by Lou Cadle
“Maybe the mother got sick and died,” Rex said.
“Or eaten,” Claire said. “Though why a predator would go for the mother and not the easier calf, I can’t explain.”
It was a clear day, and so they set the fire up by the lake and fried up some camel steaks for an early supper. The bulk of the meat would go into the steam pit overnight. Some was put aside for their continuing experiments with jerky and preserving meat with smoke.
By the time the sun fell behind the trees, only Jodi, Zach, Ted, and Hannah were still at the fire, cleaning the dishes and banking the coals for the night, debating what the best distance from the heat would be for overnight smoking.
“We might have to get up in the middle of the night to adjust it,” Jodi said.
“I’ll do it,” said Hannah.
“No, that’s okay. I’m happy to,” Jodi said. Then she yelped.
Hannah was about to ask what was wrong when she heard the crashing in the trees behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw a hell pig. Just one, but that didn’t mean more weren’t on his heels.
“Get in the water!” Hannah yelled, turning and scampering backward.
Ted ran for a tree. In seconds he had swung up to the first branch.
Hannah dashed for the water. Jodi was already in. She had somehow remembered to grab her club.
“Zach!” she yelled. “Hurry!”
Hannah turned again and saw Zach was on his knees next to the fire. He must have tripped. She froze in place, torn between getting herself safe and helping Zach.
Before she could make her decision, Jodi was splashing past her, out of the lake, her club swinging overhead. She and the hell pig converged at Zach, just as he made it to his feet. Jodi’s club came around and bounced off the long snout of the predator.
“Get in here!” Hannah yelled.
“Don’t!” Jodi said, slamming the club in an overhand arc and smashing the hell pig’s nose. “Mess! With! My! Boyfriend!” With every word she hit the animal.
Zach was pulling at the back of her shirt, trying to get her into the water. Jodi was in full berserker mode, smashing the animal for all she was worth. Zach had her moving backward, but she was fighting him, obviously wanting nothing more than to deal the monster more blows.
A swing landed on one of the animal’s flanges, and Hannah could hear the bone snap.
It was too much for the hell pig. It turned tail and ran.
“Get into the water!” Hannah said, and finally the two did, wading in until they were waist deep. Then Zach swung Jodi around and kissed her soundly.
Hannah realized that Ted was laughing, up in the tree. She looked beyond the beach but saw no more predators coming out. “Ted, do you see any more of them?”
He couldn’t stop laughing for another several seconds. Finally, he said, “No! But did you see Jodi?”
“I saw her,” Hannah said, and then she started to laugh, too, from relief.
Ted swung himself out of the tree. “My hero!” he said, in a falsetto voice.
Zach and Jodi broke their clench. Zach said, “Damn right. She saved my butt.”
They were all grinning and full of the high of defeating the beast.
And she couldn’t deny it: Jodi truly had been magnificent.
Chapter 26
The days to the timegate’s appearance ticked down. They continued to learn better ways of surviving, and one morning Hannah gave a short class on CPR, bearing Bob’s glare the whole while.
Laina reminded them from time to time about the timegate coming, as if they were likely to forget. One morning she said, “Just five days away now.”
Hannah said, “We should start early, I think. Give ourselves three days to get there.”
“How do we eat for three days without fishing?”
“We can cook meat to carry for the first day or two. For the last one, I’m not sure.”
“Isn’t the smoked meat working?”
“We’re better at it, but I’m not that sure it’s safe to eat after 72 hours.”
“We can hunt on the way,” Ted said.
“If we do,” she said, “we should allot four days for travel.”
“So we’ll carry food for two days and then hunt to feed ourselves the last two?” Jodi said.
“Yes, that’d work.”
Bob said, “What if we don’t find anything to hunt?”
“Then we’ll go hungry. I’m more worried it won’t rain all that time.”
Dixie said, “I’d like it to not rain.”
“We need it to,” said Nari. “For the water, right?”
“Right,” Hannah said. “We can soak up rain from the grass with our shirts, or gather it in the Mylar blankets and survive. Food, we can do without for two days. But we need water every day.”
“I wish we could figure out a watertight basket design,” Nari said.
“The pitch might eventually be made to work,” Jodi said.
Rex said, “I’ve been thinking about a design for lids for the bowls. A simple twist-on lid that would allow us to carry liquid without spilling any.”
Bob said, “If we’re going to allow four days, then we’re talking about leaving tomorrow, right?”
Everyone looked to Laina. “Yes,” she said. “It will be mid-afternoon when it comes. So we should leave tomorrow afternoon.”
“We’re lucky it doesn’t arrive at night,” Rex said.
“That’ll happen,” said Laina. “At some point, we’ll probably have to jump at night. But it will still be visible, I think, even at night.”
“Let’s worry about this jump before we worry about the next,” Hannah said. “Okay, then. We have a lot of work to do in a day.”
Ted said, “One day and several hours.”
“True,” she said. “We need plenty of food, and we should pack whatever we can this afternoon, though most of the packing will have to wait until tomorrow.” When you didn’t own much, every bit of it was important to your survival.
