by Lou Cadle
“They did. I know.”
“Why?”
Hannah wasn’t sure what to say. She wished for a comforting answer, but all she had was the truth. “It’s their nature. They hunt, and they go for the weakest or smallest of a group. You’re smallest, and your being behind made you vulnerable.”
“They would have—h-have eaten me?” The question made her cry harder.
Hannah sensed that something complicated was going on inside the girl, something beyond the horror of the memory being replayed in her mind, but she couldn’t work out what exactly that might be. “You’re safe now,” she said. “You’re in camp, and I’m right here, and someone will be with you all day tomorrow. It’s over. Your job for the next few days is to heal.” She waited until the tears had subsided and said, “Are you in awful pain?”
“Only if I move at all.”
It was a better answer than Hannah had hoped for. “Then don’t move. Do you need anything? Water?” She had lost a good deal of blood, so she probably was thirsty.
“In the morning,” Nari said. “I’m tired.”
“Then go back to sleep if you can.”
Hannah stayed awake until she could hear Nari’s breathing grow steady and deep. Then she snuck out of the debris hut and went to the fire. Rex and Claire were there.
“What’s up?” Claire said.
“Nari’s awake and talking. Or asleep again now, but she was talking for a short time. Pass the news along to whoever relieves you, if you would, so people don’t worry needlessly. I’d like water for her when she wakes up. Are there bottles here somewhere?”
“I have one,” Rex said. “Take it.”
“Thanks,” she said. “How’s the meat coming along?”
“Slowly, like it’s supposed to,” Claire said.
The next day, Zach and Bob stayed with the meat and Hannah asked that one of them check in on Nari every hour.
“Can she move?” Bob said.
“Probably best if she kept it to a minimum. The shoulder especially; I’d like to give that wound a chance to start knitting. And you might have to support her on her worst leg.”
“What about using the latrine?”
“I left her with a bowl and told her to use it as a bedpan. So if you could empty it?”
Zach made a face, but Bob nodded. “Will do. She has water?”
“Yeah, two bottles, but she may need more. She lost a lot of blood.”
They left Bob and Zach smoking meat. The rest of them hiked to the cabin site and set to work with a purpose. They moved rocks, dug holes to seat the last few, and arranged them so that the flattest faces were on top. The mortar wasn’t as good as they’d used before, but Rex said it should hold for the few weeks they would need it to. “Barring really bad storms,” he added. “Not sure the mortar will hold up to that.”
They built a curved wall that stretched all the way across the cliff face. Instead of leaving a space for a door, they left a high threshold of rock, almost knee-high on Hannah. They’d have to step over it, but it might help stop a small animal or trip up a larger one. By the time they needed to return to the river that afternoon, they’d gotten most of the way through laying a second course of stones, using smaller stones than the first and mortaring them in place. They worked fast, and without a break. The labor was hard.
Everyone was tired and hungry as they marched back.
Hannah went straight to the debris hut to check on Nari. She was napping. Hannah needed to check her dressings before the day was done. Tomorrow, she’d need to take them all off, wash the bandages well in the river, and dry them before putting them back on.
Everyone else was at the fire, eating the roast that had been cooking all day.
“Sorry,” Zach said. “It’s a little burnt around the edges.”
It was a little burnt everywhere, but Hannah didn’t care. She just wanted food, and she worked her way through the overdone meat as if it were a medicine she had to get down. It was, in a way. After a day of hard work, her body needed fuel. Everyone else was tired too, and it showed in how little they spoke. Zach kept up dinner conversation almost single-handedly.
When she checked in the debris hut after supper, Nari was stirring. “Hey, how are you?” she said.
“Sleeping too much.”
“Your body needs to mend itself. You need food to help it do that. There’s roast and smoked meat now.”
“Eww, no.”
Hannah kept herself from taking on a Mom role, lecturing her any more on how she had to eat. “Could you eat fish?” she said.
“Maybe,” Nari said. “I’m thirsty.”
Hannah grabbed the empty water bottles and returned to the fire. “Is there any fish from today?” she asked Bob. “Nari can’t stomach red meat right now.”
“We caught a couple,” he said. “They’re in the water.”
He had rigged up a basket in the water to trap the fish, tied to a stake with a homemade rope. Two fish were in there, still alive, swimming in a circle in the confined space. Hannah picked up one of the stone knives from the area where they’d been slicing up meat, went to the basket again, reached in and grabbed a fish, and killed and gutted it. She rinsed it in the river and laid it on a rock close to the fire to cook.
Then she flopped down by the fire to watch over it.
“You’re tired,” Bob said.
“Exhausted. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Not overdoing?” she asked him.
“No, just sitting for the most part. I even took a short nap.”
“Good. Zach’s doing okay?”
“Yeah. You can focus your nursing inclinations on Nari. The rest of us are healing.” A second later he said, “I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I didn’t mean to sound so ungrateful.”
“You didn’t,” she said. “Or if you did, I’m too tired to pay attention.”
“I wish I could help more.”
“You’re helping. We need to eat, and you guys are cooking and smoking meat. And someone needs to keep an eye on Nari while we’re building.”
