by Lou Cadle
“I’m sure we have some left. I hope you’re hungry.”
“I could eat a little,” Zach said.
Jodi was done fussing over him, and Hannah sat on his other side. “You mind if I check your temp?”
“Knock yourself out.” He turned his head and gave a weak cough.
“Does your chest hurt at all?”
“No. I mean, a little, I guess, if I cough for too long. But not now.”
He was definitely fevered. He’d caught some disease here. And there was little she could do to help him beyond giving him bark tea. She wondered if she had modern antibiotics, something like ampicillin, if it’d knock out a three-million-year-old bacterial infection. Who knew? It’d be better than nothing, though. She left the two young lovers alone and joined the others.
Most people opted for roasted birds, but Zach, Nari, and Bob wanted soup. The big fuel supply burned down quickly, and they rushed to get the birds cooked. As a result, Hannah’s food was slightly underdone. Back when there were four grocery stores within walking distance of her house, she’d have never choked down undercooked chicken. But she was hungry enough today that she would have eaten her birds entirely raw, heads and all.
All the bones went into a pile to be made into more broth tomorrow. By that time they were losing daylight, the birds were eaten, the bones were buried in snow, and Hannah was tired. While the others talked by candlelight inside the igloo, she curled up on her side in a ball and dozed to the sound of their voices.
The next morning, as a result, she was up earlier than most of them. When she could wait no longer, she crawled out to use the latrine. It was still dark. Overhead a brilliant display of stars stretched from horizon to horizon, bright enough—even without a moon—to cast a shadow of her hand when she held it out. She believed that one grouping was the Big Dipper. A squashed, misshapen one, but still, they were moving closer in time to the stars of home. She’d remember to mention it to Rex. As she turned a full circle, she saw two spiral galaxies, clear as could be, one face-on, one edge-on to Earth, and she felt a sense of wonder, even gratitude, at having an experience few modern humans could have: standing on a world without light pollution, seeing the local slice of the universe and, in seeing it, feeling more than ever that she was a part of it.
It might be a bit warmer today than it had been the other mornings. On the way back from the latrine, she checked the spot where they’d buried the bird bones in the snow. They hadn’t been disturbed. Good news/bad news, the bad news being that a scavenger leaving tracks would give Laina the opportunity to set traps.
She stayed outside stargazing until the cold drove her back inside.
When everyone was awake and gathered outside, Claire organized them into two hunting teams. “We need to find something more than birds. Yesterday wasn’t good enough.”
“Better than nothing,” Rex said.
“It was good to eat, but it wasn’t enough. Sorry, Rex. The net worked great. We need meat though. Large game. Or a herd of small game. Even something the size of tiny horses would be good.”
“Horses are bigger now,” said Bob. He frowned in thought. “Or possibly extinct.”
“Whatever. Weasels. Beavers. Anything that size, as long as there are a lot of them. That, or one big animal.”
“Mammoths are big,” Ted said.
“Which is why both teams will be headed in that general direction. Priority one is to find meat of any sort. Priority two is to find mammoth tracks, dung, or some sign of where they’ve gone. If we do that today, and don’t find alternate game, tomorrow we can follow them, just like you want, Ted. Okay, gear up, everyone.”
Jodi went in the igloo to say a final goodbye to Zach. Hannah spent a few minutes asking Bob and Nari to take care of him, and checking on how they were healing.
“I’m okay,” said Nari. “The physical therapy seems to be helping with my arm. I can raise it six inches higher than I could the first day of exercises.”
“Terrific,” Hannah said.
“I’m okay. A bit tired,” Bob said.
“Fever?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
She reached over and felt his cheek and forehead. “No, I don’t think you have one either. I didn’t really think straight before now, but of course we’re all at risk for catching whatever Zach has, crowded together as we are. Especially as we eat less and get weaker, our immune systems might not be able to fight it off.”
“I feel fine,” Nari said.
“There’s no way we can keep our distance from him,” Bob said. “Not in these circumstances.”
