Read Ivory Carver 02 - My Sister the Moon for Free Online

a bundle outside the door. She reached in to touch the girl's hand and then quickly turned and left. 
    Blue Shell's daughter pulled the bundle into her hut and tied the door flap open to let in light. The bundle was wrapped in grass mats, and when she saw what was inside, her surprise made the breath catch in her throat. A suk. The finest she had ever seen. The skins were fur seal, tanned to such suppleness that she knew Chagak had worked a long time stretching and scraping them. 
    She unrolled the garment and laid it across her lap. The back of the suk had been made with the darkest fur, and was banded at the bottom with a ruff of white cormorant rump feathers hung with shell beads. The sleeves were cuffed with tufts of brown eider feathers and on the outside of the collar rim Chagak had sewn a strip of pale ribbon-seal fur, trimmed into a pattern of ripples, a blessing asked from the sea. 

    Blue Shell's daughter hugged the suk close to her, and she felt comfort in the cool softness of the fur. She slipped the old suk off over her head. Her mother had worn it a whole year before Gray Bird had allowed his daughter to have it, and so the cormorant skins were very frail. It seemed that she spent as much time repairing it as wearing it, and during the past winter it had not been warm enough, even with bundles of grass stuffed inside as a lining. 
    Blue Shell's daughter moved to the center of her shelter where the middle pole lifted the roof high enough for her to stand. There she pulled on the new suk, feeling the softness of the inside skins against her breasts. It fitted her perfectly. The sleeves ended just above her fingertips and the bottom edge fell below her knees. She looked down at herself and wished that she dared run from her shelter to the edge of the stream to see her reflection in the water. 
    She crouched, drawing her knees up into the suk. It was long enough to touch the ground when she squatted and so would keep her bare feet warm. 
    It is true then, she thought. I am to be a wife to one of Chagak's sons. Why else would she make me a suk? Amgigh did not want her; sometimes he even joined Qakan's taunting. It would be Samiq. But then she pulled her thoughts from such a hope. Perhaps she would never be a wife. But for now, for the rest of this day, she had this beautiful suk. She would not allow herself to think beyond that. 

SIX
    BY THE TIME THE SUN WAS SINKING FOR THE night, Blue Shell's daughter had finished the tooth. She had carved carefully, scraping and cutting until the surface of the tooth was whorled like a whelk shell. She held the tooth near her oil lamp and looked at it with critical eyes. It was not perfect—a hard ridge of ivory, something her knife could not shape, ran the length of one side, and there was a chip on one edge—but it looked like a shell. 
    Besides, she reminded herself, she would be careful to conceal the tooth under the edge of her apron. And perhaps the tooth carried its own power to deceive, to fool her father's eye and protect itself from his knife. 
    She raised her suk and tied the tooth to the belt of her apron. She was smoothing her hands over the fur of the suk when her mother came to the shelter. 
    "You must come out," she called, and the girl saw the surprise in her mother's face when she stepped outside wearing her new suk. 
    "It is from Cha-Cha-Chagak," Blue Shell's daughter said. 
    Her mother made an uncertain smile and nodded. 
    The tightness that had seemed to bind Blue Shell's daughter during her time in the tiny shelter suddenly left, and she spread her arms out, catching the wind with her fingertips. She began to laugh, and she turned so she could see Tugix, the great mountain that guarded their village. 
    "Be still," her mother said. "You are a woman now, not a child." 

    And the daughter answered, "I have n-n-never been a ch-ch-child." 
    Her mother looked away and the girl closed her eyes, for a moment regretting the words. But then anger