by Lou Cadle
Zach said, “The grass is probably okay to eat too—or would be, if it weren’t so dry.”
Jodi said, “We could do that tomorrow—try and find more food to test.”
Hannah shook her head. “I’d rather you do some cord-making.”
“We need to fish again,” Rex said.
Hannah nodded. “In the morning. Tomorrow you catch us our brunch, and Claire is doing really good at fishing with the pole, so she’ll catch us our supper from now on.”
“We could use more spears,” Ted said. “Some were lost back….” He faltered. “You know.”
Hannah knew the time had come when they needed to talk about Garreth, as a group. And she needed to apologize to Dixie, though she didn’t really want to. Hannah couldn’t bear to look at her. Not just because of the bruises. But because she blamed the girl for Garreth’s death, too. And she didn’t like her, and doubted she ever would.
But she shouldn’t have hit her, and it was cowardice to avoid apologizing. And more cowardice to avoid talking about Garreth.
When the house is built. She knew it for an excuse. But a delay would also give her time to think of what to say.
After supper, they hiked back to the debris huts. Halfway there, Dixie spotted a strange creature in the tree. Hannah thought at first it was the lemur-like creature that Bob had said was a primate. But this looked more like a small fox.
Dixie approached the tree it was in, and the animal hissed and bared fangs at her.
“Meat-eater,” Rex said.
“What is it, Mr. O’Brien?” Dixie asked. “The name of it.”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “You should get away from it, though.”
“I don’t think it could hurt me,” Dixie said. “It’s hardly bigger than a house cat.”
“No, but still. It doesn’t look happy to have you close.”
Hannah wondered if it were possible the little animal hunted in packs. Maybe it could be dangerous to them, if that were the case.
But something about the animal said “loner” to her. Then she wondered if she was applying 21st century rules to animals that didn’t follow them.
They were careful whenever they crossed a game trail, thinking that they were more likely to encounter animals at dawn and dusk. But they saw nothing this evening except a few of the Eohippus, and they made it back to their debris huts with some daylight still left. Hannah used the time to clear out the last of the sticks and rocks from the floor of the hut. She had felt a few digging into her last night, and tonight, she wanted to sleep soundly.
And she did sleep soundly, until a scream woke her.
She sat up so abruptly, she banged her head on the log that created the backbone of the structure. Leaves rained down on her.
“Who was that?” asked Laina.
“I don’t even know that it was human.”
But then another shriek came, and she was certain it was human. “Dixie,” she said.
“Where are they?” Laina was still groggy from sleep.
Hannah had grabbed her backpack from its place as the door to the shelter, and was fumbling around for the flashlight. She finally had it, flipped it on, and it gave out a light so dim she couldn’t see Laina’s face three feet away.
“Damn,” she said. “Remind me to charge this at the beach tomorrow.” She yanked her boots on, pulled at the laces without tying them, and went sprinting toward the commotion, the flashlight barely giving out any light at all. It was just enough to keep her from tripping over logs.
“Help!” Dixie screamed. “Somebody!”
Hannah crashed through the woods toward the sound, worrying now about Laina, behind her. She hoped she had stayed in the shelter. All she needed was someone lost out here at night, too.
Or hurt, by whatever was hurting Dixie.
A low-hanging branch smacked Hannah in the head, and she bounced off it. Ow. That hurt. Ducking under it, she made her way toward Dixie, who was close, now. The girl was cursing and crying and yelping, making enough noise that at least Hannah was reassured she wasn’t dying.
Hannah saw the debris hut. No one was outside it, but a bare leg stuck out of it. Dixie’s. “What’s wrong?” Hannah shouted at the girl, leaning over.
“Get it. I need help.” The girl shrieked again. “I can’t stand to touch it!”
“What?” Hannah said.
“A snake!”
“Are you bit?”
“Not me. Claire!”
“Get on out of there, Dixie. Let me in.”
