Free And She Was by Cindy Dyson

let the waves turn the kayaks.
    The whale breached as their bows pointed straight at it. None of the women had envisioned a whale. This one was small, a gray whale, and young.
    Aya reached into the kayak for the small pouch of monkshood oil. She held it upright as she slid the tip of her spear inside, coating it with poison. She unfastened her throwing stick and slotted the spear. The whale remained at the surface, within range. She circled her tongue against the entirety of her mouth, tasting for remnants of the dead-man’s fat.
    And threw.
    Slukax shouldered her own weapon, waiting to see which way the whale would break. The spear shot forward in a low arch; it landed with a popping noise to the rear of the fluke. Aya had not known to aim for this vulnerable spot, where the poison could readily enter the beast’s bloodstream and work its slow death, but her arm had been directed there nonetheless. The whale immediately dove straight down. Slukax had no time to throw.
    Aya watched the spear disappear with the whale. The waves from its plunging descent splashed at the kayak’s bow. She dropped her weight low and waited. When she looked up nothing remained to show she had speared a whale. The water calmed like a pond, and fog sunk across it.
    Aya felt her legs cramping under the skin skirt. Her mouth grew dry. She could no longer see Slukax. They found each other with their voices and began the journey back to shore. Aya began a song, and Tugakax and Slukax joined. They sang a wedding song and a birthing song and a song to the birds and, at last, a song to the whale.
    For three days, Aya sequestered herself in the isolated whale-hunters ulax . Slukax and Tugakax, she knew, would find a story to tell the others. Although women did not enter this ulax, they knew what the men did there. They grieved so that the whale’s suffering spirit would be drawn toward theirs. Aya neither ate nor drank. When she found herself thinking of things other than the whale, she let a mournful sigh into the silent walls. With her mind, she told the whale how it should die. She promised it she felt its pain as her own. She wondered if her husband had felt the whale the way she did. Twice since their marriage, he had hidden himself away in this same ulax, willing his own whales to die. Did all hunters feel this connection? Or had the Dry One given her something more?
    Aya tore at her kamleika; she pulled her hair from her scalp. She ripped the beads from her neck and let them fall to the ground, an offering to the land itself for what she had taken. As her mouth dried and her stomach ached, she told the whale how she suffered with it. She felt it slow in the gray water. An ache stretches along its body. It can no longer sound as deep and must keep returning to the surface for breath. And each time, its eye takes in the rough shores of the island. Aya told it to let her pain draw it further toward death, toward land.
    On the morning of the fourth day, Aya climbed outside to find Slukax and Tugakax waiting for her. Aya led them along the beach. An image of the whale, belly bumping against the rocky shore, had formed. She led them toward the place she saw in her mind. When they drew close, Aya saw it was true. Her whale had followed her through hunger, thirst, and pain, and died for her.
    As she came close, a thrill she’d never felt coursed through her. They would live. She felt the power of life and hope.
    “Cut here,” Slukax said, directing Aya’s knife around the spearhead, still embedded in the whale’s flesh. “Now here, and here.” Slukax traced a jagged line around the wound in what they hoped would be mistaken for the bite of a killer whale. Tugakax returned to the village to tell the people that the sea had given them a gift at last.
    Aya heard the excited shouts and saw three boys round the bend first. The entire village came running, knives held high, pulling skidsbehind their skipping feet. She was wet from feet to waist, having