Displaced

by Drake,Stephen

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Then you worried for nothing!” she chided.

  “You know, life may not be easy, but with you it sure won’t be boring.” Murdock chuckled.

  Rose smiled, obviously pleased with herself.

  “Good! Glad to hear it,” she said, snuggling with him in the hot water.

  “Kevin,” Rose said after a long silence during which they soaked, “I have to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “I trapped you. We really aren’t married. There’s nothing legal, and it’s unlikely to be for a long time,” she said after a long pause. “If you don’t want me to refer to you as my husband, I’ll understand.”

  Murdock lay there. He felt as if he were in heaven. He had the best woman he could possibly want and a situation that he could only dream about on Earth. As far as he was concerned, he had it all. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said after thinking for a while. “If things don’t work out between us after the first fifty years or so, I’ll just tell you to leave. Okay?”

  Rose raised her head and looked in his face. His was a good face improved by a shave. “Deal,” she said softly as she rubbed his smooth face with her hand.

  They soaked for a long time before getting out and going to bed. After making love again, Murdock sat up on their bed.

  “Rose, if I believe I’m married to you, and you believe you’re married to me, does it really matter about all the legalities?” he asked seriously.

  “Not a bit,” she responded without moving or even opening her eyes.

  “Then I say we’re married, if you agree,” he declared.

  Rose rolled over and touched his thigh.

  “I do agree, dear one,” she said, holding back the tears. “Now, go to sleep. You’ve completely worn out your new wife.”

  They both slept soundly the rest of the night.

  #

  Over the next few weeks, Murdock and Rose tried to make their new home better. Murdock made a small rack for smoking meat and set it up in a little alcove close by the entrance. He found a stand of what passed for hickory trees, felling a few with the small hatchet. He used the chunks to smoke some of the venison and a few fish. With the rest, he fashioned a bow and a few arrows, though it took some experimentation. The arrows, though straight, had no fletchings, nocks, or points, but he was working on that part. He knapped a few points, but these were more useful with the three spears he’d already made than with an arrow.

  Rose, meanwhile, learned how to braid long sections of thin rope from the tall grass that grew on the other side of the stream. She also learned to weave the grass into mats for sleeping on, covering the sand. At first, Murdock went with her to harvest the tall grass, but soon, he was comfortable with her skills and was assured that she could handle herself in an emergency.

  Together they found some wild vegetables that were similar to onions, carrots, and potatoes on some of the walks they made both upstream and down. Beyond the pools in their cave, Rose found a depression that Murdock filled with water. She soaked the hides in a brine, which he made with the salt from the lower part of the cave. Together they managed to flesh the hides, get the brain tanning mixture applied, and stretch them to dry with poles that Murdock had made. This took work, but even though Rose was not used to the amount of work required, she never complained and had become a great helper to Murdock. Under his tutelage, she was well on her way to becoming a good frontier wife.

  The bond between Murdock and Rose grew at a phenomenal rate. Murdock considered himself to have finally found the perfect woman, and Rose believed she had found the perfect man for herself. Whether they were working together or training in fighting techniques and weapons, the two were inseparable. And many times their work was interrupted with spontaneous and passionate love-making.

  Beron showed up as it suited him. The three shared whenever possible, as it was the most efficient way to communicate. Often Beron came at suppertime, though he only accepted small amounts of raw venison. Murdock assumed that he only ate it to be sociable and that Beron came, then, to enjoy their company. Beron did not understand the two humans’ puns and jibes, so they tried to refrain while Beron was around, lest he think they had lost what little sense they had.

  Murdock was setting up the poles to smoke the wolf hides when Rose came skipping and bouncing up to him.

  “Kevin! It’s wonderful! I finally got my menses,” she exclaimed.

  “Okay . . . so what’s so wonderful about that?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be grumpy or something?”

  Rose’s face showed that he had dashed her exuberance.

  “It’s wonderful as far as I’m concerned,” she said seriously.

