Strontium-90 Read Free Page B

their totems.”
    “Tell me more,” the Lur said.
    Kulik did.
    Soon, the Lur raised its stone axe and cut its hand. Kulik cut his palm with his knife. They clasped hands—the Lur’s dwarfed Kulik’s cold fingers. They mingled blood and swore frightful oaths.
    Before they left, Kulik knelt and pretended to retie his moccasins. In reality, he palmed his newly chipped arrowhead and dipped it in a drop of the Lur’s blood. Kulik chanted softly so the arrowhead would not simply lap the blood and grow greedy for more. He had sworn the oaths and dared not risk his soul. He let the arrowhead feed on the Lur’s strength and ferocity. He let the arrowhead grow strong with the power of a living totem.
    ***
    Kulik regained his strength the next several days as the Lur continually startled him. It could hear a rat burrowing in the snow or sniff out a hare where it stood frozen. When the hare bounded out of the snow as they closed in, the Lur hurled a wooden dart before Kulik could draw his bowstring. The beast’s accuracy was uncanny.
    In three days, they crossed the Ice four times, searching each valley for the last king’s cairn. Fortunately, each time they crossed the Ice the wind blew gently and the sun shined. The Lur slew a caribou in the last valley and they feasted that night before a roaring fire. Instead of twisted dwarf trees, pines grew here in abundance.
    Before the fire died, the Lur rattled its spirit bones in its huge cupped hands and threw them onto a circle in the dirt. The beast crouched over the bones like a dire wolf over a lemming’s hole. Soon, while its hands shook, the Lur gathered the bones and dropped them into the pouch.
    Kulik lay on his side, with his stomach comfortably bloated with meat. He sat up, however, and rubbed sleep out of his eyes as the Lur picked up its axe.
    The axe-head was fashioned out of a red stone unfamiliar to Kulik. A normal axe had a thin, triangular-shaped piece of flint set in a split of wood and tightly tied by leather thongs. The Lur’s axe was different. The red stone was smooth, without the chip marks of a normal axe. It was heavy and oblong, with a hole drilled through the middle of the stone. The axe’s maker had thrust a stick through the hole and wedged it tight through cunning artifice. It still had leather thongs wrapped around it, however. One end had been ground to a sharp edge, but that part was also uncannily smooth. Someone had chiseled tiny symbols upon the axe-head and painted them white. The huge axe was dotted with them.
    “This is Blood of the Earth ,” the Lur chanted. “My father gave it to me. His father gave it to him. It was fashioned before the great battle against the Great Ice, thousands upon thousands of moons ago. After each heroic victory, the bearer chiseled his soul’s mark upon the axe. In this way, the axe grew more powerful through the generations. Tomorrow, I will brandish it in the Ice. And because of its strength, we shall march to the cairn of the last king of the Lurii.”
    “The bones spoke of this?” Kulik asked.
    The Lur’s ears lay flat against its head and it snarled like a sabertooth.
    Fear coursed through Kulik. He lay down as his grandfather had said a man should do before an enraged bear. In this way, hunters who acted dead sometimes survived as the bear sniffed their pretend corpse and then waddled away.
    After Kulik heard the thud of the axe upon the ground, and the Lur as it stretched out, he peeked around. Kulik waited until the fire become red glowing embers. Stealthily, he arose and silently sang the weasel song. He crept to Blood of the Earth . With a pounding heart, Kulik crouched before the legendary axe. His thirsty eyes drank in the many marks. Then, just as stealthily, he retreated to the other side of the embers. He sat cross-legged and took out his double-length arrow. Kulik pricked his finger, and with all the delicate art of a manito, he painted two of the Lur marks on the arrow.
    Later, he bundled the