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spring, true, but no cold could so disquiet him. It was what lay among the shallow, winding valleys. Upon the hills.
    All around him were
inuksuit
—structures of rock, in the image of men. Kannujaq recalled his grandfathers tales of how these were made by the Tunit, the elusive people who had occupied the land long before Kannujaq’s people arrived. This was the way in which the Tunit hunted. Every year, the caribou would take paths that avoided the
inuksuit
. And every year, the Tunit herded them into kill zones. Kannujaq’s grandfather had seen one such site: there the Tunit had left piles of bones, piles that could have accumulated only after generations.
    Who would live like this?
Kannujaq thought.
    Being unmarried, Kannujaq travelled alone. He had almost become complacent over this last winter, used to being in one place. It had been a sweet, rich autumn of good fishing, better seal hunting. He had lived under a shelter of interlocking whale ribs, found all over the rocky shoresof this area. There he had practised patience while living alongside the family of his hunting partner. Elders had spent all season telling him about the much harsher winters in the times of their forefathers. He had managed to escape around the time the ravens, those first nest builders of spring, began their nuptial dances in the sky. It had been a long winter.
    (But, oh, how he and the others had brought in
tuugaaliit
, those small, dark whales with the spiralled tusks!)
    For it was whales that drew Kannujaq, like everyone else, to this place, and ever eastward, deeper into the unknown lands, just as whales and walrus had lured his father, and his father before him. Kannujaq’s father had not been much of a storyteller, but his grandfather had been an endless source of tales, most often of the lands their family and others had passed through, of how there probably was land and islands and hunting forever ahead.
    Kannujaq could never know that his grandfather was wrong. What lay east of them was mostly a vast ocean. On its opposite side, there stood the Byzantine Empire at its strongest, the envy of lands Kannujaq would never know, places steeped in centuries of iron and bloodshed.
    Kannujaq’s grandfather also told of the trees back west, supposedly thicker and higher as one moved southward. Among these lived the Iqqiliit, tall and painted and fearsome. The old man could never have imagined that, even as he spoke his words to young Kannujaq, a Mayan king stood atop a pyramid temple engineered with advanced mathematics, sacrificing his sacred blood to bring victory in war.
    Kannujaq would never know that, even as he recalled his grandfather’s tales, another man, named Alhazen, who had been studying lenses in a land called Egypt, was pondering his findings on the nature of rainbows. Alhazen’s young religion, called Islam, was only now losing momentum after sweeping across a world that, strangely, subsisted almost entirely upon grains.
    In fact, if Kannujaq had known even one hundredth of what was occurring while he was staring across the amber hills, he would have been immensely grateful for his relative isolation.
    He was spared the knowledge, for example, that the great lust of many peoples was for a substance called gold, which had just brought African Ghana to its peak. He had no idea that the world could hold so many people who would demand such trivialities. In a place eventually known as China, commerce was flourishing under the nascent Sung Dynasty, ruling over sixty million souls. Its emperor was even now troubled by distant, distant relations of both Kannujaq and the Tunit—called Mongols.
    Kannujaq might have been even more confused by the place called Europe. There, the empire of Charlemagne had finally fragmented, its western portion becoming young France. France had been having a difficult time, having had to placate a force of Scandinavians, called Norsemen, by handing over Normandy to them.
    These