by Lou Cadle
The animals were beginning to drift away. The last to turn to go was a hoofed animal, what had to be a camel or a relative, Hannah thought, as its face swung toward her. Something about the ears said “camel,” though like the ones from later on, from the Oligocene, it had no hump.
It had passed them, stopping to sniff in their direction, maybe detecting a new threat. And she and kids were that. This would be a perfect-sized animal to hunt for food.
It decided there was nothing to worry about at the moment from the unfamiliar smell, and it continued plodding away from the lake, up through the trees. Hannah heard movement behind her and turned to look, feeling the familiar jolt of adrenaline that readied her to fight a predator, but it was just the rest of the kids, making their way through the trees.
Ted and Rex had left the cover of the trees to watch the last of the animals walk away. Hannah was letting her mind switch to planning mode, thinking through what was the most important task to begin the day, when Ted gave a wordless shout of surprise.
She pushed past Bob and turned to look where Ted was pointing. Through the sparse forest growth, she could see the camel was running, being chased by something lower to the ground.
“What is it?” she said.
Rex said, “The same kind of animal that we saw up at the hilltop.”
“The hell pigs?”
“Yeah, two of them.”
The chase had moved beyond her sight. She realized that birds had been calling before that, and for the moment they had been stilled by the activity. Or maybe it was the humans that had them quiet. She said, “Maybe we should wait behind the cover of the trees, then.”
“I don’t think that would help,” Ted said. “The camel thing wasn’t making any noise. They spotted it anyway.”
Other hell pigs were coming out of the trees too, far down the animal trail.
Rex said, “Maybe we shouldn’t fish here today. Somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” said Hannah, though she didn’t think moving a quarter-mile off would take them out of the hell pigs’ hunting range. She wondered if they’d stick around all day, or move back into the grass to follow the grazing animals. Maybe after eating this morning, this particular group wouldn’t need to eat for a day or two.
Claire said, “Wouldn’t hurt to keep moving with the fishing anyway. It’s a big lake, and we might catch different fish in different spots.”
“Though you four need to stay together while you fish,” Hannah said. “The rest of us need to find some clay soil today.” Seeing the hell pigs this close to where they wanted to stay made her more determined to start a solid structure as soon as possible.
Nari said, “I’m hungry.”
Claire said, “I know, me too. If we’re lucky, we can get enough fish to have brunch. And then we’ll catch more for supper.”
Bob said, “Sounds good. So we should split up again, Hannah?”
“Yeah. Ted, you and Rex go back and get your spears, okay?” She looked around to make sure everyone else had theirs. Jodi had her club. “And maybe when we get the house built, we should all practice climbing trees quickly. I don’t think those hell pigs can climb.”
“No,” Bob said. “They wouldn’t be able to.”
They broke into groups as they had before, agreeing to meet back in two hours.
“Let’s look further away from the lake,” Hannah said to Jodi and Zach. “If we can find a stream feeding the lake, that might be a place to start our hunt for clay.”
“Didn’t notice any yesterday,” Jodi said.
Zach said, “Why don’t we walk at the outside of the trees? We’ll go faster.”
“Sounds good,” said Hannah. “Besides, that way we can see danger coming at us over the plains, if it does.”
“Unless they’re better hunters than us,” Jodi said.
Good point. “But we’re smarter than them,” Hannah said.
“I don’t know if I could climb a tree at all,” Jodi said. “It’s been years since I tried.”
“Good point. For sure we should all practice.”
They walked out of the woods and followed the irregular border of the outer limit of the trees. To their right, the dry grassland spread out upslope. The nearer grass was greener. She pointed it out. “The water table must be pretty high. If we needed to dig for water right here, I think we could.”
“But we have plenty,” Zach said. “The lake is big. And it isn’t making anyone sick.”
