Mamu and Red Snow

            Mamu stood motionless at the hole in the ice. 

            It was a way he had of being invisible.  In fact, under a light snow, perfectly still within and without, he could blend into the white behind him and seem to vanish like a passing thought.  This was one of the talents that made him such a good hunter.  Yet it was strange and perhaps even funny, even to Mamu himself, that hours of careful work would culminate in stillness and invisibility.  All that effort to become one with nothing.  But as his people always said, the ice was full of quiet laughter.

            Mamu, neatly and precisely, had already taken a walrus tusk and added ridges to it to turn it into a rough corkscrew.  With this he had drilled a hole in the ice at a spot forty breaths from the edge of the floe.  Then he used his axe to hack out a circular opening about two feet wide.  The chill blue water lapped slowly against the edge of the hole as he worked on it to form a tiny pool. 

            As the water in his pool lightly froze, Mamu walked further on, probing with his pokestick until it made a slushy sound.  He dug through the top layer of snow to get to the soft mush of ice below, ice that had been compacted by yesterday’s drizzle.  He chopped out a saucer-sized section, sat down cross-legged on the floe and placed the slab in his lap.  With his bare hands, he began to smooth and press the blob of ice into the shape of a lens.  Quickly, skillfully, he blew on his hands and smoothed the curved surface.  Then he flipped it over and repeated the process on the other side.  When he was done, he had a perfect disk, about the size of his own head.  And because it was made of heavy slush ice smoothed over, it was translucent. 

            Mamu walked back to the hole, broke up the thin cold film that had formed over the water, then held the translucent saucer of ice between the hole and the sun.  The bright rays danced through his hand-made lens and focused on the water in the hole.  Although he could not see it, he knew that the focused light would penetrate the thick water and that the seals would notice it as they swam below the floe.  So far from the edge, they would be just ready to come up for air; they would see the light and know there was an airhole there. 

            Mamu went back into stillness and waited.

            He waited for three hours like that, unmoving and still as ice and then, in an instant, a seal poked its nose through and took a deep breathe of clear air.  At that moment, instantly alert and ready, Mamu slammed his hook into the seal’s nose and shouted “Ayah!  Ayah!”  His dogs, lounging near the sled, heard the call and were up in a moment and tugging on the line, pulling away from the hole.  The rope attached to the end of the hook pulled taut and slowly, with Mamu shouting and the dogs straining, they hauled the seal up out of the hole.  It lay there on the ice, breathing mightily from the struggle until Mamu, expertly and calmly, hit it once with his mallet on the soft tissue over the eyes.  Just like that the seal was dead.

            “Forgive me, my cousin,” he said as he deftly removed the hook, “forgive me for my clumsiness.  But you will feed my family for many days and we thank you for this.  In the next life, I pray, that I may be a seal like you, so grand, so proud, and you the clumsy hunter.  May you catch me and feed your own family and in this way will the balance of life be restored.  Squatsisitilla!”

            And it was true.  Mamu ate with his wife Bakuba and his two sons on that night and for many nights after.  They roasted the seal meat over an open fire and seasoned it with salt dried from the ocean.  They used the blood for fuel and the skin for clothing.  As they huddled inside the tent close to the fire, Mamu could hear the dogs outside fighting over some scraps.  And the wind.  And always, always the sounds of the ice shelf creaking and groaning. 

            Laughing, according to the old men and their stories.

            Mamu lived in a timeless world where the pace of life was determined by the ice, by the sea, by the seasons, by the migration of seals and bears.  Outside, in the world at large, it was perhaps sometime in the 24th century, no one knew for sure anymore and Mamu and his people did not care.  As it had been so many times before in its history, the earth was once again in the grip of ice.  It was the Third Ice Age in the time of men and women.  The glacial sheet reached from the polar cap all the way down well past the border of Canada. 

            Mamu and his tribe lived at the very edge of that glacier where the freeze met the sea, in an area that was once the shore of a state called Connecticut.  But now the land was buried under the ice, which broke up into slowly drifting floes at a mass of water long ago called Long Island Sound.  Mamu and his people knew nothing of these matters of name and place.  They called the area simply the place, and the body of water our water, and the region beyond their hunting grounds the other place. 

