I look over at Screamer.
He’s tapping at the bird head with one paw. The helpless idiot. I push him away and crush the head with a rock. I dig out the tiny brain and extend it to Screamer on my fingertip. With my other hand, I make a roof over my finger so the rain won’t wash away the precious sustenance. Screamer eats the brain. Daintily. Funny kitty. I’ve lost all table manners, but Screamer has not. I suck the eyes out of the destroyed sockets and give them to Screamer too.
The water around me moves in tiny waves. It carried away my vomit and seems almost clean now. So I wash my face and hands in it. It stings my eyes. I taste it. It’s salty! The rain has been so heavy, it’s made the seas rise this high. The seas!
This is a magic rain. An evil rain.
I can’t think about that. I can’t succumb to terror. Get moving!
I fight my way to standing and lift Screamer onto my shoulder. We have to climb higher. He quickly moves under the curtain of my sopping hair.
I fold my hands into a ball in front of my mouth and exhale on them. I was lucky not to fall backward when I climbed to this shelf. Please, whatever force is helping me, please stay with me now. Don’t let me fall. Don’t let another shower of pebbles sweep me away.
I climb. And that mysterious force must be right beside me, for just a body length higher up the rock face is a clump of ferns that must have been washed there from a patch of grassy hillside above, and in its midst dangle three more birds. I’ve raided chukar nests before—simple ground scrapes in the middle of ferns or bushes. These fledglings should have gone off on their own days after hatching. But here they are.
“Hello, little chukars. Scraggly things. Hello. Did you return to your nest—pathetic as it was—seeking comfort? Poor, desperate things.”
I climb in tiny increments to keep from falling, my eyes on the ferns. I hardly dare breathe as I reach out a hand and tuck the birds between my mantle and my shoulder. If they stay alive until I arrive someplace where I can eat them, they won’t rot. Dead things rot. Fast. Though maybe not in rain like this. “I’m sorry,” I say to them.
Three of them. I search through the ferns, but only with my eyes. I won’t risk letting go of the rock unless I’m sure there’s a bird to grab. But there aren’t any others. The ferns held exactly three. That’s what my thought had been: I could eat three more. I should have thought, Many more. Chukar nests can hold ten eggs, even fifteen sometimes.
“What do you think, Screamer? Hmm. Are you saying I couldn’t have kept them alive long enough to be able to eat them all fresh killed? Good point. Their bodies would have been wasted. It’s better this way. Only three is better. You’re right.”
I climb, and the rock gets ever more slick. I hold on with fingers and toes, pressing my whole body to the surface as hard as I can. It scrapes my cheek with each upward movement. The pounding of the rain on my head replaces all thought. It doesn’t hurt, it just wins.
At last my hand reaches an open spot again. Let it be a cave this time.
But it’s a peak. I crawl over the edge and onto an alm—a mountain meadow—the home of my chukars, no doubt. I stand and walk away from the edge. My feet slip on mud that’s a thin layer now; the rain has washed so much away that here and there bare rock shows through. I balance carefully, arms out to both sides, moving slowly. The mud grows thicker the farther I get from the cliff edge. I sink into it gratefully. Dirt means plants. I know plants.
The rain falls as heavy and steady as ever, but the air is light enough that I can make out extensive green of varying heights ahead. I walk slowly. The plants don’t make themselves known to me till my hands reach for them. Coriander greets me like a charm. I stuff the lacy leaves in my mouth and imagine the green juice running down my throat, seeping through my insides, making me spicy too. I chew on the more pungent stems now. The root comes up and I didn’t even tug on it. That’s because the ground is so sloppy. I hold the root up to let the rain wash it, then I eat it. Good. This is good.
I pull a chukar out from under my mantle, whisper thanks, and twist its neck. I don’t know for sure if it was still alive. I don’t want to know. We need that meat, Screamer and me. I reach for the kit, who huddles under my hair behind my neck, on the outside of the mantle. He resists. Idiot.
