Bonesetter

by Laurence Dahners

  They kept moving stores out. After several more trips to stock the three escape sites, they had nearly cleaned out their stores in the Cold Springs cave. However, Pell now judged that any one of the three sites could get them through the oncoming winter, even with minimal success at winter hunting or trapping. Certainly, they would be hungry, but they would survive without much more difficulty than many of the winters he had spent with the Aldans. Even more amazingly they all believed that, if they kept working at the pace that they had been, they could restock the primary cave before winter came. They set about replenishing those stores, spending most of their effort restocking their grains and roots, which would become scarce towards winter before the hunting ran out.

  Tando had an idea about their storage. They had always buried their meat in the soft dirt at the back of the primary cave but as they dug it up they were left with a substantial pit. He had them dig an even larger hole, which they roofed over with poles he had lashed together in a criss-cross pattern like the rafts some tribes used. They put the bulk of their stores in the hole, stacking them with room to spare for air circulation to keep things dried out. They left holes in the lid to provide the ventilation. When they put the lid on, they covered it with dirt and began living on top of it so that the dirt packed down and the edges soon became invisible. The ventilation holes were hidden under piles of other supplies. Tando reasoned that without large visible stores of food, other tribes who might visit would be less likely to attack them. They still kept stores above, both to utilize and to appear to be “what they had” if someone did try to rob them.

  As the cool crisp days of autumn rolled around, they felt well prepared for winter. They also felt that they could survive even if driven away from their primary cave, though they still worried about being driven away from the fruits of the hard work they’d done to the cave into a home. Also there were the very real dangers of the fight that would have to occur to force them out. Despite Tando’s original doubts, Pell thought more about his “man sized snare.” He tried building large snares for animals as a way to test his ideas. A loop of braided leather suspended across a deer trail with a little ivy wrapped around it for disguise had successfully snared the neck of a deer. Pell had been watching the snare in hopes of learning something about how it would work. The deer had walked into the loop, no doubt expecting the ivy to be easily pushed out of its way. When the remainder of the loop had dropped onto its back, it had startled violently, then bolted, drawing the noose tight and throwing itself to the ground. It had thrashed so violently that he thought it might have broken its own neck. In any case, it died before Pell could get his spear into it.

  Snaring a deer was pretty exciting, but as he thought about it Pell realized that Tando was right, he couldn’t count on a human not seeing and understanding the rope. Even if their enemy didn’t see it, a man bolting to draw the noose tight on his own neck seemed unlikely. Besides how could Pell set it up to trap only enemies? When he arrived back in camp with the deer about his neck the excitement was huge. At first Tando and Donte assumed that he must have speared it as they hadn’t made a snare that large before. Learning that he had successfully made a snare so large created so much excitement in its own right that the implication of trapping a human never came up. They all set to work harvesting and curing the large skin provided by the deer as well as its stomach that would make an excellent water bag. Then there was the meat to slice and smoke.

  Pell couldn’t stop thinking about his “man snare” though. He worked for a while trying to set up a noose that drew itself tight. He could make this work with a small noose by tying it to a springy branch that he had bent over. When he released the branch with his finger inside the loop, the noose snapped painfully tight. However, he couldn’t envision any branch that he would be able to bend, that would be strong enough to seriously injure another person with its noose.

  Nonetheless he spent one of his days at the camp laying out nooses in front of the cave where he could imagine confronting a group come to rob them. He found that he could bury the noose in the dirt so that it wasn’t visible. He had Tando stand in the noose while he stood up on the cliff above and jerked up on the noose. He easily trapped Tando in it, but could not figure a way to pull on the noose with sufficient force to seriously impede an entire group of attackers. He hung the end of the rope over the base of a small tree while he was thinking about it. Then he realized that if he pulled down on the end the noose would go up. He tied two fairly big rocks to the end of the rope, propping them in place with a stick that could be jerked out from under them. This worked, jerking the noose up into the air, though the two rocks weren’t heavy enough to accomplish much. After thinking a while, he fashioned a net of cords into a pouch on the end of the rope. He carried rock, after rock, after rock up to place them in the pouch. The big bundle was braced with a limb held in place with a stick. He set up a smaller rope to pull out the stick that was now holding the rocks in place. The end of this small rope was tied off inside the cave where the cave’s defenders could work the trap by jerking hard on the end of the rope. Pell desperately wanted to try it out and see what it did to someone trapped in the noose, but he couldn’t bear the thought of carrying all the rocks back up the cliff.

  The leaves began turning and the mornings getting cold. The snares still brought in a fair bounty of summer-fattened animals with which the three continued to build up their stores. They worked hard on rooting now as the roots they found were large and juicy with a summer’s worth of storage. These roots they stacked up in the “visible” area but Donte brought in so many that they dug their “hidden cellar” a little bigger, putting more roots and some more of their smoked meat down there. Pell was pleased to see that the vents were keeping things in the cellar dry. So far, there seemed to be little or no spoilage.

