Dawn of Mammals (Book 5): Mammoth Read online

  “Stop,” Laina said. They all stood still, at about Laina’s spear-range of a hundred yards, and waited for the birds to settle down again and go back to their previous behavior. Laina gave it another few minutes and then said, “Very slowly.”

  They ambled toward the flock. One bird ran away from them, making it to the far side of the flock. Two others stopped feeding and watched the humans. Laina waved everyone to a stop, and they waited until the birds went back to feeding. The third time the humans moved in, closing to within forty yards of the flock, the birds had enough. One called out, and the whole bunch took off with a high-pitched two-note call.

  Hannah checked out where they’d been pecking. She dug a finger into the cold ground but found no hint of the food the birds had been hunting. If there were insects down there, they were too small for her to see and so too small to provide food for people. Maybe they’d been going for tiny seeds.

  “I can work with this,” Rex said. “Give me a day. I’ll come up with something.”

  “Let’s keep moving,” Laina said. “We have plenty of day left.”

  Three hours later, they had still found no sign of animals, not a single track. They sat and ate their meat and drank most of the water they had carried along in their packs. At least its proximity to her body had warmed it enough that it didn’t start her shivering, as water fresh from the lake did.

  Dixie said, “Claire might need to ice-fish to feed us.”

  Laina said, “Fishing is harder in cold weather. You don’t get many bites.”

  “Then what do we do for food?”

  “Find tracks or scat. I have traps with me if we do.”

  Hannah said, “We’re awfully far from the igloo.”

  “Less than a half-day’s walk. That’s still good enough for setting traps,” Laina said.

  “I’m hungry,” Dixie said.

  “Maybe the pregnancy is making you hungrier,” Hannah said. “Are you okay otherwise?”

  “Fine. My breasts are sore—sorry, Rex, TMI—but otherwise, I’m fine. I’m not sure why people make such a big deal of it.”

  “I think pregnancy is different for different people,” Hannah said.

  “I remember when my aunt was pregnant twenty years ago,” Laina said. “She was sick all day, every day. Right up until the sun went down, and then she could eat something.”

  Rex said, “It’s so weird to hear you talking about twenty years ago in your life.”

  “It’s hard to remember it, it was so long ago. I was thirteen.”

  “And I remember thirteen clearly,” Rex said.

  Laina’s eyebrows moved in a sort of comment on that, and Hannah realized that Laina hadn’t been making many facial expressions before. Her flat expression was part of what had made new-Laina different than old-Laina. That, eight inches of extra height, and sixteen extra years.

  What Hannah thought was that the quirk of the eyebrows just now meant that Laina was learning how to be a human among humans again. She’d fallen out of the habit. She was falling back in.

  If it had been Hannah who’d had that experience, she didn’t think she’d have psychologically survived the years of isolation. And if she had, she’d have gone mad as a hatter. And if she somehow might have avoided that result, she’d have run screaming from renewed contact with other humans. Maybe she was underestimating herself? No, she was certain she wouldn’t have survived Laina’s experience with Laina’s equanimity or adaptability.

  “Hannah?” Rex said.

  “What?”

  “I asked if your feet are as cold as mine.”

  “I drifted into thought, sorry. My feet, yeah, definitely cold. Are your boots still wet?”

  “Damp at the toes, maybe. They’re sure frozen-feeling.”

  “Take a boot off, and let me look at your toes to make sure you aren’t developing frostbite.”

  Laina said, “Hannah, your nose is white.”

  Hannah felt it. “And my fingers are cold if I don’t keep them pinned to my armpits.”

  Dixie said, “If I didn’t have this cape thing, I’d be frozen solid.”

  “It’ll feel better if we move again,” Laina said, standing up from the flat boulder they’d been sitting on.

  “Let me check Rex’s toes first,” Hannah said.

  He obediently stripped off his boots and socks.

  His toes didn’t show the same signs of frostnip her own would. He’d have to be pretty far along in frostbite before she could see it. “I forgot you’re black.”

  Rex laughed. “I’m not sure how you could forget that. I’m standing right in front of you every day.”

  She laughed too. “I mean, I am clueless as to how to diagnose the pinkness or whiteness of your toes when they aren’t pink in the first place. Mind if I touch them?”

  “Go on.”

  She cradled his toes in her hand. Colder than her hand. “You feel this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a good sign. Warm the toes with your hands for a minute or two, is all I know to tell you. You’re not in serious trouble though.” She looked around. “Anybody else?”

  “I’ll look at my own,” Dixie said. “What should I look for?” She was wearing Zach’s boots, which were a size too big for her.

  When she stripped off a boot, Hannah saw she’d rubbed blisters on her heel. “Those are going to hurt.”

  “They hurt already. What am I looking for?”

