by Lou Cadle
“The soup is made of everything else,” Dixie said. “Heads, tails, bones, but not the guts.”
“Good use of resources,” Hannah said.
Claire was looking strangely at her. As Hannah focused on her more, she made a face, and then put her finger to her mouth in a “shhh” sign.
“Uh, Claire, you okay?”
The girl shook her head, hard but fast. When Dixie glanced up, Claire schooled her face into a bland expression.
Something between the girls, then. “I want to look at your throat,” Hannah said. “Come over here, into the light.” The fire was shaded now by the sun going down behind the trees.
She did want to check Claire. She had the girl tilt back her head and looked at her throat. It was deep purple, all the way around. “Too bad we don’t have a mirror for you to see this,” she said. “That’s a spectacular bruise.”
Claire shifted herself so that Hannah blocked her view of Dixie. She pointed and mouthed something.
Hannah shook her head, not understanding.
“Be—”
“Don’t talk.”
Claire looked frustrated. She mimed writing.
“I’m out of paper.” Some had been used to start fires on wet days. There hadn’t been much to start with, just a bit to write down details of fossil finds to put in the bags with the fossils.
Claire frowned. Then she looked around, saw something, and walked over to the edge of the lake.
Hannah followed.
Claire dropped to her knees, grabbed a rock and wrote something in the patch of sandy dirt at the lake’s edge.
WATCH OUT!
Then she scrubbed it out with her hand.
Hannah looked at Claire, not understanding for a moment. Then she got it. “Dixie?” she whispered.
Claire nodded emphatically.
What now? Seriously, Dixie, what now?
Claire wrote something else. “Talk when?” She pointed to her throat.
“Not today,” Hannah said. “Tomorrow, maybe. Do you think you can eat today?”
Claire scrubbed out the last message and wrote, “Soup.”
“Oh! Of course. Good idea.”
“Hungry!” was the next message.
“I’m sure you are. But is the throat feeling better?”
She nodded, stood up, and wiped her hand on her pants.
“We were lucky, then. It could have been a lot worse.” Then she remembered. “Come on over to the fire.” She led the way and then explained to the two girls about Bob’s chest pains. They hadn’t seen him collapse.
“So he’s okay?” Dixie said. “Or not?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like we can call 911 and have a hospital run tests. It could be anything from—gosh, a pulled muscle, even, as he was carrying a load of bricks—to a serious heart attack.”
“Is he going to die?” Dixie demanded.
“I don’t know. Or yeah, we’ll all die one day. But he looks better now than he did a few hours ago. If he makes it through the night, I’m optimistic. Just don’t let him do anything. He should hardly lift a finger tomorrow.”
“Who shouldn’t lift a finger?” It was Nari, bringing a load of bricks out.
Hannah had to explain.
Nari’s eyes filled with tears. “Are you sure he’s going to be okay?”
Hannah wavered between comforting the girl and telling the truth. She opted for truth. “I wish I knew. We just all have to keep an eye on him. He shouldn’t stand up for anything more than relieving himself tomorrow. And it’s going to be hard to convince him not to pitch in to harder work. Day after tomorrow, I predict that’s going to be a fight we have every day with him. So everybody stand firm. He can make cordage. The next day, he can flip fish on the cooking rocks. Nothing more strenuous than that.”
“Maybe I should have a heart attack,” Dixie said. “Get out of some work.”
“Shut up,” Nari said. “It’s Mr. O’Brien.”
Hannah was surprised at that. Those two had been thick as thieves at the beginning, whispering together, Nari following Dixie’s every lead. But since Garreth’s death, there’d been a rift. And Nari sure didn’t seem in any hurry to heal it. Who knows how Dixie felt about it.
At some point, they had to talk about Garreth, as a group. Have another memorial service. Get everything out in the open, including making her apology to Dixie—to everyone—public. But with Bob’s heart now being an issue, Hannah was going to have to put it off for longer.
Get the hut built. Start hunting for more food. Figure out how to process the cashew nuts. Get those things accomplished, and maybe in a week or so there’d be time to take a breather.
Not that a group therapy session about Garreth’s death—and about Hannah’s loss of control—was going to be “a breather.” It’d be harder for her than hauling bricks. But she knew it had to be done.
Chapter 16
That night, after they had washed the clay pots and banked the kiln fire for the night, she let people decide where they wanted to sleep—in their debris huts, or behind the short wall of the new cabin. She and Laina and Ted and Rex chose the debris huts. To everyone else joining Bob in the cabin, she said, “You might want to set a watch. That wall’s not going to stop a predator from just hopping over.”
Dixie said, “Like one of those hell pigs couldn’t just bust down a bunch of sticks and leaves where you’re sleeping.”
Bob said, “Luckily they seem to be diurnal predators.”
Zach said, “What’s that mean?”
“Daytime predators. Nocturnal means at night. And there’s a word for only at twilight too, but I forget it.” He winced as he adjusted his position.
“Your chest hurt again?” Hannah said.
“No.”
“So, kids,” Hannah said, “let’s pile up that grass so Mr. O’Brien can rest easy tonight, all right? That’ll be the last task of the day.”
