Bonesetter (18 page)

That night Pell and Donte ate roast piglet with baked roots and fresh berries that Donte had found.
Tando lay dully, staring at the ceiling and ignoring their attempts to entice him with food.

The next several days Pell ran his traplines in the morning and went gathering with Donte in the afternoon.
The traplines continued to produce their bounty of several small animals per day.
Donte delightedly exclaimed over the success of his “hunts”, day after day after day.
Pell struck the corpse of each of his “kills” with a rock to make it seem that he had killed it with his “newly found” throwing talent.
Kills chewed on by scavengers prior to his retrieving them were given to Ginja if their condition was too bad or were dismembered before being carried in if
they were
salvageable.
The majority of the meat they smoked for winter.
Donte spent her mornings
making
the skins into leathers and furs, stitching some skins into rough clothing, stuffing “fingers” of intestines with smoked meat
and fat
and weaving baskets for grain storage.
Tando continued to mourn listlessly, eating little and contributing nothing to their efforts.

Pell and Donte finally discussed whether they should consider declaring Tando “ginja” and throwing him out of their little tribe of three. He awoke two mornings later and declared that he was hungry.
Pell was surprised to find that they willingly fed him a huge breakfast a few days after debating the need to “cast him out.”
It was, nonetheless, good to see Tando up and moving around.
After the meal he proclaimed himself ready to go along on Pell’s morning hunt.

This shook Pell!
He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t considered this problem before.
How would he be considered a “great hunter” if Tando, or
anyone
for that matter
, came along and watched him hunt?

They set out into a muggy summer morning miasma, as steam seemed to rise from the lush summer vegetation. The day promised a scorching afternoon after the thin clouds burned away.
Ginja followed the duo cautiously at first but after a bit she began to lead as she usually did when Pell was alone.
Tando asked how Pell was able to sneak up on
any
prey, commenting not only on the noise Pell was making as he walked but also on the fact that, with the wolf out in front, it surely would have flushed any prey before Pell got to it.
Pell dithered about in his own mind, wondering how to respond to Tando’s questions.
He suddenly realized that he needed to follow a different route than he had the previous day in order to
stay away
from his traps. Tando would surely notice them.
He decided to head west but before he could call the wolf and head that way she bounded ahead with a little yip… directly to the site of the first trap he had laid the day before!
A raccoon scurried away from the site of the trap. When they arrived, Ginja stood guard beside a slightly chewed squirrel.
The squirrel hung by a thong noose from a branch Pell had propped against a tree.
Pell had noticed that squirrels often used sticks and branches that had fallen against the trunks of trees as paths to run down to the ground.
Pell had taken to suspending his nooses just over these “squirrel paths.”
When that proved successful, he stooped to propping branches against trunks to make more “squirrel paths.”

Pell tried to block Tando’s view of the trapped squirrel in hopes of cutting it down and claiming that Ginja had merely driven away the raccoon who was its rightful owner.
However, Tando stepped in quickly to examine the squirrel and the thong excitedly.
“Pell!
You made this little thong noose didn’t you?
I’ve seen one of them dangling out of your pouch.
But how did the squirrel get caught in it?
Wait… Is that what the thongs are for?!
Is this how you hunt?
You catch animals in these things, don’t you?”

Pell stared down at his feet shamefacedly and muttered, “Yes.”

“That’s incredible!
How does it work?!
Show me!!
I’ve
never
seen anything like this!
Can I do it too?
Must you have the spirit power to set one up?”

Pell slowly looked up.
Tando wasn’t making fun of him!
In fact, Tando was so excited he was practically dancing a jig.
He
didn’t seem to think that Pell was a
hunting
failure because he used snares.
Though, Pell thought to himself, if Tando ever saw him throw, his dismal accuracy would still be a source of ridicule.
Nonetheless, at present an awed Tando evidently thought the snares to be further evidence of Pell’s “amazing powers.”

Pell, worried that Tando would again begin demanding the revivification of Tellgif, tried to dispel his awe. He attempted to explain the snares as the simple tools that they were.

“Of course you could do it Tando.
There’s nothing magical about it.
You know that rabbit I brought in to the tribe at the end of winter?”

“Yes?”

“Well I didn’t actually kill it with a throw.
I missed and saw it go into its burrow.
So I sat by the burrow for a while hoping it would come out so that I could hit it with a club.
It didn’t come out, but while I was sitting there waiting I thought to put a noose about the burrow entrance in hopes that the noose would slow the rabbit down enough to give me a better chance to hit it.
Then I left to check out a place where some vultures were circling. I wasn’t even there when the rabbit came out.
But if the noose is placed right, most of the time when animals run into it, it pulls tight around their neck.
The animals struggle like they’ve been speared and the noose gets tighter and tighter until it chokes them.
So I just go out every day and suspend nooses over
the
paths and trails where animals run.”

Tando sat down, still staring in amazement at the squirrel dangling in the noose.
“This is unbelievable!
Why didn’t I think of this?”

“It was just luck.
If that rabbit hadn’t gone into a hole I could see, right when I had a thong with a noose tied in it, I wouldn’t have thought of it either.”

