PLEASE NOTE: This preamble includes some answers to questions about Monah's story. Skip it if you are only looking for a read.

Preamble/Author's Note: The story below was written to fit a prompt from 'Aim to Engage 2021,'a contest promoted on Wattpad. The rule limited its size to 500 words, its era to 500 years from today and its inquiry to what our descendants could be feasting on if there still was a Christmas to celebrate.

Genetically predisposed to squirm under tight rules, your author chose to use the Winter Solstice as a likely celebration that predates Christmas by millennia; dispense with the habitual engorgement of the masses with festive dishes and sweets considering that our descendants will be lucky to eat crow five centuries from now if our ongoing climate disaster endures; and last, determine what human population could possibly survive the next five centuries. Your author picked the Inuits, a people for whom he has the utmost respect. They have done it before, they can do it again.

The story of Monah illustrates a minuscule episode of a behavior that is essential in the survival of an isolated population, the avoidance of interbreeding. Primitive societies dealt with this problem in various ways, the most familiar being invasions or conquests and the taking of slaves whose offsprings contributed to an enrichment of the conquerors' gene pool.

The ancestors of today's Inuits who dwelled on the grounds of at least two previous inhabitants of the Canadian northern islands were said to practice what we would call today open marriages and a welcome for strangers. This is strongly disputed and forbidden by religious moralists. To which this author can only answer that genetics laws speak for themselves.

Given the breadth of the notions presented above it is obvious they could not be included in the 500 words limit of Monah'story. Some attentive readers may find enough clues in the text to understand its development; for those still puzzled, here's a timeline of the story.

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1/ Seventeenth to twentieth century, introduction of Inuits to Europeans, beginning with whalers, explorers and scientists, ongoing.

2/ Twentieth century to mid 2500s, the dystopian part of the story; the world's populations disappear, cultures vanish, the Inuits survive; some popular songs are remembered in the strong tradition of the Inuits' oral history although the meanings of the words is lost.

3/ Mid 2500s, Monah and her parents arrive at Kuvic's igloo.

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MONAH

She was twelve and an orphan when her exhausted parents died in Nuvik's igloo. They were Inuits they said, they had walked the wolves' land seeking shelter and love from kin. Nuvik did not believe them, no one crossed that killing ground. But the girl stood over the corpses and sang his forefathers' words when left to the wolf on a winter trail, too old, too ill to walk further.

"Take me. Swiftly kill me. Carry my soul 'til your last day and let me go to roam my way." The words were familiar, but from the harrowing whine of an orphaned pup through her odd chant ending with the eerie howl you would hear from an old male pierced by an arrow, Nuvik knew that her parents had taught her a language only known to very few.

"She's a witch," Kapotek half-crawled to her, the blade of his knife flashing in the feeble glow of the oil lamps. "I am Monah, I am your kin." She stood proudly, ignoring the knifepoint at her heart.

"Enough, we need her," said Kuvik to his brother, the hateful, bitter wreck of a man he had become after the three miscarriages of his two wives. The tribe needed new blood. The summer meets where playful couplings followed the wild dancing were poorly attended now, and the custom of hosting strangers on the solstice, when firewater eased the chaos of sleeping arrangements, was subsiding from a dearth of strangers.

No visitors would ever come. The fleeing hordes from the baked lands where cannibals had devoured the last of their children had nearly all died from starvation, disease or murder with a few left to succumb to wolves and to the native Innus until those perished from similar ills. Protected by miles of an icy wilderness of downed forests where wolves did not care to trample, the coastal Inuits had survived.

At her new home Monah taught Kurik's children the language of the wolves and the ancient melodies with words no one could understand after five centuries of their silencing. Home with seal meat or fish Kuvik sat with them and listened, observing her, a child becoming a woman. Summer days at the beach and long winters in the warm igloo were alive with joyful singing, with grandmother and even Kapotev's aging wives joining in. One dark night on the shore the man was drunk and thought to rape Monah. In an instant his knife was in his heart.

Five summers had gone and the Longest Night followed a warm day. Monah was on the high bench, loosely wrapped in white sealskin, long bare legs showing. Kuvik traded his top for a bearskin before he climbed to her. The children tittered and saw her throw back her head and then they were cheek to cheek and grandmother blew off the lamp. In the darkness a child began "Lay with me my sweet..." and all joined in harmony "we waited for so long..."