Chapter 14 – Part Of Who I Am

	We found the first jaw trap early the next afternoon.  Thankfully Odina caught it before any of us triggered it, which was especially good since this one seemed either made for very large game. . . or people.  It would have badly maimed whoever had stepped in it.
	The lioness sat hunkered next to it, carefully selecting a long, heavy stick and positioning it just so, before thrusting it down into the pile of frozen leaves and detritus concealing it.  When it snapped, it cracked the stick in two with a shockingly loud noise that echoed through the trees.
	“Well,” Finnegan murmured uneasily, his hand on his pistol, “if they didn’t know we were here before, they certainly do now.”
	“I had to trigger it,” she sighed, “in case we circle back around this way.  Any sort of marker we leave could get covered by snow.”  She crouched down again, looking at it more closely now that it was spent.  “It’s rusted,” she declared, “but not horribly so.  I think it’s just in disrepair, I don’t actually think it’s been here long.”
	“If’n they’ve got one, they’ve got more,” Sawyer said, worriedly.  “You wanna press on, Ma?”
	Odina scrunched up her muzzle for a moment before standing and shaking her head.  “No.  Not worth the risk.  This one was sheltered from most of the snow, but a lot of the others won’t be.”
	“So what can we do?”  I asked.  “We’re close to the Basin.  A few miles, at most.”
	Odina shook out her duster and looked out past us, towards the distant mountains.  “We made good time,” she said.  “If they choose to follow us this far, if they kept their horses, they’ll be days behind.  They can’t know the trails as well as Takoda and those animals won’t handle the mountains well.”
	“That’s quite a few ‘ifs’,” my father noted.  “What’s your plan?”
	“We start a fire,” she said matter-of-factly.  “And wait for the bear tribe to find us.”
	“Is that wise?”  Finnegan asked.  “They might shoot first, ask questions later.  Or not at all.”
	“They won’t shoot Tulimak,” my father said, reaching over to put a hand on my arm.  “I am certain of that.  We will just have to make very sure it is clear that we are all here with him.  Everyone stays together.”
	I glanced around, noting all eyes were on me, now.  It made me incredibly uncomfortable.  “What?”  I said, my voice wavering.
	“You may need to accept being the center of attention for a little while,” my father said with a lopsided smile.

	Building a fire was welcome, at least.  We hadn’t had one for days and in addition to chasing the cold away, I was very much looking forward to some warm food, too.  My father brewed tea and Finnegan offered to make us all a simple stew with some of the provisions my family had packed up for us.  It was just jerked meat, root vegetables and a little salt, but he seemed to have a fair idea how to portion things out and cut the ingredients, which impressed me.
	“When I make stew,” I said, my muzzle resting in one paw, “I just sort of boil water with things in it.  You keep taste-testing and adding. . . things. . . .”
	“I’m trying to get the salt right,” he said, taking another slow sip from the ladle.  “It’s rarer than gold in some places, we’re lucky to have it.  Don’t want to overdo it.  It was a real treat in the Risers,” he reminisced.  “We’d get some occasionally from my mother or my uncle’s clients.  We always tried to make it last.”
	“I didn’t know you could cook,” I said.
	“I didn’t know you couldn’t,” he countered, smirking at me.  “You talk about food a lot and you. . . clearly seem to enjoy eating-“  He paused at that, as if worried he’d offended me.
	I stared back at him.  “Uh-huh,” I said.  
	He smiled fondly, like I’d done something cute.  I didn’t understand him sometimes.  “So I don’t know.  I guess I sort of figured you’d have a bent for cooking.”
	“I can grill fish,” I shrugged, “but cooking is women’s work most of the time.  Some of the men in our village have specialties they prefer to prepare, and everyone salts, smokes and grills fish, but I never learned much other than the basics to keep me fed when I was traveling.”  I smirked a little and nudged him in the shoulder with a fist, “That’s why I need to get married, eventually.  My wife can do all of those things, while I fish and sell at market.  She can forage, garden and grind maize, make bread and keep our home warm and tidy, raise the cubs. . . .”
	“Sounds nice,” he said, his voice hard to read.
	“I’m sorry,” I said at length, not certain if I’d said something wrong.  He was always the one who talked about how I should marry someday, how what we had was temporary.  Was he upset I’d started saying it?  
	It’s not as though it was actually something I wanted.  The wife part, anyway.  The rest. . . yes, I suppose.  At the very least, it made me sad to think I was going to miss out on all of it.
