the domed sod hut with her buckets of water.
The winter camp was quiet as they wended their way between sod and bark shelters to Stina's hut. They passed the meat racks and storage huts of their neighbors. Here were the atti, platforms on four tall legs where frozen sides of reindeer meat were resting. They passed njalla, tall racks set high on a single smooth, slippery pole, the best way to guard food against voracious wolverines. A row of reindeer sledges, turned upside down to keep out the snow, looked much like a row of upended boats, with their keels, sterns, ribs, and bulwarks. There were the covered akja for hauling loads, and the half-covered pulkor for driving. Lasse drew energy from the familiar sights of home. But Heckram found he dreaded seeing Stina.
Every winter the herdfolk returned to the talvsit for a few months of rest. The sod and bark huts were patched, or new ones built by younger couples. Fresh birch twigs were cut and spread on the earth floor and covered with a layer of hides. Down from the storage racks came the sledges and winter skis that had rested there all through the summer while the folk were on the wide tundra, and up on the racks went the summer gear that would not be needed until the spring migration began. Their lives made an elliptical orbit between this winter talvsit and their summer camp at the base of the Cataclysm.
Heckram loved the site of their talvsit. He had visited other ones, when he was but a child on the back of one of his father's harkar, but thought none of them were so well placed as his own. Here were deep fresh springs that never failed, steaming in winter as the cold water gushed out of the ground and made contact with the colder air. The forested hills offered plenty of fuel for the fires and ample birches with their tender twigs for flooring and their knurled bark for the carving of utensils. The snow fell deep on the hillsides, but beneath it were tender lichens of the pine fells, no inedible soggy green moss. The herd wandered, but never far from the camp. The watchful herdfolk guarded their beasts as they pawed deep holes in the snow and shoved their hairy muzzles down to feast on the revealed lichen.
The old woman's winter shelter was on the outskirts of the sita, where she and her husband had built it when their life together was new. Heckram lifted the door flap of Stina's hut and motioned Lasse in. He paused outside to stamp the clinging snow from his boots, then gritted his teeth and ducked in to face Lasse's grandmother.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the sun-bright snow to the fire-lit dimness of the cosy hut. Flames burned cleanly on the stone hearth, the arran, near the center of the hut. Stina knelt nearby, tethered to the center pole of the hut by her belt weaving. She did not deign to notice their entrance, and both stood, feeling awkward.
She was dressed in worn but brightly colored woven garments decorated with the bright ribbon weaving of her own hands. Her deep black eyes flashed at them once from their deep nests of wrinkles. Then she looked away as if they were of no consequence to her. Her thinning black hair was pulled back from her face in a severely neat roll, and her busy hands never paused in their manipulation of the bright fibers she joined. Neat shanks of dyed fibers and grass rested near her, waiting their turn to be worked into the bright pattern. Everywhere was the work of those same tireless hands, in the cheeses and blood sausages that hung from the rafters, in the cheese molds and salt flask woven from grass fibers, and the traveling baskets with their intricately simple patterns. The water buckets stood brimming with fresh water from the spring. Here a roll of shoe grass hung from a rafter, ready to insulate the laced boots her hands stitched. The carved shoe-grass comb near it had been worked by Lasse's father and was older than the boy. The hut smelled of the birch twigs and clean hides, of the fire's heat and the cheeses. It was a homey, welcoming smell, and Lasse sighed as he sank gratefully by the fire.
Stina knotted a bit of the fibers and slowly unfastened the work from her waist. 'So.
You've found your way home, have you? Never mind that someone might have been worrying about you, out hunting two days when you said you'd be back in one.'
The two men looked at each other, and Heckram shrugged at Lasse and whispered,
'You tell her. She's your grandmother.'
