1Twenty lifetimes after Asha, the people had spread into many bands, and they had forgotten her name. They had not forgotten the horn. Each band carried one, and when two bands met, the Keepers still traded coals before anyone traded meat.
2One of those bands lived in the valley of the white stones, where the hills came close together like two hands about to clap. Every autumn the gazelle came down that valley out of the cold north, going to their winter grass. They came in a river of backs, thousands of them, for three days. Then they were gone for a year.
3The people of the valley lived on those three days. What they killed then, they dried and smoked, and it carried them through the snow. So they had built a thing to help them. Two low walls of piled stone ran down the valley, wide apart at the top and close at the bottom, like the mouth of a fish trap. Where the walls met there was a pen of stone, and a pit. Runners drove the herd between the walls. The gazelle followed the stones, as gazelle will, until there was no room to turn.
4The master of the drive in those days was a man named Hadu. He was the best hunter in the valley, and he knew it, and he was not wrong. He had a daughter named Sena, fourteen winters old, who ran faster than any boy, and a small son named Pim, who followed Sena everywhere and was fast at nothing yet.
5Sena had run the herd for three autumns. She had learned what her father had never troubled to see: that the river of backs was not all one thing. At the front of it, always, went the old does. One had a torn ear and a white scar on her shoulder. She knew the way. The rest did not know the way. They only knew her.
6In Sena's fourth autumn, Hadu made the walls longer. All summer he had the people carrying stone. "My father took sixty in a drive," he said. "I have taken a hundred. This year we will take all that come between the walls, and we will not be hungry again while I live."
7The herd came with the first frost. The runners rose out of the grass shouting and beating hides. The gazelle swung between the walls, and the walls held them, and the valley filled with dust.
8Sena's post was a gap in the east wall where a spring came through. She was to stand in the gap and wave a hide so that nothing passed. She stood there. And out of the dust, straight at her, came the doe with the torn ear, and behind the doe perhaps twenty others, mostly does heavy with next spring's young.
9The old doe stopped three strides from her. Its sides went in and out. It looked at Sena, and she saw that it was not looking for mercy. It did not know there was such a thing. It was only looking for the way.
10Sena lowered the hide. She stepped out of the gap. The old doe went by her so close that she felt its warmth on her knees, and the twenty went after it, and they were over the spring and up the east hill before the dust had closed.
11That evening there were more than four hundred gazelle in the pen and the pit. Nobody in the valley had seen such a kill. They sang. Hadu did not sing. He had counted the tracks at the spring.
12He did not strike her. He did worse. In front of the fires he said, "My daughter stood in the gap and the gap was open. She has fed the wolves on the hill tonight instead of her brother. She will not run in my drive again." Then he turned his back, and so did the others, for he was Hadu.
13Sena said only one thing. She said, "Who will show them the way back next year?" Nobody answered her, because nobody understood the question.
14There was too much meat. That is a thing the songs about that hunt leave out. The people cut and dried and smoked until their hands split. Still a third of it went bad on the ground, and the valley stank until the snow, and the wolves and the vultures grew so fat that they would not move out of a child's path.
15The next autumn the people sat at the walls and waited. The frost came. On the fourth day after the frost a small herd came down the valley, forty or fifty, with a doe at the front that had a torn ear.
16"There," said Hadu. "They are late and they are few. All the more reason. We need every one."
17Sena was not a runner any more. She was carrying stones with the old women. But she walked up to her father in front of everyone, which was not done. "Those are the ones I let go," she said. "Those and their young. They are all there is of this herd. Take the bucks. Take the yearlings. Let the old one through with her does, or there will be no one to bring them down the valley."
18"The north is full of gazelle," said Hadu. "It has always been full. Do you think the north is a pen, and I have emptied it?"
19"I think this valley is a path," said Sena, "and a path is kept in somebody's head. That one's."
20A man laughed. Hadu's face went dark. He put a spear in a boy's hands and set the boy in the gap by the spring. They took all that came. The doe with the torn ear died in the pit with the rest, and there was meat for half the winter, and nobody sang.
21The third autumn the frost came, and nothing came with it.
22They waited ten days at the walls. They waited twenty. The wind blew down the valley of the white stones and brought nothing with it but the first snow. The long walls stood there, wide at the top and close at the bottom, and no living thing was between them.
23Then began the hungry winter. They ate the dried meat that was left. They ate acorns, ground and washed until the bitterness left them. They dug roots out of the frozen marsh. They ate the hides off the shelters, boiled soft. The old ones gave their share to the young and lay down and grew still. Hadu's mother went that way, and three others.
24At midwinter, Pim took the coughing sickness. He was six, and there was nothing on him to fight it with. Sena sat with him four nights. She chewed roots soft for him and he could not swallow them. On the fifth morning he was cold under the furs.
