by Lou Cadle
“I’ve never heard you snore.”
Hannah finished spitting out the stringy fruit pulp and took a drink from the bottle without letting it touch her lips, offering it to the others. She’d swallowed a tiny amount of the fruit’s juice without meaning to. It was tart stuff, but she thought it would ripen into an edible fruit, maybe a bit on the tart side still, like a persimmon. But it would probably be a great source of vitamin C.
Or could it be vitamin C had yet to evolve. All animals needed some vitamins, surely, but were they the same vitamins in this world as in the one she had grown up in? She tried to think it through. Surely the chemical existed, though, even if they were the only creatures here who needed it. She had to admit she knew nothing about vitamin compounds and when they’d evolved. She wondered if even the experts knew that.
They walked until it was time to turn around without finding a stream leading to the lake, or any soil that looked at all like clay.
“Sandy stuff,” said Jodi, standing up and letting the last of a soil sample run through her fingers.
“Let’s cut in and go back along the lake, then, see if it’s different there.”
“I don’t know,” Zach said. “I mean, yeah, no sense in retracing our steps. But all the dirt looks wrong, at least in this area.”
It did. She wished, not for the first time, that M.J. was still around, with his knowledge of geology. He could explain the how and why of the lake and the soils—
And that’s when it hit her that it had been a couple of hours since she had thought of Garreth. Focused on the hunt for soil, on the periodic scanning for danger, on wondering about vitamins, and on her ideas for building strong walls, she had let him slip from her mind. The rush of guilt that followed that was powerful, stopping her in her tracks.
The two kids, chattering together, got ahead of her in the trees. She stopped and leaned her head against the rough trunk of a pine. She knew at some level that it was normal to move on, to let grief fade, but she felt terrible for it. She should feel guilt. She should remember what she had failed to do for Garreth and not let herself off the hook.
Then she realized the kids had walked out of her sight and hurried to catch up to them. She couldn’t bring Garreth back, but she could try harder to protect the ones with her.
They went to the edge of the lake, and walked back toward the rendezvous point. Again, she could see the others fishing. Ted waved, and she waved back. Every twenty steps, either Zach or Jodi stooped to check the soil, but they were finding sand, and small pebbles rounded by the lake water. Nothing that would build them a brick cabin.
“Maybe we should think of rocks instead,” Hannah said. “But we’d still need mud to mortar them. This stuff wouldn’t even work for that.”
Zach said, “We should import it, then. Go out into the grassland and find some.”
Jodi said, “But how would we carry it?”
Zach said, “We need a wheelbarrow I guess.”
“May as well wish for a pick-up truck,” Jodi said, cheerfully. “We could carry more.”
“I do wish for one,” Zach said. “Think how fast we could look for something like clay with one. Drive fifty yards, stop, hop off the bed, dig, and hop back on.”
“Sure. Or go hunting. No more need to run down an animal. Drive at them until they fell over from exhaustion, then run over the head. I could do the driving.”
“Should I trust you? How’d you do in driver’s ed?”
Hannah listened to them talk for a few minutes about school, about the old world of learner’s permits and school and classrooms. Then they switched right back to talking about this world when Zach found a straight hardwood limb he said would make a good spear.
Hannah admired their flexibility. In many ways, the kids were adjusting better than her. They were bouncing back from their grief better than her, too. Able to jump from talking about the old world to the new without falling into a funk any more. They adapted quickly. Maybe it was their superior intelligence, or maybe it was their youth, or maybe it was the absence of the weight of responsibility. Whatever the difference, she envied them.
And once she had taught them everything she knew about woodcraft and wilderness survival, they’d be able to manage without her. She could hand over leadership to Ted or whomever the group selected. She longed for the release of that day.
They walked all the way back to the fishing crew without having found anything like the sort of soil that could make bricks.
Claire had built up the fire some time ago, by the looks of it. It had burned down to coals already. Some big fillets were laid out on rocks. “I started cooking when I saw you were getting closer,” Claire said.
