My wife and daughter stopped breathing hours ago.

Their frozen corpses cling to my body.

Their skin stuck to mine, despite the many furs I have wrapped around us.

Many of the pelts come from my long life as a hunter.

Others are recent additions, stolen from old neighbors, turned into bitter enemies. When the blazing eye shut days ago, our people fell on each other, thinking it was an omen of the end of days.

They were right.

How long have I told them that their new ways insulted the ancestors and the gods?

Once, we were a proud and ferocious people.

We spread our numbers through the conquest of others and filled our bellies with the hot blood of game,

hunted through sheer skill and determination. My family has always been hunters and warriors.

I thank the old ways that my father died when I was

young, before our people betrayed everything he stood for. Instead of hunters and warriors,

they worshipped new gods, who they appeased with farming and civilization. They scoffed at me

for clinging to the old ways. My daughter grew embarrassed by the sight of the tattoos covering my body,

revealing my greatest accomplishments and struggles for all to see.

But nobody laughed when the eye closed.

They turned on each other, the so-called civilized, turning into murderers, rapists, and thieves.

Our people had grown soft, and none were able to stand up to me.

It was a simple matter to take what my family needed to survive.

The ground is layered with the frozen blood of those who stood against me. My family didn't always understand me, but they always loved me.

They didn't understand why I couldn't embrace the new and give up the old,

but they never left my side.

...