Bonesetter 3 -summer- (Bonesetter series)

by Laurence Dahners

  Manute looked around as they came out of the trees into another clearing, “There they are,” he said, seeing Pell, Woday and Gia crouching over something on the right side of the clearing. It’s a boar! he thought with some excitement about all the food the animal represented. They all turned that direction.

  As they approached Sandro whispered unbelievingly, “Great Spirit, that woman’s… beautiful!”

  Manute had heard people say things like that about Gia many times, but it always made him uncomfortable, “Careful what you say, she’s my sister.”

  Sandro glanced at Manute, then, seeing the serious look on Manute’s face, lifted his hands, palms forward, “No offense, I assure you. I’m only admiring her.” Firming his expression, “We’re here to see the bonesetter.” He turned forward and walked directly to Woday, “Bonesetter, I’m Sandro.” He turned to gesture at Jomay, who held his arm out, “My cousin broke his elbow and we’ve walked four hard days to find you.” Evidently noticing the disturbed look on Woday’s face, he hesitantly said, “Would you be willing to treat him?” Looking anxious, he knelt and dropped his traveling pack to the ground. Starting to unwrap it, he nervously said, “We’ve brought payment. Some fine flint spear points. Some salt from the sea people. Some beads…”

  Sandro’d been sounding more and more desperate at Woday’s lack of response, so Manute interrupted him by stepping forward and putting a hand on his shoulder as he knelt. Sandro turned worried eyes up at him and Manute said, “You’re speaking to the apprentice. The younger one’s the bonesetter.”

  Sandro blinked up at Manute once, then twice. He turned to stare at Pell, then turned again to stare up at Manute. He leaned closer and whispered, “That one’s practically a boy!”

  Manute shrugged, “Still… he’s the Bonesetter. He’s who you came here to see.”

  Sandro’s head turned back toward Pell who was slowly standing up. Pell’s eye was focused on Jomay’s elbow.

  Manute saw Sandro’s eyes widen as Pell rose from his squat next to the boar. And rose and rose. After all, when the Bonesetter reached his full height, everyone else seemed short.

  Pell stepped to Jomay, “May I look at your elbow?”

  Also looking up at Pell with wide eyes, Jomay nodded.

  Pell knelt next to Jomay and gently touched his elbow.

  Jomay stepped away and shouted, “Don’t poke it! Fix it!”

  Pell looked Jomay in the eye and said, “I have to understand what’s wrong with it to have any idea what might be done.” He shrugged, “I’ve never tried to treat an elbow before so I…”

  A look of horror on his face, Jomay stepped away even further, “Never treated an elbow!” He turned to Sandro, “We walked four hard days to see a bonesetter who’s never even treated an elbow?!”

  Sandro sighed, “We walked four days to see a man who they say actually gets bones back in place!” He waved at Jomay’s elbow and said, “You remember just how successful our own medicine man was don’t you?”

  “At least he’s treated elbows before!”

  Sandro shook his head slowly, “I don’t think he has, he just didn’t admit it like this bo… man. Valla’s only tried to put two bones back in place during all the years I can remember.” Sandro shrugged, “He didn’t succeed either time. You know Danra with the crippled finger? Valla tried to straighten Danra’s finger. Everyone knows how well that turned out.”

  Pell had stepped back when Jomay first barked at him. Now he said quietly, “I don’t know if I can put your elbow back in place. I have a trick I can try if you like, but it might not work.”

  Jomay turned to stare wide eyed at Sandro.

  Manute gave a little laugh, “He always says it might not work. So far it always has. The people he treats are as good as new.”

  Pell turned to Manute, apparently appalled by this claim, “They are not! Falin still limps a little, Panute’s leg turns out to the side and it’s a finger short. Her fingers are gone for spirit’s sake!”

  Looking a little exasperated, Manute turned to Jomay, “Falin would’ve been crippled forever. Panute would’ve been dead. They may not be perfect, but they’re so much better than they would’ve been. It’d be crazy to worry about the few things that aren’t quite right.” He waved dismissively at Jomay’s arm. If you don’t let him fix your arm, it’s going to be completely useless to you.”

