by Sue Burke
When we got there, I knelt to study it. “There’s three kinds of tracks. Kat, bird, and something big and heavy with a tail. This is a popular trail, and everyone in the neighborhood knows about it.”
Cawzee and I took the lead, armed and ready. Soon we saw a big dead coral sphere about twenty meters from the path. Just to see what would happen, I put a clay bullet in a sling and threw. The coral shattered. Caterpillars and land trilobites tumbled out like a squirming wave, and a foul breeze wafted toward us.
“They were eating it!” Honey said. “That explains a lot. It must be densely nutritious. See how many animals there were in there!”
An hour of slow, careful hiking later, we were almost up the rocky hill. I was looking at the way the land could be great for an ambush. But the dirt was thinning out, and so were the corals. The Glassmakers got there first, Cawzee waving weapons. At least he was doing his job.
“Big,” Scratcher called back to us.
I scrambled to his side and looked. A wide, long, shallow, empty lake bed filled the valley behind the hill, and it had been empty for a year or two.
Honey ran up. “Wow! This is new! Look! There’s still a big pond down there near the middle.” It lay over two kilometers away, ringed in red, probably the same filaments that grew in the war zone. “Let’s go there!”
“Let’s take a long look before we do anything. A lot of things live there.”
Dead, dried-out water plants and animals and corals and stiff clumps of red quitch grass covered the ground, except on the bare sandbars. I gave Honey the telescope so she could scan the far side.
“There’s another escarpment! The river came over it before, I can see the entry. I bet the river is flowing around it now!”
“Here be-it now no river,” Cawzee said. He smelled like a mix of very overripe fruit, nervous.
“Right!” she said. “The earthquake moved the ground, and the river shifted.”
Scratcher tapped me and pointed to some tracks with a whiff of stinking fear.
“Carni-kat,” I said. “It’s good hunting here. Let’s not get hunted.”
“Can we go down now?” Honey said.
“Why?” I said. But a nearby sandbar glittered like a yellow jewel lizard. Maybe gold. Maybe I could bring Stevland a present he’d love.
“Well,” she said, “we can see what lived here. Maybe take some samples.”
“Okay,” I said, “let’s head for that sandbar.”
Far away, I saw a shadow move and checked it out with the telescope. Carni-kat. Another one next to it. I warned everyone, as if we weren’t on edge enough already. But we made it to the sandbar safely.
Honey saw the gold. “That’s useful for making wires for radios and things. We knew it came from somewhere in the plains. Let’s take what we can!” She handed me a sack for samples.
I made sure my gloves were on tight, then scooped sand, pebbles, and gold into the sack.
“Aren’t you going to sort it?”
“We don’t have time.”
“Are we going to keep exploring?”
Scratcher answered with the scents of fear and flee. Cawzee, at the far end of the sandbar, didn’t seem to be paying attention.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “We can figure out what happened already. The lake dried up. I’m guessing that as the corals died, the populations went up of the animals that ate dead corals, like caterpillars and trilobites. That had a ripple effect. Velvet worms are higher up in the food chain, and their numbers went up. Now they’re hungry and looking for food.”
“Wow!” Honey said. “That’s smart!”
“Thanks.” I saw a red velvet worm sliding toward her. “Honey, run! Towards me! Run!”
She looked up wide-eyed, and after a second of hesitation began running. I started slinging bullets. The worm turned away.
But it turned because a carni-kat was leaping at it. One, two—no, five, maybe more kats were skulking in our direction.
I heard hooves and glanced back. Cawzee was running toward us, weapons raised. Scratcher was staying where he was in the middle of the sandbar, the safest place around. Good. Honey was at my side by then, tense, ready to sprint again.
The kats crouched, eyes on us. They began to squeak, one answering the other with complex sounds. I could guess what they were discussing. I slung a bullet and they scattered, then regrouped with the grace of practiced hunters.
“Cawzee, shoot some arrows!”