They passed a stand of sycamore trees. Hannah plucked a leaf from a low-hanging branch. It looked exactly like modern sycamores. That made her remember the fruit she had in the bag. She had rubbed some on her lip after supper. So today, she needed to chew some and spit it out and later on eat a small bite. She had the other two halt while she rooted around in her backpack for the bag with the fruit. The kids were talking about sleeping in the debris huts.
Zach said, “Mr. O’Brien snored so loud he woke me up.”
Jodi said, “I think I do sometimes too.”
“I’ve never heard you snore.”
Hannah finished spitting out the stringy fruit pulp and took a drink from the bottle without letting it touch her lips, offering it to the others. She’d swallowed a tiny amount of the fruit’s juice without meaning to. It was tart stuff, but she thought it would ripen into an edible fruit, maybe a bit on the tart side still, like a persimmon. But it would probably be a great source of vitamin C.
Or could it be vitamin C had yet to evolve. All animals needed some vitamins, surely, but were they the same vitamins in this world as in the one she had grown up in? She tried to think it through. Surely the chemical existed, though, even if they were the only creatures here who needed it. She had to admit she knew nothing about vitamin compounds and when they’d evolved. She wondered if even the experts knew that.
They walked until it was time to turn around without finding a stream leading to the lake, or any soil that looked at all like clay.
“Sandy stuff,” said Jodi, standing up and letting the last of a soil sample run through her fingers.
“Let’s cut in and go back along the lake, then, see if it’s different there.”
“I don’t know,” Zach said. “I mean, yeah, no sense in retracing our steps. But all the dirt looks wrong, at least in this area.”
It did. She wished, not for the first time, that M.J. was still around, with his knowledge of geology. He could explain the how and why of the lake and the soils—
And that’s when it hit her that it had been a couple of hours since she had thought of Garreth. Focused on the hunt for soil, on the periodic scanning for danger, on wondering about vitamins, and on her ideas for building strong walls, she had let him slip from her mind. The rush of guilt that followed that was powerful, stopping her in her tracks.
The two kids, chattering together, got ahead of her in the trees. She stopped and leaned her head against the rough trunk of a pine. She knew at some level that it was normal to move on, to let grief fade, but she felt terrible for it. She should feel guilt. She should remember what she had failed to do for Garreth and not let herself off the hook.
Then she realized the kids had walked out of her sight and hurried to catch up to them. She couldn’t bring Garreth back, but she could try harder to protect the ones with her.
They went to the edge of the lake, and walked back toward the rendezvous point. Again, she could see the others fishing. Ted waved, and she waved back. Every twenty steps, either Zach or Jodi stooped to check the soil, but they were finding sand, and small pebbles rounded by the lake water. Nothing that would build them a brick cabin.
“Maybe we should think of rocks instead,” Hannah said. “But we’d still need mud to mortar them. This stuff wouldn’t even work for that.”
Zach said, “We should import it, then. Go out into the grassland and find some.”
Jodi said, “But how would we carry it?”
Zach said, “We need a wheelbarrow I guess.”
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��May as well wish for a pick-up truck,” Jodi said, cheerfully. “We could carry more.”
“I do wish for one,” Zach said. “Think how fast we could look for something like clay with one. Drive fifty yards, stop, hop off the bed, dig, and hop back on.”
“Sure. Or go hunting. No more need to run down an animal. Drive at them until they fell over from exhaustion, then run over the head. I could do the driving.”
“Should I trust you? How’d you do in driver’s ed?”
Hannah listened to them talk for a few minutes about school, about the old world of learner’s permits and school and classrooms. Then they switched right back to talking about this world when Zach found a straight hardwood limb he said would make a good spear.
Hannah admired their flexibility. In many ways, the kids were adjusting better than her. They were bouncing back from their grief better than her too. Able to jump from talking about the old world to the new without falling into a funk any more. They adapted quickly. Maybe it was their superior intelligence, or maybe it was their youth, or maybe it was the absence of the weight of responsibility. Whatever the difference, she envied them.