  Looking aghast, Pell said, “Don’t say that, he might…”

  Jomay waved a weary hand, “He’d just as well say it; it’s true.” Tremblingly he held his arm out, “Do whatever you have to.”

  Pell didn’t try to touch him again, just looked at it from every angle. “Can you move it?”

  “No,” Jomay said disgustedly.

  “Not at all?”

  Jomay shrugged his good shoulder and wiggled the elbow a tiny bit, “Only that much. It hurts, and it’s useless.”

  “How did it happen?”

  Jomay drew back, “Why does that matter? It’s broken. Just fix it!”

  “To be able to put it back, I have to undo what happened to it. Understanding what happened tells me how to undo it.”

  “I was wrestling,” Jomay said slowly. “The other man landed on the back of my elbow when we went to the ground.”

  “Ah,” Pell said, as if that’d been important, though Manute couldn’t imagine why it would be. Manute noticed Pell was feeling his own elbow as he knelt to stare at the back of Jomay’s. Pell reached out and gently touched the back of Jomay’s elbow again.

  Jomay said plaintively, “Please, do what you’re going to do and get it over with.”

  “Oh!” Pell said, drawing back as if surprised. “No. Not until we give you some medicine to keep it from hurting so much.” He turned to Gia, “Can you take him back to the cave and start giving him some of your special recipe?”

  Gia nodded, “But I don’t want to give him much until you’re there.”

  Pell said, “Okay.”

  Jomay looked relieved.

  Gia and the two men had turned toward the cave when Sandro stopped. He said, “How’d that pig die?”

  Pell looked down at it, “Spears.”

  “You attacked it with spears? Just the three of you?!”

  Pell grinned at him but only nodded.

  Sandro looked around, “Wait, you don’t even have any spears.”

  Pell pointed to one side. There were a few of the long slender throwing spears lying next to the pig. Sandro evidently just hadn’t noticed them.

  Sandro frowned, “You attacked a boar with little spears like that?!" He lifted his three spears, “Maybe instead of paying you with flint or salt, I could teach you how to make a spear like one of these.” Then his eye caught on the heavy spear Manute’d been carrying, “Wait… you guys obviously know how to make a real spear. Why are you using those skinny little things?” He shook his head, “One of those could easily break and leave you defenseless in the face of an angry boar!”

  Pell laughed, “We’ll show you how the little ones work later. For now, you need to go with Gia.”

  As Gia started to lead the two men away, Sandro stopped and crouched, shifting his spears to be ready to defend them. “Wolf!” he said, indicating a massive wolf at the edge of the clearing. His eyes widened when he realized the others were laughing.

  Manute said, “Don’t worry, that’s Pell’s wolf, Ginja.” He turned to Pell, “Call her over here so they won’t have to worry.”

  Pell called, “Ginja,” and held up the pig’s tail.

  Manute enjoyed watching the expression on Sandro and Jomay’s faces as the massive wolf rose from where she’d been lying in the shade and trotted over to Pell. She took the tail and trotted back over to lie down in the shade and gnaw on it.

  As Gia led the astonished newcomers back toward the cave, Manute turned to Pell, “Why aren’t you and Woday going with them?”

  “There’s nothing for us to do right now. We’ll cut up the pig and carry it back.”

 
; “I can start on that,” Manute said. “When you get back to the cave you can send some people down here to help me.”

  Pell shook his head, “Really, there’s nothing for us to do until Gia’s given him medicine. Since I’m supposed to be teaching Woday, I thought I’d use this pig to show him what I think’s wrong with Jomay’s elbow.”

  “What?!” Manute said in consternation. “How can you use a pig to show him what’s wrong with a man’s elbow?!”

  Pell shrugged, “Whenever I get a chance with the animals we eat, I look at their bones. Even when I’m gnawing meat off the bones after a roast, I’m studying them and trying to understand how they fit together. That way I learn how we’re put together.”

  Manute stared, “We’re not put together like pigs!”

  Pell shrugged, “You may be right. I’ve never cut up a person, so I don’t know for sure how we’re put together. But all the animals I’ve cut up are all built about the same.”

