“He can walk on it now if he wants?!”
“Well not now!”
“When then?”
“I’m not sure. When he thinks he can. When it feels OK. When it doesn’t hurt.”
“You don’t seem to be sure of anything! What kind of ‘Bonesetter’ are you?”
Pell felt a flush rising on his neck, “Well, no, I’m not sure. And I’ve told you that I don’t consider myself to be a ‘Bonesetter.’ Just someone who has a trick for putting bones back in place when they’re deformed.” He considered just inventing answers to her questions. However, memories of his own disgust when he had felt that Pont had just made up responses to queries rose to silence him.
Gia left, muttering, “’Just a trick for reducing bones.’ Huh! Well what is a ‘Bonesetter’ then?”
Despite Gia’s apparent dissatisfaction with Pell’s answers, she stopped Pell the next day. She laid a bundle of assorted medicines out before him. “Bonesetter, I have medicines for a cough, medicines for pain, medicines for a fever, poultices for redness and heat—what will you take in payment for Falin’s treatment?”
Pell’s ears grew warm. As before, the “Bonesetter” appellation felt splendid but undeserved. He considered the different medicines she had arrayed before him. “I’d rather that you taught me how to make the powerful pain medicine that allowed me to set Falin’s leg without his being in agony.”
“No! It’s much too dangerous! Even I nearly killed Falin by giving him too much. Besides, when you use the correct amount they do feel some of the pain.”
“Well, I know that it was too much. Teach me the mixture and I’ll just use less.”
“How can you say that? You have to give more to big people and less to little children. I misjudged Falin’s size, not the dose of the medicine.” Her voice took on a musing tone. “Even if you judge the size correctly, sometimes the medicine seems to be much more powerful than other times. Even when prepared in the same way and given to the same person.” Then she looked up sharply. “It has poppy seeds in it—harvested on different days, they have different potency! In any case it is very easy to misjudge, as I did, and much too dangerous for someone inexperienced with medicines, such as yourself.”
“But, it made the bonesetting so much less painful for Falin. If, in the future, I am called upon to set more bones, it would be such a kindness to give them some of your medicine, even if I use much too small a dose.”
Gia looked at Pell curiously. “Well maybe you’re right, but the magic in this pain reliever is too strong for you to make by yourself.” She had said this much with a sly tone. She shook herself and with a more open look said, “Besides, my grandmother would kill me if I gave away her secret! However, I will make quite a bit for you, perhaps enough for five or six more ‘bonesettings’, and leave it. If you need more you can trade with me for it in the future.”
Pell agreed at the thought of meeting her again someday. She set about making it up. He was chagrined when she appeared later with several mixtures for him and set about giving him careful directions for them. Some parts had to be ground, then steeped. Others steeped without grinding. The liquid from one mixture was combined with the dregs of another and words must be said at each step! Finally, there were careful instructions for dosing children and varying sizes of adults. At first, Pell thought that he could never remember it all. Astonishment came over him when he considered that this was but a portion of one of many recipes that she must carry in her head. Despite his feeling of hopelessness, she, having had to learn recipes herself, knew the trick of it. She drilled him over and over with questions and repetitions until she was sure he had learned the recipe and would not forget it.
Gia and her brothers began packing to leave. Pell walked up behind Gia and Manute as they were making a bundle. As he slowed, admiring Gia’s legs as she bent over the bundle he came to overhear Manute. “Gia, I just don’t understand their luck hunting. Almost every time they go hunting, they return with game! Usually, quite a bit of game! The few times they’ve let me go with them we’ve been no luckier than any other time I’ve been hunting. Tando strikes me as a very good hunter but Pell isn’t a very good throw. Yet even when Pell goes hunting alone he comes home laden.”
“Well they must be good if they always get game! Maybe you just scare it away ‘clumsyfoot’.”
