by Lou Cadle
“Not sure.” Hannah sniffed it. It had very little smell. “Maybe something in the peach or apricot family?” She really wasn’t at all sure of that. It could be something that went extinct millions of years ago. But she rubbed the fruit on her hand, starting the testing process. If it were underripe, eating very much of it would give her diarrhea, no doubt, but she should still be able to determine if it was toxic or not, even if it was tart. She pulled out one of the zippered plastic bags for fossils and put the rest of the fruit into that.
Zach was walking ahead of her by several yards, with Jodi trailing him. Hannah hurried to catch up.
Zach said, “A stand of saplings just ahead. That was one of the things to look for, right?”
It was a stand of thin trees that might never become big trees. They might even be birch trees, or something related, with light bark that looked to be peeling off naturally. “I like these,” Hannah said.
Zach pushed at one. It bent and sprang back. “What do you want them for?”
“A roof. I have an idea about building with brick, if we can find clay soil.”
Jodi said, “What if we can’t?”
“Then stones plus mud to fill the cracks, up to at least here.” She put her hand at waist level. “On top of that, we either build an A-frame of saplings, lashed together. Or if we can find enough really flexible trunks like these, maybe a rounded roof.”
Zach said, “How do we cut them?”
“Bob says we should be able to make a hand axe. Basically, an axe without a handle. We don’t need much skill to do that. We just need to crack some rocks until we have a sharp edge on something that can be held in one or two hands.”
Zach looked doubtful. “Sounds like a lot of work, using one.”
“It probably will be,” Hannah said. “Everything is a lot of work, isn’t it?”
Jodi said, “You have that right. Getting water, filtering water, making fire, weaving a net, making bedding.”
Zach said, “Tanning hides. Basket-making.”
“Brick making too,” Hannah said. “That’ll take a few days, though most of it waiting for the bricks to bake in a pit.”
“I’ll never take anything for granted again,” Jodi said. “Clothes, a can of food, a can opener, a burger, turning on water and seeing it run out of the tap and knowing I can drink it without worrying. If we get home, I mean, I’ll appreciate every bit of that.”
Zach said, “I think we’ll get home. Laina seems to know what she’s talking about, with the timegate.”
Garreth wouldn’t be going home. Nor would M.J. Hannah couldn’t stop the thought.
Jodi said, “Anyway, so these trees are good?” She looked to Hannah.
“They are. Let’s hunt in a circle around them for a place to build. A clearing with trees on every side would be good.”
They looked for a half hour, and they did come up with one mediocre possibility. It wasn’t a clearing, but a sort of indentation at the edge of the woods. On three sides, they would be protected by trees from the largest of the animals. On the fourth side, there was a patch of flowering bushes with thorns. The giant uintathere could probably plow right through them, but smaller predators might think twice.
Hannah checked her watch. “I’m sure there’s something better. But we have to get back now.”
“Should we mark it somehow?”
“I think we can find it again, but I’ll tie a rag onto a tree that we can see from across the lake, okay?” She remembered that the “rags” she had were strips from Garreth’s shirt. And that made her remember his broken body, and wrestling his jeans off, and cutting up his shirt.
Everything she thought of led back to Garreth. Her eyes filled with tears, and they burned her. An effect of the dehydration, no doubt. She walked toward the lake, broke out of the trees, and dug in her pack for a strip of shirtfront. Finding a branch hanging out from the rest, she tied it there.
Jodi looked up at it. “Is that Garreth’s shirt?”
Hannah nodded. And then it hit her full force again, and she sat on the ground and cried again, her face buried in her hands.
Jodi said, “Keep an eye out for danger, Zach, okay?” And then Hannah felt the girl’s arms go around her. “It’s okay, Hannah.”
That just made her cry harder, at the kindness of the girl.
Jodi let her, holding on to her, patting her shoulder once in a while.