“Where? I see-me nothing!”
“There, next to that big clump of grass. On the left.”
That’s where three were crouched together, making plans.
Cawzee shot a pair of arrows faster than I knew he could. The first arrow hit a kat square in the ribs. The rest scattered, squealing, and disappeared into the landscape. The injured kat took a few short hops and fell.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. But Cawzee had dashed off in the other direction, and by the time I’d turned around to tell him no, he was holding up the arrow with a twitching kat hanging from it.
“First big kill. Me! Mine! For queen!”
“Fine. Make sure it’s dead. Whack it on the back of the head. Now let’s get out of here!”
We ran to the top of the ridge, took a long look back to see if we were being followed, and began climbing downhill.
A half hour later we were close enough to see our raft. Three big, shiny, purple things were hulking around it. Through the telescope, they looked like giant trilobites with blunt heads. Each was half the size of the raft.
I handed the telescope to Honey. “Those are new. Take some notes.”
“Let’s go look!”
“Let’s not. Anything that big in this environment is tough as stone and mean.”
One of them nudged the raft.
“I think it’s biting it!” Honey said.
Scratcher was ready to bolt and smelled, surprisingly, like attack. I put a hand on his back.
“Hold on. They can crush us like lizards. And they’re a bright color. That’s a warning. They’re dangerous and they want everyone to see them and stay away.”
“Queen make raft.”
“Yes, it’s a fine raft and we need it.” I tried to think about what to do. I didn’t have any good ideas. We were in big trouble.
“Cawzee, let’s go, you and I. Slow, very slow. Let’s see what we can do.”
He handed the dead kat to Scratcher, and we began walking.
The giant trilobites kept nudging the raft until it moved. One lowered its head and started to push. The raft rose up, up, and tipped over with a crash.
“No no no no no,” Scratcher squalled behind us.
The trilobites kept nudging the raft’s logs, ripping and crunching like a carpenter’s workshop. I decided we were close enough.
“They’re feeding!” Honey called. “They’re eating the logs.”
“We will attack-them,” Cawzee said, reeking of aggression.
I put an arm around his shoulders to hold him back. “We’ve never seen these before. We don’t know what they can do. But they’re dangerous, we can see that. I know we need the raft. But if we shoot some arrows, they could charge at us. We’d lose the fight. We need our lives more than the raft. Just stay calm.”
We should have left someone behind to guard it.… No, that wouldn’t have helped. No one would have been safe alone, and even all four of us couldn’t have stopped three giant purple land trilobites. But without the raft, we couldn’t get home.
If we had to stay in the plains it would be tough survival. I was trembling. I forced myself to stop. We’d left the bats inside the cabin, safe. If the bats were alive, we could send them home for help. I listened for them. They should have been screeching. But I heard nothing.
I stood there, useless.
The trilobites ate most of the logs, then they reared up and smashed what remained of the raft. The bats darted out of the wreckage and flew around, screaming the word for danger. They must
have been huddled inside in terror. The trilobites rooted around in the wreckage, munched a little more, then began climbing the riverbank away from us.
Cawzee tensed, ready to run.
“Wait until they’re far away. The raft will be the same if we wait or if we don’t, but the first thing is to stay safe.” There was something we should be doing. “Cawzee, you speak bat. Call out ‘home, rescue.’ You’re louder than me, they’ll hear you.”
He took a deep breath. I covered my ears. He began to call loud and clear. The bats answered with “Danger! Flee!” They exchanged calls a few times with him, then turned and flew like arrows northward.
“Good job, Cawzee.”
“They will fly-them one day and one morning, I think. The city will send-us help.”
“Maybe even less time than that. They’re in a hurry to get home.”
I knew that half of all homing bats failed to arrive if the distance was more than a day and the terrain was new to them. And if we didn’t know about the big purple trilobites, what else was out there? And what was keeping the trilobites in the plains, out of the forest? But I didn’t say that. Everyone was scared enough.
