by Lou Cadle
Blood sprayed out.
“Gusher!” Ted said. “Good hit!”
Hannah twisted the spear. It seemed she had hit the jugular vein, but it had been pure dumb luck. The animal’s heart pumped its blood out. Hannah let go of the spear and yanked her knife out of her pocket. She stabbed the neck again, and tried to cut more of the blood vessels. Ted hung on to the animal, and its struggles began to weaken after a minute. It took another minute and a half for it to bleed out, for its heartbeat to fade to nothing. One of Ted’s jean legs was soaked with blood, and her hands were slick with it.
She yanked her knife back and wiped it on the grass.
“It’s a good-sized one,” Ted said.
Hannah wiped her hands on the grass, trying to get the slick hot blood off so she could start the gutting of the animal. She’d be bloody again in a second, but she needed to be able to grip the knife to make the first cut.
“Where’s Claire?” Ted said.
Hannah glanced around. The herd had run down the hill and halfway up the next by now. Claire was nowhere to be seen.
“Claire!” Ted said, jumping to his feet, sounding worried.
“Here!” came the girl’s voice, from over the hill far behind them.
Ted started for Claire but stopped himself. “You sure it’s dead?”
Hannah checked. “It’s dead.”
Ted ran off toward Claire’s voice, and Hannah flipped the oreodont and began the preparation of the meat. She had finally found a honing stone for her knife, but it was nowhere near as sharp as it had been. It was good enough for this job.
She had the intestines out and was taking out the liver to set aside when Claire and Ted came over the hill, laughing. Hannah glanced back. Claire had a small animal, an oreodont young, slung over her shoulder.
It was a lot of meat. They’d have to stuff themselves this next thirty-six hours.
We need to find a salt source.
She pushed the thought out of her mind and went back to dressing out the kill. They saved heart and liver, and Hannah would try to make sure everyone had a little of each for the nutrients they contained, though she still hadn’t convinced Nari to eat organs. They saved the head, to use the brains for the second stage of curing the hide, the first stage being urinating on it. In fact, she meant to make another big clay bowl for use for just that—soaking it in urine. The smell wouldn’t be nice—nor was the smell of decomposing brains, as they’d learned back in the Oligocene, but it would be worth it to have a big skin like this one.
“Good job,” she said to Claire, when the girl tossed down her dead animal next to Hannah’s. “Why don’t you two see if you can clean it yourselves?”
“I’m not sure I can,” said Ted.
“I can.” Claire had seen her father clean game and had helped Hannah learn how.
“Then Ted, why don’t you do it to get the practice.” Hannah had the larger animal almost skinned. Once she did, she handed over her knife. Then she dug through her supplies until she found the little scraper Bob had been making. She had been worried that banging rocks together was too much work for him, but he didn’t complain of pain. In fact, he was looking so recovered she thought he should start walking short distances to get back into shape, so he could manage the hike back to the timegate.
She used the scrapers to remove flesh and fat from the hide. It was messy work, and the lack of a handle meant her hand was always slick with blood or fat, so she kept wiping her hands and scraper on the grass to clean them. She pulled the carcass along with her, as she moved to a patch of cleaner grass every few minutes.
Claire was coaching Ted through cleaning the lamb. It was about the first thing she’d ever seen him not master in minutes. She couldn’t tell if he was squeamish, or what, but it took him so long she had the skin of the big oreodont mostly clean by the time he was done. Claire had picked out the liver and heart of the smaller kill. “You want me to skin it?” she asked Hannah.
“No, we have a walk ahead of us. Let’s get it back to the campsite as soon as possible. Just stick the organs back in it and tie it with twine. I’ll carry it.” Her backpack had some waterproofing, so she probably wouldn’t even get bloody. “I’m afraid you’ll have to carry this big one’s meat, Ted.” In the woven basket backpack, blood would be dripping from the bloody meat and onto him.
“That’s fine,” he said, wiping his hands on the grass to clean them. “Maybe it’ll rain and wash the blood off me.”