“I know.”
“Don’t be upset, Hannah,” Nari said. “We’re all doing the best we can. Without medicine and doctors, you can’t fix everything.”
“I can’t fix anything,” she said.
“You sewed me up,” Nari said. “I’d have bled to death otherwise.”
Hannah smiled her thanks. “Well, time for us to get going. Good luck fishing today, Bob.”
She was partnered with Dixie and Ted. Had she been in Claire’s place, she would have kept those two separated, as they were still barely speaking. But she wasn’t in Claire’s place, so she accepted her assignment without complaint.
For a time, both hunting parties walked together back toward where the mammoth tracks had been sighted, but short of that spot Claire split them up. “We’ll go around that bunch of hills that way, and you guys go this way. We’ll meet right back here, no later than mid-afternoon.”
Ted led the way. Hannah walked next to Dixie. “How are you feeling?”
“Good. Fine.” She glanced at Ted’s back. “I’m fine,” she said with less assurance.
“I’m glad you aren’t sick to your stomach.”
“Not even a bit. My tits feel funny is all. Like if I sleep on my stomach, it hurts.”
“I’m so glad. I mean, that you’re not nauseated.”
“And I’m crazy hungry. I know you all are hungry, too, but I could eat my own left arm.”
“Don’t do that!” Hannah said, in mock horror.
“Yeah, I do kind of need it.” She raised her left hand and looked at it. “Love these mittens.”
Ted said, without turning, “We’ll have to drop them if we want to use the spears right.”
“Hope it’s a problem we run into,” Dixie said. When Ted didn’t answer, she flipped his back a middle finger.
Hannah didn’t blame her. She wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted Ted to be saying, but something better than he had been. “How ya doing today, Dixie?” or “Sorry for impregnating you.” Something along those lines would be nice. He might have said that in private to Dixie, but she didn’t think he had. Mostly, he gave her the cold shoulder.
Dixie may not have been her favorite person for the past six months, but illogical as it might be, she empathized with her now. No pregnant woman should be treated like this by the man who knocked her up.
For an hour, they hiked up a slope. When Ted crested it, he pulled up short. “Whoa,” he said. He dropped to his knees
Hannah hurried to his side.
And there they were, in the middle distance. Mammoths standing in a cluster. Her eye was drawn to the tusks. Long, curving, gleaming white in the oblique arctic sunlight. Their fur—or “hair” might be the right word—was shaggy and thick, a color between gray and brown. There had to be thirty-five to forty of them. Two were babies, the rest adults.
“Cute,” Dixie said, kneeling beside Hannah. “Look at the mother pushing the baby away.”
A mother mammoth was discouraging the smaller of the two young animals from trying to suckle.
All of them were digging under the snow for something, food more than likely, using their curved white tusks to dig. “I wonder if what they’re eating we can eat,” Hannah said.
“We can eat them,” Ted said. “Forget a bunch of bushes.”
That’s what the animals were digging for, low-growing bushes. They uprooted them wit
h their trunks and ate them whole, leaf, stem and root. A couple of the mammoths piled up a few bushes first and then took a break from digging, eating several bushes at once. None of the nearby beasts pilfered those. They were all intent on their own tasks.
The baby, finally giving up on getting to the mother’s milk, picked up a bush she pushed its way and tossed it up in the air. It shoved it into its mouth, chewed for a minute, and spit it back out, a bit worse for wear.
“We need to go for them,” Ted said.
“With only three of us?”
“We could take the baby,” Ted said. “It’s small.”
“You’d look good hanging off the end of one of those tusks,” Dixie said.
Ted shot her a look.
“Let’s all try and get along here,” Hannah said. “But Ted, yeah, that mother isn’t going to let you waltz in there and snatch her baby. She’ll gore you. Stomp on you. Pitch you a hundred yards away without hardly pausing for breath.”
“Squeeze you to death with her trunk,” Dixie offered.
“Possibly that too.”
Ted said, “Aren’t you hungry?”