I decided the trilobites had gotten far enough away. I motioned to Honey and Scratcher. We started walking. Carefully. Everything else that was wrong with the Coral Plains was still there and trying to kill us.
The raft looked like what I’d expected instead of what I’d hoped for. The logs were chewed up, with not enough solid pieces left to make a little raft for even just one person. The cabin’s contents were spread out, some of it nibbled, and the food had been trampled. The same for the clothes and bedding.
“They liked the wood,” Honey said. She sounded like she was going to cry.
“Why wood?” Scratcher had picked up a gnawed fragment and was stroking it as if he could make it feel better.
“The wood probably tasted good,” she said, her voice catching. “I think this kind has lots of potassium, even for wood. Kats, our kind of kat, like to nibble these trees. And some crabs and birds.”
Scratcher began searching methodically through the debris, stinking of suffering. Honey helped him, stone-faced. Cawzee danced around, checking the horizon. I didn’t like the storm clouds I saw coming our way. It was early afternoon and getting windy.
“All right, we have some food and clothes and most of our gear. Let’s make a shelter out of what we have for tonight. Cawzee, stand guard while we work. Carni-kats might have followed us.”
Scratcher mumbled about his queen as he took stock of what we had, then pantomimed a way to reassemble the cabin, more or less, with the roof set down as a floor to protect us from the ground and the orange sail serving as the new roof.
We got to work. Soon Honey was tying the sail mast in place as the roof beam as I held it steady. She had inspected the ropes for dangerous hangers-on and then taken off her gloves to pull them tight. But as she was looping the ropes for a knot, a coral lashed out from a fold in the sail and stung one of her fingers. She screamed.
As fast as I could, I grabbed her hand, pulled the finger clear, pinned it against the wall of the cabin, and chopped half of it off with my hunting knife.
She kept screaming but didn’t resist. I gripped the finger tight, the third one on her left hand, to stop the bleeding.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She sobbed but was trying to control herself. She raised her injured hand high and took over from me, holding the stump of the finger shut. Good first-aid procedure. I hoped I had cut away enough. Scratcher was pulling out the first-aid kit. I took her upper left arm and squeezed to hold a pulse point shut to keep it from bleeding more.
Cawzee stared at us, frozen in place.
“Cawzee, keep your guard up! The smell of blood will attract things.”
He took a few steps back, then began a careful circle of the raft.
Honey panted, staring up at her hand, then down at the tip of the finger lying on the ground.
Scratcher motioned for her to sit down on the remains of a log so he could examine the wound. I couldn’t look at it. It wasn’t the blood, it was something else. I had failed. I’d lost the raft, and a team member had gotten permanently injured.
Scratcher fussed with her hand, then guided my hand to hold hers again. It felt slick with salve or blood or sweat. He picked up a needle and thread and began sewing. Honey tried to hold her hand still, but she needed my help. I tried to distract myself by looking around for approaching predators.
When Scratcher was done, he gave her some antibiotics, painkillers, and tranquilizers and sent her inside to her bunk, which was now on the floor instead of a shelf on the wall, since we had no shelves. I found the coral that had stung her, flat and orange. It tried to sting my gloves. I dropped it and crushed it under my boot into sticky powder. We finished assembling the cabin.
Then I got buckets of water and washed the blood off the cabin and the area around it until I was sure I had done enough, then I rinsed it some more. I buried the fingertip a good distance away. I wished we could have moved the cabin, but it was too fragile. I helped Cawzee skin his trophy kat far away from us, downstream. We tossed the corpse into the river.
“What be-it your first big kill?” His voice warbled. He was still scared.
“A fitch. Remember how excited Stevland was? He thought they were extinct. Okay, now we need to stretch this out to dry. I think on these bushes over here. The fur looks good. When you lay it flat, you can see the pattern.”
“Queen will like-it.” He did not seem convinced.