I give him a hard yank and he comes loose, a strand of yarn under a claw again. At this rate, he’ll ruin us. I drop him in the mud and plop the bird’s head and one wing in front of him. “I’m not going to crack the skull for you this time, Screamer. Do it yourself.”
The kit stays hunched, as though by bending his legs he can escape the rain.
I pluck the rest of the bird and eat it.
Screamer just stands there.
I kneel beside him. “I know you’re a baby. But you can’t stay a baby all your life or you won’t have one. Eat or die.”
Screamer just stands there.
I smush his face against the bird head. “Please. Please eat. Come on, Screamer. Eat the eyeballs, at least. Please.” And the kit finally tears in. He eats the eyeballs first, as though he understood my words. Now he eats the tongue. He cracks the thin bones in the side of his little jaws and makes mewly guttural sounds. He’s got to the brain now. Good. Finally he gnaws on the wing. Ineffectually.
I snatch it from him and he growls at me. “You couldn’t be a worse idiot if you tried.” I pluck it and give it back to him. Screamer devours it. He grinds the bones with his back teeth.
This meal, as it were, took time. And though I’ve just eaten, I feel as though I could drop. I crawl on all fours into a lush thickness of green. Not only coriander, but dill and fennel. Maybe the seeds blew here from fields below, or maybe these plants have grown here since the beginning of time. But if this rain keeps up, they might not be here much longer.
I lie on my right side with my left arm reaching across my chest and a little forward. Screamer nuzzles his way under my arm, so that the sleeve of my mantle makes a roof for him. I should kick him out. If something happens to me, he has to fend for himself. He has to learn. But I can’t think straight right now. Besides, I knew when I propped my arm that way—I knew the kit would take the opportunity. A pair of idiots. I close my eyes.
Thud.
I struggle against the weight on me. I shout and push. The weight rolls off and gets to his feet.
Screamer screams.
I’m on my feet, eyes level with the chin of a boy in front of me. It’s very dark—night dark—but even so I can tell his face is distinctive, large nose, wide-set eyes. I might know him. He might be a fisher boy.
“Sebah?” he says.
I don’t know his name. But I’m sure that’s who he is now. “You must be fast,” I say.
“What?”
“You raced up the hill ahead of the water.”
“No. I was in a boat when the rain started.”
A boat! “Where? Where’s your boat?”
“I couldn’t bail fast enough. It filled to the brim.”
“So you swam here?”
“I can’t swim. I held on to the gunwale. Boats don’t sink unless they spring a hole.”
“So where is it?”
“It floated to a rock face and I climbed away. To safety.”
“You let the boat go? You idiot! The boat was safety!”
“Who’s an idiot? If I didn’t get out of that boat, I wouldn’t have anything to eat. I lost my nets. You can’t catch fish with your hands.” He puts his face in mine. “You’ve been eating.”
“Coriander grows aplenty here.”
He pushes his tongue into my mouth. I jerk backward. “I knew it,” he says. “Blood.” He puts his hand behind my head and grabs me by the hair, pulling me up so hard I have to stand on tiptoe. “Give me your meat.”
“Let go.”
“Meat first.”
“What? You think I’m going to run away?”
“You carry a knife.”
He knows things about me. My teeth feel grimy at the thought.
He puts his other hand on my throat and feels for the string that normally holds my pouch. He reaches farther down.
“Stop!”
His hand moves up again. And he finds them. He pulls out a chukar. The fledgling should have died of terror by now if nothing else, but it lets out a quick series of chuk-chuk-chuks loud enough to hear through the rain. I’m amazed. The boy’s lips protrude and his brows come together. “You ate one of these?”
“Two.”
“Raw?”
“Don’t be such a baby. Pluck it. It’s better than starving.”
He shoves the bird in my face. “You kill it. You pluck it. You feed me.”
“Why should I?”
“I’ve got you by the hair.”
I take the bird from him. “Let go of my hair.”
“I will when I’ve finished. All of them. Ha! You thought I didn’t know about the others. But I felt them move.”
“There’s only one other.”
“Then I’ll finish both.”
