by Inmon, Shawn
Alex’s mind raced, looking for a solution.
Coyotes can’t climb. If I can get to the trees, I can at least jump up and try to outwait them. They’ll tear that Desma-ta apart as a consolation prize if I do.
Alex feinted again at the two coyotes that stood between him and the trees. They jumped back a step, but then squared up on him and the two behind him closed. One got close enough to bite the back of his leg before he swung the club down, catching it with a glancing blow. It cried out, then jumped back into position.
Alex saw the next few moves in his mind and knew he wouldn’t survive them.
Amy will never know what happened to me. She will think I deserted her.
He swung the club with increasing desperation, but he had been exhausted when the fight had started. Now, he felt like the Desma-ta had at the end of the fight. His spirit was willing, but his flesh was weak.
An arrow whizzed across the prairie and struck the coyote directly in front of Alex. At the same moment, a short spear sank into the side of another. Both shrieked in pain and surprise and turned to see what was attacking them. The others raised their hackles and went from a hunting posture to a defensive one. As a unit, they began to back away from Alex and move in the opposite direction from where they had come.
Alex gaped. Standing among the trees of the forest were Doken-ak, Janta-ak and Sekun-ak. Janta-ak held a bow with another arrow already notched. Doken-ak was fitting another short spear into his atlatl and Sekun-ak held a heavy spear ready to throw.
“What are you guys doing here?” Alex asked, then stopped, realizing he was speaking in English. He also realized he was so exhausted he could barely stand. The last three days had more than taken their toll.
Alex focused on his limited knowledge of Winten-ah and asked again, “Why are you here?”
Speaking slowly, enunciating each word, Doken-ak said, “Saving your skin.”
“I thought no help for me,” Alex said in pidgin-Winten-ah.
“No help with task,” Sekun-ak said. “Help staying alive.”
Alex kneeled for a moment to recover—from his exhaustion, from his surprise, from his survival, which had seemed a distant dream only a few moments before.
The three men approached him but stood casually around as though they were at a barbecue, not exposed in the land where everything wanted to kill you.
After a moment’s rest, Alex did his best to lift the bag onto his shoulder to carry home.
Sekun-ak lifted his hand. “Desma-ta?”
Alex nodded. “Desma-ta.”
Sekun-ak extended his hand. Alex handed the bag over. Sekun-ak untied the knot, held the bag at full arm’s-length and turned it upside down. The Desma-ta fell out of the bag and laid on its back for two long seconds, either playing dead or shocked at its sudden change of circumstance. Then it sprang to its feet and scrambled away. It ran to the nearest hole and turned and barked viciously at the men.
Alex tipped it a salute, glad that Sekun-ak had verified the result of the test here, so he didn’t have to carry the little beast all the way back to the cliffside.
AND SO, MANTA-AK, BORN long ago as Alex Hawk, became a hunter for the Winten-ah.
There was no hunt scheduled immediately after Alex’s completions of his three tasks, so he was able to rest and recuperate from his ordeals. The wounds he had received—the bad scrape on his leg, the deep scratches from the desma-ta—had time to heal.
Two weeks went by and he grew bored and anxious. He was never one to sit around and while away his days. He did what he could to make himself useful around camp. He discovered that the old people who sat in the uppermost chamber were unable to climb the ladders that high themselves, so a personal sling system had been developed.
When they woke in the morning, they needed to be carried, one at a time, up to their communal room. In the evenings, the process was reversed.
Alex volunteered for that job. The elders were taller than him but seemed to almost be fading away and weighed much less than he thought. Aided by the sling on his back, Alex was easily able to carry them.
No need for weightlifting or a gym when you’ve got people to carry.
Hard work is often its own reward, but carrying the elders had other benefits. They took a shine to him and shared stories, history and secrets Alex might not have ever learned any other way.