	He shook his head, focusing on the stew.  “Don’t be sorry,” he shrugged.  “It really does sound nice.”
	“I know it’s probably a very mundane life for a world traveler like you,” I said.
	He laughed, leaning back and looking up at me.  “Tuli, I didn’t come all this way looking for adventure or out of some wanderlust,” he huffed.  “And I’m earnestly not disparaging your ‘mundane life’.  I think it sounds. . . amazing, honestly.”  He reached down and tugged up the edges of his worn collar around his neck, puffing out a breath into the cold.  “Peaceful,” he said after a further few moments, his tone soft.  “If someone’s content being a home-maker, spending all their time and energy on the little’uns, keeping house, whatnot. . . they’d be lucky to have you.  Where I come from, everyone has to work outside the home.  Doesn’t matter who you are, or how many kids you’ve got.  You don’t have the option of staying home.”  
	He tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot.  “That’s why I know how to cook.  My mother wasn’t the only one who was out on the job all the time.  There were a lot of other kids in the Risers.  I made us a little extra coin, watching over some of them.  From the time I was barely older than most of them.”  He chuckled.  “Don’t get your hopes up, though.  I’m hardly good at it.  Just passing.”  
	“I’ll bet you could get good at it,” I said.  
	He glanced at me out of the corner of one green eye.  “What’s that supposed to mean?”
	I shrugged, averting my gaze.  “Just that you’re a very focused person.  You could probably get good at just about anything if you wanted to badly enough.”
	“You could learn to cook, Tuli,” he reasoned.  “It’s not that hard.”
	“I don’t really want to, though,” I admitted.
	“Lazy bear prefers to be doted on,” he teased.
	“Hey, poke fun all you will,” I snorted.  “I’m unusual enough as it is.  So what if I’m a little more traditional about family roles?  I’ve just always preferred male pursuits.”
	I gave him a good few seconds.  He only smirked at me.
	“What?”  I asked as if I didn’t know.
	“Not.  Saying.  A thing,” he sing-songed, continuing to stir the stew.
	“You two are snickering like Tulimak’s eldest sisters,” my father muttered as he moved in closer to the fire and sat down beside us.  “Care to let me in on whatever is so amusing about our current circumstances?”  He sniffed, leaning over the pot.  “That smells good.  Seems you’re good for something, after all.”
	“Otterfa,” I said, exasperated.
	“Oh, he takes it all in good stride,” the older otter said.
	“Honestly, given our situation,” Finn cleared his throat, “you’re being very kind.  And anyway Tulimak, you forget that I spoke to your sisters, at length.  This just seems to be the way your family communicates with one another.”
	“We’ve always been kinder to him,” my father said, speaking to Finn around a hand, like it was a great secret.  He didn’t bother whispering.  “He’s a very sensitive boy.  We only give as much as we can take in our family.”
	“I’ve got quite the negative balance, I’m afraid,” Finnegan said regretfully.  “So I won’t participate.  But it sounds brilliant.  Any other time, I’d be all about it.”
	My father gave a slight smile.  “I am beginning to understand what it is my son sees in you.  You’ve quite the clever tongue.  You’d make a good storyteller.”
	“I’ve been telling stories my whole life,” Finnegan said dryly.
	“I’ll just bet you have,” my otterfa sniped back.
	I watched them speak, realizing with a sudden jolt of clarity that now. . . might be the moment.  It wasn’t ideal, of course.  We weren’t alone, we couldn’t go off somewhere alone.  But maybe that was good?  Maybe he would be less angry, because he wouldn’t want to make a scene in front of Odina’s family?
	Maybe I was dead wrong.  I could be a bad judge of these things sometimes.
	But it really felt right.  At the very least, if I didn’t tell him now, in this moment, I would have to admit that I was consciously hiding it from him.  Now was the time to say something.
	Or at least, it would have been, if Sawyer hadn’t whistled sharply from a nearby tree.
	Finnegan immediately got to his feet, dropping the spoon in the snow.  His hand was beneath his jacket, but he was wise enough not to draw right off.  Not that it would matter.  I’d seen how fast he was at it in the past.
	It took me considerably longer to get to my feet.  By the time I’d stood to my full height, one of them had stepped past the wood line.  If it hadn’t been for Sawyer in his roost, we wouldn’t have seen them until they were right up on us.  And that was impressive, given their size.