She set about slicing big roasts off the animal. The leg bones would make great soup, but it was big enough they could afford to leave some of it behind. When she was done with her rough butchering job, she glanced up. There was still sun in the sky, but the clouds were headed this way. It looked like they’d cover the sun just before noon.
Claire said, “The oreodonts are back to grazing.”
They hadn’t even entirely vacated this valley. Spread over the upslope to the next hill and beyond, they had taken the deaths in stride and were calmly grazing, as if it had never happened.
She helped Ted get the meat arranged for transport, and then walked back to where they had left their heavier gear.
“We’re still an hour from the lake,” Ted said.
“And what about the hell pigs?” said Claire.
Hannah had forgotten. The wind was still from the west, but they should detour well east of the predators to be sure. “Okay, maybe two hours away,” she said. She pointed east and began walking that direction, well down from the top of the hill.
“I can go and look for them,” Ted said. “Maybe they’re gone.”
Hannah stopped. “Okay, sure. Good idea.”
Ted walked upright to the top of the hill, looking out to the north. “Oh, shit,” he said.
“What?” Hannah said.
“They’re right there. Like right there. Run!” He broke into a jog, running for Hannah. She had to see. She sprinted to the top of the hill.
The hell pigs weren’t far away at all. They were tracking uphill, maybe following the human scent trail. If they got any closer, they’d smell the fresh meat too. She tore down the hill and began running too, following Ted. “Faster, Claire,” she said. “Give it all you have.”
She didn’t hold out much hope that they’d be able to outdistance the predators. Certainly not in a sprint. And ahead, there was nothing but grass. No trees at all to climb. Not even a patch of bushes to hide behind, not that she thought that would help them. Their only chance was to run like hell and get enough distance between them and the predators that they would not be able to run them down.
That was one thing she’d learned in the past eleven weeks. Predators were great at sprinting, but no good at the marathons. So if you were far enough from them, and you jogged away, they might halve the distance in a sprint, but they’d not catch up to you. She’d seen it played out a few times between predators and other prey. They seldom made that mistake as adults, as experienced hunters, but the younger ones did, sometimes misjudging their ability to catch prey across a longer distance.
But these were too damned close, still. Hannah put on a burst of speed. Ted, weighed down with probably eighty pounds of meat, was slowed from his normal speed. She caught up to him, and so did Claire. They ran side by side, and then Claire pulled ahead.
She glanced back at them and, when she noticed she was pulling away, slowed.
“No!” Hannah said. “Keep running! Get as far as you can, as fast as you can!”
“They see us,” Ted said, panting.
It gave Hannah another burst of adrenaline, and she managed to get more speed out of her legs. She closed the distance with Claire. Behind her, she could hear Ted dropping behind by another few paces. And then another few. “Hurry, Ted!” she said.
She was nearing the end of her sprinting energy. She had to slow down in a second. Just ten more steps. She made them good ones, remembering Ted’s coaching of them all on the art of sprinting, using her arms, leaning forward, and cou
nting the paces down. Her lungs were burning and her heart pounding hard. She counted down to zero and managed to get four more strides out of herself before she had to slow to a jog.
Gasping for air, she turned. Ted was twenty yards behind now. The basket bounced on his back, probably throwing off his balance worse.
And behind him ran the hell pigs, all four adults in a bunch, the younger one trailing. Their heads were lowered, raising the hump on their backs. The bristly hair blew back with the wind of their charge. She could count the teeth in the lead one’s mouth, they were that close.
They were going to catch him.
“Drop the pack, Ted!” she screamed, turning to jog backward a few steps. “Get rid of it!”
He hesitated. The hell pigs closed the distance another foot. Another.
“Do it!” she shrieked.
He reached up and peeled one strap off, then the other as he turned. He yelped as he saw how close they were, and then he heaved the pack downhill, at the hell pigs. Pivoting, he sprinted for all he was worth.