“No, I thought of that. In our own tribe I’m considered very stealthy but I thought that perhaps they were even better. So, I’ve listened carefully. They are just as noisy on the trails as I am, in fact Pell is really noisy. They always lead the way though, and there are some areas where they don’t want to hunt. When I tried to get Tando to go down one of the trails, he said it was inhabited by spirits.”
“Well, maybe they’ve just been keeping you away from their best hunting areas?”
“Maybe…” Manute sounded doubtful though.
Pell cleared his throat and they quickly glanced around. “I brought you some of our special ‘spirit blessed’ meat for your trip back.”
They looked embarrassed, but thanked him and packed it away.
The next morning they headed out with Falin perched on Manute’s shoulders. Taking their leave, they were effusive in their thanks. Over and over, they expressed their amazement over Pell’s correction of Falin’s deformity and their gratitude that he would again walk. Falin touched all of their hearts when he tried to thank Pell as well, bursting into tears instead. They declared their readiness to help Pell’s small tribe of three at any time they were needed.
Pell thanked Gia again for the doses of her powerful pain reliever. He had thought that he was becoming comfortable around her, especially while she was teaching him about the medicine. Nonetheless, in thanking her he found himself stammering once again.
After they departed, Pell spent days in a depressed funk, rebuffing any attempts at conversation by Tando or Donte. He couldn’t admit to himself that his dejection had to do with Gia’s absence, nonetheless, all of his thoughts revolved about her. He should have kept Falin here longer. He thought of many witty conversational interludes that he “should have had” with Gia. Abstractedly, he even contemplated becoming “ill” which would necessitate that he travel to seek out her care.
Chapter Five
Several evenings later Tando again brought up his fear that another tribe might attack them that winter in order to steal their stores of smoked meat. “The Aldans would do it for sure if they knew that we had it. I’ve been thinking that they may have talked to other people at the trading place after we left. They may know about our ‘spirit meat’ and, worse yet, might think that we have a lot of it if they know we were using it for trade. Later this winter when times become hungry, Denit could push Roley into killing us even for a small quantity of spirit meat! We need to protect ourselves.”
“Maybe we should move farther away,” suggested Donte.
“No!” Pell surprised even himself with his emphatic veto of this idea. Dismay had flashed over him at the prospect of moving to a location. Gia might not be able to find him! Though Manute and Gia had left directions to their home cave when they departed, Pell remained none too sure that he could remember them or follow them correctly. He also feared that he would never get up the courage to go to her area without a good excuse, such as an illness. But daily he fantasized about her returning with another injured tribesman for Pell to treat. These thoughts remained, however, unuttered.
Aloud he said, “We’ve worked too hard to fix up the cave here! Besides, imagine how hard it would be for the three of us to move all the stuff we have in this cave to a location far enough away that Roley and Denit couldn’t find us. And, if anyone else comes with an injury for me to reduce, we wouldn’t have the cold spring water to deaden the pain.”
Donte grinned at him, and then turned to Tando. “I think he’s just worried that he wouldn’t see Gia again,” she said, as if she had been peering directly into Pell’s inner spirit.
Pell flushed brigh
tly. “I am not!”
Tando was also smiling broadly. He teased in a singsong voice, “Pell’s in love. Pell’s in love with Gia. Such a fine couple.”
“No! Anyway she certainly doesn’t want me!” Pell hung his head and scuffed a toe in the dirt.
“I’m sure she does, an amazing ‘Bonesetter’ like you? Women are crazy about men with ‘powers.’”
Pell retreated with his head spinning. He went to sit outside with Ginja in the moonlight, saying that he wanted to think about Tando’s concerns. Instead, his thoughts kept returning to Gia. Why didn’t I ask if the three of us could join Gia’s tribe? Will I ever see her again? Do I love her? Is that what these feelings are? Could she love me? Would she... possibly even... mate with me? When he returned to the cave Tando and Donte were still arguing about the possibility of being raided. Donte still argued for a move while Tando had decided that they should strengthen their ability to fight.
