by Lou Cadle
Hannah grinned. “No. It can suck, being in charge. But you’re doing a terrific job.”
“Thanks. I mean that, too. I don’t get much applause.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Hold this leg out of the way for me, would you?” Claire said.
Hannah did so, and Claire finished removing the intestines from the youngest animal. “I wonder what these critters are. They really do have fingers. The thumb is set in at an angle. Not quite opposable, but really useful. They must be able to pick fruit or nuts.”
“They had a pretty good reach too, when they stood on their back legs,” Hannah said.
“They had good balance up there. Better than a bear,” Claire said. “I had a long time to watch them while you three were on the move. Not much social interaction, though. They all had their patch of bush and ate without any socializing.”
“Bob might know what they are.”
“Is he going to be okay? He seems better.”
“I hope.”
“What about Rex?”
“I don’t know. He can hear more now than the day of the lightning strike. If his eardrums were ruptured, I have no idea how long they take to heal. Six weeks? Eight? That’d be my guess. I suspect however well he hears two months from now might be how well he hears forever.”
“At least it wasn’t total and permanent,” Claire said. “Rope, rope,” she muttered, digging through her pack with a bloody hand. “Here it is.” She shoved heart and liver back into the body cavity and then tied the animal’s legs together, making it easier to carry.
“That one will probably be more tender,” Hannah said.
“Yeah. We’ll eat it tonight. Make a roast. Stuff it with cashew fruit maybe. Have a party to celebrate a successful hunt.”
The three women carried the meat, and Ted, holding a surviving spear, kept a lookout as they marched back to camp.
It was in the middle of the evening meal, just as the sunset was turning orange, that the ash began to fall again.
Chapter 10
Ash had fallen a few weeks back. No mountains were visible, but somewhere to the west there must be a volcano. And now, like feathers, tiny flakes of gray ash were falling again. The distant mountain was erupting.
“Cover the meat,” Jodi said.
Zach reached over to grab the remaining roast and jerked his hand back. “Still hot.”
“Spear it on over here,” said Claire, shifting to make room. “I’ll get it covered.”
Nari was on her feet. “I’ll go get the biggest hide. We can probably fit it all under that.”
Ted had helped move the meat away from the fire and he, Jodi, and Zach were all leaning over it, keeping it from being covered with ash.
“I think it’s getting thicker already,” Bob said.
Rex said, “Is this ash again?” He must have missed part of the conversation.
Hannah nodded at him. She nearly said, “Eat up, everybody else,” but stopped herself in time. It wasn’t her job any more to order anyone to do anything. She tended to her own job and kept eating, keeping her left hand over the remaining meat in her bowl to keep the ash off it.
Nari ran up with a pair of hides. “These are some of our earlier efforts,” she said, “so I don’t care as much if they get stained with blood.” They spread one hide over the roasted meat and the other over the raw meat that they planned to smoke tomorrow. The three animals had provided a good amount of meat, easily enough for eight big meals. With the fish so plentiful, Claire had decided to smoke both of the larger animals into jerky and set that aside for the trip back to the timegate. “We’re taking five days to get there,” she had said this morning. “And before then, we need to figure out how to carry more water with us, in case it doesn’t rain at all on the hike.”
Tonight she said, “Let’s finish eating and get back under cover.”
Everybody wolfed down the remainder of their meat and fruit. They had also made a salad of something that may or may not have been watercress, but whatever it was had passed the test for edibility. It didn’t have any calories to speak of, but it had a nice crunch to it. Hannah wished balsamic vinegar wasn’t forty million years away in the future.
Hannah was among the first finished, so she arranged the fire for the night. They kept coals banked and half-buried in a way they had worked out over time. Their system kept the coals alive until the next morning, when they could build up the fire again from the previous night’s coals. As she worked, the ash kept falling. Some of it glued itself to the back of her hand, and when the fire was set up for the night, she tried brushing it off, but it wouldn’t come. It really was stuck on, as if with paste.
