Summer

by Laurence Dahners

  Pell asked the women if they’d take him out that afternoon, looking for root vegetables in wintertime. He wanted them to teach him how to recognize the dried up leaves, stems or vines of the plants that were hiding good roots beneath the surface. He didn’t really need to find any because the Cold Springs tribe had plenty of roots at present. But, if they should run out in the future—perhaps because they’d taken too many this past autumn—it might be important to know how to find them next winter.

  The next day Pell and Tando started back for the Cold Springs cave. As they left Teda grabbed at Pell’s arm and pulled him down to whisper, “Don’t forget to ask if I can join your tribe with my son.”

  Pell nodded, “I won’t.”

  Tando was in a good mood as they walked. Pell assumed he wanted to get back to Ontru, like Pell wanted to see Gia. After they’d walked some distance, Tando turned to Pell and, with a tone of anticipation, said, “When we’re closer, let’s keep an eye out for something to hunt. It’d be great to arrive back at the cave with a deer or pig or something.”

  Pell smiled and said, “Sure.” But, to himself he thought, I should start practicing throwing spears, not just rocks.

  Pell and Tando arrived back at the cave without having seen any large animals they could hunt. However, they encountered Woday walking up the stream with some fish. He’d gone down to check some basket traps he’d put on the main river and they’d held several substantial ones.

  ***

  As she carried the full water-skin back up to the camp, Valri reached down with one hand to rub at her empty stomach. As usual she felt surprised by how, despite her hunger, her stomach bulged. She’d been hungry every winter of her life, but never as hungry as she’d been this winter as the sea peoples’ slave. When she got sent to the river to get water, she always took a moment to fill her stomach, just to temporarily halt the constant gnawing. Unfortunately, the relief rarely seemed to last more than a few hundred heartbeats.

  Her ribs stuck out much more than in other winters and the bones in her hands and forearms protruded. Yet her feet looked fat and her stomach bulged. Though she didn’t understand it, protein malnutrition let fluid leak out and swell the tissues in the abdomen and feet. When she poked her feet, it left a disgusting indentation in the swelling.

  Valri always felt weak, and she’d started having trouble thinking.

  Karteri’d recovered from whatever had left her stranded and unconscious in the branches of the tree during the flood. For a while she’d seemed healthy, but she’d been thin to begin with and the constant hunger had been even crueler to her than to Valri. It’d left Karteri listless and irritable. The flesh thinly covered the bones of her face. Though Valri couldn’t see her own face, she didn’t think it felt quite as skeletal as Karteri’s looked.

  Valri and Karteri and the sea people’s other two slaves had been subsisting on root vegetables that a few of the kinder sea people shared with them. But they only got the roots that were going bad anyway.

  The sea people didn’t eat many animals, either not knowing how to hunt or perhaps because there weren’t that many animals near the sea. Instead they mostly ate shellfish and turtle eggs they gleaned from the beach. They caught fish that they dragged out of the surf or the river with sharp pieces of bone they called “gorges.” The little bones were tied onto long cords and baited with offal the fish apparently snatched up as food. The bone caught in a fish’s throat, allowing the sea people to pull them out of the water. But, just like the animals near Agan’s cave, fish were harder to catch in winter. When they did catch a fish, the sea people made a soup or stew and shared it amongst themselves, not with their slaves. Even in warm weather the slaves seldom got to eat fish unless the catch had been exceptionally large. Valri and Karteri had tried sucking at the fish bones after they’d been thrown on the garbage dumps, but it seemed that—as opposed to the marrow of animal bones—the process of making soup left little nourishment on fish bones.

  The sea men had used Valri and Karteri frequently for sexual gratification though less now that they were sick. Karteri wasn’t a virgin, she’d had a baby though it didn’t survive. However, she’d never been forced before and cried a lot at first.

