by Lou Cadle
He nodded, and Hannah turned back to help wrestle Zach back inside the igloo. Again, her eyes took a moment to adjust to the lighting.
Jodi had pulled Zach back to his spot. “His shirt is damp. From sweat, I guess.”
“Go ahead and leave it off then. Just get him comfortable like that. I’m going to get a rag.” She had taken the wrap off Zach’s wrist after his plunge into the lake and dried it. It was back in her pack, ready to be used as a bandage again. It’d work fine as a towel too. She stuck her head out and asked someone to please toss her the pack, and then she returned to Zach’s side.
“I’m so worried,” Jodi said.
“Of course you are. But let’s try to help him. Worrying won’t do that.” She couldn’t take the advice herself, and she doubted Jodi would be able to either.
Nari came in a couple minutes later with the bowl of ice and bandage. “Rex is still banging away at the lake ice.”
“Thanks. This is good to start.” Hannah said to Jodi, “Let’s try to get him awake and sitting up.” Jodi patted him dry, and then Hannah dumped the rag into the bowl, knowing the warmth inside the igloo would begin to melt the ice soon. If he could suck on a piece when he was awake, Jodi could bathe his face and chest with cool water. Every fraction of a degree they could lower his fever might help, might be the difference between brain damage and no harm done.
Without a thermometer to test him, she had no idea how close he was to that point. All she could do was try and get his temperature—whatever it was—down.
Another fifteen minutes and Nari left to get the steeping tea. Hannah helped Jodi brace Zach against her chest, and she shook him until his eyes opened. “Where? What?” he said.
“In the igloo, in an ice age,” Hannah said. “And you’re sick. We’re about to give you bark tea to help bring down your fever.”
“Jodi?” he said, looking around.
“I’m right here, behind you.” She planted a kiss on the crown of his head.
Hannah gave him the bottle of light brown tea Nari had brought, keeping a hand on it so he wouldn’t drop it. He fumbled with it but finally got a good grip, and he brought it to his mouth. He seemed unsure of what to do then, so Hannah gently tipped up the bottom of the bottle, saying, “Here it comes. Swallow.”
A bit dribbled out of the sides of his mouth, but then he remembered what to do and drank. He let the bottle droop, and Hannah kept hold of it. “Take a couple breaths, and do it again. It’s medicine and you have to drink it all.”
“Not bitter,” he said.
“No, it’s not. And it’s good for you. So keep drinking.” He looked at her with one eye. The other eye looked somewhere else. She was about to panic at that but then remembered he wore glasses, and it could be that without them he had a lazy eye. “Zach, close this eye for me,” she said, bringing a finger close to the eye that was drifting.
When it was the only eye he was using, it focused, and in a second he was looking at her again. “You’re blurry.”
“Your glasses are off,” she said.
“Where are they? My dad will kill me if I lose another pair.”
Hannah wasn’t sure whether to be reassured by the full sentence, or worried that he didn’t yet remember where he was. “He won’t. He’ll just be glad to see you.”
“He doesn’t like me much,” he said.
“Who wouldn’t like you?” said Jodi. “If he doesn’t, he’s an idiot.”
“Drink up,” Hannah said, helping him again with keeping the bottle steady.
He drank more this time, leaving only an inch in the bottle. “I’m tired,” he said.
“Just one more sip, and you’re done for now,” Hannah said.
He sighed, put-upon, but he also drank the rest of the tea.
“Okay, you can lie down again,” Hannah said.
Jodi eased him down. He went out again, his eyes both closed. Hannah felt his neck and face. He seemed marginally cooler. “Let’s give the tea ten or fifteen minutes to start working and see where we are,” Hannah said. “You okay in here alone for a minute?”
Jodi nodded, her eyes not leaving Zach’s face.
“Nari, you stay here, please, and let me know if you need me,” Hannah said, knowing that if something bad happened—if Zach grew seriously ill—that she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. She had a terrible image of him having a seizure from the fever and her standing by helplessly. She crawled back outside with the empty bottle.