“If we’re going to try and smoke some fish,” Rex said, “We need to cast the net right away.”
Within moments, the kids had figured out what they needed to do, and without Hannah’s urging or direction they had divided up the tasks. She and Bob were left alone.
“You’ve done well with them,” he said. “Look how capable they’ve become.”
“I had almost nothing to do with it,” she said. “They grew up on their own. I just taught them what I know.”
“And encouraged them to think for themselves, and to innovate.” He said, “And they trust you.”
“Surprising, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Everything I’ve screwed up at. Letting Garreth die. Hitting Dixie.”
“Well, yeah, you shouldn’t have done that to Dixie, no matter what a trial she is. But you know Garreth wasn’t your fault.”
“My head knows it,” she said. “My heart has a more difficult time.”
“You’ll heal,” he said. “We all will.”
She didn’t argue, but it seemed a platitude that didn’t really apply. They had moved on, adjusted to Garreth’s absence, yes. But she’d never be over it, not entirely.
“But Dixie’s another matter,” he said.
“I lost control,” she admitted. “But I can’t go quite so far as to say she didn’t deserve getting smacked.”
“You didn’t only smack her,” Bob said.
“No.” She wiggled her fingers. She no longer wore the splint, but her finger ached where she had broken it against Dixie’s face. It probably had healed wrong. She could still use the hand fine, but she imagined if she lived to Bob’s age, she’d feel it all the time and regret not having had medical care.
“You really don’t like Dixie,” Bob said.
“No. The feeling is mutual, but I didn’t like her from the first moment I saw her, dressed wrong, obviously worried far more about her looks than being logical and safe. And th
e more I knew her, the less I liked her.”
“I see that. But why? She’s just a teenager. Teenagers can be petty, and thoughtless, and selfish. I should know. I’ve taught several thousand of them.”
“She reminds me of my own teenage years,” Hannah said. “And the mean girls I had to deal with then. Sounds stupid, I guess, that I carry a grudge for half my life.” She realized something. “My god, I think I’m thirty-four now. I’ve had a birthday. Or would have.”
“Many happy returns.”
“So for more than half my life, I’ve carried this resentment.”
“Maybe it’s time to let it go.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Did they tease you over something about your looks? Were you fat, or had acne, or were you too poor to afford good clothes? Those are the usual reasons.”
She shook her head. “We weren’t any too rich, but my dad sent a check every month. We were clothed.”
“Then what was the issue? Just scapegoating? Bullying for no reason?”
“There was a reason.” Her sister. She didn’t want to think about it and changed the subject. “I wish we’d figured out a way to process those cashews. They’d be a safe food to carry—not just for four days, but for four months if we’re lost in time for that long.”
“Don’t remind me.” Bob, confined to the cabin, had been the one to experiment with the cashews and the one to discover why they shouldn’t be eaten raw. The coating of the nuts had a nasty, caustic substance in it. Bob’s hands weren’t blistered any longer, but there were fading scars from his attempt to get the nuts out of their dangerous shells.
“We need gloves to do it.”
“At the least,” he said. “Masks and goggles and plastic aprons would be good, too.”
“Maybe we’ll find another sort of nut next place. Walnuts or something easier.”
“The Miocene again.”
“I hope not back to the saber tooth nimravids,” she said.
“Could be. Could be worse,” he said. “Well, the berries aren’t going to gather themselves. Want to do that together?”
“Yeah, for the morning. Then I want to organize the gear, and repair any backpacks that need repairing.” The basket backpacks worked great for a while, but they didn’t hold up like the woven or synthetic materials of the 21st century packs. If used, if stressed with a big load of meat, they needed almost daily repair.
*
By the next afternoon, they were ready to go. Everyone wore a pack of some sort. She had tried to keep Bob from carrying anything, but he had insisted, so he had a basket backpack filled with every size of cord, from the thinnest lines of twisted grass to four-strand braids.
Leaving the cabin was surprisingly emotional for Hannah—and she wasn’t alone in this. “We did such a good job building it,” said Jodi, patting a wall affectionately.
“We can do it again the next place,” Ted said.
“But it’ll never be this one, the first one,” Jodi said.
“Yeah,” said Rex mournfully. So much of his thought was reflected in the design, it was no wonder he was particularly attached to it.
“Ready?” Hannah said.
“Let’s go,” Bob said, adjusting the woven straps of his backpack one last time.
They walked out of the woods that had protected and sustained them for nearly five weeks.
They went slowly for the first day. She made them take several rests and kept a close eye on Bob. He looked okay, but she worried he wouldn’t mention if he started feeling bad.
They were rained on, but it gave them the chance to collect water from the grass, so much that their water bottles were filled again by the time they bedded down for the night on damp grass.
They put on still-damp boots the next morning, shivering in the cool of the dawn, and set off again, down a hill and back up. At the crest of the hill, they saw before them the largest group of camels they had seen, several females with young, grazing. The animals kept their distance but didn’t leave the valley.
“We could hunt for one,” said Ted, looking at them.
