by Lou Cadle
She labored up the hill, glancing back once. Ted had made it past the rocks, the mammoths still closing the distance. On flat, clear ground, he might have beaten them. But not in this snow. The monster animals had the advantage.
As she watched, one caught a glimpse of Dixie and swerved after her, leaving two charging after Ted.
“Run, Dixie, faster!”
Dixie glanced around and put on speed when she saw she was being chased.
Hannah changed course again, back down the slope and veering directly toward the mammoth herd. She saw they had all quit eating and were trundling away, not in any particular hurry. Hannah saw the charging mammoth closing on Dixie, and again she had to make a decision in less than a second. Oh hell. She whooped and flung her arms overhead, trying to get the mammoth moving her way. “Here, over here!” she yelled.
It ignored her.
Dixie was slowing near the top of the hill, but the mammoth was taking the slope with ease. Closer. Closer still. It bent its head, as if to pitch Dixie as it had the big log.
“Deke! Shift! It almost has you, Dixie!” Hannah yelled. “Now!”
Dixie didn’t even bother to check, bless the girl. She deked one way, the other, and then collapsed into a ball and rolled back downhill.
The breath caught in Hannah’s throat as the mammoth’s thick legs moved over Dixie and hid her from Hannah’s sight. An endless moment later, the mammoth cleared the top of the hill, and behind it, there was Dixie, somehow untrampled. She rose and started running downhill again, making for the rocks.
It was as good a destination as any. Not much cover, but better cover was too far away. Hannah scanned for Ted. He had somehow outdistanced the other two mammoths—or no, they had slowed to a walk. Once they had chased him away from the herd, they seemed satisfied. Hannah turned again to check for the mammoth that had chased Dixie. It had stopped and was now turning, luckily a slow and lumbering process that allowed Dixie to gain some more distance. That the snow had been trampled down by the mammoth was helping her run faster down the slope.
Hannah watched as the mammoth made the crest of the hill. It turned and looked for Dixie. She was going to make it to the black rocks before it, but if it caught up with her there, then what? The trunk was flexible, the tusks efficient weapons. Hannah had a mental image of Dixie darting around the rocks, trying to keep clear of the reach of both. All the animal had to do was lift a leg and stomp her.
It ran after Dixie, gaining speed. Closer. Closer still. Dixie was at the rocks now and vaulted into the space between them. Hannah ran back toward her, thinking she could do nothing but die at her side, but she couldn’t just sit here and watch. Ted was keeping his distance.
One of the mammoths that had been chasing Ted lifted its head and trumpeted. The mammoth closing on Dixie looked up and slowed. It was only a dozen yards from Dixie now. It walked the last few steps and flung its trunk out, the end reaching into the space where she must be cowering.
The other mammoth—the leader?—trumpeted again, and the trunk probing for Dixie withdrew. The mammoth left the rocks and began walking back to the other two.
Hannah was out of breath and slowed to a fast walk, glancing between the animals and Dixie, but the animals had apparently ended their chase. They had made their statement, and Hannah had heard it, loud and clear. By the time she reached Dixie, all the animals were back in their herd. They had stopped to browse under the snow once again, another few hundred yards farther from the humans. A sentinel stood facing backward and kept an eye on the potential threat.
Dixie’s sobs were audible from twenty yards away, and Hannah jogged the last bit. “Are you okay?” she said. “Did it step on you?”
Dixie said, “Is it gone, is it gone?”
“It’s gone.” Hannah stepped carefully into the space Dixie was crouched in. “You sure you’re okay?”
Dixie struggled to her feet.
“Wait a second, let me check you.”
“I’m not hurt,” Dixie sobbed. And then she shocked Hannah down to her toes by reaching for her and hanging on, crying on her shoulder.
Hannah held the girl, patting her back, making comforting noises. “It’s okay now,” she said.
Ted took his time coming back. When he came close, Dixie’s sobs were tapering off. He rolled his eyes at her sniffling.
