shhhhh . . . shhhhhh.
Sleep swoops down on me with wide-stretched arms, wrapping me in an embrace, pulling me up, and carrying me away before I have a chance to resist.
I wake with a start, as if summoned by a voice. I sit up, noticing the sun far off in the west. It’s almost time for the evening meal.
What questions will I be asked tonight? I expect I will have to tell about the attack on Chev, my fight with the boy, the death of Lo.
How will my mother react when she hears that I may have killed Orn? That I let Lo die?
These questions darken my thoughts as I climb the trail back toward my camp, which suddenly seems so far away. I think of Manu, lost, far from family and clan.
When I reach the summit, my steps quicken. I’m propelled forward by the knowledge that around the next bend, the trail turns toward home.
I reach the overlook and sweep my gaze over the familiar scene in front of me—the sea to my right, the sloping plains to my left, and the eastern mountains in the far distance. And directly below me, a view of my own clan’s camp.
Even run-down and blighted by half-stripped huts, this is the place of the people I love.
But as I look down on the camp, confusion rises in me, and I have to question what I see. How could this be the same camp I stepped away from earlier today?
Every hut is complete; every structure neatly covered in smooth, fine pelts. Sun glints off the roof of the kitchen, newly covered in a dark hide of glossy bearskin. And draped across the doorway of my family’s hut hangs something new—pelts stitched to create a sort of banner of contrasting colors, pieced together in an intricate design—a field of dark fur as a background, dotted with lighter pieces to suggest stars in a night sky.
I’ve seen pelts stitched in patterns like this only once before, in Mya’s hut. This, all this, I think, my eyes moving from one repaired hut to another, could have come only from the south, from Mya and her people.
I tear my eyes from the view and race farther down the trail, wondering if I will find Mya herself in my camp. But as the trail draws close to the bottom of the hill, I catch a glimpse out over the bay.
Boats.
Three intricately carved canoes float just a short distance from shore. Two rowers sit in each one, as if waiting to push out. And in two of the three canoes, a body lies between the seated oarsmen. The canoe closest to shore bears the body of a young girl, lying as if asleep, covered all over in red ocher—the color of blood, the color of the dead.
This is Lo, making her final journey home.
The second canoe is farther out in the bay. Bright red ocher covers the length of the body that lies in the hull, standing out against the gray water, but it floats too far away for me to see the person’s face.
It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to see his face to know that it’s Orn, the boy I let fall from the cliff, the boy Chev called Dora’s son. I had been afraid to look down, to know if he had lived or died.
But now I know. Now I know he is dead.
I hear voices coming from the beach, though my view is obscured by the trees. A man speaks in a steady, commanding voice. Chev. He is answered by the voices of my father and mother. They are thanking him for the gift of the pelts. They wish him blessings as he heads across the bay. “As you return the dead to the Bosha,” says my mother, “may the Divine protect you.”
Her words ring in my ears as I descend the remainder of the trail to the beach. I wonder what will happen to Chev when he arrives on the Bosha’s shore. What if some of the Bosha still hope to kill him? What if their elders are not able to intervene? Is he brave to come and face them, or is he reckless?
I reach the beach as Chev is saying his final good-bye to my parents. I step clear of the last of the trees and the three of them come into view.
Only then do I see that there are not three people on the beach, but four. Chev is not facing the