“I don’t see how we can make ourselves strong enough to protect ourselves from the Aldans. They’re too many. They would surely kill us all if they come after us, no matter how many spears we had prepared,” Pell put in.
“We might be able to defend ourselves if we had a few more hunters and narrowed the mouth of the cave. Two men with spears can defend a cave with a narrow mouth. I’ve heard that the Brekko tribe defended a small mouthed cave for four days with just five hunters.”
“But one wall of our ‘cave’ is made of wood! All Roley would have to do is set in on fire and it’d be destroyed in no time.”
“We know it’s made of wood but Roley doesn’t. We could put more mud on it so it’d look like the mountainside. Part of it already does. Besides with enough mud it will be almost impossible to burn.”
“Well, that might help, but we’d still have the problem of needing more men to defend the opening,” Donte put in.
“One thing at a time Donte,” Tando said. “I’m just pointing out that this place could be defended. Anywhere we go we might have the same problem of others wanting to raid us. It doesn’t have to be the Aldans. Some other tribe might try to take our meat. But, you’re right, we do need more hunters. We should have tried to recruit Manute to become part of our tribe.”
Pell was aghast, “Manute wouldn’t come to our tribe without his sister!”
Donte and Tando laughed. Donte said, “He probably wouldn’t come with out his Granny or his little brother either. Aren’t you worried about them?”
“Well… yeah.” Pell looked down sheepishly but his heart was lifted by the simple contemplation of Gia’s presence in his own tribe. “But, I think she is from a very strong tribe. I’m sure the four of them wouldn’t leave their tribe to join ours.”
Donte smiled at her son’s transparent obsession with the girl but decided not to tease him about it any further. “Well maybe we’ll run into some one else who’ll join us. In the meantime what else could we do here to protect ourselves … since you two are too lazy to move?”
Tando said, “Well, as I said before, first we should start making ourselves more weapons. I could put more of those spear points we got at the trading place on to good shafts. In fact, I probably should put them all on shafts and place them about the cave. If we’re using them for defense we may need them all at once, instead of one at a time like we do for hunting.”
Pell considered this with some dismay. He didn’t think he’d do very well in a fight with spears. On the other hand, if he did get in a fight with someone wielding a spear, he’d certainly do better if he had one himself. He remembered his father’s advice, “in our line we’re not good hunters, but we are good tool makers.” Should he be trying to devise a “tool” for protection then? But, how could he protect them with tools? A thought struck. “Maybe we could rig up some kind of ‘snares’ to trap people who were attacking us.”
Tando looked at him with some surprise. “If it worked, that’d be great, but a man isn’t fool enough to stick his head in a noose. Even if he did, the snare would only trap one hunter, and, he would soon get himself free from the noose. Or, the other hunters would let him loose soon enough.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
Donte said, “Well even if you guys won’t move, we should at least move some of our stores to another location where they would be safe. Then, even if they chase us out of our cave, all we have to do is get away from them. After we escape, we’d have a place we can go where we’ll have some food and equipment.”
Tando and Pell looked at each other, then at Donte with astonishment. “That’s a great idea, maybe a couple of different locations even!”
They fell to talking about possible locations and what to store in them. The discussions went late into the evening, laying out numerous plans for the next few days.