“Thanks,” Hannah said. “That was thoughtful.”
Ted said, “We’re hungry too. So it was partly selfish.”
Jodi said, “These are bigger fish. Do you know what they are?”
“Totally,” Claire said. She went to the lakeside where she had been cleaning the fish and picked something up and brought it over. It was a fish head. “Catfish. See the whiskers?”
Hannah looked at the size of the fillets. “Good size ones, too.”
“Herring tail bait. I thought it would probably work, and it did. And Rex figured out a way to weight the line so I was able to fish right along the bottom, where they hang out.”
“Smart,” Hannah said. “Can’t wait to taste them.”
Claire said, “Dad usually had us throw them back, because as bottom feeders, he said they were more polluted.”
Jodi said, “I’ve eaten catfish, I’m sure. I didn’t know they were polluted.”
Hannah said, “Farm raised ones, probably, so not the same problems with what they eat. From the store?”
“At restaurants,” Jodi said. “Catfish and these little corn meal things, what are they called?”
“Hush puppies,” Bob said, walking up with Nari and Laina. “I wouldn’t mind some of those.”
“Does corn exist yet?” Nari said, hopefully.
“If it does,” Bob said, “I suspect it’s limited to South America, and it’d be those odd looking tiny ears, not even as long as your pinkie. Nothing like modern feed corn. But I’m going to enjoy this fish, even without hush puppies.”
“Any luck?” Hannah said.
“Yeah,” Laina said. “Hang on.” She went through her belt and pulled out a zippered plastic bag of mud. “We got it wet. It makes a ball, at least.”
Hannah took the sample and squeezed it. It did look good—much better than what her group had found this morning. “How much of it?”
Nari said, “We couldn’t really tell. There was a good patch, then some not so good, and another good patch. We didn’t get to look for very long before we had to come back.”
“It’s a good hour from here,” Bob said. “We’re running out of soap plant, too. Maybe we could hunt for that today.”
Hannah said, “And some of my medicine plant.”
“What’s that?” Bob said.
“Didn’t I mention it? Sorry.” Hannah realized she had been sunk into her grief so deeply that day, she had never talked about it. “I think I found something that can numb skin, without any worse effects. So if I have to stitch someone’s wound again, it’ll hurt less. Or if we get stung by an insect. Or burned. We can numb a burn.”
Claire said, “That happens often enough.”
It had. Popping embers from the fire, forgetting and touching a hot rock with bare hands. They’d all had tiny burns, nothing too serious, though Hannah had dabbed some of the precious remaining antibiotic cream on a couple of the larger ones. She wished she knew of a plant that could replace that—or even how to begin to identify potential candidates. Testing every plant for antiseptic properties would take forever.
“Fish is ready,” Claire said. Claire scooped the smaller fillets into the bowls and the larger fillets into the big pot, which the boys and Bob all shared, while the girls and Hannah each had her own bowl. Hannah wonde
red how that had come to be, and wondered at the etiquette of it, and why there was etiquette at all in this sort of living situation. Maybe it was a human need as basic, as automatic, as speech.
As they ate, they discussed how to work the rest of the afternoon. The cast netting had gained them more herring, and a few other smaller fish.
“I like the catfish better,” said Dixie.
Everyone agreed, but Hannah felt compelled to speak up. “The herring is higher in oil, so higher in calorie content. We shouldn’t dismiss it.”
“I think the oil is what I was belching all night,” Nari said.
“It’ll do more good than harm, though,” Hannah said, remembering how she had awoken with the taste of the herring still in her mouth, too. “So we should eat it.”
“Are those frogs?” Zach said.
“Where?” Nari said, looking around.
“The sound, I meant,” Zach said.
Everyone was quiet for a moment. In the distance, there was a noise that may well have been frogs.
“Sounds like a bird to me,” said Dixie.
“I wonder what frogs sounded like in the Paleo—sorry, Eocene,” Jodi said.