  Valri’s introduction to sex had been particularly brutal since she’d only bled for the first time four moons ago. Then Valri and Karteri’s moon-bleedings had stopped. Karteri had explained what that often meant and Valri’d despaired at the thought she’d be bringing the child of one of the sea men into the world. They’d both bled again when they’d gotten hungry in the early winter and Karteri thought perhaps they’d lost the babies. But then when their stomachs began to bulge they worried once again. Karteri said it didn’t feel like when she was pregnant, but Valri didn’t know whether Karteri could really tell. Valri felt far from normal, though she realized that might be due to starvation rather than pregnancy.

  Valri rounded the corner of the thatched hut that belonged to the chief, Radan. She found Radan’s mate Halla standing there. “Where have you been?” Halla asked angrily. “Dawdling again?” Halla raised a hand as if to slap Valri, but dropped it. “You’re so bony it’d just hurt my hand,” she said in disgust, jerking the water-skin out of Valri’s hands and turning back into her hut.

  On her way to where the slaves stayed, Valri stopped by several of the mounds of garbage scattered around the sea people’s village. She found a few spoiled roots and some rotting, sprouting grain to take back to Karteri and Quen. Quen was the sea people’s other slave. She’d been captured the previous year and still survived. There’d been four slaves when Valri was first captured, but the fourth one had tried to run away a few hands of days ago. Radan led a group of men out who found and killed her.

  From the sounds, it’d been a horrible death.

  The girl’s body still lay on one of the garbage heaps, though Valri’d noticed that a leg was missing.

  She worried that the sea people had eaten it.

  If she was going to run away, she should have done it before it got so cold, Valri thought. And, before she got so hungry and weak.

  I should have run away last fall myself.

  Valri liked to think she would’ve taken the chance; if she’d had any idea they weren’t going to feed her over the winter.

  Valri dreamed of running away anyway, though she knew she was too weak to get far.

  She often thought, I’d rather be dead anyway… if it weren’t for the way they kill you.

  ***

  Woday saw Pell get up and leave the cave. As he often did, Woday worried that perhaps his master didn’t like him and didn’t want to teach him. Or, perhaps, he was merely reluctant to order around someone older than he was. Woday had long ago adjusted to the idea that his master might be young, but nonetheless contained a genius worthy of respect. Being told what to do by someone so young didn’t bother him, but he thought it bothered Pell.

  Woday hoped that the real reason was that Pell got ideas and went off to pursue them without even thinking about calling his apprentice. The way he got so focused when he had an idea made this seem plausible.

  As Woday got to his feet and followed Pell out of the cave, he considered whether Pell might simply think of him as an apprentice bonesetter who, as such, wouldn’t be interested in Pell’s other projects. Outside the cave, he saw Pell walking across the little meadow. Woday trotted a little to catch up. “Pell, you forgot to take your apprentice with you!” he said in a lighthearted tone. “How am I ever going to learn if I’m not with you when you’re working your magic?”

  Pell wore an expression of deep concentration. “Sorry.” He gave Woday an embarrassed look, “I’ve been thinking about the bird snare. I thought it would help me figure out how to improve it if I was looking at it.” They arrived at the bird snare Pell had set up last fall and Pell stopped, standing there just staring at it.

  Woday frowned, “It works great. Why do you think you need to improve it?”

  Even though it looked as if Pe
ll was concentrating on the snare with such focus he might not realize Woday was speaking, Pell responded. “It works fine, but you can only put a snare like this one where there’s a springy sapling….”

  Pell had simply trailed off as if in mid-thought so Woday looked around for another likely sapling while he waited a couple hands of heartbeats for Pell to continue. When Pell said nothing, Woday finally spoke himself, “Do we need more than this one?”

  Pensively, Pell said, “We cut the top off this sapling last fall, so it’s been dead all winter. Wood that’s dead gets brittle.” He reached out and bent the sapling a little and Woday thought it did look stiffer than it had been. “I think if we tried to bend this one over enough to hook our snare loop to it, it’d probably break.”

  “Oh,” Woday said, understanding the problem. “Do you want me to look for another sapling?”

  “Sure,” Pell said, sounding like he hadn’t really been listening.