Hannah turned and kept running too. Claire was well ahead now, and safe. But Ted wasn’t. Not unless the strategy had worked.
Free of the weight of the meat, he came up to her, and then he passed her. Good. If the predators were going to kill one of them, let it be her.
Claire turned and yelled, “They’re going for the backpack!”
Hannah risked a glance back and saw it was so. “Get over the hilltop,” she said. True, the predators had halted for now, but that didn’t mean the meat would distract them for long.
The three of them crested the hill and ran on an angle down the slope, still moving away from the hell pigs. She hoped once they were out of the animals’ sight and those ugly things were engaged with the easy meal, the humans would be forgotten.
She ran all the way to the lowest point in the valley, but then she had to slow to a walk. “You guys keep going. I need a break,” she said.
“Me too,” said Claire, coming to a stop. She rested her hands on her thighs and sucked in some air.
“Keep walking,” Hannah said. “Go uphill. If we can get two hilltops between us, I’ll feel safer.”
Ted managed a little more jogging, but soon even he had to drop down to a walk on the upslope. Fifteen minutes later, they were over the top, and Ted flopped down on the grass.
“No resting,” she said. “Keep walking. We’ll rest once we start up the next hill and can see them coming from a long way off.”
“Is it the last?” Claire asked. “Before home?”
“I think. Maybe one more.”
Ted hadn’t moved yet.
“Ted? You okay? Come on, get up.”
He sat and flopped back onto his back.
It worried Hannah enough that she stopped too. “Are you hurt?”
“We lost the meat!” he said, slamming a fist down onto the ground in frustration.
“We still have some,” she said. “What’s in my pack.”
“Yeah, but I should have done something,” he said.
“What?” she said. “There was nothing to do!”
“I didn’t do enough.”
“Ted!” she said, getting angry. “You kept yourself alive. That’s all I expect of you. All I want. I couldn’t take another Garreth. I swear I couldn’t.”
“Me neither,” said Claire. “We’re okay, Ted. That’s what’s important. C’mon.” She backtracked to him and reached down to offer him a hand.
He cursed under his breath, but he took her hand.
In silence, they walked down to the bottom of the valley. When they were a quarter way up the next hill, Hannah allowed them to sit down and take a drink of water.
“I was so proud of that kill,” he said.
“Not as spectacular as your first,” she said. “The first for any of us, way back when.”
“Huh.” He gave her a wry smile. “More skilled, though. And damn it, I really wanted that meat.”
“The young meat in Hannah’s pack will be more tender anyway,” Claire said.
“Yeah, but barely enough for one meal.”
“We’ll appreciate it more,” she said. “I’d rather have a smaller meal and you alive, Ted.”
He sighed. “Thanks. I know. And I feel the same about you guys. I’m just pissed at myself.”
Hannah was about to lecture him for how ridiculous it was to expect superhuman feats of himself when she realized, in one of those flashes of insight that feel like being hit in the head, that she expected superhuman feats of herself too. He had been sounding an awful lot like the voice in her head that constantly berated her.
She wished, more than anything, that she could have kept Garreth alive. But she couldn’t. She did try her best. So did Ted. So did everybody. But it just didn’t happen that way.
It was time to forgive herself. Or at least to try.
They made it back to the cabin without encountering any more trouble, and the weather gods smiled on them, for it did not start raining until they were within sight of the trees. A final jog brought them under the canopy of the forest, so they didn’t even get wet.
Chapter 24
They roasted some of the cashew fruit and onion bulbs inside the oreodont in a steam pit, and dinner that night was a treat. True, they could have eaten a meal twice that size, but it was enough, and everyone praised the tenderness of the meat, and the hunters for their bravery and luck. Ted denied having any part in it and said all the credit was Claire’s.
The next morning, for a change, Hannah wasn’t the first out of bed. Yesterday’s adventures had taken a lot out of her. She was awakened by the kids as they, one by one, moved past her and outside to start the day, but she lay there resting and thinking for as long as she could avoid taking on her responsibilities again.
