Tau Ceti

by Laurence Dahners

  Pell found that if he kept his finger high in the air it didn’t throb as much. It remained swollen but he could move it still, as he proved to himself over and over, despite the pain involved. He found himself holding it next to his middle finger so that that good finger could protect it. There was nothing but a thin gruel of roots to eat that day. Pell didn’t have the courage to get any himself the way people had been looking at him but his mother brought him a bowl of it and sat behind him grooming his hair while he ate. He felt comforted by her actions but his stomach sank again when he saw the way people looked at him. He could tell that many of them were already thinking of him as “ginja.” They didn’t want him eating their food if he would be cast out to die soon anyway.

  The next day, having tired of holding the injured pointer finger and its neighboring middle finger together with his other hand, he bound them together with a thong. At first he wrapped the two fingers together but had difficulty tying the fingers together with only the one other hand to work with. Finally he managed to tie a small noose in a thong and slipped the loop around the base of the fingers. Then he wrapped a few turns and cinched a couple of half hitches about the fingers. He found that his hand could function almost normally with a short wrap of thong between each of the joints. He decided that he should go out on a hunt so that the Aldans would see him trying to contribute. He looked about for Boro but couldn’t find him. Eventually he embarked on a hunt all by himself.

  As he trudged up a little side valley toward the plateau above he knew in his heart that this hunting trip would be a farce, but he waited until he was far from sight of the cave to try throwing with his injured hand. As he had feared, the pain in his bound finger made him even clumsier than usual. He practiced throwing for a while but soon realized that there was even less chance than usual that he would hit anything that day. Nonetheless he trudged on. It was a clear, windless, cold day without a cloud in the sky but in his tired and hungry state, he had no appreciation for its placid beauty. Instead, he cringed from its cold bite, trying to draw into his furs.

  Suddenly a white snow hare exploded from under his feet! Daydreaming, he hadn’t noticed it until he had nearly stepped on it! Pell was so frightened that he dropped the stone he held in his injured hand and nearly fell again. The hare shot across the floor of the little ravine and disappeared. Pell followed it half-heartedly to the spot where it disappeared and stood, looking around disconsolately.

  Suddenly he recognized that he was standing beside a hole! The rabbit had its own little cave! He crouched down and reached into the hole as far as he could—no rabbit. He sat by the hole and pondered. If he waited long enough, would it have to come out? Might he catch it then?

  Who was he kidding? He wasn’t fast enough to catch a rabbit!

  Perhaps if he covered the hole with a fur? No, then the rabbit just wouldn’t come out at all. As he sat contemplating the problem, he unwound one of the thongs from his finger—the finger remained swollen but pink. He could still wiggle it. Daydreaming, he played with the thong a bit, tying the knots that he had learned. While practicing the slip knot that he had used to start the wrap on his finger, he fumbled and dropped the thong. When he picked it up, the loop in the end caught on a small stump next to the rabbit hole. When he jerked on the thong the little noose that he had formed cinched tight around the stump. He had to scoot down next to the stump and work it loose.

  The idea came to him that he might make a similar loop catch around the rabbit somehow, and thereby slow it down enough that he could catch or club it. He tied one end of the thong to the little stump next to the hole. Then he propped the slip loop about the opening of the rabbit’s hole with bits of brush and twigs so that the opening in the noose was somewhat bigger than a rabbit’s head. He got up and walked away from the hole while getting out another thong and rewrapping his fingers. He stepped behind a boulder almost fifteen paces from the rabbit hole. He picked out a stick to club the hare with and knelt down in a sprinter’s crouch to watch. He envisioned the rabbit coming out and becoming briefly entangled in the loop. While it was freeing itself, he would make a mad dash in with his club.

  He waited almost an hour. His excitement had faded and he was leaning on one haunch against the boulder when he saw several vultures circling to the east. With a groan, he got up and started that way hoping that whatever held the vultures’ interest remained edible.

  When he got to the area the vultures had been circling he found nothing. Either the vulture had been deceived or some other scavenger had already dragged it away.