“How long until the cabin is done?”
“We might be able to move tomorrow afternoon. Probably the day after.”
“That’s fast.”
“We won’t have a roof. But I’d rather have walls than not. You didn’t see any sign of the dogs today, did you?”
“No. Claire already asked.”
Hannah was happy to hear the dogs hadn’t followed them. Or maybe they had but were too stealthy and clever to be seen. No, that sounded unlikely. With all the meat here, and with only two people to guard it all day—one, whenever the other had gone to use the latrine or to check on Nari—surely the dogs would have attacked. They were off somewhere else, resting up from the fight. Mourning their dead, maybe.
A minute later, Bob jostled her. “Wake up.”
“What?” She looked around, confused.
“You nearly fell into the fire. Go get some rest.”
“When the fish is done and Nari is fed and I have a look at her injuries.”
“I can bring the fish to you.”
Hannah shook her head. She could manage to stay awake for another ten minutes, which was all it would take to cook the fish.
She took the cooked fish to Nari, who ate it and drank a whole bottle of water. Hannah crawled out while Nari used the bedpan. Hannah did a quick check of her two biggest wounds and rewrapped them with the same bloody bandages. She knew Nari was still awake, but she couldn’t bring herself to stay awake long enough to talk. Within seconds, Hannah was asleep.
When she was woken for her turn at the fire after midnight, she wanted to refuse. She rolled over and tried to push herself out, and her back protested with a sharp pain. For a moment, all she could do was freeze and breathe her way past it. Then the pain eased off and she could move again.
“Oh man,” she said, crawling out and thumbing on her flashlight.
“You up?” Claire said.
/> “Yeah, you can go to bed now.”
“No, I’m just now getting up. I’m partnered with you.”
“Right, right.” Hannah thought she’d probably been told that last night but had been too tired to track the conversation.
“You sure you’re okay?” Claire said
“Tired and sore. Nothing worse.”
“All we need to do is set up meat to smoke. You can rest after we do that.”
“I’ll be fine,” Hannah said.
At the fire, they gathered up the last batch of smoked meat and set it aside to finish air drying. Then they strung new strips of meat just downwind of the fire. Claire took the flashlight to go gather more green branches to create more smoke. They were using a hide stretched over branches as a sort of backstop, so that the smoke didn’t just float off but piled up around the meat, swirling around every piece. While Claire was away, Hannah made sure the hide was positioned correctly and wasn’t overheating. When Claire returned and had built up the fire to smoke more, they had to move a few feet from the fire to be able to breathe without sucking in a lot of smoke.
“Looks good,” Claire said.
Hannah yawned in answer.
“You can sleep if you want. I’ll wake you if there’s a problem.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Go ahead.”
“No.” Hannah smacked herself in the face twice to wake herself up. “Not as good as coffee, but it’ll do.”
“Seriously, sleep.”
“Seriously, no. We can’t risk another injury. I’m out of antibiotic cream. I’m out of bandages, unless we all go shirtless. The needle is dull, and I need to cannibalize more clothes for thread.”
“How is Nari?” Claire said.
“Upset. In pain. Soldiering on anyway.”
“What happened? I never heard the full story.”
Hannah told her all she could remember. She even told her Jodi’s theory about the dog pack needing a minimal number to function right.
“That’s interesting. So they might leave us alone now that their numbers are down.”
“They might, but I wouldn’t count on it. It made me think, though, that we need a minimum number to function right too. And that we might be under it right now.”
“Rex is doing okay. His hearing is almost normal in his good ear, he says.”
“Zach and Nari will need until at least the next time jump to be better.”
“Zach’s okay at fishing and tending the fire.”
“Nobody but you is great at fishing. When it’s easy, sure, like at the lake, and even the worst of us can catch a fish. But not here.”
Claire said, “Might be the season. Or the river just isn’t that full of fish. Or other animals fish too, like bears do for salmon before hibernating, and we’re competing for what’s left.”
“It just dawned on me that we haven’t seen all that many animals at the river the last few days.”
“Maybe the smoke is driving them off.”
“I hope. If so, we should keep a smoky fire going all the time from now on.”
“So Nari’s going to be okay?”
“Barring infection, she’ll live. I’m pretty worried about that. She has a dozen significant bites. If their mouths are full of bacteria or viruses—and they probably are—who knows what might happen?”
“Is there anything at all we can do?”
“Give me an hour to change bandages tomorrow at dawn.”
“With what, more shirts?”
“The same bandages. That’s why I need an hour, to wash them and air dry them most of the way before replacing them.”
“Will you clean her wounds?”
“Yeah, the best I can. We need a soap plant. We ideally need a soap plant with antibacterial properties. But I can’t think of any way at all to find one.”
“Trial and error. Basic scientific research.”
“Won’t help Nari this week.”
“If I ever get back home,” Claire said, “I’m never going anywhere without a vat of antibiotic ointment with me. And a big first aid kit. And a pile of old sheets to use as bandages.”
“If you’d had that all with you, you’d never have needed it. Some correlate of Murphy’s Law.”