25Hadu carried his son up to the place of white stones and laid the stones over him with his own hands. When it was done he stood a long time looking at the walls he had built. Then he went into the shelter and took his spear and a horn of fire and a bag with nothing in it.
26"Where are you going?" said his wife.
27"North," said Hadu. "To see where they are."
28"You will die on the way."
29"Then that will be one less mouth," he said, and went out.
30Sena caught up with him before the sun was high. He did not send her back. He did not speak to her either. They walked.
31They walked nine days up the valley and over the pass at its head. They slept in the lee of rocks with the fire between them. On the fifth night the snow came sideways and they could not find wood. Sena fed the ember in the horn with threads pulled from her own cloak and breathed on it till morning, and she did not let her father see that her hands were shaking. On the seventh day they found a dead hare, frozen, and ate it raw, because a hare cooked is a hare shared with the wind.
32On the ninth day they came over a ridge and saw smoke. Below them lay another valley, wider than their own. There were long walls of stone in it, wide at the top and close at the bottom. And on the hills beyond the walls, brown against the snow, gazelle were feeding. There were more than Sena could count.
33The people of that valley found them at the ridge. They were strangers, and Hadu had a spear. It might have gone badly. But Sena held out the horn, open, so that they could see the coal in it. An old hunter of that people looked at the coal. He looked at their faces, which were mostly bone. He took a horn from his own belt and held it out beside hers.
34His name was Olan. He gave them broth, a little at a time, for he knew what happens to the starved who eat fast. He had some of their tongue, for his mother had come from the south. On the third day, when Hadu could stand, Olan took them up onto the wall.
35"You came at a good time," he said. "The second herd is coming down. The late ones, from the far north. Watch."
36The herd came down the valley in the grey light, a river of backs. Runners lay in the grass on both sides. Sena saw the old does at the front, stepping between the walls. She waited for the shout.
37Nobody shouted. The front of the herd went down between the walls, and through an opening at the bottom where a hurdle of branches had been pulled aside, and out onto the plain. A hundred went by. Two hundred. The hunters lay in the grass like stones.
38Hadu's hand was white on the wall. "What are they doing?" he said. "The meat is walking away."
39"The meat for next year is walking away," said Olan. "Wait."
40When a third of the herd had passed, a man stood and dropped the hurdle across the opening. Then the runners rose and shouted. The rest of the herd piled between the walls, and the hunters took what they needed, and it was a great deal. Sena saw also that when the pen was half full, they stopped, and opened the hurdle again.
41Hadu watched all of it. Then he sat down on the wall with his back to the kill.
42"My grandfather's father built these walls," said Olan. He did not look at Hadu when he said it. "He was a great hunter. One year he took everything that came. Every hoof. They sang about it. The year after, a few came, and he took those. The year after that there was a winter with no herd in it." He rubbed his knee. "There is a hill behind our camp that is all small piles of stones. My people do not sing about that year. But they tell it to every child the night before its first drive. So we let the first ones pass. Always the first ones, the ones who know the way. It is hard, when you are hungry. It is the hardest thing we do."
43"How long," said Hadu, "before the gazelle came back to your valley?"
44"Some came back in my grandfather's time, because he walked north and drove a few does down with dogs, and let them go, and let them go, year on year. He ate lizards so that they could pass. He did not live to see a full herd." Olan looked at him then. "You have piles of stones behind your camp too, I think."
45"One of them is small," said Hadu.
46Olan gave them as much dried meat as two people could carry. He gave them something better also. He said that when the spring herd went north again, the people of the white stones might come and hunt at his walls, behind his hurdle, by his custom. "Until your own path is walked again," he said. "It will be a long time. Bring the girl. She watches the front of the herd. Most watch the middle."
47They carried the meat home in six days, for it was downhill and they had eaten. Eleven more had died while they were gone. Those who lived, lived.
48It took the valley of the white stones more years than Hadu had left to become a path again. But each autumn a few more came down it, late and shy, with some young doe at the front who had found the way by chance. And each autumn the people sat in the grass with their spears across their knees and their bellies tight, and watched the first ones walk through.
49The first time, they would not have done it. There were shouts. A man got to his feet with his spear back. It was Hadu who stepped into the opening at the bottom of the walls and stood there with his arms wide, his back to the passing does and his face to his own hungry people.
50"You will have to put it through me," he said. Nobody did.
51When he was too old for the drive, Sena became its master. She was the first woman to stand in that place. She changed only one thing. Beside the opening at the bottom of the walls she set up a white stone, not large. The children asked what it was for. She told them it was for her brother. She told them he had been fast at nothing yet. And she told them the rest, on the night before their first drive, so that they would know why their mothers and fathers lay still in the grass while a winter's meat walked by.