Dixie backed out of the hut and Hannah crawled in, the flashlight held ahead of her. She was expecting to have to find a little snake somewhere in the leaves. Frightened that Claire had indeed been bitten, and maybe by a venomous snake, she froze in shock at what she saw instead.
It was a boa. Or something like that. And it wasn’t a little snake. It was wrapped around Claire’s neck, and arm, and it was squeezing.
Hannah grabbed Claire’s legs and yanked her out, scrambling backward, adrenaline giving her extra strength. She got the girl outside and tried to wedge her own hand under the snake coiled about Claire’s throat.
Claire was awake and alive—or at least her eyes were open and aware. Her one arm was pinned by the snake. The other was tugging at it.
“Dixie. Light a fire.”
“With what?”
“Your lighter. Don’t worry about being tidy. Just.” She thought about the risk of forest fire, and decided it was the lesser of evils. “Light the damned debris hut on fire. I need to see!”
She rolled Claire until she saw the end of the snake, the tail end. She grabbed it and started to pull, trying to unwind it. It fought her, curling back into a coil. It was devilishly strong.
I’m going to lose another of them.
Well, screw that. She was not going to lose another of them. She patted her pants pocket, relieved to feel the lump of her knife there. She got it out, opened a blade with her teeth, and still hanging onto the snake’s tail with her right hand, stabbed it.
It moved so fast and powerfully, she was thrown over on her side by the force of its movement. Hanging tightly to the knife, she rolled back over and got to Claire’s head. The debris hut catching fire, now, and she could see that Claire’s face was purple. She let go of the snake’s tail and, praying she didn’t cut through to Claire’s throat, stabbed the coils around her throat. Blood welled out of the body, and the snake’s head came up, from out of nowhere, and whipped around.
It bit her. And it hurt. The damned thing was as big around as her wrist. She grabbed for the head, missed, and it bit her a second time, right on the webbing between thumb and forefinger. She grabbed once more and got it just behind the head. She yanked at it, but it fought her. Damn, but the thing was strong! She stabbed and stabbed at its neck, then sawing through.
The head popped off, and Hannah was on her butt, knife in one hand, snake’s head in the other. Blood dripped down her hand.
By then, Laina was there, and then Ted came running up.
“Ted, help me get this off her!”
She dropped the snake’s head and tried to unwind the snake’s body from Claire’s throat, but even in death, the muscles were hard to fight.
Ted cursed, took a grip on it, and said, “Try to roll her.”
Hannah grabbed Claire’s hip and rolled her away from Ted, who stepped to the other side, and yanked with all his might up on the snake.
Claire spun in a full circle, banging into Hannah. She saw the tail of the snake and started to unwind from the other side, flinging the length of the body over the girl’s torso once, pulling it under her, and throwing it over a second time.
Ted hauled again and then Rex came up to help him.
Finally, the last of the body of the snake came free, and Claire was gasping for breath, making harsh sounds.
Hannah bent over the girl. “You’re okay. It’s okay.” She hoped it was true.
Eyes wide, Claire did nothing but draw breath. It
was obviously painful to do, and it was noisy.
Hannah wondered if the snake had crushed something in there, if bone or cartilage were so damaged that she’d still lose Claire.
“Just breathe. You’ll be fine.” She looked up. The fire of the debris hut was threatening to jump to the tree stump that the spine of it had fallen from. Soon, it would be out of control. By this time, nearly everyone was there, in the clearing. Ted and Rex had the snake on the ground. It was three times Ted’s height. Twenty feet, if it was an inch.
“Someone, get the fire under control,” Hannah said. “Before it burns down the whole woods.”
“I have water on me,” Zach said.
“No, use dirt. Kick it over the flames,” Bob said.
Hannah attended to Claire. The girl’s color was returning to normal. That was a relief, but Hannah felt helpless. There was nothing she could think of to do. If there was damage inside the girl’s neck, she couldn’t repair it. That was the work of delicate surgery. If there were brain damage….
