There was still a good amount of smoked fish so he tore off and chewed a big-enough hunk to cut hunger and then turned to Little Carl.

The child was awake but did not speak, even to answer. He stared at Leif as if seeing through him. He would not eat and his forehead felt definitely warmer now, and Leif knew he was sick but didn’t know what he could do about it. He splashed some cold seawater on the little boy’s forehead to make it feel cooler, and he tried to fight down the horror from the death days in the camp that now seemed to be following the canoe. Seemed to be hunting them. A dark beast that he could not see but had come in his dream was now coming with them. At them. To take them.

Go north, Old Carl had told them. Go to where the air was not poisoned, and Leif untied the braided cord from the trees and pushed off and took the paddle in his hands and dug deep into the water. Dug down like he was digging into the earth. Dug down as he was digging for his life. Or dug deep, he thought, as if digging a grave.

Out of the inlet and into the bigger channel the moon-currents were flooding north and he rode them.

Rode them.

Praying for the cleaner air that wasn’t poisoned that Old Carl said lay somewhere to the north.

Pushed, ripped, dragged the paddle through the water so that the beautiful cedar canoe had a life of its own, a life without poison air, a life to live, to be.

North.

Without a break. His arms and shoulders and back screaming in agony, but still digging deep and long. Until it came to be later in the day, almost evening, and he found himself weak, weaker, and knew he was getting hot, burning with the death fever.

Leif stopped paddling. He let the moon-currents have them while he leaned to the side and vomited fish and bile and traces of blood into the water – as Little Carl had been doing all day. He could not fight anymore and collapsed and let the fever take him as the moon-currents took them.

Swirling into his mind, his thoughts, his dreams, fevered currents and mind pictures and finally, at last finally, the great and almost joyous release of nothing. Away into no place, no time, no being, no thing.

Away.

And away.

Nothing.

Mother Waters and Brother Whales

He did not know . . . anything.

For the longest time he only knew, or thought he knew, he was dead. He had gone to that place in the dark world where all was without knowledge or understanding and what he believed was true did not really exist and when that was gone there was nothing to replace what he had been. Replace his life.