But Stina's ears were as keen as ever, and she went on mercilessly, 'Never mind that someone's old grandmother has to fetch her own water, and check her grandson's harke as well as her own. Never mind that she cooked food enough for two last night, and kept it warm far into the night for someone who wasn't coming. Never mind that she must spend an hour looking for the milking scoop that someone had hung up out of sight and reach, and then struggle to milk a vaja that hasn't been trained to stand properly still. Never mind -'
'I got shot.' Lasse's words dropped on the lecture like a load of tree snow on an unsuspecting hunter. 'Heckram, help me get my coat off.'
But before Heckram could move, Stina was there, tugging gently at the sleeve as the tone of her lecture changed abruptly. 'It's just as your mother was saying last night, Heckram, when the poor woman stopped in to see if Lasse had taken supplies for more than one day. 'Off they go to hunt, with never a care as to whether we'll see them again!
Off chasing the wild vaja, when they'd both be better off at home, tending to what they already have, yes, and perhaps looking to a future that is not so far away.' Oh, but what does a man care when he worries his mother and gives her a night without rest?
Nothing.'
Her tongue stopped for a moment as a tousled Lasse emerged from his coat. She handed the garment to Heckram for him to hang up and knelt by her grandson as if he were a child. 'Well. You may be a bad shot, Heckram, but at least you made a neat job of bandaging it. Here I expected blood and a mess, with a piece of leather strapped over it.
But this is as nice a job as I've seen since Kila the midwife went south with the traders and married there, never to come back to those who needed her, never even thinking of her old uncle left alone. But look at your shirt, boy! Now where am I going to get the wool to mend that, and this your father's own shirt, made for him by your mother's little hands. You've bled all over it! She traded the hides of her own reindeer for that wool, she who could scarcely afford to, and worked into the night by the firelight to weave -'
'Heckram didn't shoot me,' Lasse cut in mercilessly. 'It was a stranger, hunting alone and on her own. And she's the one who bandaged me.'
'Well!' Stina rocked back on her heels, to regard him with wounded anger. 'And never a word of this do you tell to your own grandmother! I suppose the whole sita is buzzing with this tale, and I shall have to hear of my grandson's adventure from that gossip Bror. Well, what am I to expect? What am I, just a worthless old woman, fit only to weave and cook and mend and clean and milk and ...' She added sting to her words as with seeming meekness she turned to the fire, to move a simmering pot from its edge. Turning her back on them, she shuffled with exaggerated care to the wooden trunk to take out bowls and spoons.
'You are the first to hear of it,' Heckram declared hastily. 'But for a word or two to Elsa, just enough to be polite. She knows she'll have to get the gist of the tale from you, while Lasse eats and sleeps. No, thank you.' He shook his head to the proffered bowl.
'Now I must leave, so that Lasse can tell you all of it. I've a mother of my own to return to, and no doubt chores to catch up on.'
'Listen to him! As if Ristin would let her home go to wrack and ruin because her son is gone for a night. It isn't so long, young man, since she was bringing in wolf pelts, and you but a brat in the wood komse hanging from her pack saddle, yes, and bawling so that she had to stuff sweet marrow in your greedy little mouth to keep you quiet. But no, now he's a man, and the only one who has ever hunted or worked, I suppose. Well, Lasse, are you going to tell me of this strange woman who shoots my grandson and then mends him? Or must I wait to hear the tale from Ristin?'
Lasse rolled his eyes at Heckram, but he only grinned as he ducked from the hut. He took a deep lungful of the cold air, grateful that Lasse was in competent hands, and that Stina was not angry with him. Evening had fallen swiftly, and the only light in the sita was that which leaked from the huts. He hurried over the familiar paths between the huts, avoiding sleeping dogs curled before their owners' doors, ducking around the looming storage racks. A figure stepped suddenly from the darkness directly into his path, and Heckram halted abruptly to keep from running into him.
'Sorry,' he murmured as he moved to pass him.
'Of course you are,' drawled the other, and Heckram halted, turning slowly.
'Do you have a problem, Joboam?' he asked with excessive courtesy.