“Can you hear me?” she asked Claire.
The girl nodded, and flinched as her neck bent with the nod. It obviously was painful for her to move it at all.
“Do you know where you are?”
Another nod, smaller this time.
Hannah tried to think of a question that didn’t require a verbal answer. “How many of us are there?”
Both hands went up, ten fingers. Then one solitary finger. Then she erased that and put up ten fingers again. That was right: without Garreth, it was ten.
“You’ll be okay,” Hannah said, feeling more hopeful that it would be so. At least Claire had memory intact. “But don’t try and talk, okay?
Claire pointed to her throat and shook her head. The message was clear: I can’t.
“That’ll heal.”
The others had managed to put out more than half the fire.
Hannah said, “Build a fire ring, or find some way to keep light on us, please.”
Bob seemed to have everything under control.
Hannah took up Claire’s hand and said, “You’re going to be okay. I know you were scared. But it’s over.”
Claire pointed over Hannah’s shoulder. Dixie was standing there, watching.
Hannah noticed Dixie had her backpack slung over one shoulder. Good, she hadn’t let it burn. “Yeah, she saved your life. Thank you, Dixie. You got us all here in time.”
“I hate snakes,” Dixie said, with a visible shudder. “I hate snakes.”
“That one would give anyone a phobia,” she said.
Ted said. “Yeah, look at it. It’s huge.”
Claire waved Hannah nearer. Her voice was strained and painful just to hear, but she managed to get out, “Eat it.”
Hannah grinned at her. “You bet. Everybody, Claire says we should eat it, and she’s right. Snake is perfectly edible.”
Claire lifted their joined hands and pointed to where they were connected.
It took a second to see what she was trying to convey. Hannah’s hand was swelling around the snake bites. She prodded the area. It was warm, and it hurt, but she’d felt worse. “I don’t think it had venom,” she said to Claire. “Did it bite you, too? And don’t talk again. Let your throat start to heal.”
Claire shook her head.
“Good. It wouldn’t need venom, after all. It had other talents.”
Dixie was saying, “I’m not going to sleep on the ground again. Ever. Not with snakes like that around.” She seemed more upset, not less, now that the excitement was past.
Bob tried to calm her. “Three days at the most, we’ll have something built.”
“Does it matter?” Dixie said, her voice rising. “They’ll crawl in anyway.”
“Not if we build well,” he said.
“It’ll come through the door. Or wiggle between the branches on the roof. And what do I do then?”
“Dixie, shhh,” Bob said. “It’s fine. It’s over. You’re okay.”
The fire was burning lower, and it was harder to see Claire. Hannah wanted to be able to see her, make sure she didn’t start to have breathing troubles.
Though what could Hannah do if that did happen? Lake water on a bandana was as close as she could come to a cold compress. Without real medicine, without real medical equipment, she was out of luck.
Or rather, Claire was.
“I need you to keep still,” she told the girl. We’ll carry you to the home site tomorrow.” She’d probably have to set a nurse on duty, losing two people’s work for the day, delaying when the cabin would be done. So be it.
Claire tried to speak, but Hannah pressed her fingers over her lips.
“No. If you can’t mime it, it can wait.”
Claire did something with her hands, which Hannah didn’t get. Then she tried it again, and at the end, mimed reeling in fishing line.
“We’ll see. If you’re up to it, you can sit and fish. But nothing strenuous. We have the net, too.”
Claire mimed drinking.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “I think it’ll hurt. Can you possibly wait until morning?”
Claire shrugged.
Hannah turned and said, “I guess once you make sure the fire is out, and build me a campfire, you should all try and get some more sleep. Dixie, you can go back with Laina and take my place in our shelter.”
“No way,” said the girl. “I’ll climb up a tree and sleep there, if I need to.”
“They’re probably in the trees,” Rex said. “The snakes, I mean.”
