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She twisted to look back at her son. Kerlew stared up at her, his eyes suddenly going wide. He shrank from her fury. 'You are not a shaman!' She spat out the words. She glared at him, her fury strangling her. No more words would come. 'Pick up firewood!' she snarled at last, turning away from him. The straps cut into her shoulders savagely as she jerked against her burden to get it moving again. She could hear him muttering sullenly behind her, but she also heard the snap of a dry lower branch broken from a tree. He would obey. She thought of Benu's son, who would have run ahead with his bow in hopes of a rabbit or grouse. He had been no older than Kerlew. An alert boy he had been, his eyes large and bright, his hands already clever at carving. He had died of the bear plague. All the women had mourned his death. But Kerlew had lived. They bad hated him for living.
    The tears that stung her eyes were cold on her cheeks. She wanted suddenly to throw off her harness, to turn to Kerlew and hug him and tell him she was glad he had lived, that she loved him, would always love him, no matter what. But she could not. She had to get to the top of the hill, she told herself, and the boy would only have leaped away from her, struggled against her embrace. He did not need her tears and hugs. He needed her strength. She panted as she drew the travois over the crest of the hill. Standing still to breathe, she heard his muttering.
    '... and I will be treated better there, when I walk among the reindeer-folk. Yes, I will lead them all, and Tillu will be only a woman who must tend to the men.'
    The valley ahead of her was a deep one, full of darkness and reaching trees. Tillu began the long descent.

CHAPTER THREE
    Heckram stood alone on top of the pingo and looked back the way they had come. Winter had already claimed the tundra. Diffused moonlight seeped through the overcast and reflected off the snowy plains, giving a false aura of dawn to the scene. But dawn was many hours away, and wiser men than he were sleeping.
    Cold emanated up from the frozen heart of the giant frost heave he stood upon. The dark earth covering it was carpeted with lichen and vegetation; they in turn were frosted by last night's sprinkle of snow. The cold of the pingo's heart tried to numb Heckram's feet through his thin boots as the chill night leaned down on him.
    The peak of the frost heave, a crest near sixty times the height of a man, lifted Heckram and made it seem that the tundra was a flat land, pale and featureless as the surface of a frozen lake. Distance and the uniform whiteness of the early snow cloaked its rolling swells and masked its long flat river valleys. The scouring of ancient glaciers had ground this part of the world into submission long ago. Ice had shaped it and mastered it and retained its dominance here. Freezes and thaws cracked its rocky bones and tortured its flesh into distinctive patterns, stripes and checks of earth separated by lines of ground frost. Even the long hours of daylight in the summer barely penetrated it. The skin of the tundra might thaw and bloom, but its heart was an icy secret.
    A shallow blanket of powdery windswept snow covered all but the tallest grasses and brush of the tundra. There were no trees to stand tall and give a sense of distance to the vastness. The black line where the horizon met the night could have been but a step away, or mythically far. Clouds blanketed the sky this night; no stars betrayed the jest.
    But Heckram had climbed the pingo to regain perspective, not lose it. He blinked his weary eyes and turned south, toward the foothills and forested mountains that were their winter goal. Ahead of them, perhaps two or three days as the herd traveled, they would find browse for the reindeer and fuel for winter fires. There, too, were the sod huts that offered as permanent a shelter as the nomadic herdfolk would ever know. In the winter camp, the older people and smallest children would shelter out the