  He thought disgustedly that the rabbit hole was out of his way back home. Pell debated a minute but decided that he should at least salvage the thong he had left there. There probably remained enough daylight. He trudged back that way.

  As he came around the corner he saw a puff of white about two feet from the hole! He picked up a stone and crept closer—it was the rabbit!

  He threw but missed as usual. The rabbit didn’t move though! As he came closer he saw the thong biting deeply into the rabbit’s neck. After being caught, the rabbit’s violent thrashing had apparently broken its own neck or strangled it.

  Pell was beside himself with excitement. He had never successfully hunted before. He’d contributed to group kills, sure, but he’d never killed an animal by himself. He would gain status in the tribe when he brought home this rabbit! Status was something he desperately needed. He never considered trying to eat the rabbit himself. No matter how hungry he was, the value of the nutrition in the rabbit could not compare to the value of at last being recognized as someone with the potential to become a hunter.

  Pell threw the rabbit over his shoulder and started back jauntily. He contemplated in his mind his reception back at the cave and how he would describe his hunt. An unerring stone that struck the rabbit dead in its tracks? Suddenly Pell stopped on the trail as he realized that the hare’s carcass showed no evidence of being struck by a stone.

  He took it down from his shoulder and looked at it for a moment then ran his fingers over it, pondering his story. For an instant he considered describing how he had actually ensnared the animal. But, no one would believe him—besides, the prestige of his “perfectly cast stone” would be lost forever. After more contemplation he lay the animal down, backed up a few paces and cast a stone at its prostrate form.

  He missed!

  Disgusted, he threw several more times and was about to walk over and manually strike the rabbit with a rock when a throw finally struck its hindquarters. He reexamined the carcass. The portion of the hind limb just below the knee was deformed, with the lower leg sticking out at an angle. It reminded him of his deformed finger from the day of his fall. He pondered this for a while, then tugged on it but was unable to get it back out to normal length. Then he pulled as hard as he could. Still when he let go it remained shortened and angulated. He thought back to how he had bent his finger back when he had tried to rip it off his hand. Only when he bent it backwards had his finger slipped back into place.

  As he had bent his finger, so he bent the rabbit’s leg in the same direction it was already deformed, bending it beyond ninety degrees. Then, rather than pulling on it to make it longer, he “pushed” the apex of the angle out, as he had when trying to rip off his finger. To his delight the hare’s bone crunched slightly, then felt as if something slipped back into place. When he straightened out the angle in the limb, it held its length and lay nearly straight! With a little push, he straightened it the rest of the way. He pulled it back out to the side and it fell apart again. He felt it carefully. He could tell the bones weren’t in contact like they should be because when he pushed on them the limb shortened. In addition it was floppy and tended to lie in a bent position. He reduced the fracture again using his trick of bending it more before trying to bring it back out to length. It worked again! He displaced it again and tried reducing it in a number of other ways. None of them worked! No matter how he pulled and tugged, it wouldn’t go back into
place until he first bent it back at an angle. He was very puzzled by the whole thing, not realizing that he had discovered a “bonesetting” principle—a principle that would still be in use thousands and thousands of years later. He wanted to cut the leg open to try to find out why it worked but knew that if he brought the rabbit back to the cave cut open, someone would think he had eaten part of it without sharing. After a moment’s consideration he shook the leg back out of place, put the rabbit back over his shoulder and resumed his way home. The forest thickened and the game trail he was on led slowly back to the little valley where the Aldans’ cave lay.

  When he arrived back at the cave, Pell’s mother Donte was the first to see him. She greeted him first with a little wave but shortly thereafter with a loud cry when she recognized that he had a snow hare draped over his shoulder.

  Donte appeared more excited than Pell about the kill. He realized that she too, was worried that her son might be declared “ginja” if he didn’t develop hunting skills soon. Such being the case she intended to broadcast his success to the rest of their little community as strongly as possible.