            They hunted and lived and told stories and wondered about the way of things in the world.  They were the descendents, after all, of people who had left the industrialized world, who knew the ice was coming, and who turned their backs on civilization.  Mamu was the fourth generation after the first ones, the ones who left the cities and the grid behind and returned to a purer life.  It was just in time to learn to live in the natural world again, now that that world had reclaimed itself. 

            And Mamu loved his life and would not have traded it for any of the remnants of the technological world that was still left.  But then that sound came cracking through the wind and the dream went splintering. 

            Mamu heard it one morning and knew instantly that it was not the ice laughing.  It was a familiar sound, one that he had only heard a few times before.  Like when the safaris came.  Rich folks who still lived in cities in the south still came up to the ice to hunt.  These were sloppy men, fidgety men, who knew nothing of the balance of life.  They shot their prey from great distances, took the pelts and left the carcasses, cared nothing for the souls of the dead.  Did not even eat their kill.  Mamu hated these men for their carelessness and the moment he heard that gunshot, he knew in the soft within his heart that one of them had just shattered his stillness forever.

            Mamu gulped for breath as he ran, ran, and ran towards his dogs.  He had left them a good quarter of a mile from the tent, knowing they would be safer there if the floe began to break up.  But as he got closer to them he could see that something was wrong.  They were not huddled as usual but jittery and restless and tugging at their leashes.  In three more paces he could see the burgundy stain spreading slowly like blood in ice. 

But the huskies were all there, all eight of them, and it was not until Mamu came right up to them that he could see what had happened.

            “Oh no!  No!” he shouted, not able to take in the vision in front of him.  For there lying in the snow, lifeless, lustless, was his guard dog, his beloved Red Snow.

            Mamu could not believe his eyes.  He lunged on top of her, bellowing and sobbing, and tried to hug her back into existence.  He kissed her eyes, tugged at her thick fur, screamed to the stars to help him, but it was no use.  Red Snow had been shot.  Her body lay there like so much carrion and it was a very long time, as his wife and sons caught up with him, until he was able to quiet himself and sit and stroke her fur and accept what had happened.

            Red Snow had not been an ordinary sled dog.  Not a huskie like the others; she was a Chow, a kind of dog originally bred in China as a temple guard.  Thick reddish fur covered her strong frame and while the huskies huddled to keep warm, Red Snow would sit off by herself near Mamu but always facing away, protecting him from whatever was out there.  Her face was full and proud and her eyes round as black moons, her tongue was black too and it felt like warm snow.  On short treks she stayed near the sled but on long ones, she rode in it like a princess.  Mamu trusted his huskies but he entrusted his life to Red Snow and when he dreamed that night it was of her, her round brown eyes and her handsome snout, and he wished above all else that he could nuzzle under the thick fur of her throat and hide there from the evil in the world.

            Before dawn, he watched the sparks from the pyre rise into the sky and cried through his tears: “Oh Brother Moon, open your arms that encircle the whole wide world, and accept the spirit of my beloved Red Snow, my friend and guardian.”

            But later that morning, he was alone in his own skin and did not know how he would bear this, or for how long.

   

            Days later Mamu, over his grief barely enough to wander to the village for supplies, overheard something that nabbed his attention.  A guide, one of the people who led the safaris, was talking about a man who had just killed some bears at the edge of the ice.  Mamu’s people hated these strangers but they paid well for guides who would take them on expeditions.  They were not hunters, these men.  They were idlers, playboys, out on a lark.  They killed for skins, not to keep them warm but as mementos.  Black bears that had migrated to the edge of the ice and learned to survive were their prey and they wore their bearskin coats to show their courage in a world with none.  But it was the kind of courage that Mamu equated with cowardice. 

            Mamu badgered the man with questions, almost to point of insult, but eventually got his answer.  The group had indeed been hunting in the area near Mamu’s encampment and in the morning one of them went off to hunt by himself.  When he returned he boasted of killing a red bear but the ice had forced him back before he could claim it.  There was no red bear in the place and Mamu knew that this man, this brutal man, had killed his beloved Red Snow.