“Mr. O’Brien, were there any?” Nari asked.
“Frogs go back quite a while,” he said. “So yes. And some are edible.”
“Eww,” Nari said.
“They’re said to taste like chicken.”
“I’ve never had chicken,” Nari said.
That made everyone stop and stare at her.
“Vegetarian, remember?” she said.
Jodi said, “But you never even tried a chicken nugget at school?”
“Never,” she said. “I had a tofudog. And garden burgers. And some tofu nuggets that I think were supposed to look like chicken nuggets.”
“Wow,” Ted said.
Dixie said, “So this is the first meat you’ve ever had, here?”
Nari nodded and looked at her empty bowl. “Or fish.”
“Do you like it?” Zach asked.
“No,” Nari said. “But Hannah said I had to eat it to keep me alive, so I’m eating it.”
Laina said, “Do you have to pray for forgiveness or something for eating it?”
Nari shrugged. “It’s not really forgivable. I mean, I could pray, but the animal would still be dead, right? I can’t fix that.”
All the kids were looking at her curiously, clearly having a hard time getting their minds around that view of food.
Bob cleared his throat. “So, we’re agreed, right? We’ll move everything close to the clay, fishing and all.”
“Sounds right,” Hannah said. “And we’ll build there, but we should use the debris huts we’ve already built to sleep in tonight. Everybody pass me your bowls. I’ll do dishes.”
That only entailed rinsing the bowls and taking a small handful of sand to lightly scrub them. She had discovered her firing of the bowls wasn’t so expert that she could scrub very hard, or the clay began to crumble. Maybe when making the bricks for the house, she could find a better way to bake them, and she’d be able to replace these with more sturdy dishes. Then these could be used for other purposes, carrying non-food items.
Claire set up the big bowl for fish stew with the smaller fish, trying to judge how close to put it to the fire in order for it to be ready but not overcooked in four to six more hours. Then they all went out to check the site where the clay had been found.
Hannah kept her eye out for game trails as they walked around the clay site, hunting for a building site and stands of saplings. By noon, they had decided on a place to build close to the clay source. She kept it well away from any game trails. There were some saplings in a stand, birches, she thought, and she set everyone to knocking them down. Rex and Ted were about the strongest, and she dithered for a moment before deciding where their strength would be best utilized.
“Okay, Dixie, you and Bob, try to break rocks until you get us a hand axe, please.”
“Sounds good,” Bob said. “Let’s check for the biggest rocks we can find. Fine grained, I bet, would work best.”
“Keep your eye out for—” Hannah began, and then stopped when Bob quirked an eyebrow at her. “Sorry. It’s habit. I’ll try to break it. I know you both know already to glance around to look for danger from time to time.”
Nari set to carrying water from the lake to the clay. Claire went with her to build another fire, at the lake’s edge, for firing the bricks. Zach and Jodi she sent out to gather grass.
“Why?” Jodi said.
“Part of the brick-making process. We’ll mix up grass and mud, and that’s a brick.”
Zach said, “And we’ll be careful. Watch for attack, look around. Don’t worry.”
She smiled, and as they walked off, she realized it was probably her first smile since they lost Garreth. Again, she felt a stab of guilt at moving on. She could feel it wanting to drag her down, but she resisted its pull.
She forced herself to focus instead on the task at hand. “While you’re taking out those saplings, Ted and Rex,” she said, “be thinking of a way we can make the bricks square.”
“Molds?” said Rex.
“We can’t make wood molds,” said Ted. “You know who we need for this?”
Rex said, “Who?”
“Ms. Teggart. Mr. O’Brien’s wife. She could figure it out.”