The next morning erupted with activity. It reminded Pell of the days when they had worked hard all day, every day, trying to build up their home and winter stores. Tando began cutting poles and assembling spears while Donte and Pell loaded up their packs with smoked meat, roots and other stored foods as well as two of the three spears that were already available. Pell and his mother started hiking out to a site that was at the end of one of their trapping runs. The late summer day was heavy with heat and that, in combination with the ponderous packs they were carrying, broke them out in a copious sweat. Fortunately, at midday a welcome breeze skirled about to make it tolerable. When they reached the site that they had discussed the night before, it was much as Pell had remembered it. A large slab of rock had fallen from the side of a cliff and was leaning up against it, leaving a kind of tunnel underneath. It wasn’t really big enough to make a satisfactory long-term living site but it did provide a good, if cramped, little shelter. With some difficulty, Pell climbed up underneath the slab and explored a fairly large crevice between the slab and the cliff wall. It bore little spoor to indicate animal visits, but that wasn’t surprising as it was relatively inaccessible and absolutely nothing was growing up there. He dropped a rope to Donte. While she was wrapping their supplies and tying them to the rope, he rearranged some shale in the crevice to make a small flat area. Then he pulled up the bundles of leather wrapped supplies and placed them in the crack. He covered them with some strong smelling bitter leaves and more of the loose shale. Finally, he added some lion scat that they had gathered on their trip. He hoped the scat would both disguise the smell of the smoked meat and discourage smaller predators. They built a campfire so that they could put its ashes up there as well. While the fire burned down, they spent a couple of hours piling rocks in one end of the little tunnel underneath the slab to close it off into a one-ended “cave.” Before they left Donte climbed up to look at the storage site. Donte’s sensitive nose declared the medley of herbs, scat and charcoal, “horrid.” She did think that the cache would be relatively safe from predators; nonetheless, she suggested stuffing some thorny brambles into the crevice above their cache as well.
On the way back, they gathered some grain in a small meadow and found some apples that they hadn’t seen before. They talked about ideas for creating other cache sites. Pell was excited because he envisioned using sites such as the one they had just set up to extend their trapping range. They could make two-day trips staying at the cache shelters. On the other hand, the bounty of the land was so plentiful in the summer that it was hardly necessary now that they had learned to trap. Perhaps such a system could help in the dearth of winter though?
Over the next week, they stored food and equipment at two more sites, investing enough effort at each to make them into minimally livable campsites or, as they had begun calling them, “escape sites.” These two sites both had small cavities in the rock walls of ravines. The cavities were too small to use as living sites, but they stored the food in them and then were able to close off the small openings with piled rocks. Donte had them crush soft limestone into a powder and dust it all about the rock closures and over the floors of the cavities. She said this would help keep ants and insects out.
>
They revisited the first site to make sure that animals hadn’t disturbed it and to take more supplies out to it for storage. Animals hadn’t gotten into it but the grain wasn’t staying as dry as they liked, packed into the tight crevice. They moved the stores down into the small cave they had created by blocking one end of the tunnel, set it up so that air could move about the grain, then walled up the other end of the cave. Before walling it off, they covered the stored meat with some dirt in hopes of obscuring its scent more thoroughly.
Pell was surprised to find that he could reach higher than Tando when they were piling the rocks for the closure. To his astonishment, he realized that he had grown to be even taller than Tando! He remembered his fight with Denit when he had suddenly recognized that he had outgrown his erstwhile tormentor. He had realized then that this was apparently his year to grow, but he had not really grasped what the unrestricted diet provided by his trapping had been doing to his teenage growth spurt. Whereas most members of the Aldans and other tribes he had known were somewhat stunted by chronic hunger during their youth, he was reaching the full potential of the height prescribed in his genes.
As they dug up supplies from their primary cave to move them out, Pell was astonished at the sheer volume of smoked meat that they had already preserved. They also had a great deal more grain and tubers than he had realized. The Aldans, like other hunter-gatherers had spent only a few hours per day procuring food during the summer plenty. When they had had little ability to store it except in their own layers of fat, what was the point? They had spent long hours searching for food during the winter dearth, though to little benefit. For the Cold Springs three, their new ability to store food and their fear of starvation in winter had led to their working long hours in the summer for the first time in their lives. Working long hours during the abundant times of summer, in combination with the rate that they were able to snare the abundant small wildlife, had led to a cornucopia such as they had never before experienced or expected. Because small game was difficult to hunt, the Aldans had mostly hunted large game in big hunting groups. Pell had never really recognized just how much small game was actually available in this bountiful land.
Bonesetter Page 17