Hannah saw red. She pushed Dixie gently away and climbed over the rocks to confront Ted. She stuck a finger in his face. “Never do that again. Never! When I say stop, you stop!”
“Nothing happened.”
“Why do you always have to test things? Why can’t you listen, and stop, and think?”
“You going to punch me the way you did Dixie? Cuz let me tell you, I think I’ll win a fight with you.”
“What is wrong with you?” she said. “And no. I’m sorry I hit Dixie, like I said before. I’m not going to hit you. If I thought I could shake some sense into you, I’d shake you until your teeth rattled. But I don’t think anything can do that. Stop and think before you act, Ted!”
“We had to do it. Now we know how close we can get. How fast they r—”
“Shut up. Just shut the hell up.” Her fists were clenched and she could feel her head and shoulders shaking. Not from the cold. From anger. Anger driven by fear and worry and—just plain anger. She turned away from him so she wasn’t tempted to put an angry hand on him, and she returned to Dixie. “Let me check you over, make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay. I was just scared. So scared.” Her tears came faster again. “Are they still close?”
“Ted, keep an eye on them.” If he wasn’t going to say something kind to Dixie or apologize for his reckless behavior, she wanted him out of her sight right now. She patted Dixie’s back again.
Dixie made an effort to get control of herself once more. “It wasn’t for me.”
“What wasn’t for you?”
“My fear. I mean, I guess a little. But mostly I was thinking of the baby. All I could think of was that I had to protect it. Poor little thing.” She looked at Hannah with shining eyes. “I guess that’s what the mammoths were thinking too, right? I would have killed to protect it. I would have died to protect it.”
“Ahh,” Hannah said. Interesting.
“Is this hormones making me feel like this?”
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “Maybe it is.”
“It’s like....” Dixie couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence and shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never felt anything close to it before. Not about my family. Not about a boyfriend. Not even about me.”
Hannah flashed back to Dixie’s cruelty to Garreth. This was not the time to press the issue, but she wondered if she could ask Dixie to pretend she was Garreth’s mother, and how she’d have felt if she saw someone treat him the way Dixie had. Maybe this was a watershed moment for Dixie. Hannah wished she knew how to turn it into a lesson, into a form of empathy that might stick.
Or maybe she didn’t have to say anything. Maybe Dixie would come to that herself in due time. She decided to avoid lecturing. “So you’re feeling better disposed toward the pregnancy.”
“That’s putting it mildly.” Dixie had quit crying. She scrubbed her face with her hands. “I want to give it a chance at life.”
“Good,” Hannah said, and she meant it. “I’m happy for you.”
“Are you?”
“I really, really am.” She smiled. “If you want to protect it at this stage, you need to protect yourself. Forget about dying for it. That’d just kill the fetus too. You stay alive for seven more months, right? Then you’ll both be fine.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“We all are,” Hannah said, though she wasn’t so sure about Ted. And she herself never did well enough at anything to meet her own standards, but that was typical for her. “Let’s get back to the meeting point, okay?”
“Sounds good.”
She climbed out of the rock pile and looked at Ted. H
e hadn’t moved too close to the mammoths, thankfully. In fact, he had to have been close enough to have overheard that conversation. She wondered how it had affected him, if at all. “Ted, you ready to go back?”
“We could take that log. To burn.”
“It’s too far from camp to drag all that way.” And too close to the mammoths still, though she didn’t want to say that aloud. For all she knew, he’d take it as a dare. “Let’s get going. I’ll feel better when we can’t see them any more.”
“I definitely want you to feel better,” he said sarcastically, and without looking at her.
She bit back an angry response. “Let’s just go. We need to tell what we’ve learned to the others.”
They hiked back for an hour in silence, Ted ahead of the two women. Whenever she glanced over at Dixie, she had a look of wonder on her face. She had clearly had an epiphany of some sort. Well, they did happen. They’d happened for Hannah a few times in her life, once about putting up with too much crap from boyfriends and once before that, about her family, in the therapist’s office.
