Nita Qwan got Gas-a-ho onto his own toboggan. The younger man was bleeding from a terrible wound right across his back where a talon had sliced through his backpack straps and into the meat of his shoulders. But even as he got the man onto his toboggan and began to pull, the blood flow slowed and then stopped.

Nita Qwan tried not to look up. He got the tumpline and brow band of Gas-a-ho’s ruined pack over the younger man and tied the neatly sliced ends to the thongs that ran the length of the body of the sled.

Ta-se-ho put himself in the straps of the now heavily overloaded toboggan. “I’ll pull,” he said. “You watch the sky.”

Nita Qwan took up his bow.

The old man leaned into the straps and began to run.

Above them, something gave vent to avian rage—a long, slow scream that froze the blood.

“Trees,” Ta-se-ho panted. “We need to reach the trees.”

“How far?” Nita Qwan asked.

The old man put his head down and ran.

It is very difficult to run on snow and ice with a bow in your hand and snow shoes on your feet. Harder to do so and watch the sky above you.

The wind came again—a gust, then a sudden wall of wind, so hard that it seeemed to lift them and move them along the surface of the inland sea. It came from behind them, pushing them forward.

In a hundred heartbeats, the fog began to break for the third time that day. The sun was setting in the west—already, the day had a red tinge.

The tree line of the shore was only half a mile away.

The great bluff towered over the lake, a pinnacle of stone that rose many, many times the height of a man. Up close, even in a state of fear, Nita Qwan could see that the whole pinnacle of stone was carved—or perhaps moulded. It was fantastically complicated, even from this distance a terrifying, massive evocation of fractal geometry.

But more immediate was the pair of black avian shapes wheeling in the air above and behind them. They were half a mile away, too.

The two men ran on.

The two predators banked and came on again.

Nita Qwan turned, saw their intention, and planted three shafts in the snow beside him.

He loosed his first shaft when the range was too long. His second shaft vanished into the air, and he had no way of judging his aim. His third shaft went into one of the great black monsters.

The fourth shaft…

At this range, he could see that the nearer creature had a great deal of trouble remaining airborne, and had Ta-se-ho’s spear deep in its side and a long burn mark.