  “I guess I just don’t get it . . .” He shrugged as he turned back to his work.

  “Dear one, I was raped. What this means is if I become pregnant now, it will be yours, without a doubt,” she explained.

  Murdock ignored her. Then, continuing working, he asked, “So, you think if you were pregnant from the rape, I would just dump the baby in the river or something?”

  “Well, no, I don’t think you would do that,” she responded hesitantly.

  Murdock secured the hides, and the fire now produced much smoke. He stood back a little to appreciate his work.

  “What do you think I’d do?” he asked without looking at her.

  “I guess I’m not sure what your views are,” she said, confused.

  Murdock turned to face her, finally, and was very serious.

  “Rose, if you had become pregnant from your rape, it wouldn’t matter to me,” he said through tight lips. “A baby is an awesome responsibility, and to deny that responsibility purely on the basis of genetics is criminal, in my view.”

  “But isn’t it important to men to know that their kids are theirs?” she asked, hurt.

  “Then I guess you don’t know me like you think you do. If you ever have a baby, how could I not love and care for it the same way I love and care for you?” he asked. “No matter the parentage, it would still be at least half of you.”

  Rose looked at Murdock’s face and gently touched his cheek.

  “I guess I have a better man than I thought,” she said as she walked away to resume her daily chores.

  They both stewed about her question for the rest of the day, until they went for one of their daily walks along the stream.

  “If you found a baby out here while walking,” Murdock said, turning toward her, “what would you do with it?”

  “I would take it in and care for it, of course,” she responded, shrugging.

  “And you would raise it and treat it as one of your own?”

  “Well, yes.” She shrugged again. “It wouldn’t matter to me who the parents were.”

  “And you think I’m any different?” he asked as he shoved his hands in his pockets and walked on.

  “I think you’re very different,” she said, stopping him. “You’re so different from anyone else I’ve ever known that sometimes it’s scary. And that is what I love most about you. You’re not like anyone else.”

  They continued their walk in silence, holding hands.

  When they had returned home, they found Beron there with another of his kind who was slightly smaller than he was.

  “Greetings friend Beron,” they said together. Saying the same thing at the same time happened more often than they cared to admit.

  “Mate hurt,” Beron flashed to them both, distressed.

  Now Murdock noticed that one of the smaller one’s front paws was swollen and that it favored that paw when it moved. He and Rose inspected the paw. Murdock tried to project sympathy for the creature’s pain and gingerly turned the paw over.

  “It’s infected,” he said to Rose.

  “Has been for a while, from the smell,” Rose replied.

  Murdock tried to project that he wanted the injured one to put the sore paw in the hot water pool and leave it there. The creature complied, and Murdock took salt
and threw it into the coldest pool.

  “Won’t that make the pain worse?” Rose asked as she followed him back to the hot water pool.

  “It shouldn’t make it too bad,” he explained. “The amount of water should dilute it enough. We have to do something to clean it out, or she’ll die from the infection.”

  Rose took off her grass skirt and got into the hot water. She gently rubbed the injury site to try to get all the dirt and sand out of the wound.

  “Trim as much of the fur away from the wound as you can,” Murdock told Rose as he handed her his six-inch knife.

  Murdock looked over at Beron. He lay quietly close by, large and ominous, watching everything that Murdock and Rose did.

  “She has something stuck under one of the pads,” Rose reported after trimming the fur and cleaning and inspecting the wound. “It looks like a sharp rock sideways under the pad.”

  “Can you get hold of it and pull it out?” he asked.

  “Maybe after it’s cleaned out a little more,” Rose said, looking closely at the injury.

  “Well, don’t try to remove it yet,” he told Rose. “Just let it soak in the water so it can get cleaned out. Sorry about your tub.”

  “I’m not worried about it,” she said, looking sideways up at him and smiling.