And once she had taught them everything she knew about woodcraft and wilderness survival, they’d be able to manage without her. She could hand over leadership to Ted or whomever the group selected. She longed for the release of that day.
They walked all the way back to the fishing crew without having found anything like the sort of soil that could make bricks.
Claire had built up the fire some time ago, by the looks of it. It had burned down to coals already. Some big fillets were laid out on rocks. “I started cooking when I saw you were getting closer,” Claire said.
“Thanks,” Hannah said. “That was thoughtful.”
Ted said, “We’re hungry too. So it was partly selfish.”
Jodi said, “These are bigger fish. Do you know what they are?”
“Totally,” Claire said. She went to the lakeside where she had been cleaning the fish and picked something up and brought it over. It was a fish head. “Catfish. See the whiskers?”
Hannah looked at the size of the fillets. “Good size ones too.”
“Herring tail bait. I thought it would probably work, and it did. And Rex figured out a way to weight the line so I was able to fish right along the bottom, where they hang out.”
“Smart,” Hannah said. “Can’t wait to taste them.”
Claire said, “Dad usually had us throw them back, because as bottom feeders, he said they were more polluted.”
Jodi said, “I’ve eaten catfish, I’m sure. I didn’t know they were polluted.”
Hannah said, “Farm-raised ones, probably, so not the same problems with what they eat. From the store?”
“At restaurants,” Jodi said. “Catfish and these little corn meal things, what are they called?”
“Hush puppies,” Bob said, walking up with Nari and Laina. “I wouldn’t mind some of those.”
“Does corn exist yet?” Nari said, hopefully.
“If it does,” Bob said, “I suspect it’s limited to South America, and it’d be those odd-looking tiny ears, not even as long as your pinkie. Nothing like modern feed corn. But I’m going to enjoy this fish, even without hush puppies.”
“Any luck?” Hannah said.
“Yeah,” Laina said. “Hang on.” She went through her belt and pulled out a zippered plastic bag of mud. “We got it wet. It makes a ball, at least.”
Hannah took the sample and squeezed it. It did look good—much better than what her group had found this morning. “How much of it?”
Nari said, “We couldn’t really tell. There was a good patch, then some not so good, and another good patch. We didn’t get to look for very long before we had to come back.”
“It’s a good hour from here,” Bob said. “We’re running out of soap plant too. Maybe we could hunt for that today.”
Hannah said, “And some of my medicine plant.”
“What’s that?” Bob said.
“Didn’t I mention it? Sorry.” Hannah realized she had been sunk into her grief so deeply that day, she had never talked about it. “I think I found something that can numb skin, without any worse effects. So if I have to stitch someone’s wound again, it’ll hurt less. Or if we get stung by an insect. Or burned. We can numb a burn.”
Claire said, “That happens often enough.”
It had. Popping embers from the fire, forgetting and touching a hot rock with bare hands. They’d all had tiny burns, nothing too serious, though Hannah had dabbed some of the precious remaining antibiotic cream on a couple of the larger ones. She wished she knew of a plant that could replace that—or even how to begin to identify potential candidates. Testing every plant for antiseptic properties would take forever.
“Fish is ready,” Claire said. Claire scooped the smaller fillets into the bowls and the larger fillets into the big pot, which the boys and Bob all shared, while the girls and Hannah each had her own bowl. Hannah wondered how that had come to be, and wondered at the etiquette of it, and why there was etiquette at all in this sort of living situation. Maybe it was a human need as basic, as automatic, as speech.
As they ate, they discussed how to work the rest of the afternoon. The cast netting had gained them more herring, and a few other smaller fish.
“I like the catfish better,” said Dixie.
Everyone agreed, but Hannah felt compelled to speak up. “The herring is higher in oil, so higher in calorie content. We shouldn’t dismiss it.”
“I think the oil is what I was belching all night,” Nari said.
“It’ll do more good than harm, though,” Hannah said, remembering how she had awoken with the taste of the herring still in her mouth too. “So we should eat it.”