I wring the bird’s neck and rip off the head and drop it for Screamer. The kit climbed up my mantle while the boy was talking, but he climbs back down now. Slowly, obviously worried. He needs to learn to jump. To leap, like a proper cat. But at least he’s going after the chukar head. I pluck the bird and bite into it.
The boy slaps me across the mouth.
I spit the bite in his face. “I wasn’t eating it, you idiot! My teeth are the only thing I have to rip off pieces. Here.” I shove the bird against his chest. “You do the rest on your own.”
He eats the bird. Then he pulls me downward by the hair till we’re both sitting. He picks the bite I spat at him from the mud, holds it up in the rain to wash it, and eats it. “The second one now.”
I do the same with the second bird. He eats it.
“You’re my woman now.”
My teeth clench. “I’m not looking for a husband.”
“You need protection. I’ll protect you.”
“I’m the one who fed you. Did you get that confused?”
“You’re my woman. Or else I’ll kill that kitten of yours.”
“Why should I care about a swamp kit?”
“You shouldn’t. But you do. You’re the baby.” He lies down, his hand still twisted in my hair, so that I have to lie with him, against his bare chest, but at least he has a swath of cloth around his middle. He reaches his other hand out across the mud and curls his fingers around a large piece of wood. A club. He must have dropped it there when he fell on me. I wonder where he found it.
“You were sleeping when I tripped over you,” he says. “I haven’t slept since the rain started.”
Screamer climbs onto my chest.
“If you’re gone when I wake, I’ll find you. So you might as well sleep while I do.”
CHAPTER THREE
Days 6–8
A faint noise from somewhere to my right. Really? The rain masks everything, but I’m nearly certain this isn’t rocks sliding. This is different. I run.
And trip. My knee smacks against something hard as I fall. I reach out and feel: a small boulder. The mountain meadow is littered with them, and I know that, I know that very well, but fear got the best of me. Big mistake. I pull my mantle up to my thigh and extend that leg to the rain. My knee is split open, but I won’t touch it to see how big the gash is. There’s nothing I can do about it anyway.
Oh! Blood. I quick pull the mantle down over my leg so the rain won’t wash any more of it away. Then I wrestle Screamer free from under the hair at the back of my neck. I stuff the kit inside my mantle and hold the cloth up above my knee, like a tent. It takes but an instant for the kit to figure things out and lap at the blood. After all, anytime I want, I eat the tall white mushrooms that have sprouted up everywhere; I simply gorge myself—but Screamer has had nothing to eat for too long.
Now, though, the kit takes a nibble of my flesh. I pull him out and slap him straight in the face. Not hard—he was only doing what any predator would do. But he can’t do that again. And a slap in the face sends a serious message. The boy slapped me in the face.
When? How long ago was that? More than a day? More than two?
I put Screamer back in his spot behind my neck and stand again. Onward. Slowly. No matter what I hear.
Walking in the dark makes me tense all over—though it’s not pitch black, not like before. There must be a moon up there somewhere. Maybe it’s even dawn already. Still, it’s dark enough to be hideous. But I have no choice. I disentangled myself from the boy while he slept, moving in itty-bitty segments at first, for fear of waking him. Soon, though, it was clear nothing could wake him. Exhaustion is a powerful force. I was so secure in that knowledge, I even pulled up some coriander before I left the boy, because I didn’t know when I’d next find a food source—I didn’t know that mushrooms would be springing up in such profusion. My family gathers them in spring, not now. But dislodging the coriander didn’t take much time—it barely had hold of the earth any longer. I looked at the boy’s club. A club would be useful, and he’d given up his grip on it; it lay there, free for the taking. But it was his, and I’m not a thief. I left fast. The boy undoubtedly went on sleeping for hours and hours.
The boy is stronger than me. So I have to stay far from him—I mustn’t lose the advantage of that head start. He might not even be following me. But he might. He might want the company. Or maybe not. He was in a boat when the rain started; he must be the fisher boy, and fisher boys are used to being alone.