She watched their renewed energy as they set to the task. They seemed to hold on to the respect for their teacher, even through all these weeks of living side by side with him. Familiarity was supposed to breed contempt, but with Bob it had not. He had managed to keep himself at a remove from them, still the teacher, even though he ate with them, slept next to them, and the boys had all seen him naked while bathing. It was a testament to the sort of man he was, and to the sort of teacher he must have been. That a teacher, in these times, could engender such a deep and lasting respect was something of a miracle.
In her times, it would have been too, as her times were only, after all, fifteen years ago. She felt ancient, though, living among the teens, closer to Bob in mental age. A twinge in her back made her stop and rub at it. Make that mental age and physical, both, at least at the end of a day of hard work.
She’d been overworking Bob. The thought had crossed her mind, far back at the beginning, that he wasn’t young, and she should adjust for that. But then life had gone on, needs had grown, and she had forgotten, treating him no differently than she treated herself or the teenagers.
She might feel as old as Bob, but in fact she was not. Nor did she know what it felt like to be him. What it was like to be seventeen, she could remember. What it was like to be sixty, she could only guess.
Her mother would be sixty soon. The thought surprised her. She didn’t think of her mother often. She had learned not to. She pushed the thought out of her mind. Long habit made that easy.
She was about to take the other three debris-hut dwellers away when Bob said, “Crepuscular!”
“Bob?” She was a little worried the outburst might be a sign of a stroke.
“The word for twilight hunters. Diurnal, nocturnal, crepuscular.”
She was relieved. “Avoid crepuscular predators then, and goodnight, all.”
* * *
The next morning, they unloaded the bricks first thing. Rex made a suggestion about making the kiln fire burn hotter by digging a trench, and she let him do that. Claire said she was out of bait a
nd so they cast the net, but it only took a single cast to get enough herring to satisfy her bait requirements.
Rex said, “I have an idea for a single-person net too, so Claire—or anybody—could use it on her own.”
“Cabin first,” Hannah said, “and other things later.” She had other projects in mind too.
As she worked on making more bricks that morning, she thought about that. She wanted to weave baskets to use as backpacks for everyone, so that gathering grass or fruit didn’t have to be done by the armload. They had three useful backpacks. Dixie’s small and fashionable one was falling apart. Also, the more gear they accumulated, the more they needed a way to carry it through the timegate.
They had a big clay soup pot and five smaller ones. She could easily make another five, once the cabin was built. They had the fishing net, much repaired, some small-game skins from the Oligocene, and some bones and turtle shell and clam shells they’d saved from the Paleocene. They had the spears they carried, and Jodi had her club. Now they had the hand axes, and they were likely to make more tools. They had coils of cordage, though they were quickly using up all that in making the structure for the upper walls and roof of the house.
There was a lot more on her mental to-do list. She wanted to find a really good honing stone and carry that with them. She wanted to make more animal traps: snare, deadfall, and pit. They hadn’t collected the snare traps when they had fled the Oligocene, and with these woods and game trails, it was stupid not to trap every day. That fish were plentiful was terrific, a great gift of nature, but game provided red meat and skins and possibly tools. Claire had suggested that if they saved the ligaments, they could make some use of those. Hannah wanted to try and drill holes in some bones so they had more needles. The one steel needle she had was getting dull. She wanted to try and collect pine sap or some other such material for glue.
She wanted to test more foods and find more fruit. She needed to figure out how to process the cashews, now that they’d eaten their way through almost all of the tart fruit. Because it drew insects, they had it stored a couple dozen yards away from the cabin building site. The nuts seemed to be left alone, for the most part, by rodents and the primate, which told her more than anything else that the humans shouldn’t consume them either, not until they worked out how to treat the nuts to remove whatever was putting off the other animals.
The fruit was very astringent, possibly because it was under-ripe. But two of them—Ted and Nari—had seemed to have a mild allergic reaction to it, getting red around the mouth when they ate it. Nothing worse than that had happened, but she worried that it was an allergy and that if they continued to eat the fruit, it’d get worse. She had no way of dealing with a case of anaphylactic shock. She finally asked Ted and Nari to not eat the fruit, and they had to look on mournfully as the other kids did.
She hauled another load of bricks out to the kiln, which she had Nari tending. She’d asked Zach if he wanted to do that, not wanting to only pick girls for the less physical tasks, but he’d said no, he was enjoying learning how to build a house.
They took a break for an early lunch. It had taken longer for Claire, fishing alone, to catch enough food for a meal for ten, but she had. They ran out of bricks just after lunch, and so she set the net team to helping catch a larger supper. She pulled Claire off fishing and asked if she felt up to constructing some traps.
“Yes,” she croaked.
Hannah said, “I think maybe you shouldn’t talk the rest of the day.” She had said a few words at lunch, and her voice had seemed stronger then. Now it was fading.
Claire held up a finger. “Dixie,” she said.
“Is she bothering you somehow?”
An adamant shake of the head. “Doesn’t like you.” It was clear how much it pained her to get those few words out.
“I know. That’s no secret, Claire. But you really have to quit using your voice now. Tomorrow morning, you can try again.”
