***
In the morning we found ourselves standing in a small flat area between the rough burrows where we were required to sleep. Actually, I was not ready to declare it to be morning. The glow at the eastern edge of the cloud had barely begun. Wilson looked like he had already been awake for hours, and clearly was not about to allow any of us to get the proper amount of sleep. I supposed I would have to take a nap around lunch time.
Nub had taken me under his tutelage and directed me to stand next to him in the front and center of a very rough approximation of the rectangular formation we had watched yesterday. Wilson called out my name as he bore down on my position. My armor itched with apprehension. He was carrying two long sticks each with one end sharpened. He stopped ten meters away.
"Well, step out here boy!" he ordered. "Let's us veterans show these children how it’s done," and I found myself moving a few meters closer to him.
He tossed one of the two sticks high in the air directly at me, and I thought I was very clever to duck out of the way. It crashed to the ground behind me and I watched Wilson with a smile on my face to see if I could avoid the next one he threw.
His expression shot fire at me. "Pick...it...up," he growled.
My smile washed away as I scrambled to retrieve the stick. When I recovered it and turned back to face him he had closed the distance between us to barely a meter. I froze in fear. He held his stick up in front of him, one claw at the base, one a short distance above. Was he about to hit me?
"You hold your spear like this," he bellowed loud enough for the whole group to hear. Some of them began to move out of their positions in the rectangle to find a better viewing angle. I attempted to mirror his grip with my shaky claws on my own stick. Apparently I did it wrong because he reached one claw forward and gripped my stick near the center. When I felt him tugging I simply let go. Again, he gave me that look that I had been interpreting as furious disapproval. It occurred to me that maybe his face just looked that way most of the time.
He held the stick out to me again. "Hold the spear tightly."
I grasped the spear again. He pulled on it and it slipped from my grasp.
"Tighter!" My rear legs were running away but the others couldn't move.
I did as he demanded, and SNICK my upper claw cut the stick in two.
He stared silently first at the end of the stick in his claw, then at the other piece at my feet. He closed his eyes for a moment, took a single deep breath, then dropped the other half of my stick at my feet. "Not that tight."
He thrust his own stick out at me whispering harshly, "Take this one."
In my terror I had no choice. I grasped at the stick one claw above his, the other below, and SNICK SNICK his stick was in three pieces. I was finally able to take a step back away from him. He lowered his head, turned his back to us, and for a moment I thought he was laughing. He did not turn back to face us. With a vague gesture he ordered, "Everyone take a spear and get back in formation."
The crowd rushed forward to a large pile of sticks across the way. I allowed myself to blend into the current of bodies and having selected the thickest stick I could find, returned to as close to the middle of the rectangle as possible. I decided at that moment that I would never find myself in the front of the group again.
Chiton Page 3