I want company. It doesn’t feel right to be so alone. If the boy was younger than me, or if he was a girl, I’d have stayed with him whether I liked him or not. But he can hurt me. So being alone is better, no matter how awful. I let myself sleep whenever I truly need to. I won’t risk the kind of exhaustion he felt. Anything could happen to someone too weary to wake easily. But besides those brief naps, I keep moving. I walk even as I eat, always uphill. It’s slow, though. I haven’t gone far, I know that.
That sound comes again—the one that made me rush and fall before. Panic can be an enemy. I stop and stare through the rain.
That fur looks familiar—even matted down, I can see it’s like Screamer’s. But the creature is more massive than a swamp cat, and that tail is short for any kind of cat. It moves a little, and now, in profile, it’s obvious: heavy head on a thick neck, sloped back. A striped hyena. The skin on my arms prickles against the rough wet cloth of my mantle. That mantle is wool. It smells like sheep when it’s wet. My sense of smell no longer works, but maybe the hyena’s does.
I once saw a hyena splinter a camel’s thigh bone. It was at dusk in a garbage heap outside town. I watched from the safety of a perch on my father’s shoulders. I was little then—so I sat sideways, a leg down his chest, a leg down his back. But even high and safe like that, I still clasped his head with both arms as I stared. The camel was dead already, of course, and its meat had been cut off and taken away. But, still, that bone was gigantic.
This hyena’s gaze is fixed on another creature, facing it. A boar. His tusks protrude only a half finger’s length, but that doesn’t fool me. Boars can slash anything apart. My stomach clenches. My cousins are shepherds. They complain of boars preying on lambs.
Both creatures are scavengers. Neither should be a danger to the other. But this is a mortal standoff. Unnatural. And they shouldn’t even be out and about now—not in daytime. It’s the fault of the rain. Starvation changes habits.
I swallow the saliva that has gathered in my mouth—a taste of sick. I mustn’t run. I can’t risk falling. My only chance is to slip away without them noticing me. I take a step. But standing in one place for that long caused me to sink into the mud. Pulling my foot free of it makes a quick suck noise, like a kiss. The hyena turns his head in my direction. His rounded ears stand high. The boar lifts his head and snuffles. They might not see me, but for sure they heard me. And they might smell the wool. And the blood from my knee.
I run.
I don’t know where to. I just run. They chase. I hear them right behind me, gaining on me. It’s as though they’ve joined forces.
And, oh yes, a tree. A cedar! A stand of cedars! Magical cedars!
The first branching is easy to reach just by lifting a leg and hiking myself up. I cling there. The trunk is so wide, my arms barely reach to its sides. The next branching is higher. I stand on tiptoes; only my fingers graze it. The hyena and boar are nearly here. No choice, no choice. I hurry along the lower branch as it inclines upward. I go as fast as I dare, my hands out to each side for balance. The hyena yips. I take a long step. My hands can clutch the next branch up now. I take another long step, then grab hold of that branch and swing up so my legs hook on it. I struggle to right myself on the top side of the branch.
I look down. The hyena jumps into the first crux of the cedar. I’ve never heard of hyenas climbing trees. But he’s sure-footed. He runs up the branch I was just on. Races up it. I barely have time to pull up my legs before he jumps at me. And falls, smashing against the lower branch, skittering off it, splat below. The boar is on him in a flash.
And it is a flash for real. Lightning. The whole world fills with light—a sheet of it. I watch the boar. The light comes on, then off. Each time I can see, the boar is working in a different spot—so it seems like he has jumped from one place to another. It’s almost comical, except it’s grisly and awful. The boar now stands amid the shreds of the hyena. He gobbles.
When my body no longer thrums hard from inside, I scoot along the branch. It scrapes the insides of my calves and thighs. I don’t care. No more standing with arms free. I reach the trunk and put my feet under my butt and straighten up, pressing against the bark, the wonderfully solid bark. The next branching is too high to reach again. Well, that’s all right. I press myself back down to sitting. The way the trunk leans, I can nestle into the wedge, sheltered. It’s amazing to be out of the rain. I sleep.
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