  Wondering if perhaps he’d be better off staying with Pell, Woday wandered off around the edges of the clearing. He found a few saplings, but wasn’t sure whether they’d be satisfactory. He noted their locations and went back to find Pell.

  Pell had a stick, about the length of the sapling, balanced over his arm. He was pushing down on the short end and watching the long end swing rapidly up into the air. Woday didn’t know what to make of this, so he said, “I found three saplings that might work. Do you want to look at them?”

  “No, I’ve had a different idea. Let’s go get a hand axe.”

  Thinking of his role as an apprentice-assistant, Woday turned, saying, “I’ll get one and be right back.” He trotted across the meadow to the cave.

  Woday returned with one of the pile of hafted axes Yadin and Deltin had been making over the winter. They were planning to barter them at the River Fork trade meeting this summer and expecting to make a good profit. Woday thought it was crazy to use a hand axe when they had a stack of the hafted ones sitting around. Pell was still thoughtfully balancing his long stick over his arm, a distant look in his eyes.

  Woday and Pell wandered out into the trees. Pell picked out four saplings three fingers thick and several that were two fingers thick, marking them with a blow from the axe. Then he said, “If you’ll finish cutting these down, I’m going to go look for rocks and thongs to finish my idea.”

  As he walked away, Woday thought dispiritedly, As good as Pell is with an axe, it’d go faster if he cut these trees down while I looked for rocks and thongs. Sure enough, Woday was shortly making a hash out of cutting down the saplings, striking them wildly over broad areas before he finally weakened them enough to break them at the chopped section. He wondered if he should try to trim off the branches, but decided he should wait and see if Pell actually wanted the branches removed. Besides, the way Woday swung an axe, there was a good chance he’d damage the trunk if he tried to cut off branches.

  When Woday dragged the saplings back to the front of the cave, he found Pell there talking to Gia. Pell had a selection of various sizes of heavy looking stones and a substantial bundle of thongs and cords with him.

  Pell looked over the saplings, then took the axe from Woday and used it to cut the tops off the saplings, producing several foot-long stakes as he did it. With precise single blows, he cut off the branches, some right at the trunk and some several fingers away from the trunk. When Pell finished, Woday realized that three of the four heavy saplings he’d chosen all now ended in a Y-shaped fork at the top. Did he pick those three because they split into Ys at the top?

  Pell handed the heavy saplings to Woday and said, “Can you char points on the bottom ends of these?” Then he picked up the foot-long stakes—which all had short stubs of branches at their bottom ends—saying, “And, char points on the top ends of these?”

  “Sure,” Woday said, extremely curious about what Pell was going to be doing with the smaller saplings and, therefore, disappointed he wasn’t going to get to watch. He took the heavier saplings in to the fire inside the cave and began rolling their bottom ends back and forth in the flames until the tips had charred a bit. He brought them to hardened points by scrubbing charcoal off the ends against the stones around the fire pit.

  Woday went back outside with his pointed stakes—three of them having the Y-forked tops. He found Pell binding heavy stones to the upper ends of the smaller saplings. He was using the cord to wedge the stones between the stubs of branches he’d left on the saplings. Woday eyed the shafts with the stones bound to the ends of them and said, “If you’re making some new kind of club, don’t you think the shaft needs to be stronger?”

  Pell drew his head back as if startled. He studied the stick with the stone bound to the end of it. “Maybe you could make a club this way…” he said ruminatively. Then he looked up at Woday and frowned, “But it’d only be good for fighting, right? It seems to me that if you wanted a club for fighting, Deltin and Yadin’s hafted axes would be better.”

  Woday’s eyes widened at the thought of using the hafted axes to fight. Partly in horror at the damage one could do, but also with the thought that, if he had to fight, he’d really like to have a hafted axe to fight with. And, I really hope the other guy doesn’t have one! After pondering that for a moment, he wondered, When did they get to be Deltin and Yadin’s hafted axes? It seems to me that Pell was the one who thought them up; Deltin and Yadin just make them.

  Pell picked up his three saplings with the stones attached and walked off across the meadow. “If you don’t mind Woday, bring your stakes, and a good hammer stone.”