The world was too bright. She realized she’d dropped her sunglasses somewhere, and asked everybody to look around. Bob found them by the fire. “Here they are.”
She grabbed them and sat next to Bob.
“How is he?” Claire said.
“I’ll know more in a half-hour. We might have to bring him back out in the snow a few times to keep the fever down.”
“I guess there’s no hunting today.”
“Jodi probably won’t leave him, and I shouldn’t,” Hannah said, “but the rest of you can go.”
Claire looked torn. Hannah was glad it wasn’t her decision. Her own responsibility was clear. She needed to stay here and do what she could for Zach.
“We’ll stay,” Claire said, then she raised her voice so everyone heard her. “I want everybody either gathering fuel or fishing or finding a new place to pound a hole in the lake ice. We can drop the net in that second place and see if we can catch anything. Everybody stay roped together, and keep yourself from dropping through the ice, whatever you do. Everybody else needs to stay healthy for tomorrow’s hunt.”
Hannah said, “It’ll be hard to stay healthy with no food. I’d like to get Zach to eat something, in particular. Nari, too—she’s rebuilding muscle. And Bob, who might be losing heart muscle for all we know.”
“I know we need to eat,” Claire said, angry. “I know that!” She stomped away.
“I didn’t mean it as criticism,” Hannah called after her.
Bob said, “She’s stressed out. No food, and Zach, and whatever Ted was telling her didn’t please her very much.”
“I wonder what he told her.”
“Well, you were there, weren’t you?”
“I was, but he and I might tell a different version of the story.”
“What happened?”
“We found an antelope, or something much like that, killed it, and ate a bit of raw meat as we butchered it. And then we lost it to a meaner predator than us.”
“What?”
“Smilodon.”
“Really? I envy you seeing one.”
“Oh, no you don’t. You really want to hold that experience to drawings in the museum.”
“Tell me about it,” Bob said.
Hannah described the animal the best she could. “Scared me so much I couldn’t think. I ran away, even when I knew I should be protecting the others if I could.” She shook her head. “Not that I could’ve.”
“Maybe we’re hardwired for that. Ever had that thought? Humans like us lived in times not too different from this. The dire wolf and saber tooth tiger and mastodon—that’s part of our heritage. Bison and deer too. Maybe we have stronger instincts about them than about something like the hell pig.”
“I don’t know about that. I just know I about crapped myself in fear.”
“But you all made it back.”
“We did, but we lost the meat. It would have fed us for several days too. We were wondering how we’d pull all that weight with us, trying to figure it out when the tiger came, and it no longer mattered.”
“I’m glad none of you was hurt.”
“Me too,” was all she said. Until she asked Ted exactly what he had said to Claire, she wouldn’t be complaining about his behavior to anyone else. He felt ganged up on already, from what he’d said to her this morning, and she didn’t want to add to that feeling. Damn, she hadn’t checked his abdomen for where the antelope butted him. It had been driven clean out of her mind. She’d do it in another few minutes, if he let h
er.
Bob said, “Maybe you can find another deer. Where there’s one, there must be more.”
“It took us most of the day to reach it. And we found no other tracks but the one set.”
“We might catch fish today.”
“That’d be wonderful. I could stand some hot fish stew.”
Bob changed out rocks in the bowl for hotter ones, using the same strips of willow bark. Probably a good idea. She didn’t have a lot left, and they should try to get all the drug value out of each strip that they could.
For the next hour, she worked at bringing Zach’s temperature down. Jodi was a trouper about it, though she was obviously terrified about him the whole time. Nari was a quiet supportive presence, and Rex helped when she called him over to help haul Zach out of the igloo a second time. After that, enough ice water had melted—with the aid of a warm rock from the fire—that she set Jodi to bathing his face, arms, and chest with cold water instead. They woke him for a second dose of tea, and after that Hannah thought she could feel a drop in his temperature.