  One morning Pell, returning from checking the snares, discovered a small group of people ahead of him on the path back to the cave. He slowed to follow furtively. He realized they were a pretty bedraggled looking group, six in all, with two of the group riding pig-a-back on two of the others. Of the two walking, one was a boy with a limp and the other a young man. He was startled to realize that one of the carriers was a young woman. He couldn’t understand why she was carrying someone when the young man wasn’t but then they stopped for a rest and the young man helped relieve her of her burden. When she straightened, Pell’s heart leapt! It was Gia! With that, he recognized the young man as Manute and the limping boy as Falin. Pell quickened his stride calling out, “Gia, Manute, What’s happened?”

  They stood wearily, letting the rest of their burdens slide to the ground as he came up. He stopped a few paces away, holding Ginja by the ruff. She was growling and bristling as if she had never seen them before. A quick glance showed Pell that Manute’s burden was their hag of a grandmother, Agan. The other man of the party carried a woman with a deformed leg who looked quite ill. Pell embraced Manute, nodded respect to Agan, and ruffled Falin’s hair. To his dismay, he couldn’t muster the courage to greet Gia with anything more than a shy smile and a “Hello.” Again, he queried, “What happened?”

  Gia drew herself up to her full, though somewhat diminutive, height. “Pell, this, as I believe you know, is my grandmother Agan. Of course, you remember Falin and Manute. These other two are my cousin Deltin and his mate Panute.” Then she turned to Deltin and Panute. “This is Pell, the Bonesetter that Manute and I have spoken of. He controls the Wolf Spirit so you need not fear the wolf ‘Ginja’. Panute, if anyone can help you, it is he.”

  Surprised as always to hear someone speak so reverently of his skills, Pell’s eyes swept over Panute and fastened on her leg. Though angled, it was twisted so that it turned inwardly between the knee and ankle. The leg was swollen, but Panute looked much sicker than he would have expected from a broken leg. She appeared fevered, leaning listlessly upon the tree against whose bole Deltin had propped her. Pell was puzzled a moment, then he looked at her hand, the pointer and
long fingers of which were swollen and dark. There was a fetid ooze emanating from the mid portion of the long one. The hand itself was bright red, with streaks of red running up the arm. With dismay, he recognized that her fingers looked much like Kana’s finger did a few days before she died.

  He remembered his own panic when he had thought his own finger was turning dark in this fashion. “Panute will soon die,” he thought to himself but tried grimly to keep the knowledge from showing on his face. As he looked around, he saw despair upon Panute’s countenance, and doubt in the faces of Deltin and Agan. Unbelievably, he found the expectancy of a miracle in the expressions of the others. Infuriatingly, it reminded him of Tando’s constant and blasé assumption that Pell could right any kind of physical problem. “Well,” he said aloud, “let’s get you on to our camp and see what can be done. You can tell me what happened on the way. I can carry Panute if you will carry this rabbit and squirrel.

  They helped get Panute up on Pell’s back and soon all were back on the trail. Ginja, distressed by the large group of strangers, plunged off into the forest and was not seen further. As they walked, they told Pell a tale of disaster. Their tribe had long lived in a cave cut deep into a cliffside by a creek. As they described it, it sounded to Pell like a wonderful location. The water was cutting back underneath it so that the lip of the floor hung right above the stream. This meant that there was water ten to twenty feet below the cave that they could haul up in skins with a rope, not even having to fetch it. A ledge from the cave went down stream a ways and then curved out onto a flat, rich little meadow. Every few years though, after a heavy storm, the stream rose to flood the cave. Although inconvenient, when that happened they simply moved out for a day or so and came back when the flooding went back down. There was a smaller, though much less convenient, cave higher on the same hillside that they would move into during those periods in order to stay dry.

  Eight nights ago, the water had risen suddenly and disastrously during the night. The rains had been heavy and the water had been rising so that they had expected that they might have to move out. Unfortunately, it was the middle of the night when water first rushed into the cave, so it caught them somewhat by surprise. Nonetheless, they had thought that, as in previous floodings, they would have time to save their possessions. When the water started coming in, Manute immediately carried Agan up to the small cave and Falin had limped up as well to sit with her. The other members of their tribe had been gathering their possessions but unbelievably; the first trickle was followed a few minutes later by a huge surge of water that filled the entire cave in just a few minutes.

  Gia had been away at a neighboring tribe, ministering to a sick child. After depositing Agan in the little cave, Manute had gone back to get their important possessions but had been astonished to find himself unable to get back to the cave against the flooding waters. Nonetheless, he assumed that the others had of course, gotten to safety. He had thought that he must have missed them in the dark downpour.

  Manute returned to the cave and found that no one had arrived. They waited in growing dread as the night passed, reassuring each other that the missing members of their tribe simply couldn’t find their way back in the dark. The next morning dawned and they went out to search with growing anxiety. By evening they recognized the appalling truth.