Dixie ducked down, looking at the trees as if expecting a rain of snakes any second.
Bob said, “It’s the first we’ve seen.”
It struck Hannah that while of course an attack by an eighteen-foot boa would put anyone off snakes for a while, that Dixie was previously phobic. Then she remembered the girl’s worry about a spider bite. And her fear of heights, which had led directly to Garreth’s death.
Before, she thought the girl had been being melodramatic about that, just wanting attention. But now, seeing how incredibly freaked out she was, it dawned on Hannah that she actually was phobic. Multiple phobias. That had to mean something.
Not for the first time, Hannah wished to be back in a world of Google and instant knowledge. Maybe all those phobias were a sign of something deeper, maybe even a childhood trauma. If she could find some sympathy for Dixie, she could more easily bring herself to apologize. She wasn’t sure if she would ever like the girl—she was too much like the snotty high school girls who had made Hannah’s own teenaged life such a misery. But she might be able to work up an ounce of pity for someone hounded by many irrational fears.
Not that fear of an eighteen-foot boa was irrational. That went under the category “Sensible Fears.”
Dixie was pretty pitiable right now, though, looking up at the trees with a look of terror on her face.
“Dixie,” Hannah said. “I need you to do something for me. For Claire, rather.”
Dixie glanced her way, then back at the tree canopy.
“Can you sit with Claire for a minute while I check the fire? I need you to actually watch her, not the trees.”
“What about the snakes?”
“I’ll keep my eye peeled for a snake. I won’t let one get you.” She looked around at all the other kids, who were just watching. “Really, you all need to get some rest. We have a big day of work ahead of us, starting the house. Probably we’ll need a lot of cordage, too. And Rex, you’ll need to direct the fishing and make sure we get fed.”
Two by two, the others began to wander away from the fire.
She worried about them getting lost on the way back in the dark. But Dixie’s cell phone was finally out of power, and her own flashlight was dimmed down to nothing. She needed to find a way to provide light at night. Torches or something. Plant-wax candles?
She worked at building the fire up to sufficient to see by. She tossed some more soil onto what had been the debris hut. I have to keep
checking that all night, make sure it doesn’t flare up.
Once she had everything arranged to her satisfaction, she sat by Claire and Dixie. “We need to really put that fire out well tomorrow morning. Drag the log down to the lake. It won’t be entirely out until we do.”
“You checked for snakes?” Dixie said.
“I did. I think the fire will keep them away.”
“Can we have a fire at the house when it’s built? I mean all the time?”
“That’s a good idea. We’ll think through how to design it for that. Maybe a fireplace and chimney at one edge. It might make predators think twice.”
Claire reached up to touch her throat.
“Leave it alone if you can, Claire,” Hannah said.
After a time, Claire shut her eyes. Hannah didn’t know if she was asleep or just resting.
Now or never, I guess.
“Dixie, I’d like to apologize.”
“What?” The girl was still distracted by her fear of snakes, looking nervously around herself.
“I want to tell you I’m sorry. For going off on you. And hitting you. When Garreth died.”
Dixie quit fidgeting and said nothing, looking down at her hands.
“I don’t think I appreciated then how afraid of heights you were. But no matter, it wasn’t your choice for Garreth to stay and protect you.”
“I didn’t ask him to.”
“I know. It was his choice. I wish to God he’d made a different one, but he didn’t.”
“So you wouldn’t have minded if I died?”
“I’d have done my best to prevent it. I think you know that, deep down. And better the bird would have thrown me over the cliff than Garreth.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Hannah jerked in surprise. “I do mean that.”
“Everybody is out for himself. You want to live. I want to live. We defend ourselves first.”
“Garreth didn’t think that way,” Hannah said, feeling tears welling again.
“You went crazy.”
Hannah thought about that. She was feeling less than at her optimal mental health, that was for sure. “At that moment, when I attacked you, yes. I was crazy.”
