Bonesetter (32 page)

Pell suggested that they take turns staying awake during the night to tend Panute and they worked out a rotation,
changing
each time that a piece of firewood as thick as an arm burned through.
Pell sat with Panute the last watch before dawn, by which time she seemed fairly calm again.
Pell looked about for Ginja and was saddened to realize that she wasn’t there.
She hadn’t returned after running off into the forest the day before.
She had been gone for several days at a time on occasions in the past, but none of those times had involved a large influx of people.
He sat, worrying about her and realizing with some surprise that he had truly come to count on her companionship.

When the sun rose, Panute awakened as well, this time clear in the head, though she still looked drawn and weak.
When Gia wakened, they changed the poultice again.
Pell was dismayed that Panute’s hand remained swollen and, to himself
,
he thought with chagrin to that amputating her fingers had been for naught.
He was wondering whether to try to hide the bad news from Panute, when Gia exclaimed, “Pell, look!”
She was pointing to Panute’s arm up in the region of the elbow.
Pell could not imagine why, Then Gia said, “The redness
in her
arm
is less
!”

Pell couldn’t remember to what point the redness had extended the day before, but if Gia said it had gone above the elbow then he felt elated that it no longer did.
“Great!” Then he looked back at her hand and saw with dismay that more pus was leaking out.

Gia saw him staring at the pus.
“Oh, and look, more of the evil humors are leaking out!
I saw them coming out yesterday after you cut off her fingers.
Krill, in our tribe, once became very sick with a wound gone foul.
It had swelled and he seemed on the verge of dying, but then it burst open, letting out evil humors like those.
He soon got better.
In my talks with other healers many
speak
of people getting better when the evil
humors leak out of their bodies.” She looked at Pell musingly,
“B
ut I have not heard of someone bold enough to think of cutting people open to let the humors out!”

Panute had been staring at the pus with revulsion, but she took heart from Gia’s words and smiled for the first time since Pell had met her the day before.
A weak
and tremulous
smile, but Pell took tremendous heart from it.

Soon the rest of the group was up and they began eating leftover stew and grain.
Gia ground some of the grain between two rocks making a paste with some fat and water, which she cooked on hot rocks pulled out of the fire.
The little cakes were something new to Pell and he thought they were wonderful.
The group sat about talking pleasantly for a bit but then, to Pell’s dismay, Manute proposed that the four men go hunting in hopes of getting bigger game
than
rabbit.
Pell wanted to say that he had enough smoked rabbit to feed everyone without a hunt but didn’t want to reveal their hidden stores.
He had no good reason not to hunt, except
for
his fear that the newcomers would find out how clumsy he was with a spear.
To Pell’s consternation, Tando thought a hunt sounded like a great idea.
Listening to him talk about past hunts, Pell realized that Tando
really
enjoyed the process of going out with other men on a hunt.
Tando fetched a couple of the spears he had stored near the opening of the cave for fighting off attacks and gave them to Manute and Deltin as gifts.
Then he got out a pair for Pell and himself.
Pell protested weakly that he should stay with Panute but Agan grumpily said that watching Panute was one of the few tasks that an old woman with bad knees could do.
A task she could do while the men hunted and Donte and Gia went out gathering.
Soon the four men and Falin set out on their hunt.
Falin
carried
a sharpened wood spear that Deltin had quickly cut to his size from one of the shafts Tando had
had
stored away.

To Pell’s immense relief, the hunt was not the disaster he envisioned.
As Pell expected, Tando led them away from the area where their
snares
had been set the day before.
Instead, they went into the mature forest that lay down river from the ravine.
Scouting carefully beneath the canopy, they saw little in the way of game.
They had a hard time closing on the little game that they did see, because the crunchy autumn leaves on the ground made it difficult to walk quietly.
Eventually they saw some deer in a small meadow.
The clear area of the meadow was walled in at the edges pretty solidly where sunshine had promoted growth of the underbrush.
However, it had a narrow area on the upwind end where a big gap in the underbrush opened into the open lower layers of the forest. Tando spared Pell the embarrassment he had feared, by asking if he would work his way through the forest to the downwind end, then drive the deer toward the upwind opening.
The other three men and the boy would hide
near
the deer’s obvious exit point from the meadow.
Pell’s tensions eased.
Most hunters would be hurt to be asked to drive rather than participating in the actual kill.
Therefore, usually the youngest hunters would be the drivers.
Falin was a little
too
young though.
In any case, Pell was grateful that he would not be called upon to cast his spear in front of the others.

While the other four very slowly made their way into position at the upwind opening, Pell took his time, working far around the clearing.
He knew that he wasn’t as quiet as other hunters but by staying wide of the clearing he managed to be perceived as a minimal threat
by the deer
. Pell’s scent spooked the deer before he stepped into the wide end of the clearing though.
Then he began striding noisily uphill towards them. Looking frequently back at Pell, they moved up the clearing into the narrow opening.
The deer focused on Pell and didn’t notice the other hunters.
Then Tando leapt out from behind
a
tree where he had stood motionlessly in the shadow.
He plunged his spear into the unlucky
deer
that had passed
close to his tree
. Unhurt by the cast spears of Deltin, Manute and Falin, the other deer bounded away, but the one Tando had struck only made it a few hundred yards.
It probably would have led them on quite a chase but a large wolf suddenly brought it down.
Pell’s heart leapt, Ginja was back!