“And people would have thought I was some weird sort of hoarder, walking around town with a backpack stocked like a clinic.”
“No doubt,” Hannah said. “There are people out there who go wild with preparing for emergencies. Asteroid strikes and total economic collapse and other end of the world scenarios. But I’ll bet you all the money in the world, no one could have prepared themselves for what happened to us.”
As promised, the next morning Claire delayed their departure until Hannah could take the bandages off Nari and wash them in the river. Dixie and Jodi helped get Nari out of the debris hut so that Hannah had daylight to work in. A couple other people volunteered to flap the washed bandages in the air, trying to get them to dry quickly.
In the light of day, the wound on Nari’s shoulder looked awful. Hannah took another few stitches, trying to get everything lined up better. She feared Nari would never heal right, might never have normal use of that arm.
Nari took it all without a sound, but when Hannah looked at her, the girl’s face was shining with tears and snot, and her lips were red from biting them.
Hannah said, “Don’t worry if there’s a little bit of blood today. But mostly, everything is knitting up. Just your shoulder and back of your leg might bleed this morning.”
Nari nodded. Hannah told her to hang tight and went back to see how the bandage drying was going. They weren’t entirely dry. “What I’d really like is for them to be bone dry and put them in the sun to bleach for a day,” she said.
“When we’re in the cabin, you can do that,” Claire said. “Can you use them damp?” She was obviously anxious to get going.
“I guess I’ll have to.”
Claire came along to the debris hut and hung back, watching while Hannah finished re-wrapping Nari’s worst wounds.
A half-hour later they were marching double-time to the cabin site with a load of saplings Rex and Ted had been chopping while Hannah had been doctoring Nari.
This time they brought smoked meat with them, so they took a break mid-morning to eat. It helped fuel them up through five o’clock by Hannah’s watch. The third course of stones was laid and Rex was well into building a framework for the upper walls. He had two of them digging postholes in the dirt for the uprights, just inside the stone wall. They’d not fully limbed the saplings, because the upper leaves were going to be part of their roof.
When they were ready to leave, Claire said, “This is good enough to start with. We’ll move here tomorrow. Everything else, we can finish up while we live here.”
“You sure?” Rex said.
“Since I saw what those dogs did to Nari, I’m sure,” Claire said, grim-faced. “I don’t want to spend more than one more night in those flimsy debris huts.”
They were all exhausted again that night, but it had been worth it. They ate the last oreodont roast—this one not overcooked—and set watches for another night of smoking meat. Tonight would complete the task, and they’d have meat to eat as jerky or to make into stews.
Bob had fed Nari a midday meal of fish. “I talked to her for a while. She’s getting antsy, wanting to be up. I can relate.”
“I’m sure you can. Thanks for distracting her.”
“She could be better.”
“Physically, or mentally?”
“Both, of course. But I was thinking mentally. She was timid before, but I don’t know that Claire or any of us is ever going to get her to hunt again.”
“Time will tell. Let’s give her a chance to physically heal and then see how her mental state is.”
“She’s in pain.”
“It drives me crazy that I can’t help with that.”
“You’re doing your best.”
“So are you. We all are.�
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“And we’re getting more skilled all the time.”
But it wasn’t enough. Hannah didn’t say it aloud. She felt like they were fighting a rearguard action in a losing war. She was afraid. That was the terrible truth about her. She wasn’t brave. She wasn’t all that capable. She was just afraid. Exhausted and afraid.
The trip to the cabin the next day did not go as Claire had planned.
For one thing, she hadn’t taken into account that two people might have to be carried, not just one. Neither those two nor Zach could carry a share of the supplies. And one person had to pull the travois. So they prioritized their gear and left for tomorrow what they didn’t absolutely need. They also took anything they thought scavengers might eat or destroy, like the hides.
Bob said he could walk. And he did. They moved slowly for his benefit, in a tight group, keeping an eye out for danger. Bob did well until the land began to rise, and then he slowed. Finally, he said, “Wait,” and he sank to the ground.
When Hannah hurried over to check on him, he waved her aside. “I’m just tired. No pain. Sorry.”
“Everybody rest,” Claire said. “Nari, are you okay?”
The girl’s face had been white with pain the whole trip. Being hauled over rough ground was doing her no favors. She had insisted on trying to stand that morning. Hannah had called over Jodi and Claire to brace her. Nari hadn’t been able to put any weight at all on that one leg. Hannah had stopped her before she did more damage to it. So she had been hauled the whole way.
While Bob rested, Hannah checked on Nari. “I’m okay,” she managed to say, but her voice was faint.
Ted was pacing around the group, and Rex was clearly anxious to get back to the cabin. But Claire said everyone had to move as a group, and so they waited. When after only fifteen minutes Bob got to his feet again, Hannah caught Claire’s eye and shook her head.
Claire said, “I’m still a bit tired myself. Fifteen more minutes, and we can move.”
Hannah took the chance to sit as well. She watched Ted pacing for another five minutes and said, “Ted, you’re making me dizzy. Please sit.”
“I think there’s something out there.”
“Where?” Hannah jumped up and grabbed her spear.
“Back the way we came.”
