side, the hungry animals surged forward. With a sudden crack the tree fell, its outstretched branches slapping the muzzles and shoulders of the most eager reindeer. The animals staggered from the impact, but immediately plunged back. In an instant the tree was surrounded by reindeer stripping it of beard lichen.
While the deer were occupied, Heckram and Lasse cut two more trees in rapid succession, taking turns with the axe. Lasse's animals, hearing the falling giants, came from their place farther down the hillside to join in the easy feeding. The two herdmen sat down, panting, on the stump end of one of the fallen trees and watched their beasts feed.
'You're right. It's about time to move them,' Heckram said as if their conversation had never been interrupted. 'The godde know where the feeding is best. A wise herdman sees that his animals follow them.'
'Good. Tonight?'
Heckram considered. Night was the best time to move in this weather. The colder temperatures froze the top of the snow in a hard crust that men and beasts could walk on. He and Lasse could move their animals up higher in the hills, where the thaws of spring had not yet ruined the grazing. Then, when spring reached that high, they would bring their animals down again, to begin their longer migratory trek from the forests across the flat tundra to the summer grounds.
'Tonight. Is your grandmother coming?'
Lasse looked aside, squinting across the bright, snowy hillside. 'No. Not this time.'
It was a bad sign, and Heckram knew it. When the older folk began thinking they were too old to move from the talvsit to the temporary camps in the higher hills for the early spring grazing, it was a sign they were wearying of life. 'I don't think my mother will come this year either. Nor Elsa's parents.'
Lasse considered this gravely. But all he said was: it will make a lot of animals for you to manage.'
Heckram snorted, trying to speak lightly. 'They say our fathers managed this many and more, and all belonging to themselves. We've a way to go before we regain all they had.'
'It's so important to you.'
Heckram gave Lasse a strange look. 'And isn't it to you? Besides, what else is there?
Wouldn't it be nice to kill a fat, strong harke for meat this autumn, instead of having to harvest the sickliest one that might not winter through anyway? How would it be to have fresh, thick hides on the floor of the kator this winter, instead of making do with the old worn ones? Wouldn't you like to load pulkors and harkar with your excess meat and hides, and go south to trade? To have tools of bronze instead of stone and bone, and shirts of warm wool instead of patched leather?'
'Do we live so poorly, then?' Lasse asked softly.
Heckram was startled into silence for an instant. 'No. But it's not so rich, either.'
Lasse stared off across the snow while he spoke, and Heckram wondered if he spoke to him or to himself. 'Yet, there's poor and poor. There's Joboam, with twice the animals that you own, the richest furs, the sleekest vaja, the best of everything. Yet, with all his wealth, Elsa wouldn't have him. And there's you, with enough to go around, if you are thrifty and careful. But Elsa was willing to wait for you to be ready. I think you two would have been wealthier than Joboam or the herdlord himself. Heckram, do you ever wish you hadn't waited?'
Heckram looked at Lasse, seeing him anew. His color was high, and his grandmother had put new braiding on his old hat. He wasn't sitting like a boy waiting for Heckram's reply. His posture said that he was a man now, and they were men discussing the ways of herd life. Idly he wondered who the girl was, and how well Lasse would herd the impulses of his heart. But when he spoke aloud, he said coldly, 'No. I've never regretted my waiting.' Only hers. But he did not add the last aloud, and Lasse would never suspect it.
If Lasse heard, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he abruptly announced, 'Capiam is thinking of asking Tillu to come with us to the summer grounds.'
Heckram stiffened slightly. 'What for?'
'What for?' Lasse echoed incredulously. 'As healer, of course. How long has it been since we've had one? The old women do their best, but all they know is what they have from their mothers. They aren't really healers. And Tillu is good, even if she couldn't save Elsa. Look how well my arm healed.'
After she shot you, Heckram thought to himself. And you'll never know just how effective her 'cure' for Elsa was, my friend.