            There was no word for revenge in Mamu’s language, there was no sense of it.  Nor of retribution, of reprisal, of vengeance.  Theirs was a simple language, the words of which were meant to connect not destroy.  But the word squatsisitilla, restoring the natural balance, Mamu knew very well.

            With great effort, and not a little coercion by agreeing to give the guide an extra pelt, Mamu found the name of the man who had killed his dog.  He said the name over and over as he tried to memorize it and the sounds felt odd in his mouth.  Even so, he knew at that moment what he had to do.  He would visit this man and talk to him.  He would set things right again and restore the balance of life.  Mamu knew he could not bring Red Snow back, but in restoring everything to its quiet rhythms, he would ease the passage of her soul into the sky.

            “John Warner,” he said over and over.  “John Warner of Manhattan.”

            The nights were dark in that time of ice, the waters cold, and the land a frozen skin over the warm earth.  But Manhattan, the jeweled city, still sparkled and survived.  Manhattan was now at the very edge of the ice, the far point of civilization.  Only 100 miles north, the freeze covered everything but the inhabitants of the city kept themselves warm before their mistscreens and their mediapods.

            Mamu packed his kayak, kissed and hugged his wife and sons, and coasted down the shore towards New York City.  The trip took three days as he tested the water with his hand to make sure the temperature was not changing, for this would be a sign of going off course.  Kayaking southwest he followed reflections like ghosts leading a wayfarer, the glint of the sun in the day and the sheen of the moon at night.  He barely slept, did not stop to hunt seal, and only ate what he needed to in order to have the energy to paddle.

            Then, watching a bear fishing near the rim, a thought suddenly occurred to him.  What he did next would have been seen as bizarre by his family and friends, but it made perfect sense to him at the time.  It took him a half-mile out of his way and added four hours onto the trip.  But in the end, as he continued the journey, he thought it was a clever decision on his part.

            Soon the stars above were overwhelmed by the universe of lights glowing on the horizon.  He had heard of the bright city, the sparkle city, the city of a billion stars, but he had never been there before.  Mamu had never ventured far from the floe on which he had been born.  And so as the skytappers and sweepways and vertical trams of Manhattan rose up in the distance, he felt a mix of awe and fear and, in his tininess, doubt about whether he would be able to do what he knew he had to do.

            Following an inner sense of energy that came from years of tracking packs of seal, Mamu paddled the waterways lacing through the landmass and eventually came to the shore of the brightest part of the city.  He passed under an immense bridge, far larger than the ice bridges of the north, and stowed his kayak at the foot of it next to a tall tower.  Then taking his pack and his spear and axe, he wandered through the streets of the city.  What he was looking for he could not have explained.  How was he to find a single man – this John Warner – in the midst of all that chaos, all those people?  Yet Mamu was a hunter who followed his intuitions and he felt certain that his goal would reveal itself in time.  Patience, he told himself, was the lens, and stubbornness the hook.

            And what did they make of him, these sturdy New Yorkers who had survived the attack and the blast and the storm and the ice?  Nothing much.  He was just another bundled trekker making his way through the challenges of the streets.  Yes he was holding a spear but stranger things were seen in New York and no one thought twice about it.

            The city in the winter, dusted with snow, has always been magic to behold.  Lovers love there and songwriters weave their melodies and even those trudging in the street do so with a secret delight.  Out-of-towners have thought that New Yorkers live exasperated lives but they mistake vigor for distress.  Everyone Mamu passed was on the way from there and there and in this way the city, even in the grip of the chill, was a lesson in grit and verve.

            But this was all quite new to Mamu and utterly overwhelming.  So many structures and people and vehicles and motion and action and interaction.  He had heard of buildings and cars and trams and all sorts of things; news of the industrial world reached his village but was greeted with bemusement, never envy.  Still, to be there in the middle of it was quite a different thing.  It struck him as a world spinning out of control.