She stepped over to the shore and worked at washing it off. It had to be scraped at. And the dry stuff had a pumice-like effect, so that by the time she was done, her hands felt raw. “This is nasty stuff,” she said to Jodi, as the girl kneeled beside her to wash up. “Scratches you as it comes off.”
Bob joined them and said, “It’s rock, really. Flakes of rough rock.”
Hannah said, “If you had pans to scrub, this would do the trick. It’s worse than steel wool on the skin.”
Claire called over, “Maybe it’s useful for something, then.” She raised her voice. “Rex? Put your mind to this, please. Find a use for the ash.”
Hannah said, “I’m getting under the roof before I’m coated again.” She was the first in the cabin, and set the pinesap candles alight. Under the trees, it was dark already, and inside the cabin it was like night. But it was also free of ash, she was happy to see. The woven roof was keeping it out.
The next morning, she realized that wasn’t strictly true. The tiniest particles of ash had filtered through the roof and settled on everything, including her. It wasn’t much more than a dusting, but outside in the woods, ash coated even the bottom tree leaves. Outside the trees, it must be a good deal worse.
It was not going to be fun working out there. Nari could stay indoors to work on sewing. A couple of others could find another indoor task to do. But the rest of them had work that required being outdoors, including smoking the meat, which she’d volunteered to help with. Without any tree cover, she’d be coated with ash flakes within an hour.
She’d keep her sleeves rolled down today, that was for sure.
One by one, the others wandered out of the cabin. Hannah spent the time reorganizing her pack. She’d pulled several items out for the hunt yesterday, to keep her pack free for carrying the kill, and she now rearranged everything. She also gathered more pine sap for wounds, shoving it with a stick into the Altoids container. She had wanted to make tongue depressors for some time now—both to apply the pinesap without gluing her fingers together, and in case she wanted to look down someone’s throat. Now that she was getting adept with the stone knife, she started in on that experiment, shaving a medium-size branch of its bark and then peeling off thin strips until she had a flat surface.
Jodi emerged from the cabin, yawning. “Whatcha doing?”
“Making a stick out of a stick, as ridiculous as that sounds,” she explained. “As I get better at whittling, I might be able to make more complicated items than a flat stick. Let me know if you think of anything you need.”
“’Kay,” Jodi said, yawning. Then, “Latrine.” And she wandered off. She was not a morning person.
Rex returned from his trip to the latrine and said, “It’s still falling. The ash.”
She nodded. Until everyone was awake, she didn’t want to have to talk loudly to him. He could hear loud speech now. Later, in private, she wanted to check his hearing and see how his emotional state was about the hearing loss. She had abdicated as leader, but she was still the medic for the group. Not a very good one, she thought, watching Bob come back from his morning visit to the latrine, rubbing his chest. Better than nothing, she hoped.
Everyone who could do so switched their activity for the day to work under the trees. She and Zach were smoking meat, and Jodi wa
s fishing that morning, so they were stuck out in the ash.
“Where do you think it is?” Zach said. “The volcano?”
They had already talked about this when the ash first fell, almost a month ago. “I don’t know my Cenozoic timeline well,” she said. “Most of what I do know, I learned at the park this year.”
“I’m just worried it might be Yellowstone.”
“Remember, Bob said there really wasn’t one back now.”
“Or something as big.”
“Well, that could be. But whatever it is, we’re far from it. I’m happy about that.”
He still seemed worried but tried to talk himself out of it. “At least we’re halfway through the month. Even if it gets worse, we’ll be out of it soon enough. And into a new challenge next time.” Her imagination sent her a picture of them being dropped right into the red maw of a volcano. But logically, no. What were the chances of that? Erupting volcanoes must only cover—what? .00001% of the planet at any given time.
Still, she wished she hadn’t had the thought at all.