  Murdock tried to visualize to Beron what was wrong and what he planned to do about it. Beron nodded slightly, but Murdock got a very strong sense of distress and concern from him.

  Murdock got a chunk of raw venison and offered some to Beron, who refused, and then offered it to his patient. She ate it grudgingly, but Murdock could tell she wasn’t hungry.

  “She doesn’t feel like eating,” Rose told him.

  “How do you know?” Murdock asked.

  “She told me,” Rose said, shrugging.

  Murdock was taken aback. He had received no mental images from his patient.

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “She’s Beron’s youngest mate,” she told Murdock, who knelt by the side of the pool. “ I gather she’s his favorite. There is one other complication you need to be aware of, Doctor Kevin.”

  “And that is?”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Murdock’s mouth hung open in shock. So, if what I do helps, I save two lives, otherwise it could cost four lives: Beron’s mate and unborn cub, and mine and Rose’s lives, he thought. “Nothing like pressure,” he said to no one in particular. Then, to Rose, he asked, “How’re you doing in there?”

  “Pruning up nicely, thank you very much.”

  “It should be clean enough now,” he told Rose as he stripped off his clothes. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “I can do it,” Rose said.

  “No, I need you to keep her calm. This is going to hurt her, and I don’t want her to strike out at me when I need a steady hand and all my focus,” he said as he got in the pool.

  Rose left the pool without arguing and went to the patient’s head, stroking it to keep her calm. Murdock, inspecting the injury, could barely see the offending piece of rock.

  “She is being brave and says she trusts you . . . and so do I,” Rose told him.

  With some effort, Murdock pried the big pad up just enough to get a grip on the protruding edge of the rock. As he pulled it slowly out, he heard Beron’s mate grunt and breathe heavily. When the rock was out far enough that he could grip it, he smoothly pulled a little faster until it was out. Then he immediately put the paw in the water and left the pool. He showed Rose the rock.

  Rose glanced at it and then at the water in the pool.

  “Um, you might want to do something about the bleeding,” she said indicating the water.

  “It needs to bleed for a bit,” Murdock explained to her, “to help clean it out and to drain the infection.”

  Murdock picked up one of the strips of wolf-hides, some of the rope Rose had made, and went to one of the cave walls and dug out some clay, and then put it on the hide. Taking some of the clean water from the pool inlet, he mixed the clay into a thick paste on the leather side of the pelt.

  “How’s she doing?” Murdock asked Rose as he moved the pelt and clay closer to his patient.

  “Much better, but she’s still in pain,” Rose told him.

  “Get her to stand lightly on this hide and clay so I can tie it up,” Murdock requested.

  His patient complied, and Murdock bandaged the paw as best he could.

  “Well, Doctor? What’s the verdict?” Rose asked.

  “The patient will survive,” he said, “but I’m not so sure the Doctor will! I think it’ll be fine, if she’ll leave the bandage on for a few days. I’d really like her to stay off her feet, but I don’t know if that’s possible.”

  Beron got up and left, flashing many thoughts of gratitude and calm, leaving his mate in Murdock’s care.

  “You’d think he be a little more worried,” Murdock said as he watched Beron leave.

  “He is,” Rose told him. “He’s just entrusted you with his greatest treasure! It’s a high compliment.”

  “How would you know?” he asked, turning toward her.

  “She told me,” Rose responded as she went back to check on Beron’s mate. “We girls just know these things.”

  Murdock shook his head.

  For the next couple of days, Beron’s mate didn’t move much. She finally accepted some of the raw venison from Murdock and Rose, and she left the bandage alone. Beron’s mate refused to communicate with Murdock directly, which stumped him. Rose was no help in the matter. When he asked her about it, she just giggled, saying “It’s just girl talk,” and went about her business.

  When Beron returned early on the third day, his mate was on her feet, walking with a limp and feeling much better, according to Rose. Her appetite had increased, and their stock of raw venison was almost depleted.

  “Follow,” Beron commanded both Rose and Murdock after inspecting his mate.