  As Woday collected the stakes, he mused to himself that when he left his home tribe to seek this apprenticeship, he would never have expected his master to be so polite to him.

  To say nothing of how much younger he’d be.

  Pell stopped and laid his weighted sticks down near the sapling from last year’s trap. He took the heavy stake that didn’t have a Y at the top, looked one more time at the sapling from last year, then pounded the stake into the ground close to it. Once he had it seated, he wiggled it a little bit and pulled it back out of the ground. Then he took one of Woday’s Y topped stakes and put it in the hole, tapping it gently with the hammer stone to set it.

  Woday shook his head when he realized that if he’d tried to drive the Y topped stake into the ground without first making a hole for it; the hammer stone would have broken the Y at the top. Where did he learn how to do these things?!

  Next, Pell balanced one of the smaller saplings with the stone weights over the Y. Woday realized Pell had left a stub of branch on the small sapling that hooked against the Y. Thus, when the weight of the stone pushed the short end of the sapling downward, the sapling didn’t slide out of the Y.

  The other end of the sapling—even though it laid across the Y far off center—wasn’t close to heavy enough to balance the weight of the stone. Woday thought Pell’d miscalculated. However, Pell merely asked Woday to hold the long end of the sapling down. Then Pell tied a long cord with a short stick on the end of it to the long end of the sapling. He fashioned a noose at the end of the long cord and draped it in a circle on the ground. He stepped over to get one of the foot-long stakes and barely hammered it into the ground in the middle of the circle.

  Pell stepped back and looked over the entire set up with a look of fierce concentration on his face. He glanced at Woday and said, “Okay, let go.”

  Surprised, Woday let go of the cord. As the weight on the other side of the Y fork dropped downward, the long end of the sapling rose into the air, pulling the cord. The noose closed around the stake, jerked it out of the ground, and flung it up into the air. At that point apparently the noose loosened slightly. The stake slipped out of it and flew almost all the way across the meadow.

  Pell looked startled. He started across the meadow after the stake so Woday followed after him, wondering how a flying stake was going to capture an animal. It’d flown off at quite a speed, so Woday wondered whether it might be that Pell actua
lly intended the stake to hit an animal like a spear or a stone would. How would he aim it? Woday wondered.

  They’d reached the other side of the meadow and Pell was looking around. “Do you see it?” he asked.

  Woday looked around. “Is that it?” he asked, pointing at what he thought was the stake in the middle of a bush.

  “Oh, yeah!” Pell said, stepping to the bush and reaching in to pull the stake out. He studied the stake for a moment as if he were pondering its nature, then looked back across the meadow to where it had come from. He hefted it a couple of times, then threw it back toward the snare he’d been building. Woday was surprised to see that—though Pell looked like he had thrown it as hard as he could—it didn’t go all the way back over to the snare it’d come from.

  Pell started after the stake he’d just thrown and Woday followed him once again. Unable to hold in his curiosity anymore, Woday said, “Are you trying to make a snare that’ll spear animals on the other side of the meadow? How would you aim it?”

  Pell stopped there in the middle of the meadow and gave Woday a surprised glance. Then he looked back and forth from one side of the meadow to the other. Finally, he laughed and turned back to Woday. “You give me too much credit! I wasn’t trying to build anything to throw spears, I just built a snare that didn’t work right!” He looked back and forth across the meadow again, then took a few more steps and picked up the stake where it had fallen. “But, it really threw the stake a long way, didn’t it?”

  Woday nodded, thinking about how hard Pell had thrown the stake by hand, and how it had only traveled about two thirds of the way back to the snare. Pell continued his trek back toward the snare he’d been building, so Woday followed.

  There followed a period of experimentation with the snare. The device didn’t throw Pell’s stake across the meadow again, though Pell occasionally paused to stare across the meadow as if he were still thinking about it. They built and rebuilt the snare, Pell seemingly becoming more and more frustrated with it. Eventually, Woday said, “What’s wrong?”