  He was grateful for her efforts, as the questions her excitement generated provided him a ready opportunity for a little bragging. He soon found himself repeating himself in the details of his “throw” which, though a little off, broke the rabbit’s leg so that he readily caught it and then broke its neck. The snow hare’s pelt, intermediate between winter white and summer gray-brown, had soon been removed. The carcass itself was gutted, broken up and thrown into one of Lenta’s pots with some water and grain and the bowl full of blood that had been drained from the animal. Then the clay pot was set into the fire. The guts were split, washed, chopped and placed back into the pot also. Though the brains would normally be used to cure the hide they also were scooped out into the pot. At this time of year nothing that was potentially edible missed it’s opportunity to become part of the “soup.”

  Though one rabbit among the twenty-two of them living in the cave wasn’t much, it was better than they’d had in several days, so everyone was excited. Just as it was getting dark Gontra and Bonat came in with another hare that Gontra had killed and everyone’s spirits rose even further. To his disappointment the spotlight shifted away from Pell when Gontra arrived, but later Tando came in and when he heard of Pell’s kill, congratulated him warmly. Tando’s excellent reputation as a hunter gave the kind words even more meaning. Pell sat down to eat with an intense glow of happiness.

  Pell managed to retrieve the broken thighbone from the stewpot and covertly examined it between sucking any remaining marrow from it. With all the flesh gone he could see the fracture just above the knee, and put it in and out of place with ease. No funny maneuvers were required to reduce it. After pondering a while he decided that it must be the overlying flesh that constrained the “bonesetting” to such a funny maneuver. Perhaps later that summer he could break a rabbit’s leg and cut into the flesh to understand it better.

  That night, drifting off to sleep with a stomach that wasn’t growling with hunger, Pell had a period of nagging doubt regarding his deceit in claming to kill the rabbit with a thrown stone. How would he continue to deceive the others? A few witnessed throws would again bring questions regarding his ability to throw well enough to be a hunter.

  To his dismay it came to a head the very next day. Belk and Lenta’s new baby had died in the night. Everyone had been expecting it because, with little to eat, Lenta’s breasts gave little milk. Expecting it or not, the tribe’s mood hung bleak about the cave and Roley decided to dispatch the hunters in small groups. Roley assigned his son Denit to take Pell and Boro with him on his hunt. Denit had fifteen summers and was bigger and stronger than Pell and Boro at only thirteen summers each. Denit considered himself a man and deeply resented being sent out to hunt with “boys.” He strode ahead of them fuming. Once out of earshot of the cave he turned angrily. “You children had better be absolutely silent on this hunt. If you spoil my hunt I’ll bring home your ears for the dinner pot.” Pell and Boro nodded meekly as he turned on his heel and strode ahead.

  Pell tried to walk quietly but to his dismay both he and Boro frequently broke twigs in the wooded areas and sent pebbles tumbling on the rocky parts. He expected Denit to turn and explode at all the noise they made, but Denit didn’t seem to notice. After a while Pell realized that Denit was making as much, if not more, noise than they were! Maybe Denit wasn’t the great hunter he made himself out to be? In fact, as Pell thought back, he realized that although Denit was always bragging to the younger boys about his hunting skills, as best Pell could remember, it had been many moons since Denit had brought home any game. Pell frowned, has Denit ever had a kill of his own?

  Denit wasn’t looking around much either. Roley and Tando were always telling the boys that a good hunter surveyed his surroundings constantly. Game frequently froze in plain sight and could be very hard to see if you didn’t constantly scan the area you were passing through. With a guilty twitch Pell realized that he wasn’t scanning either—he swept his eyes to the left and then to the right. He stared! There, not thirty feet from where they were passing, was a hare standing absolutely still at the base of a bush. Nearly invisible due to its own smudgy brownish-whitish color, it just sat there! Pell whirled and threw the stone he had in his hand.

  As he had feared the night before, his throw went wide. Way wide! It hit so far away that for a second he thought the rabbit wouldn’t bolt, but then it exploded up the hill away from them before he could throw again. Pell was still staring disconsolately after it when Denit struck him in the side of the head with a powerful blow. For a second Pell didn’t know what had happened. When his mind cleared, Denit was astride his chest angrily waving his flint knife and demanding to know why he shouldn’t take Pell’s ear. Boro was standing wide eyed three paces away. But Boro showed no intention of trying to physically stop Denit. Pell sobbed apologies over and over.

