Another Extract from "The Hunt for the Great Bear"

This is from near the beginning,when the main character, Grubhunter, is getting ready to go on his first hunting exedition.


I was up in the early morning long before first light. I hadn’t slept much. My mother and Ember were asleep. I could hear their breathing deep and slow. I moved quietly so that I wouldn’t wake them. I wanted the time to myself, to be alone with myself in the dark, getting ready to go hunting, excited about it, and keeping that excitement quiet and still inside me. I stood above my mother lying on her side touched my fingers to her shoulder. Then I went out of the shanty.
Outside I cracked the ice off the top of the water in the bucket and filled the cup and drank it down. It made me gasp. I drank another half cup then put the cup down and splashed some water over my face. I felt fresh and awake now, and I lifted my spear from where I’d left it leaning against the wall and started off, making my way across the Shelter and out of it towards the Rock.
The sky was clear and the snow shone bright hard in the moonlight. It was a few days to full moon, and the old man’s crumbly face was looking down at me sad and mournful as if I could make him whole again. I gazed at him up there, thinking about the spirits of the dead swimming in his pale seas, and wondering was my father’s spirit swimming among them, or was he still walking somewhere in the world? One day maybe I’d trek off after him and find out. When I’d come back from the hunt and proved a man. That’s what I was thinking then. I didn’t know when I came back I’d be trekking off for a different reason.
I looked down and left the old man to it. Ahead of me I could see where the Rock sloped up at the north edge of the Shelter, starting off gentle at first with tumbled boulders scattered around it, then rising high and steep, and the path winding up it to the top. Black rock, and the glow of a small fire on the skyline, with little flickers of shadow passing across it. So the others were there already. Waiting, and probably cursing my because I was late. The cold bit into me and I pulled my hood down across my face and wrapped my cloak tighter about me. When I came to the edge of the Shelter I stopped.
There wasn’t a sound. And there was the kind of stillness that you can almost feel touching you. Up on the Rock the others were making ready for the hunt. And back there in their shanties the people were sleeping, not stirring yet. And there I was, not in one place or the other, caught in between them, like I wasn’t in any place at all, like I’d stepped out of the world into a different one that had no name. And I had no name in it. As my father had stepped out one morning and was gone from the world forever. I turned and looked back then towards the Shelter, just to make sure it was still there. I could see out shanty from where I stood and there was a figure standing in front of it.
It was Ember, lit clear by the moon and the moonlight on the snow. I couldn’t quite make out her face but I could tell she was looking at me. I must have woken her when I left and she followed me out. Standing there now in the doorway and watching me go. I raised my arm towards her and waved it slow, and smiled, and hoped she could see it, but she didn’t show any sign or make any movement. My arm was still raised and I was still waving when she turned and went back inside. I stood staring at the empty doorway for a while and the dark beyond it. Then I lowered my arm and turned myself and went on.