Strontium-90 Read Free

if that was a sign. His grandfather could have read it. Kulik knew he was not yet manito enough.
    He sat up and his chest tightened. After his grandfather’s death, he had simply hoped to be a shaman. Now he aimed to become a manito, to replace the coward who led the People.
    The valley had moss, patches of snow and twisted, dwarfish trees unlike any he’d seen. All around him towered baleful glaciers. The ice mountains howled their anger this morning like little gods, a cold thing that ought to have made him shiver. Instead, Kulik began to search. He found sparrow nests in the wind-twisted trees and eggs in the nests. He chanted to the sparrows, asked their permission and then ate the eggs and trapped several of the fluttering birds. The ease of it showed him the increase in his power.
    Fortified by the food, slight as it was, he worked hard. With his stubby flint knife, he notched the end of the stick. He used sparrow feathers to fletch it because small sparrows dare to attack ravens many times their size in defense of their nests. In three carefully cut slivers, Kulik fixed tufts of dire wolf fur for cunning.
    It might have surprised Kulik once, but not now, when he discovered perfect flint pieces. With a shaping stone and the upper beak of an eagle, he chipped and ground an arrowhead. The eagle totem would grant the arrow swiftness in flight. Tomorrow he would bind the flint to the arrow. Then he would paint a blood portrait on a boulder and perhaps let the arrowhead sip the blood so it would become greedy for more.
    Kulik bowed his head in awe at what he did. This arrow might become as deadly as Feast of a Mammoth . He had once held the legendary arrow as it quivered with rage.
    “It thirsts to kill,” his grandfather had told him, the arrow’s maker. “Now chant the song of safety, lest a death spirit strike you tonight in your sleep.”
    Kulik shuffled deeper into the valley. Thoughts of food began to consume him. He had three regular arrows and his bow. He began to hunt for hares and rats, although the spirits yet shrieked across the icy mountains.
    It dawned on Kulik later that this was a sacred valley. The constantly howling winds, the lack of rabbits or rats, the strangely twisted trees and the mossy humps and folds of land, a dreadful fear seeped into him. He shuffled over a rise of ground and came upon a terrifying print in the snow. He knelt and his heart began to flutter like one of the sparrows he’d caught earlier.
    The footprint was like a man’s but twice as big. The endpoints on the toes could have been claw marks. Kulik knew the legends of the Lurii. Some told of Lurii hunting men.
    As Kulik stared at the footprint, a shadow filled it. Openmouthed, Kulik raised his head. He felt numb and was unable to move or croak a sound.
    The beast was huge, likely ten feet tall when it stood upright. Its furry head resembled a man’s in a vague way, although the head was as wide as Kulik’s chest. It had a flattish snout, with flaring, leathery nostrils. The ears were triangular like a sabertooth’s ears. The eyes were black and sunken under a bony brow ridge. As it opened its mouth, the beast revealed wolfish fangs.
    “Who are you?” the beast asked, using the spirit tongue.
    Kulik was too dazed to reply, too terrified to draw his knife.
    The beast’s fur was sable, sleek and black. It had long arms, one of which rested on the ground, on its knuckles. It had comparatively short legs, and it hunched forward, as if it used its dangling arms to help it walk or run on all fours like an animal. The beast must weigh as much as five men.
    Kulik groaned. Sweat trickled down his back.
    The Lur cocked its awful head.
    That’s when Kulik noted other things. The Lur wore a leather belt. From it dangled a rabbit-skin pouch. A big leather sack lay at the Lur’s feet. In its monstrous hand was a dreadful stone axe.
    “Why are you here?” the Lur asked. “I thought men feared the Ice.”
    Kulik tried to gather his