Free Alaska by James A. Michener Page B

children: 'There were brave men and women who loved cold lands and the hunt for mammoths and caribou. They liked the endless days of summer and were not afraid of winter nights like this.' Looking at each of her listeners, she tried to instill in them a pride in their ancestors: 'My son is a brave man like that and so is Toorak, who killed the bison, and so must you be when you grow up and go out to fight the mammoths.'
    The old woman was right about many of the men who came north. They thrilled to their contests with whale and walrus. They were eager to do battle with the white polar bear and the woolly mammoth. They fought the seal for his fur so that they might survive the arctic winters, and they mastered the secrets of ice and snow and sudden blizzards. They devised ways of combating the ferocious mosquitoes that attacked in sun-darkening hordes each spring, and they taught their sons how to track animals for fur and food so that life could continue after they were dead. 'These are the true people of the north,' the old woman said, and she might have added that a hardier breed never existed on this earth.
    'I want you to be like them,' she concluded, and one of the girls began to whimper: 'I'm hungry,' and the Ancient One took from the sealskin tunic she wore in winter a piece of dried seal blubber and apportioned it among the children, retaining none for herself.
    One day at the turning of the seasons, when there was practically no daylight in the village, the old woman almost lost courage, for one of the children who had gathered in the dark hut to hear her tales asked: 'Why don't we go back to the south, where there's food?' and in honesty she had to reply: 'The old people often asked that question, and sometimes they pretended to themselves and said: ”Yes, next year we will go back,” but they never meant it. We cannot go back. You cannot go back. You are now people of the north.'
    She never considered her life in the north a penalty, nor would she allow her son or her grandchildren to think of it in that way, but as the hellish days of winter closed down when days lengthened but cold increased and ice grew thicker she would wait till the children were asleep, and then whisper to her hungry son and his wife: 'Another winter like this and we will all die,' for even now they existed by chewing sealskin, which provided them little energy.
    'Where will we go?' her son asked, and she said: 'My father spent four days chasing a mammoth once. It led him east across the barren lands, and over there he saw fields of green.'
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    'Why not go south?' Tevuk asked, and the old woman told her daughter-in-law: 'The south never had a place for us. I'm finished with the south.'
    So in those tantalizing days of early spring when winter refused to stop tormenting these people at the western end of the land bridge, the fine hunter Varnak, seeing his family slowly dying of hunger, began asking about the land to the east, and he came upon a very old man who told him: 'One morning when I was young and with nothing better to do, I wandered eastward, and when night came with the sun still high in the heavens, for it was summer, I felt no need to return home, so on and on I went for two more days, and on the third day I saw something which excited me.'
    'What?' Varnak asked, and the old man said, eyes aglimmer as if the incident had occurred three days ago: 'The body of a dead mammoth.' He allowed Varnak time to fathom the significance of this revelation, and when nothing was said, he explained: 'If a mammoth saw reason to cross that bleak land, men would have a reason too,'
    to which Varnak said: 'Yes, but you said the mammoth died,' and the man laughed: 'True, but there was a reason for him to try. And you have just as good a reason.
    For if you remain here, you will starve.'
    'If I go, will you go with me?' and the man said: 'I am too old. But you ...”And that day Varnak informed the four members of his family: 'When summer comes we shall