Hannah ran out of tears—literally, her body, short on moisture, could not produce any more. Her eyes still burned, but she had to pull herself together. Had to be a leader, not a liability. Not a leech. She wiped her face with her shirttail, and Jodi let go of her. “Thanks,” she said to the girl.
Jodi sniffled. “I miss him too.”
Zach said, his voice tight, “We all do.”
“And we will,” Hannah managed to say, “for a long time, I’m afraid.” She got to her feet and glanced quickly at the kids. She realized she hadn’t been making frequent eye contact with them—or with anyone—and probably hadn’t since she’d beaten up Dixie.
She had to do something about that. Had to do something about herself. Get herself together.
Chapter 8
Her crying jag had slowed them down, so to make up the time she went right around the lake’s edge, quicker traveling than weaving through the woods. Sometimes, Claire and the net crew were in sight, and sometimes they disappeared behind a patch of trees.
Once, she caught sight of Bob. He didn’t look up to see her, as he was studying something on the ground. Still, he showed no sign of being worried, and it was a relief to know that everyone was okay.
When the ten of them were gathered again by the fishing spot, they were able to report on what they had seen and discuss what needed to be done before nightfall.
“Herring,” Claire said, pointing to the netters’ catch. “If they aren’t something like that, like ciscoes, I’d be shocked.”
“What are they like?” Nari said.
“We gut them, we cook them, and we eat them, bones and all.”
Zach said, “Won’t we choke on fish bones?”
Claire said, “No, those are super-soft. You just eat them, bones and all. But when I clean them, I’m saving some tails for bait. I think I might catch a pretty big fish with that. If I get lucky, I mean. And if the line can take a big fish without breaking.”
Bob said, “So what’s next? Shelter?”
“We can’t build a good shelter yet. Unless you guys ran across some clay?” Hannah said.
“No, but we found some saplings and a good clearing,” Bob said.
“Tomorrow, then, or the day after, we’ll find the clay. And once we do, it’s still going to be three days until we can build walls, I’d think. So until then, we need a temporary shelter. Or five of them.”
“That sounds like a lot of work,” Ted said.
“It’s pretty easy work. Simple, though it’ll take a couple hours to accomplish.”
“Like a lean-to?” Bob said.
“A debris hut.” She sat, smoothing the sand in front of her, and using a pebble to draw a diagram. “We find a downed limb or tree trunk, eight feet long. Ideally, it’s elevated off the ground a bit over a foot naturally, like with a broken trunk sloping down from the stump. If not, we put one end on a big rock or stump, and the other end rests on the ground. Then you set up sturdy sticks, leaning against the center trunk at a forty-five-degree angle. Close together, for not much longer than a human body. Then dump a bunch of leaves, grass, and twigs on top of those. And it’s a shelter. Two people working hard, we certainly can do it in two hours.” She checked her watch. “Which is about half of what we have until sundown.”
“Where?” Rex asked.
“I saw plenty of potential sites over on this side. We probably won’t be within sight of each other, but we’ll be within calling distance.”
“Will it keep out predators?” Nari said, crossing her arms and rubbing one in an unconscious, nervous gesture Hannah
had seen before.
“Not for long,” Hannah said. “And that’s why I want to build something better. But with a little bit of luck, we’ll make it through three nights in these, and by then we’ll have built something sturdier.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “It’s a plan. We also need to cook the fish.”
Claire said, “We could eat them raw.”
“Eww,” Nari said.
“I’ll start a fire,” Dixie said. “They’ll cook pretty fast if we put them on sticks, right? Directly over the flame, I mean. I’m hungry. And there are plenty of sticks in the woods.”
Now that her thirst had been quenched, Hannah felt the hunger too. “Good idea.”
Dixie didn’t look at her. Hannah didn’t want to look at Dixie. The girl’s face was still bruised from Hannah’s beating, though the bruises were beginning to shift from purple to yellow at the edges.
Hannah knew she’d have to apologize to the girl. But she didn’t want to. And until she could mean it, she wouldn’t.
