Panoag. It's a simple word with a complex, and for myself sentimental, meaning which is properly pronounced "pah no ag." It once referred to a man, to his clan, to his encampment, and to his territory. The days of its commonly spoken use are beyond us now, as is the custom among those people who once spoke it with pride, reverence, and fear.
Panoag himself was a great hunter, a wise leader, and a gifted healer. He once led a proud people, governed a flourishing village, and commanded a large territory Kail of the Sardar mountains, Tun of Axe glacier, from the Hrimgar mountains in the Klim to the icy Rim shores of mighty Thassa, and bounded along its Vask edge by the Northern Forest.
I carry with me to this day a scar given me by the hand of the man himself as fair trade for an insult I had unknowingly paid him. "I would bring a white-skin inside my home to poison instead of leaving it on the ice as meat for the sleen?" Those words ring in my ears even now when I think of the man. He had growled them at me in the same moment that the back of his hand split my lip upon my own teeth. I had brought the bowl he had given me to my nose before to my mouth.
From a small copper pot I drank a dark and bitter, but welcome and nourishing elixir which had been brewed from snow, a pinch of salt, small sprigs of needle-tree boughs, peelings of gray stone lichen, and a few berries of a regional shrub known to me only as the gant bean. I called it this for two reasons, firstly because the small bean shaped sangria colored fruits were a favorite staple in the diet of migratory arctic gants, and secondly because I had never been able to wrap my tongue around the native pronunciation of the thing. Ahuacathl, acuahatl, ahuatalc. Whatever it was, it was beyond my linguistic ability, thus for me it simply became the gant bean.
From within the excavation beneath the sagging, snow laden branches of the needle-tree where I sheltered, I watched the flames of the fire in the distance dancing with the wind. Bright yellow orange sparks thrown skyward by the erratic explosions of enraged embers whirled away into the night sky, whisked ever onward, rising up it seemed among the very stars.
Finishing the potent drink, I used the copper pot as a scoop to gather snow for extinguishing the small fire I had built to brew it. Knowing full well that the life giving calories it had provided me with would allow my body to sustain its warmth throughout the remainder of the night, I pulled the heavy fur cloak tight around myself, and reclined upon the soft, dry mat of shed needles.
Spitting a small remaining fragment of the gray lichen from the tip of my tongue, I closed my snow-glare stung eyes against the hypnotic beauty of many thousands of stars glittering diamond like within the dark tapestry of infinity. With the low, groaning accompaniment of swaying boughs, from the trees came a natural chorus of soft voices. The wind, and those mournful night cryers the hook-billed fleers, sang me away to the realm of memories and dreams.
Startled from sleep by sudden pain, I awoke in a fury to greet the dull gray light of a snowy dawn with a roar and swing. The memories contained in dreams were at times much too potent, the emotions, and pains, and responses could be all to real. My left foot throbbed with the sharp hallucination of pain, the long bones behind the toes seemingly shattered once again by the heavy hammer-strike of a weighted club head.
Seething with anger I swept the overheating confines of the heavy cloak away from my form as I rose to my feet and stepped out from the makeshift shelter to seek the bracing succor of brisk, coursing zephyrs. Sweeping snow from a nearby limb into my palms I raised them to cup my fiery muzzle and burning eyes. After a moment, and then using the icy snowmelt to wash my searing brow and gullet, I raked the biting bathwater from my hands into my hair to dry them, as well as to soothe my roasting scalp.
Torn from the ill womb of a nightmare, and flung headlong again into a primeval consciousness by the abrupt impact of the realities of the cold and the hunger, I returned to the shelter beneath the boughs, stuffed my cheeks with pieces of salted meat, and began to pack my meager collection of gear and provisions. There was unpleasant work to be done, with an arduous journey to begin after that. There was no benefit in procrastination or virtue in the abandonment of either. Some things, disagreeable as they may be, simply had to be done the right way in order for one to maintain any discernable degree of personal integrity.
Kneeling beside the shallow snow blanketed pit which I had quarried from the frozen earth the day before with cold-numbed fingers and a hunting knife, I began what I was certain to be a sacrilegious act. Putting aside my personal feelings about such a heinous undertaking, I resolved within my mind that the gods, whomever they may be, would by using their own discernment either pardon or condemn me for my exploits if need be it were my destiny. I had done as best I could for him according to what I believed to be proper as well as in keeping with the customs of his culture based on my limited knowledge of it.
Spreading a unique tunic on the ground before my knees, I leaned over the concavity and began to rake my hands through the still warm bed of ashes, sifting out much of the contents onto the tanned hide before me. Minor pieces of charcoal, stone beads, teeth and fragments of bone, personal ornaments, arrowheads, and blackened earth I exhumed and gathered solemnly within his sacramental vestment. Gathering its hems around his remains, I lashed the bundle securely with leather thongs before stowing it safely and reverently among the possibles within his own hunting haversack.
Using tattered fingers to rake the dug out soil back into the depression over which I had erected his pyre, I interred what other scant remains there were within it. Gathering stones from the area I first outlined then covered the humble vault, piling them in several layers atop one another to deter the digging of scavengers that might by scent be drawn to the tumulus.
Rising to my feet and inclining my head with respect for the man and the site I then lifted the pair of our hunting packs and fitting them to my shoulders turned away to begin the long trek of many pasangs Ror to the coastal village which bore his name. It had fallen to me to take Panoag home to his descendants who could more properly send him home to his ancestors.
I was thankful then for the distance that lay between us, it would give me time to think. I would need to tell them something but that something could not, and would not, be the truth.