Claire looked frustrated but she said no more. It had to hurt her to talk. She had eaten some fish at lunch too, small pieces, well-cooked fillets. Her throat probably had taken all the stress it could.
Hannah joined the people sitting in the cabin, now four and a fraction courses of brick high, over knee-high even to the tallest of them. All the bricks being made today were being made with the holes designed to hold the structural arms of the roof. It was going to be an A-frame cabin, with a single gable. She had imagined the brick wall would reach above her waist, but it was taking too long to make the bricks.
Rex had pointed out that if they didn’t mortar in the columns for the roof, they could lift it to add another course of bricks later on. So for now, they were building a cabin too short for Rex and Ted to stand in except maybe at the very center. They wouldn’t have skimped on the height, except that everyone who had slept in it agreed that they felt too exposed to danger. By tomorrow night, they’d have a roof on, and even if a roof of pine boughs and woven twigs wasn’t any real protection against something dangerous and determined, it would have a powerful psychological benefit.
Everyone had fallen silent while doing their work. Bob was propped again against the wall, twisting cordage. Everyone else was working at lashing the last of the structure for the roof together. Hannah was about to return to help with more brick-making when she heard a crashing sound in the trees. Not too close, but close enough to make her sit up and pay attention.
Whatever it was, it was coming closer.
Chapter 17
“Has to be big,” Bob muttered.
“Shh.” Hannah waved the others into the cabin. She dragged a pair of the larger pine boughs over to block the doorway. It wasn’t much protection, but it might fool an animal that relied on its eyes to hunt. Zach did the same with the opening they’d left for the fireplace.
The animal noises were getting louder. Hannah patted the air, trying to get everyone else to stay down, to hide behind the wall. She looked around for a spear, any spear, spotted one, and grabbed it up. Her tool belt was off, lying on the ground. She considered strapping it on but decided it would only weigh her down. Better to stay light and able to run faster.
Then, hoping she wasn’t doing something incredibly stupid, she moved toward the sound. A smarter person would surely be moving away from it. But Bob couldn’t run away right now. She worried that even the fear over the noise would be too much for his heart. She had to keep the animal away from the cabin, whatever it was.
The clearing was free of extraneous twigs by this point, but soon she was past the first broad trunks and into an area with leaves and fallen branches underfoot. She had to pick her way carefully to avoid making loud noise.
That the animals ahead weren’t taking any trouble at all to be quiet worried her. If they were that noisy, it meant they had nothing to worry about. And if they had nothing to worry about, that meant she had a whole lot to worry about.
The crashing gave way to a quieter sound. Rustling. Rooting. Crunching.
She saw them from a distance, through a narrow break in the tree trunks. It was a group of hell pigs. And they had found the pile of cashews.
Whatever had kept the smaller animals away from the nuts wasn’t bothering these monsters at all. They were jostling each other for position, snarfing down nuts, the remaining fruit, and random bits of fallen material.
She circled around them, aiming for the lake. If they went back the way they had come in, no problem. If they turned for the cabin, she had to drive them or, more likely, lead them away. She couldn’t outrun them on the grassland. She might be able to climb a sturdy tree. A medium-sized tree, with more convenient branches for her to grab, they could push over. But they might not be able to swim.
If she found a perfect climbing tree, she’d stop at it, make noise, and get ready to scamper up. Otherwise, she wanted to circle around so that she had the shortest possible run to the water.
She tried to keep them in sight, but she had to duck around a stand of bushes. Whe
n she lost sight of them, their heads were still all down, busy with eating. When she caught sight of them again, three heads were up.
They were sniffing the air. One was backing up and making a turn.
Hannah backed away from them, feeling behind herself for obstacles. She didn’t want to trip on anything.
When the jaw of the hell pig that was backing up swung around, she appreciated for the first time how big its head was. It had to be at least a quarter of the length of the rest of it. It had to be big enough to fit her whole arm in there. That’d be the last she’d ever see of that arm. One snap of those huge jaws, and it’d come right off at the shoulder.
Her heel hit a fallen log with a low thud and she stumbled.
The animal that had been turning looked right at her.
She managed not to fall, but by the time she had her balance, it had taken a step toward her. The second step it took was bigger, and she saw it was going to break into a run.
She pivoted and ran for all she was worth, straight for the lake. She knew she couldn’t outrun the animal, not over any distance. Her only hope was reaching the lake. Her only hope after that was that it didn’t swim.
If it did swim, she was a dead woman.
She burst out of the trees and into a patch of low bushes. Vaulting them, wishing she had Ted’s natural athleticism, she pounded down the slope and into the lake. When the water was at her knees, she dove.
The last thing she heard before she went under was the huffing sound of the hell pig, far too close for comfort.
Her dive had been shallow, of necessity, and she tried to keep herself both under the surface and off the bottom as she stroked hard for deeper water. If it couldn’t see her or hear her, she figured her chances of survival were better.
But if it had any brain at all, it could just follow her straight in.
The thought made her turn to the right, rolling on her side and bending her legs so her feet were snatched up. Without having any idea where the predator was, she was still finding it easy to imagine it was only inches away, hunting for her.