She cut another chunk of meat in a spiral and handed the resulting strip to Zach. He wove it onto a stick and put it over the smoky fire. He pushed another green bough on the coals and coughed as the smoke hit him in the face.
When he had wiped his eyes, he said, “Is she still alive, do you think?”
She knew he meant Laina. She was never far from any of their thoughts. “I don’t know. I hope she is.”
“But we’ll never see her again, will we?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“No. I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t see any way that we can hit exactly where she is. We’d be lucky to be there soon enough to find a weathered skull. Or we’ll get there before her by a thousand years, which might as well be a million.”
“Zach, I don’t have any more answers than you do. I have a time for us to jump, which she gave me, and nothing else.”
“I wish she’d told us more about the timegate, and the timing, and how she’d figured it all out before she left us.” There was a hint of anger in his voice.
“I wouldn’t have been able to understand her if she had told us. I was lost the first time she tried to,” Hannah said.
“Yeah, I guess only Rex has a chance at understanding it. I’m no math whiz.”
“Are you angry with her?”
“Yeah!” he said. “I am!” He frowned. “I guess I’m sad, more. But when I think about it, I get pretty pissed off. Her leaving is screwing us up. Our chances of getting home are bad.”
“I get it.”
“Aren’t you mad?”
“More like….” She tried to put a word to it. “Part guilty, part hopeless. And a dash of something I don’t have a word for. Maybe a grain or two of admiration is part of that.”
“Really?”
“It was brave of her, in a kind of crazy way.”
“You think she’s crazy?”
“No. Not at all. Maybe overconfident. I know I’m not brave enough to want to be out here alone, the only human around for twenty million years.” It was strange, how she had come to think of time as a landscape of sorts. In her mind’s eye, Laina was in the middle of a vast, lonely plain.
They worked in silence for a time. Then Zach said, “Maybe we should have a memorial for her.”
Jodi called over, “No way. We don’t know she’s dead.”
“But she might be dead to us, monkey.”
Monkey? Hannah couldn’t help but smile. And then she thought about what that term of affection meant. “Um, you two are being careful, right? About avoiding pregnancy?”
“Very,” said Jodi.
“We wouldn’t want a kid back home,” Zach said. “Much less here.”
Jodi said, “Can you imagine? A crying baby, and predators around? Might as well put double arches over our heads and advertise ourselves as meat.”
“Somehow people—or near-people—survived for millions of years with babies,” Zach said. Then he glanced at Hannah. “Not saying I want one. But how did they keep them from crying for all those eons?”
Hannah said, “I’m not sure. Maybe they cried less. They were on their mothers’ backs all the time. If they were hungry, they got fed immediately. They probably didn’t wear diapers, so they were never wet or suffering from diaper rash. I’m hardly the expert on babies, though.”
“Don’t you want them?” Zach said.
“No.” In fact, she’d had a tubal at age 30, as soon as her doctor had agreed she was old enough to know for sure she wanted no children.
“I do,” he said. “One day. If we’re ever back. If we don’t get back…well, probably even then.”
“You’d make a good father, I’m sure,” said Hannah. “But I think you’re right, Jodi, about the danger a baby would bring. Not to mention that childbirth can be deadly.”
“Anyway,” said Jodi. “Back to Laina. I don’t think she’s dead. I mean, she’d be ahead of us, so she won’t be dead for many millions of years. But she was smart enough that she’d still be alive, wherever she is, two weeks later.”
“The time thing makes this crazy to talk about,” Zach said. “I don’t know what verbs to use. She is? She will be? Is today today or the day we left?”
“The fish are confused by the ash, I think,” said Jodi. “I can see them going for it on the surface of the lake.”
“It does look like fish food,” said Zach, smiling.
“You goof,” Jodi said. “Like an Eocene fish knows from fish food flakes.”
He winked at Hannah. “How many have you caught?”
“Zero. I’ve only gotten one bite. And I have to wash this sucky ash off me before it sticks.”