“Are those frogs?” Zach said.
“Where?” Nari said, looking around.
“The sound, I meant,” Zach said.
Everyone was quiet for a moment. In the distance, there was a noise that may well have been frogs.
“Sounds like a bird to me,” said Dixie.
“I wonder what frogs sounded like in the Paleo—sorry, Eocene,” Jodi said.
“Mr. O’Brien, were there any?” Nari asked.
“Frogs go back quite a while,” he said. “So yes. And some are edible.”
“Eww,” Nari said.
“They’re said to taste like chicken.”
“I’ve never had chicken,” Nari said.
That made everyone stop and stare at her.
“Vegetarian, remember?” she said.
Jodi said, “But you never even tried a chicken nugget at school?”
“Never,” she said. “I had a tofudog. And garden burgers. And some tofu nuggets that I think were supposed to look like chicken nuggets.”
“Wow,” Ted said.
Dixie said, “So this is the first meat you’ve ever had, here?”
Nari nodded and looked at her empty bowl. “Or fish.”
“Do you like it?” Zach asked.
“No,” Nari said. “But Hannah said I had to eat it to keep me alive, so I’m eating it.”
Laina said, “Do you have to pray for forgiveness or something for eating it?”
Nari shrugged. “It’s not really forgivable. I mean, I could pray, but the animal would still be dead, right? I can’t fix that.”
All the kids were looking at her curiously, clearly having a hard time getting their minds around that view of food.
Bob cleared his throat. “So, we’re agreed, right? We’ll move everything close to the clay, fishing and all.”
“Sounds right,” Hannah said. “And we’ll build there, but we should use the debris huts we’ve already built to sleep in tonight. Everybody pass me your bowls. I’ll do dishes.”
That only entailed rinsing the bowls and taking a small handful of sand to lightly scrub them. She had discovered her firing of the bowls wasn’t so expert that she could scrub very hard, or the clay began to crum
ble. Maybe when making the bricks for the house, she could find a better way to bake them, and she’d be able to replace these with more sturdy dishes. Then these could be used for other purposes, carrying non-food items.
Claire set up the big bowl for fish stew with the smaller fish, trying to judge how close to put it to the fire in order for it to be ready but not overcooked in four to six more hours. Then they all went out to check the site where the clay had been found.
Hannah kept her eye out for game trails as they walked around the clay site, hunting for a building site and stands of saplings. By noon, they had decided on a place to build close to the clay source. She kept it well away from any game trails. There were some saplings in a stand, birches, she thought, and she set everyone to knocking them down. Rex and Ted were about the strongest, and she dithered for a moment before deciding where their strength would be best utilized.
“Okay, Dixie, you and Bob try to break rocks until you get us a hand axe, please.”
“Sounds good,” Bob said. “Let’s check for the biggest rocks we can find. Fine-grained, I bet, would work best.”
“Keep your eye out for—” Hannah began, and then stopped when Bob quirked an eyebrow at her. “Sorry. It’s habit. I’ll try to break it. I know you both know already to glance around to look for danger from time to time.”
Nari set to carrying water from the lake to the clay. Claire went with her to build another fire, at the lake’s edge, for firing the bricks. Zach and Jodi she sent out to gather grass.
“Why?” Jodi said.
“Part of the brick-making process. We’ll mix up grass and mud, and that’s a brick.”
Zach said, “And we’ll be careful. Watch for attack, look around. Don’t worry.”
She smiled, and as they walked off, she realized it was probably her first smile since they lost Garreth. Again, she felt a stab of guilt at moving on. She could feel it wanting to drag her down, but she resisted its pull.
She forced herself to focus instead on the task at hand. “While you’re taking out those saplings, Ted and Rex,” she said, “be thinking of a way we can make the bricks square.”
“Molds?” said Rex.
“We can’t make wood molds,” said Ted. “You know who we need for this?”