A Keel of Mammoth Skin

Adrift on a storm-lashed glacial sea, the eighty surviving members of the Sun-Hoof tribe cling to life aboard the Mor-Kahn—an eighty-pace coracle sewn from fifty mammoth hides. In the belly of the vessel, lashed to the main mast, stands the weeping White Stag, the last spirit of the inland forest. His breath lulls the predatory sea-beasts and keeps the leather hull from dissolving in the brine, but you cannot eat breath. Hidecombe, a blunt, middle-aged sinew-sewer whose hands are cracked from pulling frozen gut-thread, alone understands the boat's fragile anatomy. When the hunters' hunger turns into a mutinous frenzy for the stag's flesh, Hidecombe must keep her people from butchering the only thing preventing the ocean from eating them whole.