“I have to use the latrine,” Dixie said. She said that even if they were, as now, miles from any latrine they had dug. “You two go on ahead. I’ll catch up.”
Hannah glanced around out of habit, looking for danger. But the landscape continued to yield nothing but snow and rocks. Mammoths and birds, that’s all of what they’d seen alive. She sped her steps until she was walking next to Ted. “Did you overhear what Dixie said back there, about the baby?”
“Fetus, like you said. It’s not a baby.”
“True, but it will be. That’s how gestation works.”
He said nothing.
“I know you’re unhappy about it, but do you feeling nothing for it? For Dixie?”
“It was just a hook-up,” he said.
“The baby that results will be a human being. You feel no connection to it at all? No worry about keeping it safe from harm?”
“Don’t lecture me.”
“I’m not trying to, not right now. If I was going to lecture you, it’d be about your propensity for dangerous action. Or about being kinder to Dixie right now.”
“That’s funny, coming from you.”
She kept her voice pleasant. “It is, isn’t it? She’s growing on me.”
“She’s doing the opposite for me.”
“I think you’re feeling guilty. Or ashamed, perhaps, and taking it out—”
He turned on her. “You don’t know me.”
She raised her eyebrows. He was angry, but she saw the shame and frustration and guilt in his face, too—or maybe none of that existed, and she was merely wishing it there. “I don’t know you,” she agreed. “Not very well at all.” She pointed ahead. “You go on. I’ll wait here for Dixie.”
He pivoted and stomped away, kicking up snow in anger.
She wished she knew how to help him move past whatever it was he was going through. But he was right: she didn’t know him. Maybe she had misjudged him from the beginning. He had seemed a cheerful sort, easy to work with, but it was possible his strength was a surface phenomenon. He was attractive and athletic and bright. Maybe life had been too easy for him up until he stepped through the timegate. Maybe he could deal with catastrophic change like time travel and physical danger, but not with emotional problems.
Dixie? Now she was showing interesting depths. Hannah was curious how that story might unfold.
Chapter 9
The next day, the group came up with no good ideas about killing a mammoth, but they couldn’t stop talking about it.
That they’d eaten the last of their meat stores made the topic of the utmost importance.
“I’m not sure we could kill one,” Dixie said. “They’re big, like twice as tall as me. The hide looks thick. Will our spears even push through it?”
Bob said, “There was evidence that ice-age humans hunted them by driving them off cliffs, I believe.”
Claire said, “I haven’t seen a cliff.”
“We could corner one,” Ted said, “against some rocks.”
Hannah said, “I doubt that we could break one out from the herd, unless we convinced a big one to chase us far away from its pals, and I think that’s the least likely one to be able to kill. We should target one of the babies. Thinner hide.”
Dixie said, “But better-protected. The whole group of them will do anything to keep the young ones safe.”
“We need food,” Jodi said. “Zach is sick and needs food. I know you’re all hungry. I am too. But he needs it to get better.”
And Nari was still healing and Bob’s heart didn’t need the strain of starvation, Hannah did not point out. The thoughts were never far from her mind.
“We might be able to last three weeks without food anywhere else,” Bob said. “But not in this climate.” He slapped his hands on his thighs. “We need to fish more. I do, I mean, so that I’m contributing something.”
Ted said, “We haven’t caught a single fish yet.”
Bob said, “We haven’t worked very hard at it.”
“There are the birds,” Rex said.
“Not worth the calories expended, though we may have to resort to that anyway,” Claire said. “What we need is red meat. Laina, do you have any other ideas of how to find any?”
“Stay out longer, look more places,” she said. “I don’t know more than that.”
Ted seemed angry when he said, “We know where the mammoths are. We need to hunt one of them.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” Claire said.
“Exactly,” Ted said. “Talk isn’t worth a thing. We need to get out and hunt the mammoths. Let’s leave at dawn tomorrow.”
