Free Through the Whirlpool by K. Eastkott Page A

friend was reaching out… that look of shock a nd fear in his eyes as he realized he could not regain the safety of the canoe...
    Kreh-ursh blocked the vision, aware once more of his friend’s absence. He slid the boy’s talisman back under his tunic as he felt that ache knotting his guts again. Why were things like this! Why wasn’t Kaar-oh here now, attempting sea-nomad-becoming? Yet his friend had gone for good. These memories… were just memories… but they were all that now remained.
    Wiping his sight clear, he slid his own carving out into his hands. The delicate wooden shape brought his concentration back , and he cleared his mind of everything except that first image he’d seen with Taashou—he slipped into trance. Little by little, the figure in his hands began to feel warm. Soon it was firmly drawing him, a hot weight in his palms pulling, pulling, as if it wanted to escape from his hands, dropping to the left. He turned that way... Yes, it was pulling him to the left. He half-opened his eyes, searching for a path leading in that direction. There was nothing off the track but a wall of lush ferns and, lower down in a slight valley, a stand of taller trees that poked above the surrounding growth. They attracted him, for no reason other than a vague intuition. Returning his amulet to its pouch, he pushed off the track and moved down the slope toward them.
    At first it was difficult to make progress. Ferns and undergrowth formed a barrier that stopped him advancing, but gradually he entered a different type of jungle. Here the trees reached higher and wider than they did on the ridge, with more space between the trunks. There were fewer plants growing on the bush floor. These were bhaa-shot trees—their fat, spherical boles curving up into three or four thick boughs that held clusters of limp, purplish fronds. The large, yellowish fruit they produced, once cooked, was succulent and nourishing. Kreh-ursh for ced himself to conquer his fear again—though the bhaa-shot weren’t quite as tall as the trees he had climbed on the coast—and shimmy up, carefully avoiding the bark’s knifelike spines. He knocked down three fruit. Back on the ground he stowed them in a net bag he had tucked in his belt. He continued on his way. The much sparser undergrowth at ground level made progress easier, but the fallen, rotting fronds could be slippery underfoot.
    He walked through the jungle, keeping the upslope leading to the volcano on his right. The terrain and plant life continued to change subtly, the bhaa-shot grove giving way to stands of bheem-aa , straight, rough-barked trees with small needle-shaped leaves, and lohn-goh, a strong-wooded variety with flaky bark scales and small rhomboid-shaped leaves. Clusters of pale yellow and red rree-taa flowers hung from tree forks or curled around the snaking vines, providing bright spots of color against the green and brown forest. Bird life was prolific. Wide-tailed lehk and acrobatic, blue-breasted keh-moh flitted through the bush space hunting for insects. Once he disturbed a large mehrr-koh, which blundered screeching from tree to tree before flapping heavily away, the scarlet and purple of its back and wing feathers contrasting sharply with the rich yellow hues on its breast.
    A fter walking for a long time, up ahead to his right, Kreh-ursh spied one: a taat-eh tree, a single one. His tree, the kind he was looking for! He climbed toward it. It was a mature specimen, possibly over a hundred years old. The solid, fast-growing trunk, wider than he was high, soared straight out of the ground into the highest treetops. He placed a hand on the smooth, waxy bark and knew he was getting close. He pushed on ahead. Soon he saw others, and before long, the taat-eh were the only kind of tree surrounding him. He stopped for a while and, closing his eyes, summoned again the visionary picture of his own tree strongly into his mind.
    Opening his eyes, he knew it was there. He couldn’t