Read Online The Eye of the Hunter by Dennis L. McKiernan - Free Book Online Page B

the ice so grey? I mean, it looks as if it’s frozen milk—milk gone bad with dirt, that is.”
    B’arr glanced over at the wee one and grinned. “You see good with
Mygga
eyes. It
jokel melk
—glacier milk, in tongue you speak.”
    As he tied the last bootie on Kano, the dog now licking at the sledmaster’s face, B’arr pointed eastward with hischin in the direction they were travelling. “Great
jokel
ahead. Ice fall down from above. Ice cloudy. Full of
jokel melk
. Melt in summer. Make river. River run dark. Things grow good in
jokel
water, in
jokel melk
.
    “But river get hard in winter. Land shake. River crack. River break. Make knife edge all over. Cut dog feet. What she-
Mygga
name bootie we call
sokk
. Keep dog feet from cut on ice.”
    Strolling over to the Warrows, Aravan arrived in time to hear B’arr’s words. “Glacier milk.” he murmured. “Silt-laden water. A river full of powdered stone, ground from the Grimwall itself by the ponderous ice of the Great North Glacier. And the land that drinks from this chill stream becomes rich soil. Plants and flowers and green growing grass burst forth from the bordering earth and reach up for the Sun in the long summer days.”
    Gwylly looked again at the grey ice, and then at the snow-laden riverbank, barren in winter, and finally at the Grimwall looming above, and he wondered how something as foreboding as this dark, ominous range could engender fertility in an ice-cold waste.
    The sledmasters soon had their teams ready to travel again,
ren
-hide booties on all the dogs, and once more they set out eastward, wending along the base of the towering Grimwall range.
    On they ran, following the curve of the glacier river, frozen in late winter’s grasp. And as they rounded a bend, Faeril gasped, for in the distance she saw great tumbled-down blocks of shattered ice piled in a gargantuan jumble, ramping in a massive heap upward, lying against an ice-clad wall of black granite. And high above, two thousand or so feet up the sheer stone, the frozen wall of the Great North Glacier loomed white and deadly, two or three miles wide or more, and massive, an enormous frozen river, itself hundreds of feet high, poised to cascade downward.
    Even as they looked, a huge section of the overhang broke away, the mass of ice falling silently for what seemed an eternity, to smash into the miles-wide ramp below. And seconds later there came a rending, a riving, a splitting
krrack!
the sound of the ice calving away just then reaching their ears, followed eventually by a thunderous
whoom!
of the mass whelming down.
    And still the face of the glacier loomed above, seemingly undiminished by the gigantic fall.
    Outward swung B’arr, driving the dogs on a course that would safely take them past this deadly place, Tchuka and Ruluk coming after.
    An hour or so they travelled along this arc, and finally the glacier and ice fall stood off to their right. Yet onward they ran for another hour, skirting out beyond the danger to come to a broad gorge a mile or two beyond the far edge.
    Again the earth trembled, and afterward came the echoes of ice rending and shattering in the distance behind.
    “Høyre! Høyre!”
called B’arr, and the dogs swung to the right in response, entering the mouth of the wide, shadowed defile.
    Before them, Gwylly and Faeril could see a sheer-walled canyon twisting up into the interior of the Grimwall, its end beyond seeing, somewhere past a wrenching curve. A mile or more apart stood vertical bluffs to either side, their tops some two or three thousand feet above, crevices and crags and ledges marring the perpendicular stone. Snow and ice clad the walls, where they could gain a foothold. Scrub pine grew there as well, twisted and gnarled by the wind. Frozen snow lay on the rising ravine floor—how thick, the Warrows could not say.
    Into this slot B’arr drove the dogs, aiming for a place known to Riatha and told to B’arr, a place where they could safely make