Laughing, Tando restrained Deltin from charging the wolf with his spear to reclaim their kill.
“Stop! Deltin stop, that’s Pell’s wolf,” he chuckled, grasping Deltin’s spear arm.
Deltin looked on with amazement when the wolf lifted its head up from the neck of the deer it had just brought down.
Not to snarl, but to nuzzle Pell’s hand.

Carrying the gutted deer suspended on a pole back to camp, their spirits rose as they bantered.
The successful hunt seemed an extraordinary omen to the two men from the shattered tribe and Tando had obviously enjoyed
hunting
immensely.
When Manute and Deltin took their turn carrying the deer Tando slowed his walk so that they pulled ahead of himself and Pell.
“That was great fun, eh?”

Pell, though he had only been the hunt’s driver, nonetheless exulted in relief at having been spared the embarrassment he had so feared.
“Yes!
And a great omen for them too, I agree.”

“I think that you should invite them to join your tribe.”

Pell was startled.
“My tribe?
It doesn’t seem
to me
like
we’re
really a tribe, but if the three of us make a tribe, it should be
your
tribe.
You’re the biggest, the strongest
and
the best hunter.
Anyhow, why would
they
join
us
?”

“Why would they join
us
?!
Think Pell!
They’re homeless, hurt and they’ve lost any winter stores that their tribe had set aside.
The question should be, ‘Why would you let them join us?’
You’re the one who has great quantities of food stored for the winter.
You, more than anyone else in this land, have no fear of starving this winter.
The only adversity that you face is the need for a few more hunters to help fight off attacks by other tribes.
I know you don’t really need them to help us with hunting, but you know I still worry about how we’ll defend ourselves.
That big snare you set up outside the cave
amazes
me—and it might help, but only if attackers place themselves right over it.
Anyway, I think that you have
more than
enough smoked meat to feed all of us,
and
the six of them
, through the winter.
I believe that it would be worth sharing our stores for the extra hands at defense.
Besides with a few more successful deer hunts smoked away, even the six of us wouldn’t be hungry.”

They walked in silence a little ways,
and then
Pell spoke, “I guess you’re right.
We should invite them to join us but I just can’t think of myself as the leader of our tribe.
If one of them disagreed with me, I could never enforce my decisions. Roley
can
tell anyone to do anything without an argument because
he’s so strong
.
I don’t even think of the things that a leader should, like whether
Agan’s tribe
should, or would, join us.
I know that you’re grateful for the fact that I set your wrist, but, ‘my tribe?’ no, that’s just not right!”

“You were here first.
You saved my arm and therefore my life, so I owe you my allegiance.
The spirits told you of the snares that have provided us with such a profusion of game and the smoking that preserves it for us.
You’re the ‘Bonesetter’ after all.
But, I could be the leader if you want.
Even as the ‘leader,’ I’d do as you say.”

“Well, I suppose… that’d be OK.
When will you ask them to join us?”

“Soon.”

They caught up with the others and took a turn carrying the deer.
Tando asked the other two what they planned to do after Panute was better.
The matter of fact way Tando assumed that Panute would, in fact, recover again astonished Pell.
However, if the others thought his assumption surprising, they made no comment on it.
As they tried to respond to Tando’s question, it became apparent that they had no real plans worked out as yet.
They had both been assuming that they would return to the area of their previous cave, or to the area where they had traditionally wintered.
Their winter location
was
a smaller, more closed in cave in a small valley off the big river.
They said that, even in winter, some small game could usually be found in the little valley
beside it
.
Although they did not say as much, it was obvious that the two were worried about how they would survive the coming winter after the loss of the stores of grain and roots that they had put by in the past summer.

In his mind’s eye Pell pictured Panute surviving her illness, only to die in the winter due to her weakened state.
He realized that in a similar situation, Roley would already have declared Agan and Panute ginja.
Knowing that the tribe could not possibly survive the winter while trying to support them, he would have cast them out immediately so that they would not diminish what few stores the tribe could still put by for winter.
Roley certainly wouldn’t have spent time and energy traveling somewhere in an attempt to heal someone in Panute’s poor condition.
Pell realized with dismay that he himself considered such a decision, the very same abhorrent decision that he despised Roley for making, to be better than risking the entire tribe’s lives in what was sure to be a difficult winter even for the healthy
members
.
He wondered if Gia’s tribe did not cast people out, or whether they
would
declare the two sickly ones ginja, but only when the spirit of death already
looked
the
entire
tribe in the face?

Tando looked over at the two of them as they walked alongside.
“Who leads your tribe now?”