“We have the smoked fish.” They had carried enough dry wood to build a fire tonight to cook the fish, as she didn’t yet trust that their smoking was preserving it sufficiently. Another time, she might risk the experiment of eating it and seeing if anyone was ill, but not now, when they needed to hike another day and a half to get to the timegate.
Bob slowed down in the afternoon. Hannah called a halt early, not worrying about their pace. They’d still beat the timegate by a half-day. She had left early for just this reason. The afternoon rain came later, and was lighter, but it was still enough to soak up sufficient water to slake their thirst. She agreed that Ted could take out a group hunting, but they came back empty-handed.
The third morning, they set out early, after building a fire with the last of the wood and cooking the smoked herring. That left them with enough food for just one meal, made up mostly of berries, so the instant they arrived, they’d need to find fish or meat within a day or two. And they needed to find water immediately.
“We’ll probably come out into a dryer climate again,” Bob had warned them, after Laina had said the maximum jump they could get was 24 million years.
On the final morning, Bob was moving even more slowly. The long walk was wearing on him, so Hannah slowed their pace more, and stopped every hour for a break.
Three hours later, they found the hell pigs.
Chapter 27
It was the same group that had chased them before, she thought, or one with identical numbers. They spotted the animals from a distance as the humans walked back down the valley on the last leg of their journey to the timegate.
The hell pigs were feeding.
“We need to give them a wide berth,” she said.
Bob said, “Maybe even go back over the crest of the hill and wait.”
Laina said, “Just not too long a delay, please. We can’t afford much more than an hour.” She was wearing Hannah’s watch, keeping track of when the timegate would appear.
Hannah should have had them leave another half-day earlier. Nothing to be done about that now, though. “Let’s back up this way.”
Dixie said, “I think I recognize those bushes over there. From the first day we were here.”
Hannah wasn’t sure how you’d tell one patch of bushes from the next, especially now that the bushes had all turned green from the rain and were putting out new leaves, but she gave the girl the benefit of the doubt.
They went back up the hill at an angle taking them further away from the predators. Bob’s steps slowed even more on the slope. Hannah didn’t want to take a break until the hell pigs were out of sight, though, so she matched her pace to his. Some of the kids got ahead of them. Others hung back—Zach, Jodi, and Nari.
They were plodding up to the top of the hill when Hannah glanced behind herself and saw that one of the hell pigs was coming their way. “Oh, crap,” she said.
“What?” Zach asked.
“We’re going to have company.” She pointed.
He looked back and his mouth dropped open. “Jodi, you catch up to Ted and them,”
“I’m not leaving you behind.”
Bob said, “You should all catch up. You too, Hannah. Don’t wait for me.”
Hannah couldn’t help but think how predators culled the weakest of the herd. Right now, that was Bob.
Nari said, “I’m staying with you, Mr. O’Brien.”
“Us too,” said Zach, but he looked unhappily at Jodi.
“I can go faster,” Bob said. “At least for a little while.”
“Then let’s,” Hannah said. “Let’s get over the lip of the hill and out of their sight. They’re stupid enough they might forget about us.” She didn’t think they were stupid about hunting, though.
Nari said, “They just ate. Why would they want us now?”
“Maybe they don’t,” Hannah said. “Maybe they’re only making sure w
e don’t steal their meal.”
Bob was panting as he labored up the last of the hill. Hannah wished there was something she could do for him, but beyond getting in back of him and pushing him—which would likely throw his balance off—she couldn’t think of a thing. She jogged the last few dozen steps up to the hill’s crest and turned to watch the hell pigs.
Only the one was coming this way, though the rest seemed to have finished their food. One was rubbing its long snout in the grass, cleaning blood and grease off. One was grooming its forelegs.
But one plodded steadily in their direction. She didn’t like it.
As Bob came up beside her, she said, “Any chance you can jog?”
“I’ll try,” he said.
“Then let’s get out of its sight and get moving.”
A dozen yards under the crest, they turned away from the predators’ location. They set out at a slow jog, parallel to the line of the hills. Ahead and down the valley, Rex saw what they were doing and came to a halt. She saw him calling to the leaders, Ted and Laina, and they stopped, too.
They were too far to yell to. Hannah waved her hand forward, trying to get them to keep moving. If there was to be a confrontation with the hell pig, she’d rather put the fewest of them at risk as possible.
Could she, timid Nari, weakened Bob, and Zach and Jodi fight off the animal? Jodi had done it before, but she thought it would be a close thing. When Hannah tripped over a stone, she stopped and used the butt end of her spear to dig it out. Bob stopped, too, and his breath was rasping in a way she really didn’t like. There was a patch of stony ground here, and she called a halt. “Grab some rocks,” she said. Maybe they could keep the animal from getting close by throwing rocks at it, and then they’d not have to test their prowess with the spears and club.
She stopped Bob from doing the same. “Don’t weigh yourself down any more.”
He nodded and bent to rest his hands on his thighs, trying to catch his breath.
She was worried about him. He was sweating, and his color looked bad, too pale. “Let’s walk for a minute or two,” she said, once the kids had their pockets filled with rocks to throw.
