch bundled. Once untied, it slowly expanded outward under the weight of its contents to reveal a heap of dark, bloody chunks of meat. She deftly scooped chunks of the meat with her spoon and knife and placed them into the pot. When the stew was nearly ready and the smells overwhelming, she looked up at him and offered a faint smile. Alai returned a broad grin of relief. Sanna looked down, smiling again.

After they supped, Alai could not hold back his desire to express his appreciation verbally. “Thank you,” he said to her as their spoons scraped the inside of their cups clean.

Sanna looked at him from across the low embers, “We, too, say ‘Thank you’ after a meal. It is our custom. There is meat for three more meals.”

“It makes me very happy.”

“This night, we enter protected clan territories. We must better disguise our tracks. You will now take the pulk.”

Once they packed, Sanna proceeded to fit the harness to Alai. He began that toil with much trepidation. The pulk was held away from him by stiff poles, but it pushed him faster down the hills and it tended to slide sideways on steeper inclines, despite the fins protruding beneath it. His pace and his balance were tested anew.

Alai dragging the pulk behind him was not the only change. Sanna kept the lead, but darted ahead or into the forest regularly, presumably to scout, but she didn’t say. On several occasions, she had Alai stop momentarily so she could extract a package from the pulk before departing, or replaced a package to the sled when she returned. Alai followed brief instructions to keep along the trail or towards a fixed point at the head of the lake. Sanna always returned to meet back with his course.