You’re acting as silly as a teenager yourself.
Oh, blow it out your rear, she thought back at the voice.
Claire asked for her knife and made quick work of cleaning three dozen fish. They ranged in size from six to nine inches, counting the tails. Some of the kids found downed sticks that either had a pointy end, or they broke them to create a point. Even this small skill, breaking sticks to make them more useful, was one they had grown better at.
While the fire was getting hot enough to cook the fish quickly, Hannah took all but two cooks—Dixie and Claire—into the woods to pick the debris shelter sites. The first downed tree trunk she found was a little too high, but it was sturdy, and she decided it would be good for Ted and Rex, the tallest of the group. On the spur of the moment, she decided that everybody should pitch in on the first, and then Ted and Rex would be available to help with everyone else’s. That way, she only had to teach the lesson once.
They ate before starting on the shelters. The lake herring had cooked up quickly. Hannah wolfed down her three fish. She kicked dirt over the fire, went to the lake to get water, and poured a half-gallon over that. It was well within a fire ring, lined with rock—Dixie or someone had done a good job of that—but to be safe, Hannah went to the lake two more times and doused the fire completely. They could escape a fire by jumping in the lake, but she didn’t want to risk burning up the shelter and tools the woods would provide.
In under an hour, the first hut was constructed. Hannah worried about the time—maybe she should have started this earlier—but it should go more quickly now that everyone knew how to do it. And the girls’ shelters could be smaller. She assigned roommates by size for just that reason, until she realized that would pair her with Dixie. She revised her pairings so that Dixie and Claire would be together. She took Laina as her roommate.
The two of them soon found a likely log, not too rotten, though they had to drag it a short way to get it up off the ground far enough by propping it on a second fallen log. While Laina gathered leaves, Hannah broke sticks in half and propped them at an angle against the log. Laina came behind her and piled the debris on.
“If it rains, won’t we get wet?” Laina asked.
Hannah glanced up. “We have some canopy, so probably not very. And if we were going to use these for a longer time, there are ways to keep the rain out. You either find big leaves, and lay them across first, or peel bark, and use it like shingles, or make the roof thicker.”
“Okay. Besides, we got wet last time a lot, didn’t we?”
“It was so hot, it didn’t matter. It’s cooler now.”
“I wonder what it’s like in January,” Laina said.
“Luckily, we won’t be here in January to find out. A month is all we need, and then we can go forward another twenty million, or maybe twenty-five, whatever you can give us.” She was inside the dim space now, picking up the hard twigs on the ground and tossing them out, while Laina finished the outside.
“And one more jump, and we’d be close to home,” Laina said. “But close isn’t close enough. I need to narrow it down more.”
“How will you do that?”
“I hope the math will get me there. But maybe not,” she said. “There’s really no way to figure it out except experimenting.”
“And we can’t do that,” Hannah said. She put aside the worry about getting back to their own time until another day.
The light was fading from the world. Inside the shelter, it was already night. Even when Hannah crawled out of the shelter, under the canopy of summer leaves, she could barely see. “We should dig a latrine deep enough to last for three days, and use it. Then we can sleep.”
Laina didn’t say anything, and Hannah realized she was lost inside her own head again, just kneeling there, staring at nothing. Hannah went over to her, lifted her arm, and tugged. As if hypnotized, the girl rose and followed Hannah. Upon reflection it was probably a good pairing, her and Laina. She could keep the girl from wandering off in a daze.
In the twilight, the latrine completed, she and Laina made it back to their shelter, getting lost only slightly before finding it. In the dim twilight, the pile of leaves looked like a pile of leaves, hardly different than windswept piles that were here naturally. They crawled in and she pushed her pack against the opening to serve as a door. Hannah lay back and schooled her mind against drifting once again to thoughts of Garreth. Instead, she made a schedule for tomorrow, and thought through the tasks, until sleep overtook her.