“Hannah,” said Nari, as she came back into the cabin. “You need to come see this.”
“Okay,” she said, rolling over onto hands and knees and pushing herself up.
“We thought it was like a wildfire or something,” Nari said. “But Mr. O’Brien says it’s not.” She was clearly impatient as Hannah got her creaking body moving and out the door. “Come on.” She grabbed Hannah’s hand and pulled her along, still barefoot, down the trail to the lake.
As Hannah came out of the cover of the trees, she saw what had made Nari so insistent. The sky was cloudless—but not clear. The sky, and the ground, and even the lake were all coated with a thin gray dust.
“Volcanic ash,” Bob said. “I’m nearly certain of it.”
“Oh,” she said, stooping to scoop some up and rub it between her fingers. It was sharper than gravel, and were her fingertips not so callused, she’d have surely cut herself with it.
Nari said, “It has to be pretty far away, right?”
Rex said, “I hope it’s not one of the big Yellowstone eruptions starting. They happen like, what? Every half a million years?”
Hannah wasn’t sure. She hadn’t read up on it. She’d never applied for a posting at Yellowstone or Yosemite or any of the big, popular parks. They were hard to get into, and plenty of the more obscure parks were as beautiful or interesting.
Bob said, “I’m thinking maybe the Cascades. If there were Cascades?”
“There were,” she said. “That much I do know. There were old Cascades before there were modern-day ones. I won’t know which is out there now, but one of them certainly was.”
“Like Crater Lake?” Jodi asked. “When did that happen?”
“What seemed like a long time ago to us before,” Bob said. “But I think it was really quite recent. After mammoths went extinct. When there were already Indians in North America, after the first wave of immigration to the continent.”
“Except for us,” Zach said. “Now we’re the first.”
“We’re more like shipwrecked than immigrants,” Jodi said.
“We should take care not to eat too much of this grit,” Hannah said. “Wash all the fruits and vegetables really w
ell.”
“Will it get worse?” Dixie asked.
“No one can say,” Bob said. “But the fact we aren’t seeing anything to the west—that is, not an eruptive cloud—suggests to me it’s pretty far away. That’s going to keep us safe, I think.”
Laina said, “We’ll be gone in a couple weeks anyway. So even if it gets heavier, we should still be fine.”
Bob said, “If it gets heavier, in a way, that could be useful.”
“How?” Hannah asked.
“Eventually, the grazing animals won’t be able to get enough to eat. They’d die from it long before we would. And they’ll get weak enough that they’ll be easier to hunt.”
Claire said, “Will the fish be okay?”
“Yes, I should think so,” Bob said.
“Ashfall or not,” Hannah said, “we all have work to do today, right?”
“Not a snow day?” Ted said. “It looks like the start of a snow day.”
“Pretty dirty snow,” Jodi said.
“No snow days for us,” Hannah said. “Let’s build up the fire and start the day.”
They had found a second herb the day before yesterday, tested it, and Hannah was looking forward to trying the two herbs blended together in a sort of tea. It probably didn’t have any caffeine in it, and it wasn’t going to be very familiar-tasting, and it could no doubt use some honey, but she missed starting the day with a hot beverage.
She supposed a hot morning drink was the beginning of something—of normalization. Of having the time to track down not just the necessities of survival, but also the niceties of a civilized life.
Maybe not too civilized, she thought, as she took a bath at lakeside that morning. There was a tear in her shirt sleeve that she had no idea how she had gotten, and her toe was beginning to poke through her sock. After she was dressed again, her fraying pants lost another two rows of threads so she could fix both, and she asked the rest of the kids if they had anything that needed mending too.
From then until their fish brunch, she made minor repairs of clothing. Boots were beyond her ability to fix, and Dixie’s clothes were beginning to look really tattered. She’d not wanted to do it before, but she quietly handed over Garreth’s jeans and boots. She even managed to do it without reminding Dixie that the boy had died protecting her.