  Manute looked down at the pig a moment, “Pigs don’t even have elbows!”

  Pell squatted down next to that animal and picked up its forelimb. He pointed up to where the limb joined the body and said, “There’s a joint under here that moves like the shoulder.” Lifting and moving the limb around he pointed out how it had similar motions to a human shoulder, though they were much more limited in their scope. Pell moved on to the first visible joint of the limb after it left the body, showing how that one moved like a hinge. He said “This joint acts like an elbow.” Next he picked up the second joint outside the body and further down the limb. Pell wiggled it and said, “This one’s something like a wrist.”

  Pulling out a sharp flake of flint, Pell started cutting away the skin and flesh around the joint he’d claimed was an elbow, pointing to this and that and discussing them as if Woday grasped what he was saying. From the glazed look in Woday’s eye, Manute didn’t think the apprentice was following Pell’s explanation very well.

  After cutting away some of the flesh on the front of the pig’s elbow, Pell gripped at the shoulder and wrist with his hands, then pushed on the back of the elbow with his knee. As he did so, he said, “Jomay said this was what happened to him, the other guy landed on the back of his elbow.” There was a disgusting ripping sound and the elbow suddenly shifted.

  Manute stared at it. A large bony lump poked out of the back of the pig’s elbow just like Jomay’s!

  How did… how did he know how to do that?!

  Pell tested the motion of the joint, and just like Jomay’s, the motion was now quite limited, though the joint was lying in a more bent position than Jomay’s elbow.

  Pell started talking to Woday about what he thought had happened, though Manute wasn’t following what the bonesetter was saying. Then Pell told Woday to pull on the limb—which Manute knew was what most medicine men did to straighten broken limbs.

  Woday gave it a tug, but Pell shook his head, “Pull as hard as you can. It’s really hard to get bones to go back in place.”

  Shortly Pell had Woday standing with one foot braced on the pig’s body. Both hands were wrapped around the pig’s wrist. Woday was pulling so hard Manute thought the forelimb might come right off the pig. Yet, when Woday let go, the bone was still out of place.

  Then Pell and Woday knelt over the elbow while Pell pointed at different things with his knife, saying something about a bony protuberance catching in a bone cavity and preventing the bones from coming back out to length no matter how hard Woday pulled. Then he said, “Now let’s try redoing what happened to it in order to undo it. While you’re pulling on the wrist, I’ll push on the back of the elbow.”

  Woday started pulling again. Once it looked like he was pulling pretty hard, Pell pushed on the back of the elbow, bending the limb the wrong way from how it normally bent. There was a sudden clunk. Pell bent the elbow back the direction it was supposed to be and said, “Okay, you can stop pulling.”

  Woday relaxed. Both he and Manute stared. The pig’s elbow looked like it was back the way it had been. Pell moved it, showing them that it moved freely again. He said, “So, you bend it further in the direction it was being bent when it went out of place. Then you pull. This trick seems to let the bones go back into place, but you still have to pull hard.” He pulled out his knife. He started cutting away even more of the flesh, saying, “Let’s see if I’m right, that this is a joint out of place, not a broken bone.”

  In a few hundred heartbeats Pell had almost everything cut away from the bones and they could all see he was right. The bone wasn’t broken. It was the joint that’d slipped out of place.

  Pell said, “I think Jomay’s elbow’s dislocated, not broken.” He pushed the pig’s elbow from the back again and the bones slipped back out of place. He pointed, “See how, when the elbow’s dislocated, the point on this bone catches in the hole on that one…”

  Pell kept talking to Woday about stuff that Manute really didn’t understand. He wondered if Woday was actually following most of what Pell said, or just nodding because he was embarrassed to admit he couldn’t comprehend it…

  Pell and Woday stayed with Manute until they had the pig cut up. Several times Manute suggested that they should head on back to take care of the man’s elbow, sending someone else to help him carry the pig back to the cave. Pell kept reminding Manute just how long it took his sister to prepare her medicines.