	The one that revealed herself first was towering, nearly as tall at the shoulder as me.  With the fresh coat of snow over nearly every surface, it was hard to even make her out except where her form broke through the dark undercarriages of pine boughs.  Her fur was entirely white, unlike mine.  Cream-colored in places, especially around her muzzle.  She also wore white tanned hides, although like me, she didn’t cover herself much.  She didn’t need to.  Her hide was dense and powdered with snow, carved with elegant patterns that nearly disappeared beneath her thicker winter fur.  But what I could see were distinctively jagged, unlike the swirling patterns of my otter tribe.  
	She was marked as a warrior.  And not only by her tribal markings, but more importantly, by her far less aesthetic war scars.  There was no denying how she’d obtained the disfiguring marks across her face, the divots in her legs and arms, a torn ear and one clearly blind eye. 
	She was unnaturally lean for a bear, and not just because she was an ice bear.  They already had more sloping, slender muzzles, longer arms and legs and a taller torso.  But she was either underfed, aging, or both.
	The other, golden brown-furred and stockier, was not long following behind her.  She was also large, but not nearly as tall.  Her posture was more stooped and she had a thicker brow, grey peppering around her muzzle and eyes.  They both wore the same camouflage, bleached-out hide parkas and a decent dusting of snow.  They’d probably shaken out a few branches over themselves.  And they’d moved through sun-crusted snow without any of us hearing them until Sawyer had noticed them.  True hunters.
	They each had rifles, as well as bows, slung over their shoulders.  One for game, one for killing people, most likely.  Arrows did less damage to meat.
	They didn’t have their weapons out, though.  And their expressions, once I could make them out, surprised me.  They were wide-eyed, both of them, like they were scared or shaken.  Staring at me.
	“Ujarak?”  One of them, the ice bear, called out in a wavering tone.
	“No,” the other said, pulling back the hood of her parka and taking a few steps forward.  “That is. . . that is little Tulimak.  Aren’t you?”
	My throat went dry.  My body froze.  I didn’t know what to say to these women.  What could I possibly say to them?  This wasn’t the culmination of some dream, for me.  Until a few days ago, I’d never even known they existed.  They were strangers to me.  I felt no familial tie to them, even now, when they were standing before me.  
	They looked like me.  But. . . that was it.  I felt no spark of recognition, like I’d hoped.  No flash of memory of them.  Everything before my otter family was blank.  I was too young.
	“You can approach,” Odina called out to them in our tongue, resting her rifle down and making it clear she had no intention to use it.  She waved a hand back at the rest of us, and Finnegan similarly relaxed.  “We are here to talk.”
	“Uki?”  My father stepped up to stand beside Odina.  “That. . . was your name, yes?  Uki?”
	The ice bear began crossing the clearing towards us.  Her friend followed her a bit more warily.  “Takoda!”  She said at length, as she came nearer.  “Yes, of course.  Of course it is you.”
	She surprised us all when she came right up to him and dropped down to a knee, scooping my father up in one arm like he were nothing.  I saw both Finn and Odina jump a bit, like they were ready for something. . . but it was just an exuberant embrace.
	A bear hug, if you will.
	The way she’d kneeled first and drawn him against her reminded me of how I had to hug my family.  I felt the first bit of warmth bloom in my chest.  The first inkling of solidarity with this woman.  She had looked so intimidating upon first blush, but she was unrestrained in her affections, or her smile, which she wore very well.
	“Ahhh,” my father chuckled, patting her back.  “It is good to see you again, too.  I remember, when your clan left ours, you were the one-“
	“Crying,” she said, pulling back just slightly and looking up at me, her eyes wet even now.  “Like a babe.  I was the one who carried him everywhere, for my sister.  Especially after she was hurt. . . .”  She dragged a breath through her nose.  “Look at you.  You’ve grown up so beautiful.”
	I still could not find words.  I was admonishing myself mentally, knowing she must have thought me some simple idiot, but I just. . . couldn’t. . . .
	She looked at me imploringly, but her broad smile didn’t waver a bit.  Like she knew.
	“Just the two of you here, then?”  My father asked from beside Uki.  “Hunting party?  Where are the others?”
	Uki hung her head for a moment.  “Oh. . . .”
	“Chieftain Takoda,” the other woman, the honey-brown furred one, spoke.  “There are no others.  We are all that remains.”
	Uki’s smile returned, weakly.  She looked to me, specifically.  “Welcome home, Tulimak.”