“I think he’s less restless,” Jodi said.
“Good. Maybe he’ll get some solid sleep, and that’ll help him mend too. We need to get him up in a few hours to pour more tea into him. But until then, let him rest.”
“Can I stay with him?”
“Of course. Someone needs to, and I can’t think of anyone better,” Hannah said to her.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. I like him too. Everybody does. He’s a nice guy.”
“He’s not weak.” She managed to sound both defiant and make it a question.
“No, he’s not. Don’t worry about that. It was the fever talking.”
Hannah left, exhausted, but unwilling to spend the rest of the day doing nothing. She looked at what everyone else was doing, asked herself where her energy would best be used, and decided to gather some more fuel. She returned to the fire with an armload.
Bob fingered the hide they’d brought. “This is the antelope, eh?” he said.
“What’s left of it.”
“There’s a little bit of fat on it. And one tiny chunk of meat.”
“There is? I guess that makes sense. We didn’t have time to scrape it really well before we were interrupted.”
“I was thinking of scraping it and making soup with what I manage to get off. It won’t be much, but there’s one wilted onion left too.”
“Better than nothing. And drinking something warm will feel good, especially something that tastes like meat, even if the calories are few.”
“Okay, I will then. Have a knife on you? Or scraper?”
She retrieved one of the scrapers from her backpack and handed it over. She’d allowed herself a long enough break, so she went around the camp to see if anyone else needed her help. Ted agreed to lift his shirt so she could look at his injury. He was bruised and tender to the touch, but he had been working all day around the camp and seemed okay.
Later in the day, over soup that was little more than warm salty water, they talked about their main trouble: food. Zach was on everyone’s mind, too, but food was the key to everyone’s survival, including his.
Claire stated their situation succinctly. “We’ve found almost nothing and we have nothing left from the last place. Not a nut, not a slimy onion, nothing at all.”
“We could boil up the hide and eat it,” Laina said.
“I have a different use for it in mind,” Claire said. “I’ve been thinking about it all day.”
“About what?”
“How to bring down a mammoth.”
Chapter 13
Claire said, “I’ve been racking my brain, trying to remember everything I ever read, and everything my father told me in passing, anything at all about hunting bigger game. I don’t know much, but maybe what I do know is enough.” She looked around at everyone. “There are seven of us healthy, which is about half of the minimum I’d like to try this with, but this is what we have to work with.”
She paused to upend her bowl of soup, scraping the last few drops into her mouth with her finger. She set it aside and said, “I think our best chance is to catch one of the mammoths away from the others. And the best chance of that is if one drifts to the side or behind the main group. After that, it’s a matter of keeping it in place, isolated, while the others are moving off, or of driving it farther away from the others if we can.”
Ted put his bowl aside. “So what’s the plan?”
“It depends a good deal on you. And on that hide you just brought back.”
“The hide?” Dixie said. “What good is that in a hunt?”
“It’s fresh, it’s big, and it still smells like the animal it came from. Ted’s going to wear it over his head and be the one to get closest to the herd.”
“We don’t know one will drift away like you want,” Hannah said. “They stuck close together when we saw them, at least until they started chasing us.”
“It has to happen eventually. One will find a patch to browse while the others are walking. One will go to investigate something. One will step in a hole and take thirty seconds to pull itself out. Surely even mammoths stumble sometimes.”
“It’s a good idea,” Bob said, “but it might take a few days before it happens.”
“Then it takes a few days,” Claire said. “We’re going to gear up and follow them. Two days, three days, however long it takes. We’ll trail along. And we’ll stay within visual range. I’m hoping they get used to us being there. As they do, Ted’ll move up on them, wearing the hide. And Nari, I want you to trade pants with him for the duration. He can take your leather pants and you can wear his.”
“I’ll have to let them out. Add a strip of hide to the outer seam, maybe, and lengthen them. But yes, I can do that quickly.”
