Bonesetter (28 page)

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 cavitie
s 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
.

They kept moving stores out.
After several more trips to stock the three escape sites, they
had
nearly cleaned out their stores in the Cold Springs cave.
However, Pell now judged that any
one
of the three sites could get them through the oncoming winter, even with minimal success at winter hunting or trapping.
Certainly, they would be hungry, but they would survive without much more difficulty than many of the winters he had spent with the Aldans.
Even more amazingly they all believed that, if they kept working at the pace that they had been, they could restock the primary cave before winter came.
They set about replenishing those stores, spending most of their effort restocking their grains and roots, which would become scarce towards winter before the hunting ran out.

Tando had
an idea about their storage
.
They had always buried their meat in the soft dirt at the back of the primary cave but as they dug it up they were left with a substantial pit.
He had them dig an even larger hole, which they roofed over with poles he had lashed together in a criss-cross pattern like the rafts some tribes used.
They put the bulk of their stores in the hole, stacking them with room to spare for air circulation to keep things dried out.
They left holes in the lid to provide the ventilation.
When they put the lid on, they covered it with dirt and began living on top of it so that the dirt packed down and the edges soon became invisible.
The ventilation holes were hidden under piles of other supplies.
Tando reasoned that without large visible stores of food, other tribes who might visit would be less likely to attack them.
They still kept stores above, both to utilize and to appear to be “what they had” if someone did try to rob them.

As the cool crisp days of autumn rolled around, they felt well prepared for winter.
They also felt that they could survive even if driven away from their primary cave, though they still worried about being driven away from the fruits of
the
hard work
they’d done to
the cave into a home.
Also there were the very real dangers of the fight that would have to occur to force them out.
Despite Tando’s original doubts, Pell thought more about his “man sized snare.”
He tried building large snares for animals as a way to test his ideas.
A loop of braided leather suspended across a deer trail with a little ivy wrapped around it for disguise had successfully snared the neck of a deer.
Pell had been watching the snare in hopes of learning something about how it
would
work.
The deer had walked into the loop, no doubt expecting the ivy to be easily pushed out of its way.
When the remainder of the loop had dropped onto its back, it had startled violently, then bolted, drawing the noose tight and throwing itself to the ground.
It had thrashed so violently that he thought it might have broken its own neck.
In any case, it died before Pell could get his spear into it.

Snaring a deer was pretty exciting, but as he thought about it Pell realized that Tando was right, he couldn’t count on a human not seeing
and understanding
the rope.
Even if their enemy didn’t see it, a man bolting to draw the noose tight on his own neck seemed unlikely.
Besides how could Pell set it up to trap only enemies?
When he arrived back in camp with the deer about his neck the excitement was huge.
At first Tando and Donte assumed that he must have speared it as
they hadn’t
made a snare that large before.
Learning that he had successfully made a snare so large created so much excitement in its own right that the implication of trapping a human never came up.
They all set to work harvesting and curing the large skin provided by the deer as well as its stomach that would make an excellent water bag.
Then there was the meat to slice and smoke.

Pell couldn’t stop thinking about his “man snare” though.
He worked for a while trying to set up a noose that drew itself tight.
He could make this work with a small noose by tying it to a springy branch that he had bent over.
When he released the branch with his finger inside the loop, the noose snapped painfully tight.
However, he couldn’t envision any branch that he would be able to bend, that would be strong enough to seriously injure another person with its noose.

Nonetheless he spent
one of his days
at the camp laying out nooses in front of the cave where he could imagine confronting a group come to rob them.
He found that he could bury the noose in the dirt so that it wasn’t visible.
He had Tando stand in the noose while he stood up on the cliff above and jerked up on the noose.
He easily trapped Tando in it, but could not figure a way to pull on the noose with sufficient force to seriously impede an entire group of attackers.
He hung the end of the rope over the base of a small tree while he was thinking about it.
Then he realized that if he pulled down on the end the noose would go up.
He tied two fairly big rocks to the end of the rope, propping them in place with a stick that could be jerked out from under them.
This worked, jerking the noose up into the air, though the two rocks weren’t heavy enough to accomplish much.
After thinking a while, he fashioned a net of cords into a pouch on the end of the rope.
He carried rock, after rock, after rock up to place them in the pouch.
The big bundle was braced with a limb held in place with a stick.
He set up a smaller rope to pull out the stick that was now holding the rocks in place.
The end of this small rope was tied off inside the cave where
the cave’s
defenders could work the trap by jerking hard on the end of
the rope
.
Pell desperately wanted to try it out and see what it did to someone trapped in the noose, but he couldn’t bear the thought of carrying all the rocks back up the cliff.

The leaves began turning and the mornings getting cold.
The snares still brought in a fair bounty of summer-fattened animals with which the three continued to build up their stores.
They worked hard on rooting now as the roots they found were large and juicy with a summer’s worth of storage.
These roots they stacked up in the “visible” area but Donte brought in so many that they dug their “hidden cellar” a little bigger, putting more roots and some more of their smoked meat down there.
Pell was pleased to see that the vents were keeping things in the cellar dry.
So far, there seemed to be little or no spoilage.

One morning Pell, returning from checking the snares, discovered a small group of people ahead of him on the path back to the cave.
He slowed to follow furtively. He realized they were a pretty bedraggled looking group, six in all, with two of the group riding pig-a-back on two of the others.
Of the two walking, one was a boy with a limp and the other a young man.
He was startled to realize that one of the carriers was a young woman.
He couldn’t understand why she was carrying someone when the young man wasn’t but then they stopped for a rest and the young man helped relieve her of her burden.
When she straightened, Pell’s heart leapt!
It was Gia!
With that, he recognized the young man as Manute and the limping boy as Falin.
Pell quickened his stride calling out, “Gia, Manute, What
’s
happened?”

They stood wearily, letting the rest of their burdens slide to the ground as he came up.
He stopped a few paces away, holding Ginja by the ruff.
She was growling and bristling as if she had never seen them before.
A quick glance showed Pell that Manute’s burden was their hag of a grandmother, Agan.
The other man of the party carried a woman with a deformed leg who looked quite ill.
Pell
em
braced Manute, nodded respect to Agan, and ruffled Falin’s hair.
To his dismay, he couldn’t muster the courage to greet Gia with anything more than a shy smile and a “Hello.”
Again, he queried, “What happened?”

Gia drew herself up to her full, though somewhat diminutive, height.
“Pell, this, as I believe you know, is my grandmother Agan.
Of course, you remember Falin and Manute.
These other two are my cousin Deltin and his mate Panute.”
Then she turned to Deltin and Panute.
“This is Pell, the Bonesetter that Manute and I have spoken of.
He controls the Wolf Spirit so you need not fear the wolf ‘Ginja’.
Panute, if anyone can help you, it is he.”

Surprised as always to hear someone speak so reverently of his skills, Pell’s eyes swept over Panute and fastened on her leg.
Though angled, it was twisted so that it turned inwardly between the knee and ankle.
The leg was swollen, but Panute looked much sicker than he would have expected from a broken leg.
She appeared fevered, leaning listlessly upon the tree against whose bole Deltin had propped her. Pell was puzzled a moment, then he looked at her hand, the pointer and long fingers of which were swollen and dark.
There was a fetid ooze emanating from the mid
portion of the long one.
The hand itself was bright red, with streaks of red running up the arm.
With dismay, he recognized that her fingers looked much like Kana’s finger did a few days before she died.