“We need to follow them,” Claire said. “But no more than follow at first.”
Rex said, “Reconnoitering.”
“Right. Trying to see if there is a way, any way, to kill one.”
“Great,” said Ted. “We can—”
“That’s one group of us,” Claire said. “The other group, including you, Ted, will take a route we’ve not taken before, looking for easier game. Hannah, you’re in charge of that group. Dixie, I’ll need you with me, following the mammoths, so you can compare your first encounter with them to whatever we see.”
Ted was obviously not happy with this decision, but Claire wouldn’t acknowledge his protests. She went on and divided the group in half, taking Rex and Laina on her team as well. Hannah had Ted and Jodi.
Claire said, “Mr. O’Brien, I’d appreciate if you put aside any other work and fished all day—or as long as you can stand being in the cold. Stay roped.”
Rex said, “Rather than Nari spending all day at holding on to you, we might think about driving stakes into the ice and having permanent connections for the ropes. That way, it’d free up Nari to sew or fish another place.”
“We only have the one hole in the ice.”
Bob said, “I could try to open a second one. Or Jodi could, before she leaves.”
“I’d rather you didn’t do that,” Hannah said.
Jodi said, “Why not?”
“If another person falls in the ice and gets water in his lungs, whatever infection Zach is fighting off might pass more easily to that person. If we lose another person to that, whatever slim chance we have of bringing down a mammoth grows even slimmer. If there aren’t any fish in the lake anyway, then it’d be taking a risk for no possible gain.”
Claire said, “That’s so. Until we catch one fish, we have to acknowledge that we might be casting our line into an uninhabited lake. Let’s stick with the already open hole for our fishing.”
“That’d match how sparsely populated the whole world is,” Jodi said. “We only saw birds and mammoths. We must have walked over a hundred square miles. And we’ve been able to see over twice that distance.”
“It’s as empty a world as I’ve ever seen,” Laina said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s hardly your fault,” Bob said.
“I
should have said to bring more food.”
Claire dismissed that. “You had no way of knowing. If you’ve never seen a world this empty, how could you have known to tell us that it would be? Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m worried,” Dixie said. “I don’t mean to be a whiner, but I’m hungry. I don’t want to starve to death in this igloo.”
Rex said, “Like polar explorers did. They ate the dogs, and then their boots, and then they died.”
“We’re not going to die,” Bob said, but his heart didn’t seem to be in that reassurance. “I have faith in your ability to find something. We’re due a break. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
“If I can point out again,” Ted said, “we know where there’s meat, and plenty of it.”
“I know,” Claire said. “But game we can’t kill may as well not be there at all.”
“There might be a way to trap them,” Rex said. “I want to see them, where they are, how they move. Between me and Laina, we can devise a leg trap or something.”
“Tomorrow, after we check them out,” Claire said. “We’re talking in circles here. Let’s all get to sleep now, and get geared up tomorrow early, by flashlight. We’ll go at the crack of dawn.”
The cold never felt so piercing as at dawn. Hannah consulted with Claire and Laina to see where her group of three might go that held out the best hope of game. They would take a two-mile hike and then a climb over a rocky patch to get to the unexplored area, as Laina suggested. She let Ted take the lead, and in an hour the three of them were into new territory.
From the top of the rocks there were no obvious tracks, no animals in the distance, and no hope in Hannah’s heart. But they had to keep trying. And so for another hour they hiked, and a third hour, and it was in the fourth hour that Jodi, swerving away to relieve herself, found signs of an animal.
“Guys! Get over here!”
Hannah hurried over first. “What?”
“Scat.” She walked around in a circle. “And here are tracks partly covered over by drifting snow, but you can still make them out.”
Hannah squatted down to poke at the scat with her spear. It was frozen, so it had to be at least half a day old. It looked as if it had come from a deer or antelope, and it had the same seed heads in it from the plant that they’d been burning as fuel. She picked up a piece in her mitten and tried to smash it. But it was frozen solid. “From last night, I think,” she said.