  Denit finally rose to his feet in disgust and stalked off in the same direction they had been going before.

  Pell stumbled to his feet and staggered after. Soon his wooziness disappeared but the throbbing ache in his head persisted. A sullen anger developed as well—what had Denit expected him to do, call out, “Hey, Denit, you missed a rabbit—do you want to throw first—OOPS, sorry it ran away!”?

  They trudged on the rest of the day without sighting any more game within range of a throw, though it gratified Pell when they saw a few larger animals at a distance. Winter might be drawing to a close!

  When they got back to the cave a celebration was in progress. Roley, Belk, Gontra and Tando had driven a small pack of wolves away from a deer that the pack had killed. The men had managed to steal most of the carcass for the tribe. The cookpots were truly full for the first time in nearly a moon. Gontra was drumming on his hollow log using one hand and a knobbed stick he had picked up on the way back from the hunt. The different tone produced by the stick allowed him to produce an entirely new and interesting set of rhythms that Pell found fascinating. Lessa was chanting to the rhythm in a counterpoint that had everyone clapping delightedly.

  The men were bragging that Roley had nearly killed a wolf for the pots as well. Pell was intensely relieved when, in their celebratory mood, the adults took little notice of Denit’ description of how “Pell had ruined ‘his’ hunt.”

  The next morning however, Denit pursued the subject again when Roley was making up the hunting parties. “Don’t send me out with Pell again. He makes too much noise. He throws so badly, he couldn’t hit the wall of this cave while standing inside of it.”

  Roley looked him in the eye. “Don’t forget that he’s had a kill since your last one.”

  Denit’ face went white with a mixture of fear and rage. Pell suddenly realized that Denit was worried about his own recent lack of a kill and therefore actually jealous of Pell. That insight helped little when Denit whirled to stomp out of the cave and, finding Pell between himself and the entrance
, knocked Pell to the ground on his way out.

  Pell hunted with Boro that day. Predictably, they had no luck. It was a clear bright day, cold in the morning but almost pleasant by afternoon. They saw some animal sign in keeping with the better weather. A few wolves trotted past in the distance. Boro even thought he saw an antelope in the distance, which would be great news if it truly indicated that the herds were returning.

  In the late afternoon as they walked down a ravine toward the cave they came to a narrow choke point where a flash flood had washed up a large assemblage of sticks, brush and other debris. It had caught on a couple of small trees to form what appeared to be an impenetrable morass. For a while they thought they would have to climb out of the ravine because the brush was too dense to get through. Then they realized from the way all the tracks came together that animals had found or created a small passage through one area. They crouched down to go through. Pell was pushing through a tight spot when a strand of dried vine got wrapped around his neck. He struggled somewhat frantically to get it loose in the tight little space. Afterward he mused that what had just happened to him must have been something like what had happened to the rabbit he had trapped in his thong.

  When they got to the other side of the morass of brush, they smelled blood. Looking about they saw an area off to the side where a big hole had been torn in the brush pile. It looked like some kind of animal had become trapped there and had been killed. To their disappointment, there wasn’t anything left except some blood splattered here and there. The ground was rocky so they couldn’t even tell what had made the kill, much less track it and attempt to steal its prey.

  When Pell and Boro arrived back at the cave, they found Denit strutting about proudly. A small boar hung roasting on a spit in the center of the cooking fire while Denit bragged to Exen and Gurix about his hunt. The two boys listened raptly, chins in their hands and eyes shining. Pell and Boro sat down to listen too as Denit described his chase. “So I just kept trotting after it and trotting after it. I felt so tired it hurt to breathe, but I could tell that the boar was getting worn out too. Then it started up a little ravine. I thought I would die going upslope but then the boar came to a spot where the ravine was choked off with brush. For a little bit it cast about looking for an exit but, finding none, it turned and charged right at me! Its head lowered, its tusks swinging side to side, its beady little eyes glowing red, it attacked! Knowing how much we needed the food, I didn’t give an inch. I dropped to one knee, my spear butted to the ground behind me and the boar spitted itself right below the breastbone. It dropped in its tracks.”