'Lanya took her son over to see Tillu,' Lasse was gossiping on. 'For that rash he's always had. Tillu asked a lot of questions and then told the boy, 'no more reindeer milk or cheese.' The rash is nearly gone now. And she made a rub for my grandmother's shoulder that takes the stiffness out, even in the cold weather.'
'I expect she'll come with us, then,' Heckram observed. He hadn't spoken to her since Elsa's death. His lack of feeling puzzled him. Either he should be grateful to her for ending Elsa's suffering, or hate her for ending Elsa's life. This peculiar emptiness he felt was inappropriate. It was too close to what he had felt at the thought of marrying Elsa.
Did he think the healer was as inevitable? Idly he took out his belt knife to cut a slender whip from a nearby sapling. He began to whittle at it, half listening to Lasse.
'If Capiam asks her, I bet she'll come. There's some talk against the idea. Joboam can't stand her half-wit son. He says the boy has wolf eyes. Some of the others feel the same.
Kerlew didn't seem all that strange to me, but the other -'
'Kerlew is not a half-wit,' Heckram said firmly, and this time it was the strength of his emotion that surprised him. His knife bit deeply into the bark.
'Well, that's true, I suppose. I mean, he doesn't go about drooling or anything like that. But when Missa tried to send him for water that morning, he acted like he couldn't understand what she wanted. Finally she gave him the bucket and pointed at the spring. When he got to the spring, he turned the bucket upside down and sat on it.
Didn't go any farther, just sat and stared at the water, with that spooky look in his eyes.
Then he knelt down and touched the blood-stained snow ...' Lasse's voice suddenly faltered. He cleared his throat, obviously shortening his story. 'Two of Kelr's little boys tried to talk to him, but he didn't answer. So they pelted him with snow, just to stir him, you know how boys are. And Kerlew, twice their age, ran back to Tillu, howling. And wouldn't go back, for the bucket or the water. You can't say that isn't strange.'
'The strangest part is that Kelr would let his sons so treat a stranger.' A chunk of bark flew.
'It was just a boys' prank!' objected Lasse. He bent to pick frozen clumps of snow from his damp leggings.
'Perhaps to Kelr's boys it was. But what was it to Kerlew? And you can't judge a boy's worth from a minor thing like that. Look how he came alone to the talvsit that night. I still can't believe he followed the pulkor trail all the way from his tent to our camp that night. Alone, in the dark.'
'But that's another thing,' Lasse objected stubbornly. 'Why didn't he stay in his tent, as he was told?'
'I'd promised I'd send you to keep him company. And, in the rush of things, I forgot to even ask you.'
'That's not a very good reason to walk all that way in the cold and dark.'
'Perhaps not for one of us. But Kerlew strikes me as a very single-minded young man.'
'Single-minded, you say. Simple-minded, say the others. Well, it's no difference to me. Tolerating Kerlew is a small price to pay for having a healer with us again.'
Heckram was silent for long moments. Then he gave a harsh bark of laughter that made Lasse jump. He looked at the crooked arrow shaft he had just fashioned and flung it away into the snow. In a tired voice he asked, 'I wonder if anyone has ever asked what price Kerlew will pay for us to have Tillu as our healer?'
'What price?'
Tillu turned slowly from her fire. She had just finished pouring steaming water into a small wooden trough. 'What you want to give.'
Joboam thought it was a question. He sat bare-chested on her pallet, cradling his left forearm in his lap. A poultice of cooked and pounded inner bark from a spruce tree covered the angry suppuration on the back of his forearm. The cut was no longer than a man's finger. But the swelling it had caused had puffed and stiffened his elbow, and made his fingers into fat sausages on a thick hand. Despite his pain, he bartered. 'Two wolf hides, without the tails. Or a sausage and two cheeses?'
'Whatever you choose. How long, this hurt?'
Joboam glanced down at the injury and wrinkled his brow, as if looking at it increased the discomfort. He took his time to answer. 'Long time. Long, long time ago. I was carving, and cut myself. Not bad. It didn't bleed that