“Starving,” Dixie said.
“Everyone is,” Hannah assured him. “Dixie more than most, perhaps, because she’s eating for two.”
His shoulders hunched at the words.
Hannah said, “We need the whole hunting party. Every able-bodied person.”
“I’m able-bodied.”
“No one more so,” she said. “You’re our best hunter. But look at them, Ted. There are three dozen. Each adult must weigh over five tons.”
“At least,” Dixie said. “Even the babies might weigh a ton.”
“If they accidentally brushed you, it’d be like being sideswiped by a Honda,” Hannah said.
“At least let’s get closer,” Ted said. “Maybe we’ll see something that will help in the hunt.”
“I can see fine from back here,” Dixie said.
“Look, there’s a patch of rocks over there, closer to them. Let’s get down there and spy on them.”
“What if they see us and come over to investigate?” Hannah said. “Even a friendly investigation might be deadly.”
“We’ll be careful,” he said. “You can both run, right?”
“Not very fast in the snow,” Hannah said.
“Then I’ll go alone.”
Hannah debated with herself, but it was a short debate. If Ted was out of her reach, she feared he’d do something terribly reckless. Maybe with her by his side, she could talk him out of any stupid plan.
Or tackle him if he acted on it.
“Okay,” she said. “Dixie, I’d rather you stay back here.”
“Alone?”
“Not as if there are any predators around,” Ted said.
“Or you can come,” Hannah said. “Whichever you want.”
“I’m not afraid,” Dixie said, but her tone was uncertain.
“Whichever you’d rather,” Hannah said.
Ted stood and was a dozen yards down the slope before Dixie answered. “Go, I guess.”
“Let’s catch up to him, then. Make sure he doesn’t pull some crazy stunt.”
“I can hear you,” Ted said without turning.
“Good,” Hannah said. “And curve off to your left. Don’t make it look like we’re going straight for them.”
“They aren’t even watching us,” he said, but he did shift his path to the left.
The terrain flattened out as they approached the pile of rocks. The rocks were nearly black and jagged. The darkness of them meant snow melted from them sooner than from the surrounding ground. If she had to guess, Hannah would say they were volcanic, basalt or something like that. They didn’t match the rocks visible on the hills, so they had possibly been brought down from up north by a glacier. The biggest one was as tall as she. Three boulders together formed a rough triangle with a space in between. Ted slipped in there and watched the mammoths over the top of the tallest rock.
Hannah slid in beside him. There was enough of a space between the rocks to function as a spyhole, so she nudged Ted aside and squatted down and looked too. Dixie climbed up the rock behind Hannah, the lowest of the three rocks, and sat.
“Can you see them from there?” Hannah asked her.
“Only the tops of the big ones. I’m comfortable here.”
The mammoths seemed to have taken no notice of the humans’ movements. They continued to graze, digging under the snow with their tusks, tearing plants from the ground and eating them. They moved slowly, one drifting forward a pace, then the next. Since Hannah had first seen them, they’d traveled no more than fifty yards, scouring the land clean of their preferred food.
One of the bigger mammoths pulled up a log, old-looking, and tossed it aside without undue effort. The log, shedding bark, flew the length of a suburban house and hit the ground with an impact Hannah felt through the soles of her boots.
“That one needs to enter the caber toss,” Ted said.
Hannah kept silent, not wanting to draw the mammoths’ eyes toward the humans. And she let her mental clock wind down. Ted had about a fifteen-minute fuse before he became impatient with a task like this.
She wasn’t surprised when he beat her countdown by a few minutes. “Let’s get closer.”
“No,” Hannah said, keeping her voice soft. “Let’s not.”
“They don’t see us.”
“And I’d like to keep it that way.”
“How are we going to hunt them without approaching them? Laina’s good with that spear-throwing thing, but she’s not that good. We’re too far away.”
“They have young. It’s—” she had nearly said “stupid” but stopped herself in time “—not wise to threaten an animal with young to protect.”