Hannah said, “Good idea for me too.”
“You have some ash in your eyelashes. Be careful when you rub your face,” Zach said.
“Thanks.” Hannah followed Jodi to the lakeside spot where she had chosen to wash off. Halfway through her bathing, she had a belated thought. “I’m an idiot,” she said to Jodi.
“Why?”
“We should be wearing our hats.”
“D’oh. I didn’t think of it either.” She turned to Zach. “Monkey, go back and grab all our hats, would you? At least we can keep the ash off our faces.”
“Sure. Where’s yours, Hannah?”
“Tied to my pack, which is leaning against the outside wall of the cabin.”
“Be right back,” he said.
Hannah said to Jodi, “Why ‘monkey’?”
“Short for ‘monkey fart.’”
“Well, that’s lovely.” Hannah laughed.
“Sometimes you’re old, Hannah.”
“I guess I am. I didn’t know people called each other monkey farts as terms of affection these days.”
“We do, old lady.”
Hannah laughed again. “Guilty. Old before my time.”
“You seem younger lately. Since Claire was elected.”
“Yeah, it’s a burden off me, for sure. I don’t think I’m a natural leader. I think she is. I think you are, too. And Ted.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t me, though, that got picked. Claire is fine.”
“She’s terrific,” Hannah said. “You all are. I’m so impressed with how mature you and Zach are being about the whole pregnancy thing.”
“Well, we’re not stupid. And it’s not as if there’s a whole lot of privacy anyway. And if we can get back home, that’s only—what? Like two and a half months away. I might not be able to leave ice cream in the freezer without touching it for two and a half months, but I can put off sex for that long.”
Hannah took note of the fact that Jodi thought they’d be returning home. She didn’t disabuse her of the notion. For one thing, maybe they would. Maybe a miracle would happen. Maybe the laws of physics that allowed for time travel would snap them back to their precise moment of departure if they got anywhere close. She wasn’t Laina, so she couldn’t begin to guess.
&n
bsp; But her gut told her they would not return, that the 21st century was lost to them forever.
Zach returned with the hats and Hannah’s bandana, and said, “Bob said we need to wear masks if we’re out here. He said it’s not good to breathe this.”
“I don’t have a mask,” said Jodi.
“He said to cut off our shirt tails. Yours is too short. I’ll cut off mine. It’s big enough for two masks. Can I use the knife, Hannah?”
“Go on.” She bit back the urge to say, “Don’t cut yourself!” It was hard adjusting, but she was making the effort. They weren’t children. They were young adults. She wasn’t their mother, or their leader. Claire was their leader. She had to repeat it to herself many times a day, but it was slowly sinking in.
Claire emerged from the woods an hour later and asked if they wanted to switch jobs.
“I’ll stay. No sense in everybody getting covered with ash,” Hannah said.
“Where’s Jodi?” Claire said, looking around.
Just then Jodi popped up out of the lake. “Got another. Oh, hi, Claire.”
“What are you doing?” Claire’s tone was curious.
“The fish weren’t biting. So I’m digging for clams. Or mollusks of some sort.” She held one up.
“Great,” said Claire, brushing ash off her face. “I’m going back under cover. Thanks, guys, for doing the dirty work today.”
Chapter 11
The ash fell intermittently for the next week. It had really put the fish down, and after six days of clamming, the area nearest them was nearly stripped of shellfish. They were casting the net again, but the fish seemed to have retreated to the deeper part of the lake and each catch was meager. Claire said over an insufficiently large lunch of fish and eels, “We could use another hunt. Today is a good time.”
Ted said, “Great. I’ll go.”
Claire said, “Gather your party, then.”
Hannah bowed out of this trip. Rex convinced Ted he could hear well enough to go. Hannah knew his hearing was coming back. She was testing him every other day, and his left ear was healing faster than his right. She had confidence that he might have normal hearing in one ear again.