“No! Pell
! Y
ou have a
gift
for seeing these kinds of things.
You should thank the spirits for such an extraordinary talent.”

Pell
absentmindedly
rubbed the thong with some manure to erase the smell of death and human, thinking that it would be difficult to explain such a strange practice to Tando.
On the contrary, Tando immediately grasped the idea, again thinking that Pell was ingenious.
“You do that so that the animals can’t smell you on your snare right?”

Pell shrugged, “Yes.”

They moved to a different location and Pell showed Tando how to set the snare back up.
They made the rounds of the rest of Pell’s traps.
Tando constantly questioned Pell about the snares, “Why put one here?
 
How big should the loop be?
Why do you drape grass or leaves over them?” The queries seemed endless but Pell found that they focused his own thoughts about the snares and together he and Pell thought of several other places to deploy them.
The two “hunters” arrived back in camp with a groundhog whose burrow entrance Pell had snared, a rabbit and two more squirrels.
A fairly good haul, and one which had Tando agog.
He burbled steadily about the possibilities opened up by the snares.
When they got back to cave and encountered Donte, Tando launched excitedly into a description of the snares, their fabulous haul and Pell’s brilliance.
Pell found the surfeit of praise embarrassing, yet he wished that the whole
Aldans
tribe
could be there to hear this praise heaped on their erstwhile “ginja.”

Donte, at first slow to understand, gradually became excited.
Then she grasped that the rabbit, the one she had found during Pell’s absence with a thong about its neck, had been trapped purposely rather than accidentally.
“Pell, why didn’t you explain it to me before, when I showed you the thong that my rabbit had been trapped in?”

“I
thought
that you
might
think it
was
a dis
honorable way to hunt.”

Donte and Tando gaped at Pell, absolutely astounded that he would not be proud of his ingenuity
.

Donte had questions of her own. “Why do the animals go into the snares?”

“Well, by accident, I think.
I set the snares on paths where they run.
Like the branches that the squirrels like to run on.
Small rabbit paths in the brambles and underbrush.
Around the entrance to their burrows when I find a burrow.
I suspend the bottom of the loop where I think the animal using that path will strike it with its chest.
The top of the loop is higher.
I think the animals expect to
push
aside the bottom of the loop like a twig and don’t expect it to drop about their neck and tighten.
When they begin to fight it, it tightens further.
It works best with the squirrels because they fall off the branch and their weight finishes tightening the noose. Then they hang high enough off the ground
so
that
most
of the predators can’t reach them.”

“Why don’t the animals see that you put something in their path and go around it?”

“I don’t know, but I guess it’s because it doesn’t look dangerous and they’re moving pretty fast.
Besides, I think many animals count on smell to recognize danger and I smear the thongs with the dung of other plant eaters.
The dung smell covers my scent and so I don’t think that the snare smells dangerous to them anymore.”

That afternoon they all went gathering together, taking a new route that proved to be as bountiful of vegetable foods as the morning’s trap run had of animals.
In the evening they cooked up a feast from their profusion of fresh food.
They cut up the rabbit and squirrels into strips of meat, which they soaked in Pell’s skin full of salty water and then laid out back in the smoking nook.
The groundhog they spit on a couple of sticks and suspended over the fire turning it occasionally as it roasted to a crusty brown on the outside.
Donte baked some tubers in the coals at the edge of the fire.
They ate berries while they waited for everything to cook and talked excitedly of plans to make themselves self sufficient for winter.

Pell was gratified that the other two had gotten over their funk and was pleased to be planning for the winter that he had so long dreaded.
Wiping some berry juice from his chin he said, “You know the small area of the overhang that I walled off to make this “cave” for me is getting pretty tight for the three of us.
Especially so, now that we’re starting to accumulate
a lot of food
.
I think that we should spend some time making it larger.
There is a
lot
more space underneath the overhanging rock that we could wall in.”

“Great idea Pell,” said Donte
her eyebrows up
.
“I’ve been feeling crowded, and wondering where
we could
store more tubers and grains.
I hadn’t thought about just
making our cave
bigger
!
”

Donte, and even Pell, stiffened when Tando said, “Yeah Donte, why don’t you get started on it tomorrow?” As one, they turned on him but he had a big grin on his face.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, no more ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work,’ a tribe of three is ‘too small for that’.
I just wanted to see the expression on your faces!” Pell and Donte laughed with Tando, Pell secretly grateful that Tando could make a joke.
They agreed that each of them should start cutting and collecting poles for the enlargement when they had spare time.

Tando put some more wood on the fire and turned the roasting groundhog.
While poking at t
he fire he told the other two,
“I’ve been worrying that the smell of the smoked meat, even though we bury it, might attract scavengers like hyenas or even some of the big cats that roam the area.
Maybe one of us should stay nearby to stoke the fire all the time?
I don’t mean right in the cave.
That would be a waste when we could be out trying to gather or hunt, but maybe each day one of us shouldn’t travel too far.
Then that person could come back and build up the fire a couple of times so that the fire would keep the animals away.”