  “You better stay here and wait,” Murdock told Rose at the main entrance to the cave.

  “Why?” Rose asked.

  “Because I’m the only one allowed farther up the path,” he began to explain to Rose.

  “No! Both!” Beron interrupted, flashing the message to both.

  Murdock shut up, and he and Rose followed behind Beron and his mate. The pace was slower so she could keep up, but Murdock and Rose were still hard pressed to keep up with the large animals.

  “Where are we going?” Rose asked after a while.

  “I know where we’re going,” Murdock told her. “I just don’t know why.”

  All Rose said was, “I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

  The walk was hard on them both. Beron’s mate hobbled along as best she could, but Beron acted as if it were an everyday event. The trip became easier after they turned from the path and headed for the river in the meadow. As they approached, Murdock could see all of the others in the distance.

  “Well, we’re about there,” Murdock told Rose.

  Rose reached down and took his hand. “Well, then, we’ll face it together,” she said, smiling at him. Her love for him was obvious.

  “As it should be,” he said with a brief smile.

  After they reached the river, Murdock looked around. Quite a few new faces looked back at him, as well as a lot of familiar ones. Murdock noticed one old creature who resembled Beron, but looked ancient. This one seemed to be the one conducting this little get-together.

  As the meeting proceeded, Murdock, who was more versed in their conversation techniques, managed to pick out the general gist of the meeting. Beron was touting Murdock’s accomplishments and showing great gratitude for all the things he had done. Murdock blushed. Rose stood there, mouth open, staring at him. When Beron had finished, a very long pause followed.

  “Well, this may be where we get our comeuppance,” he said quietly and nervously to Rose. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  Rose didn’t respond.

  The olde
r creature broke the silence. Murdock didn’t catch very much of what he said, but it must have been important, as everyone else remained reverently silent.

  Once he had finished saying his piece, the big white one, Murdock’s nemesis, came over and snorted at him and Rose.

  “Trust you not!” he flashed. He stated this in such a way that Murdock took it as, “I’ll never trust you or your kind, no matter what.” Then the big white one walked away in a huff.

  “He’s a friendly one, isn’t he,” Rose said facetiously.

  “Must be one of my many admirers,” Murdock responded in kind.

  When Murdock looked up, he saw that the rest of the group hadn’t moved. They stood or sat with their heads all in what seemed to be a bow. A few seconds later, fish flew out of the river, and everyone ate their fill. The general mood was one of great joy and relaxation. Beron’s mate reverently dropped a fish at Murdock’s and Rose’s feet, and they both ate their fill, raw.

  After an hour, Beron approached, bowed deeply to them both — at least, that was how Murdock took it — and then, everyone left. Murdock and Rose also turned to leave the meadow and head for home. As they walked, Murdock caught Rose looking at him in awe. He ignored her the first time, but it soon became apparent that she wasn’t going to stop.

  “What?” he asked impatiently.

  “Oh, nothing,” Rose responded offhandedly, returning her attention to the path home.

  After the fifth or sixth time Murdock caught her looking at him, he stopped and turned her around to face him.

  “What the hell are you looking at me that way for?” he demanded loudly.

  “You really don’t know do you?” she asked, incredulous. “Do you know what just happened back there?”

  “Yeah, Beron showed me his gratitude for helping his mate.”

  “Is that all you got out of it?” she asked in disbelief.

  “Yes! What did you get out of it?” he asked her impatiently.

  “I was looking at you that way because,” Rose took a deep breath. “I’ve never seen a god before.”

  “What? What the hell are you babbling about?” he yelled.

  “That wasn’t just a teddy bear’s picnic, you know. That wasn’t just Beron showing gratitude. It was a celebration, a party. This is what I got out of it.” Rose breathed deeply again. “Beron told the others that you are a mighty hunter and as generous as the rain — I’m paraphrasing now — and share in your plenty with others without expectation of recompense.”