He also worked on training Monda-ak, who was growing so quickly it was almost frightening. Now that he was one of the tribe’s hunters, he didn’t worry about the food the dog went through every day. He knew he would help to replace it soon enough. Still, the dog’s appetite was prodigious.
The little runt who had been half the size of his brother was now bigger than him and the gap seemed to grow every day. Several times a week Alex and Tontu-ak, the man who was training the other dog from the same litter, met in the open space in front of the cliffs. They let the two brothers wrestle, fight and growl at each other. It wore the dogs out a little and brought them a little peace. Also, Tontu-ak was a deft trainer and he trained Alex so that Monda-ak would also be properly trained.
One afternoon, Tontu-ak and Alex were standing in the afternoon sunshine watching the two dogs tumble over each other, snapping and yowling when Sekun-ak approached.
Although Sekun-ak had not seemed to want Alex as a member of his hunting party, now that he had qualified, he treated Alex the same as any of the others. That is to say, abrupt.
“Come with me,” Sekun-ak said to Alex.
Alex turned to Tontu-ak. “Will you watch Monda-ak? I’ll find you.”
Tontu-ak touched his forehead with two fingers, which was a Winten-ah way of nodding.
Alex followed Sekun-ak back to the armory, hoping he was about to be told his first hunting expedition would be soon.
Instead, when he entered the recessed room in the rock, he saw his belongings laid out on the table.
His stomach lurched. The sight of his rifle, his pistol, his clips and other trappings of civilization almost made him dizzy. The longer he was here, the more real Kragdon-ah seemed and the more dream-like twenty-first century Oregon felt.
“Time to destroy them.”
Mixed feelings swirled inside Alex. Intellectually, he had already agreed to dispose of them, but now, faced with destroying what felt like his last link to his former life, he hesitated.
Still, he knew he was committed.
Sekun-ak bundled the remnants of technology in a thick cloth and handed it to Alex.
He was careful not to touch any of it. The dread of what technology brings runs so deep here.
Sekun-ak signaled for Alex to follow him again and made his way up the trails and ladders until they emerged in the large chamber where the egg ceremony had been held.
This time, instead of many smaller fires, there was one large bonfire burning in the middle. It was so large and hot that it threatened to overwhelm the natural ventilation system as smoke hung against the ceiling.
The room was not crowded. There were a dozen tribe members seated against the far wall. Sekun-ak left Alex and took the only empty chair.
Alex felt alone and unsure, but when he looked to his left, Dan was there.
“It’s simple. All you have to do is drop that bundle in the fire. Then you’re done. You’ve fulfilled your oath.”
“That’s crazy. I can’t drop my clips into a fire. It could kill someone.”
Dan nodded, anticipating the question. “I told them about that. They asked me to dispose of the ammunition, which I did. I made sure there wasn’t one in the chamber of your pistol and checked everything over to make sure nothing will happen.” He paused, looked at the bundle Alex was holding. “It’s a shame. Those are beautiful guns.”
Alex remembered the warrior in the forest doing his best to destroy the rifle.
“They were. They might be disappointed, though. As hot as that fire is, it’s not going to melt the guns.”
“Told them that too. It’s a symbolic thing to them.
Tomorrow, after the fire has burned out, I’m to take anything left and throw it off a bluff into the deepest part of the river. No one will ever find them again.”
Alex’s shoulders sagged, but he nodded. “Okay. I gave them my word.”
Since it was a ceremony, Alex didn’t want to just hurry up to the fire, toss it in and walk away. That felt disrespectful to him.
Instead, he approached the fire slowly, stopped in front of it and stared into the flames for several long moments. He solemnly held the bundle in front of him and positioned it as close to the middle of the fire as he could get without singeing his eyebrows.
He dropped the last vestiges of his previous life into the fire. The flames leaped so high he could not see it.
PART TWO
Chapter Seventeen
The Hunt
Alex Hawk sprinted across the open plain. His moccasined feet pounded out a steady rhythm and his breath puffed visibly in the chill air. He was not cold, though—his buckskin overshirt and pants saw to that. Monda-ak loped easily alongside him.