A nightmare awoke her. She was awake, staring at darkness, wondering for a moment where she was—then wondering when she was. The nightmare had been nothing more than a memory of Garreth’s death. A memory, not a creation of her mind. It played over and over in her waking hours. And now it was visiting her at night.
The rest of the night was a restless one. She finally fell asleep for more than ten minutes, only be to woken at dawn by Laina muttering to herself.
As soon as the world was bright enough that she could see dim light outlining her backpack, she pushed the pack aside and crawled out. Her mouth tasted of fish oil, she realized, and she found a bottle of water and rinsed her mouth several times, spitting the water out, and then taking a long drink.
She’d never gotten a dehydration headache, but her head had felt tight and uncomfortable, like a headache was near. But today, it felt normal again. She checked her hand, where she had splinted it, and felt gingerly along the line of the thin bone she had broken. Yesterday’s shelter-building hadn’t done it any good. It ached, and when she touched near to the break, it hurt.
There was no help for that. She had to do more heavy work today, and tomorrow. She’d have to deal with it. All things considered, she preferred the physical pain to the emotional pain.
She rousted Laina out of the shelter, as it was obvious the girl was well awake, and wended her way through the woods toward the other shelters. She came upon Rex, just zipping up after relieving himself. He started as she stepped on a twig, and she apologized.
“Think we can catch enough to eat twice today?” she said. “We’ll be burning through the calories while building the shelter.”
“Yeah, we can cast the net right away.”
Ted crawled out of the shelter then, yawning. His hair had a half-dozen leaves stuck in it. Hannah took off her ranger’s hat and felt her own. Yeah, there was one. She finger-combed her hair and pushed the hat back on. “Let’s get to it, then,” she said.
They walked in the direction of last night’s campfire and came upon Bob, waiting at the edge of a thick patch of woods. One of them stepped on a stick, and when it cracked, Bob spun around, clasping his spear. “Oh, it’s just you,” he whispered.
Hannah’s senses went on full alert. “Something wrong?” she whispered back.
“Come and see.”
Chapter 9
The four of them crowded around Bob and peered past the trunk of the tree he was standing by.
At the lak
e, near the spot they had fished, there were animals standing and drinking.
But what animals! Hannah stood, agape, trying to count the different species. There were short ones, tall ones, hunchbacked ones, skinny ones, and fat ones. Horns, no horns, too many horns, just as the uintathere had, but on smaller species. Hooves and feet were both visible. Pointed snouts, flat snouts, square snouts. One stood up briefly on two legs and swiveled its head, looking for predators, perfectly balanced on only two feet, then dropped back down.
Bob said, “I can’t even guess at some of them. But that one there is, I think, a primate. An early primate.”
As he spoke, one small animal left the lake’s edge and ran back to a tree, and then climbed it, clearly gripping the tree with a five-toed grip.
“That one,” he said.
“And horses,” Rex said. “There at the water.”
“Eohippus,” Bob said. “True horses. They should have the beginnings of hooves.”
“No predators?” Ted asked.
“Not among that bunch.”
Rex said, “What about over there? Across the way? That thing is big.” He pointed.
Hannah saw the animal, a big animal indeed, with squat legs and a thick body. “A rhino?” she said because, for a change, it actually looked a little like an animal she knew about from the 21st century.
“Yeah, a subhyracodon, possibly,” Bob said. “The museum has a jaw of one from about this time.”
Rex said, “But don’t the predators have to drink too?”
“Yeah,” Ted said.
“Maybe less often,” Bob said. “They might meet some of their fluid needs with blood.”
Ted said, “Should we try and kill something for breakfast?” Then he said, “Stupid. I left my spear outside of the hut. But I can go back and get it.”
Rex said, “We’re netting fish.”
Hannah said, “It takes fewer calories to catch fish than to run down game. But I do want some red meat in our diet soon. And organ meats, especially. At least we know where we can hunt.”
Ted said, “Right here, in the morning.”