The Glass Mountains by Cynthia Kadohata

greater threat than a storm, no matter how big. I wanted to feel something again, to miss my parents and Maruk and Katinka. But I was too tired.  
    Though nothing horrible happened, this part of the trip was in certain ways worse than the previous part. The tedium of walking overwhelmed us at times. I felt I wanted to bury my head in the sand and suffocate myself to escape the tedium. When, half-starving, we reached the second lake, we collapsed in it with the dogs. One man was so tired his head fell under the water and he didn’t bother to lift it. Jobei helped him lift himself.  
    This lake was smaller by far than the last, and now there was no question of settling down. No one saw the point of staying. We found the discards of a previous group of campers—goods that probably had grown too heavy to carry. Mostly the previous group had left behind glass bottles, probably using furrto skins instead as water containers. Bakshami was a culture of glass: unbreakable glass, breakable glass, colored and clear glass, sand glass and rock glass and glass woven into threads. But during the last month when we’d been famished, we’d taken to chewing on our furrto skins. So the skins, in addition to being lighter than the bottles, doubled as food during a pinch. At the new lake we trapped furrtos for both food and new water containers.  
    We’d started cutting our hair short and shaving the dogs to get rid of the fleas, but at the lake we let our hair grow again. One family announced the mother was pregnant. They started to build a dwelling, and another family began a dwelling of their own. But except for Ansmeea and a few especially weak children, our bodies had grown into the walking. We moved with less grace but greater strength than we once had. As exhausted as we were, we still held hopes for the future, and we knew there was no future at this little lake. It wasn’t large enough to support a village even a small portion of the size of my old town. So, eventually, forty-nine of us left.  
    This time as we walked Jobei’s face thinned and grew gaunt. He retained his sweetness, but Leisha grew sullen and quiet. She didn’t care about mimicry or jokes anymore. Sometimes Jobei would try to perk her up by asking her to tell him jokes or by making up jokes to tell her. And Tarkahn’s previous constant talking had devolved into a nonsensical muttering that grew quieter and quieter until one day he moved his lips but no sound came out. I don’t know which day that happened—it happened so slowly the change had seemed almost natural, and I could scarcely imagine a time when he’d expressed himself with vigor.  
    We gave Ansmeea an extra ration each day, but she continued to wither away until we didn’t understand how she stayed alive. Her brown hair had gotten bleached from the sun even through her hood, and her skin, which formerly held tinges of sky blue, turned pink like her mother’s had been, so that she looked less and less like a Bakshami. She no longer walked; Artie carried her on the sled every day.  
    Now and then we’d come across skeletons, but most of them appeared old, from before the current troubles. There were a few, however, that appeared more recent. If there was no food we chewed on these bones for sustenance.  
    Not long after the previous lake, we came across a camp that had been decimated much as ours had been. The ashes hadn’t yet been incorporated into the landscape, and a sickening sweet smell lingered. The thought that we could be killed even this far into our trip disillusioned all of us, and one man, who’d already lost his will, lost his life as well at that. He simply looked at that decimated camp and he lay down, the life gone from him.  
    We didn’t even bother to play the rhythms. I lay awake until half-night staring into the sky and listening for the sound of humming. Once I looked around and saw the faces of my compatriots under the bright moons. All of them had eyes wide open as