  ***

  They arrived back at the cave, Manute and Woday each carrying two legs. Pell carried the pig’s entire torso over one shoulder and the pig’s head wrapped in its skin over the other shoulder. Manute’d tried to share the burden around more equitably, but Pell had already picked them up and claimed they weren’t all that heavy! When Pell laid his burden down on the ledge in front of the cave he called out, loudly enough that everyone would hear, saying, “Gia, we’ve got your kill. Shall we leave it out here on the ledge?”

  There were several people on the ledge working on projects. Upon seeing the men carrying all that meat, they’d already started grinning excitedly and coming over to look at it. They expected a portion of the pig would roast for a feast that evening.

  But hearing Pell attribute the kill to Gia rocked them back on their heels.

  More people filed out of the cave, to stare at the carcass. Manute saw Sandro, looking a little wide-eyed. Sandro turned to Boro and said quietly, “Did he say Gia killed that boar?!”

  Boro only nodded, a look of astonishment on his face as well.

  “Gia? The medicine girl, that Gia?!”

  Boro nodded again. Manute saw that most of the people in the Cold Springs tribe had picked up on the conversation. Despite the fact that they were probably all surprised themselves, they’d turned amused gazes on Sandro.

  Sandro’s eyes were focused on the throwing spears strapped across Woday’s back. Sandro said, “How in the world could a girl like Gia kill a big boar like that using such dainty little spears?! She’s lucky she didn’t get killed!”

  Now Boro, obviously comprehending what had happened, turned to look at Sandro with a broad smile. “Oh, you have to see those little spears at work.” He looked at Pell, “Is it okay if I show him?”

  Pell said, “Sure. Is Gia in the cave making up her medicines and that’s why she didn’t answer me?”

  Boro nodded, then turned to Sandro, “Just a minute, I’ve got to go get my stick so I can show you.” He ducked back into the cave. Pell hopped up on the ledge on his way in to talk to Gia.

  Manute considered going in with Pell to watch his sister and grandmother making their medicines. That was always interesting. However he thought he’d really enjoy seeing the look on Sandro’s face when Boro demonstrated the throwing stick.

  So, he stayed outside.

  When Boro came back out carrying two throwing spears with fire hardened points, Manute expected him to take Sandro up the ravine to where everyone usually practiced. Instead, Boro jumped down off the ledge and took a few steps away from it.

  Boro said, “We t
hrow these spears.” He waved out across the meadow, saying to Sandro, “I’ll try to hit that bush out there.”

  Manute laughed to himself. He was pretty sure Boro was trying to throw Sandro off by using the fact that Sandro would naturally focus on the closer bush about eight strides away. After all, that was a long throw for the heavy kind of spears Sandro was carrying. Also, while he had Sandro’s eyes focused on the bush, Boro loaded the spear on his throwing stick. Sandro had just started to turn and look back at Boro, when Boro stepped forward and whipped the spear out at the bush he’d actually been pointing at, about three times further away than the one Sandro’d been looking at.

  The spear shot past the first bush and actually flew just over the far bush. “Spirits! I missed!” Boro said, obviously a little embarrassed, though it really was a pretty good shot at such a distance. Even worse, the spear skipped once, then flipped end over end into the stream. Everyone laughed as Boro ran after it, hoping to rescue the hard work he’d put into making the spear before it floated down to the big river.

  Manute jumped down off of the ledge and walked over to where Sandro was standing, still staring after the spear. Manute doubted Sandro had ever seen anyone throw a spear as far as the stream even if it did have to skip a couple of times on the way there. He said, “Even though Boro missed, I imagine you can see why it’s relatively safe hunting boar with that kind of spear, eh?”

  Sandro turned to gape in consternation at Manute, “How did he throw it that far? He doesn’t look particularly strong.”

  “No, he was pretty sick at the beginning of winter. He’s just now starting to get some muscle back on him.” Manute winked, “Gia’s probably about as strong as he is.” When Sandro continued staring at him uncomprehendingly, Manute pulled his throwing stick out of his belt, holding it up and saying, “Boro tricked you. He threw it with one of these.”

  Sandro stared at the stick in confusion, so Manute picked up the other practice spear Boro’d brought out of the cave and said, “It works like this.” He hooked the back end of the practice spear into the cup on the end of the throwing stick, then cocked his arm back ready to throw.