Alex held his long, heavy spear low, knowing he could move it to the throwing position in a split-second. He scanned to his left and called to a tall hunter loping a few yards away, “Domit na sloda!” which was Winten-Ah for “Look, it’s tiring!” After three years, he spoke the language as well as Dan Hadaller.
Thirty yards ahead of Alex, a black-tailed buck ran on, but as Alex had noted, it was flagging. An arrow sunk into its hindquarter bounced as it ran, but that wasn’t what was slowing it.
When Alex became a Winten-ah hunter, he learned an entirely new way to hunt. As a boy, Alex and his father had sat in a blind and waited for a buck to come within firing distance of their guns. He had taken his first buck—and cut its throat, as tradition demanded of a first kill—when he was fourteen years old.
Those hunting methods did not work in Kragdon-ah. Very few animals were unwary enough to wander within range of a bow and arrow or atlatl spear. If they relied on the element of surprise, the Winten-ah would have been forced to become vegetarians.
Instead, they used the natural physical advantages that humans had. A black-tail deer was faster than a human. Much faster. But a human was mostly hairless—which allowed it to sweat, and thus cool down, even as it ran. Humans also had greater stamina than animals that relied on sprinting speed to stay alive.
The Winten-ah hunting method, then, was to send a group of trackers out hours ahead of the main expedition, find a target and follow it, but not too closely. They sent a runner back to the hunters, who led them to where the trackers were.
The hunters would run at the animal, shrieking, waving clubs and firing a few arrows. That made for a fearsome sight, but it was intentionally ineffective. They only wanted to spook the deer—or the elk or whatever they were hunting—raise its fear levels, its heartbeat, its entire metabolism.
The deer would sprint away, easily leaving the hunters behind. They would follow at a fast but maintainable pace, using the trackers again if they got too far behind. Each time they drew near, the deer would jump away again, but each time it ran a shorter distance before being winded and overheated. Its fur covering, so necessary to withstand the vagaries of weather, was its own undoing, as it never got a chance to cool down.
Eventually, it wore down, which was what was happening now. The hunting party had been chasing this buck for almost five hours. The warriors were tired as well but were getting their second wind. They knew the end of the hunt was near.
Finally, as it always did, the buck overheated to a point it could not run any more. It slowed to a trot, then stood still, even as the hunters ran at it. It had given everything it had to give. It stamped its feet and shook its antlers at the oncoming hunters, but it was for naught.
From twenty yards away, Alex raised the heavy spear that had become his primary hunting weapon. He bunched the muscles of his right arm and threw as he ran.
The spear flew straight and true, piercing the heart of the massive buck, which fell, dead before it hit the ground.
Alex and the other warriors screamed their victory to the skies. They were the ultimate predator—at least if Godat-ta was not in the vicinity—and they screamed their supremacy.
Alex Hawk now looked like any other Winten-ah warrior. His hair was long and held back by a leather tie. He was leaner than he had been when he stepped through the door three years earlier, but he was more finely muscled. He spent so many hours in the sun, his skin had bronzed. If he hadn’t been a head shorter than all the other hunters and hadn’t had blue eyes, he might have passed for a Winten-ah.
After taking a few minutes to rehydrate and rest after the chase, most of the hunters set up a perimeter around the animal. Meanwhile, two of the hunters kneeled over the carcass of the buck. They lowered their head and chanted, thanking it for the sacrifice of its life and giving them its strength.
After a moment of silence passed, the two men laid out their tools and began field dressing the buck. They were experienced and skilled. Within an hour, they had finished.
The tribe had a use for almost all parts of the animals the hunters killed. The few parts that had no use to the tribe were left for the scavengers.
The meat, the hooves, the hide and the antlers were divided up and carried back to their cliffside home. The meat would be eaten, either fresh, salted, or turned into pemmican. The hooves would be hollowed and turned into receptacles for drinking or storing powders and liquids. The antlers would be ground into a paste that Niten-eh, the medicine woman, would use in her potions.