“She’ll be proud of you. That was some good shooting.” He was slowly getting more competent. I hoped he would feel more competent. That was what we needed in order to get through, competence. Even if I had to fake it myself.
The wind had picked up and it was going to snow. The sun was setting. I ordered him inside.
By then Scratcher had food and salty tea ready. We insisted on making Honey eat, although she was sleepy, then we went to bed. I lay down next to her so she’d be warmer and not alone if she needed something or had convulsions. No one was going to die on this trip. I hoped.
I kept waking up all night, and every time I did, I looked around at the wrecked cabin, lit and heated by a little oil lamp. I heard snow rustling on the roof, saw a few flakes blowing in through cracks, and tried not to think about anything besides what to do next. I got some ideas.
* * *
At dawn I got up, grabbed my weapons, and went outside. Snow lay a palm deep, and the air was very cold but windless.
Something moved downstream when I stepped out, but I couldn’t see what. A set of carni-kat tracks came up to the cabin, paced back and forth as it had inspected the wall where Honey had bled, and then left, unhurried. The tracks were fresh. Snow had melted over some of the corals. They were warm. I’d try to remember that to tell Honey. Something made a hooting sound far away. Tiny things under rocks clicked and clattered as usual. Cawzee’s kat pelt was still there on the bush.
I went inside. Everyone was awake. Honey looked up and smiled, a forced smile that meant forgiveness. She had her notebook open and was writing.
“What’s the plan, team leader?” Her cheer was as fake as her smile.
“I’m working on that. Cawzee, I need you to come out and help me clean snow off the roof.”
Once we were out, he said, “I go for help. Glassmakers be-us fast.”
“I thought about that. It’s too far and too dangerous, and we need two guards to be safe around here, you and me. Honey and Scratcher can’t be guards.”
“I be-me—”
“And I have a job for us that will be crucial. Okay, they’ll send help, but how do they find us? They’ll see smoke. That’s what stranded hunters do, smoke signals. So we need to find stuff to burn, and it needs to be smoky. Just gathering fuel is going to be a two-person project, one to gather it and the other one to protect that person.”
During breakfast,
Honey had ideas about what could burn. Scratcher assembled tools for us. We took them and went out, keeping the cabin in sight by one of us at all times. Cawzee helped me prod and poke and drag burnable material out of the landscape.
Two hours before sunset, we were on the best nearby hill we could find with a safe, bare, stony top. The woodpile, so to speak, looked more like a garbage pile, but a small test fire had burned well, especially the bits that had been coral guts, and plenty smoky. And stinky, which we agreed might help Glassmaker searchers find us.
As far as we could see, the plains looked more or less the same everywhere. Ridges and ravines created by runoff marked the land. Coral clustered in the damper parts of ravines, and vegetation topped the ridges.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about this place,” I said.
“I not return-me here. Dangerous. Ugly. Sad.” He smelled angry.
“I’m with you there.” But I didn’t agree about ugly. Hostile, incompatible even, weird for sure, but beautiful.
We could see a section of the river below the fork, its banks outlined by corals. And, far away, a moving dot. A bright orange dot, the search-and-rescue color. Moving fast. A canoe! Cawzee started scampering around in place and bellowing so loud they could have almost heard him. I started up the fire and black smoke billowed.
The canoe would be at the fork in the river soon.
“Run and meet it,” I said. He took off like an arrow, dodging pink corals and patches of vegetation. I ran down to the cabin.
Scratcher and Honey had heard the noise and were outside.
“A canoe is coming!” I said.
They cheered and looked downriver. I climbed up on a rock. At the fork in the river, Cawzee screeched and danced on a safe, bare patch of the sandbar at the bend. Several screeches answered. The canoe came into view, a small one, with two—no, three Glassmakers. But one was too large. A queen. That was stupid! Queens should stay safe in the city. The plains were for expendable, unimportant people. We probably shouldn’t even have sent a Human woman.
The canoe stopped at the bank where it was pocked with big pink corals. The queen rose to get out.