  Deltin and Panute had been the only other survivors from a cave of twenty-three people and they, only because the two of them had started shortly behind Manute, Agan and Falin, carrying a large basket of grain. They were swept off the path by the waters just after leaving the cave but had already spilled most of the grain, struggling in knee high water. The nearly empty basket had floated like a boat and they had clung to it in the rushing waters. The rushing torrent flung them to a landing on a rocky shore at a bight in the stream. A log came aground on top of Panute, breaking her leg and crushing her finger. Amazingly enough, Deltin had been almost unhurt and was already carrying her back towards the cave when Manute, searching downstream for survivors, had found them. None of the other members of their tribe were able to swim and though they had hoped that a few people may have floated somehow and come to shore far downstream so far it appeared that no one else had survived. Gia and Agan, striving to stop the swelling and fever in Panute’s hand, had tried all their poultices and teas but to no avail. Despairing, and with nowhere else to turn, the group of six had set out for Cold Springs in hopes that Pell could work another miracle.

  Pell’s mind was racing. What could they possibly think that he could do for Panute’s finger!? A broken leg, yes, he could accept that perhaps he was the person to treat that—but a finger with wound fever? No, he wasn’t the one to treat wound fever. That was for a medicine woman like Agan or Gia, or even, though he hated to admit it, for Pont. Not for Pell. Pell didn’t even have any idea which medicines to use for wound fever. Where would they all sleep if it rained, as the dark clouds overhead were threatening? Should he try to convince Tando that it was OK for their guests to sleep inside, now that most of their stores were hidden? How were Gia and her tiny tribe going to survive the winter with only two hunters and all their summer stores washed away?

  He thought back to the horrible way that Kana had died again and again. He remembered the fear that he had had when he thought his own finger might do the same thing. Through it all, he smelled the fetid odor of Panute’s finger as her arms dangled limply about his neck.

  Then they walked into the clearing below their home cave and he saw Tando standing in the entrance. When he called out to Tando, Tando raised his hand and waved. Pell found himself staring at the missing small finger on Tando’s hand and goosebumps raised on his flesh. Tando had crushed his finger under the same rock as Kana! But his finger had been cut completely away and he had never even developed the wound fever! Pell remembered that when he had seen his own finger turning dark, he had thought of cutting it off like Tando’s in hopes of keeping the wound fever away. Might the same treatment work even after the wound fever started?

  Shortly they were all gathered in the clearing while the tale of flooding and woe was repeated to Tando and Donte. When telling Pell their tale earlier, the little group of six had held up bravely. Now, perhaps through their sheer exhaustion, tears ran freely. Especially as they spoke of Gia’s father and aunt and several cousins who had died in the disaster.

  Pell recognized the dismay in Donte’s face as she looked at Panute’s hand. To Pell’s surprise as Tando looked at the suppurating hand, his face was filled with excitement and anticipation. Tando looked brightly at Pell and said, “Well, Pell, what do we do first? Shall I gather wood for splints? Shall we move her down by the stream?”

  Once again, Pell was taken aback that Tando could be so matter of fact in expecting Pell to treat Panute’s hand. Apparently expecting him to treat it with a successful resolution, Pell almost uttered a rude rejoinder. He stopped himself, realizing that the dying woman would hear. “I’m not sure, Tando.” He turned to the others, “I only have a trick for setting bones. I’m not at all sure what might be done for Panute.” Pell felt their almost palpable dismay like a visceral blow and so, against his better judgment, he weakly offered, “I have a bizarre idea, but I don’t know if it will work. I’ve never tried it before. I’ve never even tried to care for anyone with a wound fever before.”

  “Well, for spirit’s sake, Pell, try it!” Tando exploded. “No one else has any idea how to treat wound fever! You can hardly make it worse.”

  “Tando! You don’t even know what the idea is! It may indeed make the wound fever worse. Besides Gia and Agan know treatments for it—they’ve been using them.”

  “They’ve been using them and they haven’t been working! Haven’t you been listening? It can’t be worse Pell—she’s going to die without something being done and you know it! Use your gift!”

  Despite living around Tando for years, Pell was once again shocked by his bluntness. How could he speak of Panute’s impending death in front of her? Pell’s
gaze darted to Panute and saw her eyes wide with shock. “Panute,” he hesitated, “Tando doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You’re not going to die…”

  Panute shook her head and interrupted. “Yes I am. I knew it myself. I was just surprised to hear him say it. I would like you to try your idea, whatever it is. Otherwise I’m finished.”

  “Yes Pell, lets do it, what is this idea?” Gia looked at him as if expecting him to spout the ancestor’s own truth.

  “Well, in our old cave… Once… Uh, once Tando and Kana’s fingers were both crushed under a large rock. Tando’s finger was cut completely off but it healed cleanly with a little stump as you see.” Tando held up his hand and waggled the finger at everyone, as if he was proud of it. Pell would have giggled if the situation weren’t so serious. “Kana’s finger was crushed but remained on her hand. At first, we thought Kana’s to be the less serious injury because her finger was still on her hand but it soon swelled with the wound fever. Redness and swelling raced up her arm. She died a week later.” Pell refrained from describing the horrible nature of that death and looked around at his audience.

  Tando wore a puzzled look. “So what should we have done to save Kana?”

  Pell was taken aback. He had thought that his story would make his suggestion obvious to everyone without his stating it baldly. “Well... I don’t know… I’m just observing that cut off fingers do better than crushed but still attached fingers….”

  The others looked puzzled and Tando was exasperated. “OK, but what should we do for Panute, her fingers are crushed, they aren’t cut off!”