“Make it tonight. So Ted gets close, acting like an antelope, trying to fool them into thinking that’s just what he is, another grazer following behind, taking advantage of the food they’ve dug up. A second group—the pair of Rex and Laina—comes up behind him, as close as the mammoths will allow, with ropes and the atlatl and almost all the spears. Either Rex can snarl the mammoth up in nets and ropes, or Laina can launch spears at it. Any launched spears that miss, Ted can grab and throw, or dart in and use up close. He seems to thrive on risk, so I’m letting him take the greater part of it.”
“And the rest of us?” Dixie said. “What will we do?”
“Whatever we need to. If it’s running in and finishing the mammoth off, or trying to drive the others away, or leading an aggressive defender off until the target mammoth is dead, then we do it. Until the moment comes, we stay flexible. That’s it. Not much of a plan, I know, but it’s the outline I came up with. Opinions?”
Ted said, “I’ll do my part.”
Rex said, “I need to think about the rope and….” He drifted off and got the look on his face that meant he’d be thinking and not listening for the next few minutes.
No one else was speaking, so Hannah did. “I think it’s as good an idea as we’re likely to come up with. But we’re running on next to no calories today, and we’ll be burning more as we hike, and it’ll probably be colder in whatever temporary shelters we build than in the igloo. So I don’t mean to make everyone more worried than you already are, but we’d better get this done within two or three days, or we won’t have the energy to get it done at all.”
“What will that mean for Zach and Bob?” Nari said.
“And you,” Hannah said.
Claire said, “You’ll be warmer in the igloo, and you’ll be able to conserve your energy. But yeah, if it takes us three days to do it and three days to come back, you’re going to be very hungry by the time we get here.”
“We might catch a fish or two,” Bob said. “I won’t stop trying.”
Hannah was worried about how the starvation would stress his heart. But what could she do about it? Nothing. Nothing except go on the hunt and not fail him.
&
nbsp; Dixie said, “I thought people could go three weeks without food. Didn’t we learn some formula in health class, like three minutes without air, and three days without water, and three weeks without food?”
“Depends,” Hannah said. “Three days without water in a desert would be far too long. Three weeks without food in an ice age, and when we’ve already burned away all our fat stores over the past few months? Also too long, I’m afraid.” It’d be hard on Dixie and the baby. Either her body would sacrifice her to keep the fetus fed, or it’d sacrifice the fetus to keep Dixie going.
“We three should be able to make it a week here,” Bob said. “Don’t worry about us. Don’t even spare us a thought while you’re out there. Focus on the business at hand. Keep yourselves safe, most of all.”
“I’m not sure that we’ll be able to do that,” Claire said. “Ted and to a lesser extent Rex and Laina will be putting themselves in harm’s way. I hate that. But I can’t think of how to avoid it, unless a rocket launcher pops through the timegate right now.”
They all involuntarily glanced at the spot where the timegate would appear in three weeks. But no, no rocket launcher or machine gun or convenient high-tech crossbow came falling out of midair on cue.
It was all up to them—them and their wits. And, the fates willing, a dose of luck. “I say we do it,” Hannah said.
“Sounds good to me,” Ted said. “Including my assignment.”
There were nods and murmurs of agreement all around. Claire said, “Rex?” Dixie, next to him, gently jostled him.
“Huh? What?” he said.
“Do you agree to it?”
“Sure. We don’t have a lot of choice. It’s known game. And if I could just….” He trailed off again, but this time he stood and went to the supply igloo and began pulling out gear, muttering to himself.
Hannah poured water into her bowl, drank it, and figured she’d gotten every calorie from the soup that she could. She scrubbed the bowl with snow while Claire finished speaking.
“Okay. So gear up tonight as much as you can, and have everything ready to go at dawn,” Claire said. “And if you come up with a good modification to the plan while we’re walking, don’t hesitate to mention it.”