On this day, the deer had run west, so they were farther from camp than normal and would not make it home until after dark. It was not optimal, but they had flint to start a fire and torches to light. The strength of their numbers and animals’ natural fear of fire kept them safe as they hiked.
They finally made it through the forest that surrounded Winten-ah long after dark. The dazzling night starfield and near-full moon allowed them to snuff their torches as they emerged from the forest.
When they reached the cliffside, a dozen women waited for them there. The hunters return meant they had completed their job and were relieved of all further responsibilities. The women’s tasks were just beginning, and they would work through the night, butchering and preparing the meat so it wouldn’t spoil.
The hunters would only be able to rest for one day before they launched another hunt. A single buck—even one as big as the one they had taken down—wouldn’t feed the tribe for long, and winter was coming. Winter was always coming.
After three years, Monda-ak in no way resembled the pitiful, dying furball that Alex had first met. His shoulder now reached almost to Alex’s chin. If he stood and rested his paws on Alex’s shoulders, it nearly drove Alex to his knees. He had never been weighed, but it was possible he was twice as heavy as Alex. Around the tribal home, he was as mellow as a summer breeze. He loved to play and romp with the children in the field in front of the caves. He wasn’t quite as big as a pony, but the children rode him as if he was.
In a hunt, though, his primal instincts loomed large. There were a number of hunts in the previous three years where the hunters didn’t strike the killing blow because Monda-ak got there first.
As to backing Alex up in a fight, he was an unknown. Anyone who might have been tempted to pick a fight with Alex quickly changed their mind when they saw Monda-ak at his side.
Dan had not been exaggerating when he told Alex how intelligent the dogs were. Over the years, Alex had trained Monda-ak to not only recognize hand signals, but some rudimentary sign language. Alex often had long conversations with him, and he believed that he understood. He was the only animal in Kragdon-ah who understood and responded to commands in English as well as Winten-ah.
Alex and Monda-ak were inseparable. They ate together—though the dog consumed the vast majority of the food—slept together, and spent all day, every day, together.
Three years earlier, on the third day of h
is tests to become a hunter, Alex had told Monda-ak that would be the last time he left him. They hadn’t been separated for more than a few minutes at a time since.
The first time the trader who had sold Monda-ak to the tribe returned with another litter, he gawked at the dog.
“That cannot be the same animal.”
Alex had smiled at him but said nothing. He was satisfied enough with the look of regret the trader had on his face. Trading a single basket for Monda-ak had become a legendary trade in the history of the tribe. After three years, Ganku-eh and Banda-ak had not asked him to fulfill his part of that bargain, but he knew it was coming someday.
As other tribe members asked to become hunters, Alex learned that Sekun-ak did indeed give them the same challenges he had been given—with a few minor exceptions. The younger tribe members were only required to bring back a pinecone and piece of limb from the sugar pine with no size requirements. That meant they didn’t have to climb as high as Alex did and didn’t have to face the worst of the winds, not to mention the wrath of the eagle.
Also, no rattler ever appeared when they ran to the river. It was just a test of stamina, not how to outwit a giant rattlesnake.
One thing remained constant, though. When the hopeful hunter-to-be went to capture the Desma-ta, three armed hunters trailed along behind him and kept him from being killed while he concentrated on the task at hand.
That prairie dog challenge was where more apprentice hunters failed. As a rule, they could climb anything and run distances easily. But capturing the giant prairie dogs took brainpower instead of quick reflexes and strong muscles.
After three years, Alex still thought of Amy every day. He marked the annual anniversary of his arrival in Kragdon-ah not because of himself, but because it was her birthday. He knew how fast she grew and spent many hours trying to age her forward in his mind. He dreamed of her often, but she never spoke to him in any of those dreams. She always remained at a distance, elusive and silent.