Hannah said, “Well, try to think like her, then.” Nari came back with the two big bottles of water, filled from the lake, and Hannah sat and dug a hole in the ground, poured the water in, and began to stir up mud. “More, please,” she said to Nari, who took the bottles and walked back to the lake. Hannah watched her go, keeping her eye out for danger along the girl’s path, and then scanning in every direction. Nari wasn’t out of anyone else’s sight for more than a minute, as she took the trip, but it still made Hannah nervous to let her be alone for that long. Laina she had sent to join Claire at lake’s edge, to dig a pit for baking the bricks and then starting a fire.
The boys had the saplings cleared by mid-afternoon, and she told them to hunt for anything to use as cordage. Vines. Bark that peeled easily. “Otherwise,” she said, “we’re going to have to braid grass or other plant stems again.”
“We have some cordage still from the first place,” Rex said.
“Not nearly enough to build a frame for the upper walls and roof. We need many feet of it.”
“I don’t think it’s really strong enough, either. The vines from the last place would be better. The frame will take us some time to make, either way, I bet.”
“It will. We might have to hunt for other cordage material again tomorrow.”
“Don’t you want us to fish again?”
“Claire can for an hour,” she said. “Between the soup from this morning and whatever she catches, we’ll be okay for supper.”
Zach and Jodi came back with two backpacks—Hannah’s and Garreth’s—stuffed with grass, and then they went out again.
Hanna broke the grass into six-inch lengths, which was easy, as dry as it was, and mixed that into her mud. Rex had two suggestions for forming bricks. Build a mold in the sand at lake’s edge. But Hannah didn’t see how that could work. For one thing, transporting the mud would be difficult, and then how could they remove the bricks? His second suggestion was better, to use one of the Mylar blankets to shape the bricks.
So that’s what Hannah did. She had to add more and more soil, to get a more solid consistency to her pile of mud, but finally she had it just right. She laid out the blanket, put several handfuls of straw-studded mud into it, and lifted sides until she had squared it up. It was only after she’d made a nice brick-shaped object that she realized she’d have to carry it on the blanket to the fire, and that’d mess up the shape.
No matter, though. She could easily re-shape it now that she knew what to do. She had Nari help her, taking one end of the blanket while she took the other, and they walked the one brick out to the fire.
“We rea
lly don’t have coals yet,” said Laina. She had been working on her formulas again, in the sand, while tending to the fire.
Hannah let her do it, wondering if the other kids ever resented her doing less physical work. Maybe not, though. If the girl’s computations got them home, they wouldn’t care if she never lifted a finger to fell a tree or braid cordage.
Hannah, who had turned to walk back to the clay site, froze in place. Nari bumped into her.
“Sorry,” the girl said.
“No, my fault,” Hannah said. She had realized something. Part of her—a surprisingly large part—did not want to go home any longer.
I would be okay with staying here forever. Despite the dangers. Despite the very few human companions. Despite everything.
And staying here might be better than having to go home to tell Garreth’s parents that it was my fault he was dead.
Chapter 10
By the time everyone had gathered together for supper—earlier than last night—they had accomplished a lot.
There was a clearing in which to build the cabin. Bob and Dixie had found some rocks to bash around, and they had returned with two that were about the right size, with an edge to them. Ted had grabbed one up and began pounding at one of the saplings near its thinner point, and the rock cut through it in only ten strikes.
Ted said, “I could get better at this.”
“It’d be awkward to take down a whole tree, though,” Bob said. “A big one.”
“But I could learn to do it,” Ted said.
Hannah made bricks. By midday, there were six big bricks baking in the coal pit, and another twenty-four lined up to bake. When she had exhausted the clay at that one site, she moved to the next. Bob had been right, in that there were other places nearby where the soil turned to that fine, packable sort of which she could make bricks.
After they had knocked down or cut down the saplings, Ted and Rex went hunting through the woods for cordage material and had found four candidates of plants to try.
Claire had caught enough fish by noon, and they ate well. The fruit hadn’t bothered Hannah at all, though when she showed it to the group, she explained she wanted to wait until it was ripe, so they should keep their eyes out for any that had fallen. And after lunch, she found another plant at water’s edge that she wanted to test next as food.
