Free Alaska by James A. Michener Page A

searching about for a wife, he fastened his attention upon a young woman of rare attractiveness, one who was courted by various men, but his mother, a woman who had lost her husband early in a hunting accident while chasing the woolly mammoth, saw clearly that her son would come to harm if he tied himself to that woman, and she launched a campaign to make him appreciate how much better his life would be if he allied himself with Tevuk, a somewhat older woman of common sense and unusual capacity for work Varnak, captivated by the younger, had resisted his mother's counsel and was about to take the seductive one, when the Ancient One barred the exit from their hut and would not allow her son to leave for three days until she was assured that some other man had captured the enchantress 'She weaves a spell, Varnak I saw her gathering moss and searching for antlers to pulverize I'm protecting you from her '
    He was disconsolate at losing the wonderful one,, and it was some time before he was prepared to listen to his mother, but when his anger subsided he was able to look at Tevuk with clear eyes and he saw that his mother was right Tevuk was going to be as helpful when an old woman of forty as she was now 'She's the kind who grows stronger with the seasons, Varnak Like me ' And Varnak had discovered this to be true
    41
    Now, in this difficult time when there was almost no food in the cave-hut, Varnak became doubly appreciative of his two good women, for his wife searched the land for the merest scrap for their two sons, while his mother gathered not only her grandsons but also the other children of the village to take their minds off hunger by telling them of the heroic traditions of their tribe: 'In the long ago our people lived in the south where there were many trees and animals of all kinds to eat. Do you know what south means?'
    'No.' And in freezing darkness as winter clamped down she told them: 'It's warm, my grandmother told me. And it has no endless winter.'
    'Why did those people come to this land?'
    This was a problem which had always perplexed the Ancient One, and she dealt with it according to her vague understandings: 'There are strong people and weak. My son Varnak is very strong, you know that. And so is Toorak, the man who killed the great bison. But when our people lived in the south, they were not strong, and others drove us out of those good lands. And when we moved north to lands not so good, they drove us out of there, too. One summer we came here, and it was beautiful, and everyone danced, my grandmother said. But then what happened?'
    She asked this of a girl eleven seasons old, who said: 'Then winter came,' and the old one said: 'Yes, winter came.'
    She was surprisingly correct in her summary of the clan's history, and of mankind's.
    Human life had originated in hot, steaming climates where it was easy to survive, but as soon as sufficient people were assembled to make competition for living space inevitable say after a million years the abler groups started to edge northward toward the more temperate zone, and in this more equable climate they began to invent those agencies of control, such as seasonal agriculture and the husbandry of animals, which would make superior forms of civilization possible.
    And then once more, in the time of the Ancient One's great-great-great-grandmother, or even further back, competition for favorable sites recurred, but now it was the less able who were forced to move on, leaving the most fit to hold on to the temperate zones. This meant that in the Northern Hemisphere the subarctic areas began to be filled with people who had been evicted from the more congenial climates. Always the pressure came from the warmer lands to the south, and always it ended with people along the edges being forced to live on cold and arid lands which could barely support them.
    42
    But there was another interpretation of this movement to the north, and the Ancient One related it proudly to her