The Gathering Night by Margaret Elphinstone

myself in the winter Camp of Sendoa’s family, and they told me that they were Auk People.
    That’s how I lost my kin, and my place in the world, and that’s how I found it again. If you’re not my kin now, then I have none. And if you are – if you say you are – then I’ve come home.
    Alaia said:
    Kemen didn’t actually tell us his whole story – not on that first evening when we sat round the hearth at White Beach Camp. His tongue was still so strange, even though he’d spent a whole winter learning how to speak properly, that it was hard to listen to him. I think he told us as much as he could, and sometimes he’s talked about his old life since. It’s hard to remember exactly what anyone said on a particular day, and how much we’ve heard since, and how much is just the picture we make in our own minds when we listen and remember. But certainly he told us where he’d come from, and what had happened. When we’d been at Salmon Camp last Year these terrible things were happening in the Lynx People’s hunting lands, and we knew nothing about them.
    I was very troubled by his story. I didn’t know then how much it would come to affect us. I was especially worried about the little boy whose body Kemen and Basajaun had dropped into the sea. What would happen to that child’s soul now? Kemen seemed to think the Lynx spirits would understand what they’d done. Perhaps the sea didn’t give food to the Lynx People in the way it does for us.
    Later on, after Gathering Camp, I told Kemen my fears. He didn’t know what I was talking about at first. I had to explain how when Auk People are lost at sea we beg the sea spirits to bring the drowned souls back to land. Kemen didn’t know that you shouldn’t eat anything out of the sea for a full quarter of the next Moon or the sea spirits won’t let the lost People come back. I told him he should beg the sea spirits to make sure he’d never taken any sea Animal that had once eaten one of his lost family. Kemen said that everything I said was new to him. But he didn’t eat any food from the sea for a quarter of the next Moon – I said I was sure the spirits would understand why he’d been so long about it – and after that I think he felt better. I stopped dreaming about that little Lynx boy too, which was a relief to me.
    But I had something else to worry about. Kemen first came to Sendoa’s Camp in Yellow Leaf Moon, just a short while before we lost Bakar. His troubles were ending just as ours were beginning. I worked that out in my mind while he was speaking, and the terrible thought occurred to me that perhaps he’d brought bad spirits with him on his journey, and when these spirits reached the Auk People they’d abandoned Kemen and started to feast on us instead. I looked at my mother to see what she was thinking. If I’d thought of this, she most certainly would have done so. And, unlike me, she would probably know what to do about it.
    Nekané said:
    Next day I was sitting on the hillside opposite the high sea stack that lies under the Evening Sun, exposed to the open seas that come from the edge of the world. The inward side of the stack is sheltered by the island, facing the Morning Sun. That’s where the guillemots and kittiwakes nest.
    Amets and Sendoa were showing Kemen where to climb. I watched the three of them gathering eggs. Amets and Sendoa moved quickly across the cliff-face, their bare toes feeling for cracks between the narrow shelves where the nests were. They collected the auks’ eggs as they went, reaching out with one hand while clinging on with the other, with no more pause than a man makes between one step of a dance and the next. Sometimes they crept along the rock face so stealthily they caught a parent bird unawares. They didn’t have snares with them – they’d only come for eggs today – but Amets reached