“I’m not going to threaten them. I’ll leave my spear here, if you want. But we need to know how close we can get before they react. How else can we plan a hunt?”
Hannah didn’t have a quick answer to that. Maybe Laina or Claire would have an idea when they saw the herd. She was so overwhelmed by the size and number of them, she couldn’t imagine a scenario where the humans managed to bring one down.
“I don’t want to get trampled,” Dixie said. “I vote we stay right here. Or leave and go meet back up with the others.”
“You guys stay here,” Ted said, reaching for the top of the rock. “I’m the fastest runner anyway.”
“You’re not faster than them,” Hannah said, tugging at him to bring him back down. He was levering himself up and over the top of the rock. Unfortunately, she grabbed hold of the cape he wore, and it untied and slithered back into her arms.
Ted heaved himself up and jumped down.
Hannah cursed and climbed out the other direction, past Dixie.
“You’re going too?” Dixie said.
“Only to drag him back.”
“Good luck with that,” Dixie said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just watch.”
“Definitely. Stay safe. Crawl in here if something goes wrong, and hunker down. They might miss you.” Though an animal that could smell dormant bushes under two feet of new snow could probably smell everything. Hannah walked in Ted’s wake. Sprinting was hard in the snow, even with Ted’s passage having trampled some snow down. Ted, with his longer legs and additional strength, stayed ahead of her. She hissed at him.
He ignored her.
“Ted, stop. That’s far enough.”
“We’re still beyond spear range. Gotta see how they’ll react, if we can get that close.”
“I’d prefer you survive the day.”
“Go back if you want.”
She did want. She wanted to a whole, whole lot. Ahead, the mammoths were still browsing. Ted was 500 yards from them when one looked up at him. It seemed to think him no threat, and it lowered its head. “Ted, they see you. Please.”
“Yeah, but they aren’t doing anything about it.”
Enough. “Stop. Right now.” She s
topped, closer to the animals than she wished to be. She didn’t want to put herself into any more danger.
He didn’t stop or turn around. “Claire’s in charge. Not you.”
“Claire would say the same thing were she here. Maybe we can….” She had no idea how to finish that sentence.
“What? I’ll turn around when they act nervous.”
“We’ll do it at night. Trail them and get them at night somehow. Maybe they have lousy night vision. Come back, please. At least let’s discuss it first.”
But he kept moving. Now two of the mammoths had stopped eating and were staring right at him.
Hannah could’ve sworn one made eye contact with her. She nearly shrugged, a “what can I do about it?” shrug. There was intelligence in those eyes, but not that much. It wouldn’t know a human shrug from a jet airplane passing.
One of the largest mammoths took a step toward Ted, who stopped and sat in the snow.
“Get up and move,” she said. “Make for cover.” She was backing up as she spoke, keeping her eye on the mammoths. A number of them were still eating, but about half had stopped to look up. And about half of that group was looking restless, moving from foot to foot. As Hannah backed off, their attention switched to Ted. “Get back here,” Hannah said again, in her no-nonsense tone.
The words were barely out of her mouth when one of the mammoths charged. Ted was up in a flash, but the beast was speeding up with every pounding footfall. She felt them through her boot soles. Ted ran back toward the cover of the rocks. Hannah had a split second to decide, and she opted to run perpendicular to him, back up the hill. She could imagine two positive outcomes to this. Possibility one, it would split off for her, and Ted might live. Possibility two, it’d go for Ted, and she’d survive.
When she glanced back, she saw that two other mammoths were on the move. She wasn’t sure there was a third possibility where they both lived. Possibility four, we both die.
She was running upslope, aiming for the line of their own tracks. The snow made it impossible to get up any speed, but if she could hit the track they’d made coming down here, she could go faster. Glancing around, she saw this wasn’t true for the mammoths. Three were on the move, and they were gaining speed just fine, their tree-trunk legs not impeded at all by a foot and a half of snow. They were closing the distance to Ted. If they caught him at the rocks, Dixie was right there too. Hannah screamed, “Dixie, run!”