And the sounds!  Not a moment of silence but instead a storm of language and noise.  Mamu spoke no English at all.  His tongue was a mix of Inuit and pigeon and French and noram, run through the mixer of time and slang and the need to be understood.  There were remnants of words in common with the language of the city, but he might just as well have been born on one of the lonely moons of Jupiter to understand it.

            Eventually, after a half-day trek and deep in the middle of the night, Mamu came to the place he had been searching for without knowing it.  It was perfect.  A long wide valley, utterly flat with ice, right in the middle of a vast ring of buildings like cliffs all around.  This was the ideal place for him to camp. 

            Mamu did not know this but what he had found was Central Park, encased in a permanent layer of snow, and there at the south end he erected his tent and set up his fire.  He might not be able to locate John Warner, but surely someone in one of those cliff dwellings would see his fire there in the midst and notice him.  That was the first step.  But how to attract his prey?  The answer to this had occurred to Mamu during the journey along the shore when he noticed the fishing bear.  Just like the seals that had to come up for air, so this man would have to reveal himself for something he wanted.  Not air perhaps but skins.  Bearskins.  Mamu took the pelt of the bear he had killed and carefully laid it out on the ice beside the fire.

            You would think that a native iceman camped out in Central Park with a tent, a fire, and a bearskin rug might attract the attention of the police, the media, or at least the local news.  But it did not really, or at least not with any sense of emergency.  Ice or no ice, this was still New York after all, where models wore bikinis in the winter and camels posed for ads before the holidays.  Mamu was simply assumed to be some kind of promotional event or movie shoot and the biggest issue, the open fire, was resolved when day came and he put it out.

            As he stood there before the tent though, doubt filled Mamu’s thoughts.  Was he a fool?  Was he mad?  What was he hoping would happen?  Had his pride clouded his plans?   He closed his eyes and felt a dead wind within the wind, which was nothing less than the storm of grief still inside him.  But then, floating in his imagination, was that face, her face with the round black eyes and the red fur all around.  As though she were looking right at him, the mask stripped bare, knowing him and all that he felt.  He inadvertently reached out to touch her muzzle, the soft bag of skin below her chin, the cool nose, but touched nothing instead. 

            Yet all the while, one person was taking notice.  One man among all those cliff dwellers.  Because Mamu’s intuition had been right from the start.  John Warner lived in one of the largest mansions in the city, the top five floors of a building once known as the Dakota.  It towered over Central Park and gave him an unobstructed view of life in the park, the city, and perhaps even all the way to Europe on clear days.  Something as small as Mamu would not normally have made a dent in Warner’s consciousness; he was a man of big appetites, big adventures, big money.  Warner was not a thinker but even so he was a great fan of Schopenhauer, at least in his own reading.  The world is my idea…and so everyone else can go to hell.

            But it just so happened that he was testing out a new hydroscope to see if the advertising was true, that you really could count the pores on the face of a woman a full dream away.  Amazed by its power, Warner moved the scope around until a strange sight came into view.  It was a thickly built man in a skincoat standing perfectly still before tent.  Right there down below in Central Park.  How weird!  And there on the ice before him was a bear skin, a big one.  This must be one of the traders from the north, he thought, a man with enough gumption to come all the way into Manhattan to trade.  A man, in other words, that Warner respected.  Someone with ambition.

            Knowing he would be able to get the skin from this trader, because getting what he wanted was all that Warner knew, he sent one of his assistants down to the park to lead the fellow, and his skin, back up to the apartment.

            Mamu had no idea what the man standing in front of him was saying, why he was pointing, or how he could possibly stay warm in that thin cover he was wearing.  Even when he heard the name John Warner he did not understand it at first.  It was not until he himself said it, and the other man nodded, that he knew his plan had worked.

            The walk to the building at the edge of the valley, the trip up the elevator, and the apartment itself were all a blur to Mamu.  Glossy surfaces seemed to bounce and reflect every dint of light until you were blinded by it all.  But he tried to keep his steadiness for he knew he was finally at the end of his long journey.

            Warner was standing in front of the window when the assistant ushered Mamu in.  He was an amazingly tall, gruff looking man, with huge hands.  And his manner was anything but quiet.  A flood of words came out of Warner’s mouth which were like icicles to Mamu but he understood instantly that Warner wanted the skin.

