Dawn on a Distant Shore Read Online Free PDF Page A

dry.
    "I'll do my best
by them."
    "I know you
will." Nathaniel wiped his hands on a piece of sacking. "I'll be
leaving at sunrise, but there's something to do this afternoon first, and I'll
need your help."
     
    In winter, Hidden Wolf
was mean-spirited: quick to punish any misstep, and unforgiving. Nathaniel
focused on the wind, feeling the mountain talking to him through the web of his
snowshoes. Liam followed closely. They had things to discuss but it wasn't wise
in such a wet cold, the kind that would settle in the chest if you gave it the
chance.
    They walked uphill
through stands of beech and maple and birch. All around them pine and hemlock
were heavy armed and dragging with snow. Grouse startled and fussed as they
passed; overhead the squirrels whirred and screeched at them, flinging beechnut
shells. There was plentiful evidence of the wolf pack that roamed the mountain.
They didn't hide the remains of their prey: small game, mostly, but they had
feasted recently on a young buck, leaving nothing behind but gnawed bone, a
sprouting two-point rack, and a tattered hide.
    Nathaniel made a wide
berth around a hump that another man might have climbed right over, an elevation
that looked like nothing more than a downed tree covered with snow. He pointed
out the vent hole and the faint mist of rising breath to Liam.
    "It's there for
the taking if things get lean."
    Liam looked around
himself, taking his bearings. Later in the season he would almost certainly
come back here to brush away the snow and put a bullet through the bear's eye.
The hard part would be getting the carcass back to the cabin.
    On the backbone of the
mountain they were met by a merciless wind that wanted nothing more than to
send them flying out over the forests. Moving carefully on the exposed ridge,
they made their way to a small plateau where a few boulders provided a windbreak.
There they stopped to take off snowshoes and strap them to their backs, and
then they started down a cliff face. Liam grabbed at stunted juniper to steady
himself on the way down, catching himself easily when he began to slide. Nathaniel
saw him taking his bearings again; the boy wasn't lost, and could find his way
back to Lake in the Clouds alone if need be.
    When he had Liam's
attention, Nathaniel pointed out a spalt in the cliff face that might have been
nothing more than shadow. Without any explanation, he reached up and pulled
himself into the mountainside.
    The rushing wall of
water that formed the outer boundary of the cave sent a wave of cold right to
the bone. From a store of wood stacked against the far wall they lit a fire,
and then a torch.
    "I didn't imagine
it like this," Liam said as he warmed his hands. "I thought it would
be bigger." His eyes kept moving to the long line of wolf skulls wedged
into a crack in the far wall.
    Nathaniel disappeared
into the shadows at the back of the cave. There was a dragging sound, and a thump,
and he appeared again, wiping his hands on his leggings.
    "It is
bigger," he said. "Come have a look."
    He had rolled away a
good-sized boulder to reveal the next cavern. The torchlight danced on barrels
and baskets and neatly bundled pelts. Hung from pegs driven into fissures were long
ropes of dried corn and squash: provisions enough to take seven or more people
through the winter. It was dry and quieter here, but cold.
    "This is how you
managed, last winter," Liam said, mostly to himself. Some of the men in
the village had been set on driving the Bonners and their Kahnyen'kehâka family
members off the mountain, resorting to thievery when intimidation got them
nowhere. They had raided the cabin in the fall, finding less than they expected
in the way of winter stores. Billy had been at the heart of that trouble, and
where Billy went, Liam had gone, too.
    Nathaniel saw all this
moving on the boy's face, anger and shame and the regret for his part of what
had happened. But it was Liam's battle and he could not fight it for him, so
Nathaniel