            Mamu put it down onto the floor and stared at Warner, as still as ice and stone silent.  Warner, fed up at this mute iceman in his high-tech lair, finally bellowed: “ Well what the hell do you want for it?”  Mamu did not understand that either but from the tone he guessed the meaning.  He gathered himself up to his full small height, straightened his back, and tried to force all his rage into his steady glare.  Then he pounded the floor with his spear once.

            “I am Mamu the hunter,” he said, trying not to waver.  When there was no reaction, he banged the spear on the floor again.  “I am Mamu, son of Nuk, great-great-grandson of the first of the returned men.  And you…you are nothing.  You are less than nothing.  You are below the even the krill that feed the whales.”

            Another pound on the floor with the spear, but Warner did not budge, did not say a word.   In his view there was merely a ridiculously small fellow with a round, expressionless face standing in his office holding a pole.  And the words, of course, were complete jibberish.  It was like some kind of wacko joke being played for his birthday.  Except that it was not his birthday.  Warner might have laughed but the man before him was so intense in his demeanor that he thought for a moment that this might actually not be someone’s gag.

             “It is you that I have come for,” Mamu said.  “You, who took the life of my Red Snow, beloved of my family.  Red Snow, do you understand?  My guardian, my friend.  Whose name even now is echoed in the sky.”

            Warner almost laughed but the tension in the air would not support it.  What on earth was this iceman babbling about?

            “You, you did this.  My Red Snow!  The noblest creature that ever walked the ice and you killed her.  How dare you,” Mamu said and this time he stomped the spear with such force that it actually cracked one of the Italianate tiles.

            It was then that Warner suddenly realized that this absurd fellow in his Eskimo costume might actually cause him harm.  He was thinking about whether to go for the gun he kept in his desk or the ceremonial sword on the wall when Mamu slowly and steadily lifted up this spear and pointed it directly at Warner’s heart.  The point on the tip hung perfectly in the air and Warner only then saw that there really was a sharp blade on the end and he knew that any move could be his last.

            “Now you shall pay,” Mamu said bluntly.  ”You will pay for this crime.  Pay with your life just as you took that of my Red Snow.” 

            He moved the spear forward in the air a few inches until it almost touched Warner’s chest.  It was remarkably steady there, not even a hint of motion.  During that pause, Warner though he might be spared.  But Mamu was only gathering his courage for what he knew must be done.

            “I kill you now,” he said, not moving the spear.  “I do this now for my Red Snow!  From now on you are dead.  I take your life in exchange for hers.  As the sun moves, and the sea shines, and the otters bark…you are dead for your misdeed.  From this day forward, you are dead.  Do you hear me?  Do you understand me?  I declare it!  I Mamu, son of Nuk, now take your life.”

            Warner blinked once in utter confusion but Mamu took that to be a sign of understanding and at that he lowered the spear, shook his head once as if to signal the end, pounded the floor for the last time, and turned and walked out of the room, the apartment, the building.  Warner, stunned and confused, watched him leave without relief or fear or much of anything.  In fact he had absolutely no sense of what to feel or think.  What had just happened, he wondered, but no answer came.

    

            Outside, it was snowing again and Mamu opened his mouth to catch some flakes on his tongue.  They tasted like the middle of the winter with a robust Spring to come.  A large flake fell onto his cheek and melted there and he knew that Red Snow in the sky was thanking him with her tears for avenging her.  The man who killed her was himself dead.  Perhaps not now, not tomorrow, not even for many years.  But some time – in the timeless time that is all that matters  – this man would die.  There was no question about it.  And whenever that was and for whatever cause, he would do so knowing the reason for his death.  Though it be in the next few moments or at the end of a long and tiring existence…he would know that he was losing his life for the one he took.

            Squatsisitilla.

            Mamu felt a quiet inside that he knew was the touch of his beloved.  And he trudged north, knowing he would dream of Red Snow each night along the dark shore until he returned to his home and heard the ice laughing once again.