  “The signs that you have frostbite. The skin can be white, or gray, or blue. Dead to the touch.”

  “Numb, but not dead. Ow,” she said, as she touched the blister.

  “I’ll put some reed on that tonight,” Hannah said, thinking it’d be best if Dixie stayed off her feet while it healed, though they might not have that luxury. Maybe she could switch to moccasins tomorrow and give those blisters a rest.

  Dixie and Rex laced up their boots again and all of them moved on.

  Laina guided them in a wide circle back to camp. As the hours passed and they saw no sign of game at all, Hannah grew more concerned. The long hike and the cold combined to make her burn through the food they’d eaten in no time, and she was aware of her hunger as a sharp pain in her midsection. Soon, that’d turn to weakness—not just for her, for all of them. And then they’d really be in trouble.

  They had to find food, and soon.

  Chapter 5

  The other group had fared no better. Back at the igloo, Hannah checked everyone’s toes, fingers, noses, and ears for frostbite after they ate some cold dried fish.

  “But what can you do for it?” said Ted as she checked his feet.

  “Nothing,” she said, “except get us all warm.” She finished checking his hands and said to him, “Keep your hands in your pockets next time. Or under the cape.”

  “Then I can’t carry the spear.”

  “Rope it on you or something. I don’t think predators are going to be as much of a problem. What would they eat?”

  “Us,” he said.

  “If any of you get serious frostbite, there’s nothing I can do. It can turn gangrenous and then you’ll die. I can’t bear to lose another of you.”

  “Nor I,” Claire said. “From now on, no more daylong ventures on cold days. We’ll limit our time exposed and stay in the igloo most of the time.”

  Laina was directing a few of the others in building a better entrance into the igloo, a hallway or tunnel that would prevent gusts of wind from coming in. She said, “If we stay here for part of the day tomorrow, we can try to catch fish.”

  “Yes,” Claire said.

  Laina said, “And build a second igloo as a shelter for our gear.”

  “If there are no predators, that doesn’t matter,” Ted said.

  Laina said, “There are ice storms. Wind.”

  Claire said, “We may as well. It won’t take long.”

  Rex said, “We need to replace the tools I lost too.”

  Nari said, “We don’t need an axe. None of you saw a
tree, right?”

  Good point. Hannah checked Claire last. She seemed less frost-nipped than any of them. “You must have a good metabolism or circulation or something.”

  “Small favors, right?”

  “Might be quite a big favor in this climate.”

  Claire jammed her feet back into her boots and said, “Okay, everybody into the igloo. I know there’s daylight left, but we may as well all warm up.”

  It was already warmer in there than outside. Zach, Bob, and Nari had spent some time inside, and the building retained some of that warmth. Bob had molded something like a candleholder and stuck it to the wall. Into this he’d set one of the Altoids containers with pinesap in it, so they even had light.

  Laina said, “The night’s melt might put that out.”

  “That’s okay,” Bob said. “We’ll put it out before then anyway.”

  “My flashlight is charged, if anyone needs it.” Hannah had brought it inside with her. “Just wake me up if you need it.”

  “We could work a dental pick into the igloo walls to use as a hook for that,” Rex said, “so you don’t roll over and smash it during the night.”

  “Tomorrow,” Claire said.

  “Long list for tomorrow,” Dixie said.

  “And I have to make more mittens,” Nari said. “I want everybody to have some. Then we won’t have to worry about frostbitten fingers.”

  Zach and Jodi had been quiet most of the time, holding hands and sitting close. Every so often, Zach coughed, but it wasn’t as racking a cough as it had been. Hannah hoped he had worked out all the water from his lungs by now.

  She remembered to ask Ted about physical therapy for Nari, and they discussed that as a group. The new thinking, Ted said, was to push early for a person’s recovery. Might be painful, but in the long run it was better for people. Others who had the experience of a recent injury echoed him, and so they all came up with a stretching routine for Nari, and Ted insisted on weight-lifting too.

  “The big hides are heavy,” Bob said. “She could lift those.”

  “Sure, that’d work. Lift a small one, then two small ones, then a bigger one. As soon as it gets easy to do, increase the weight again. Let’s see, for your arm, you’ll want to do these.” And he began to demonstrate.

  Ducking his waving hand, Claire said, “Tomorrow, and outside please. There’s not enough space in here to do calisthenics.”

  To Hannah’s ear she sounded weary. Hannah was too, but Claire was younger and should have more energy. The burden of command, probably. Feeling responsible for feeding the group and not being able to—that was hard. Worry drained you. Hannah had enough of her own worry with thinking about the health of everyone. She had nearly forgotten about Rex’s hearing loss in the face of worse health issues. That and his grace in accepting it made it possible for her to push that to the back of her mind, but she wished she could have done something to help him. With the endless roll call of new patients and the potential for frostbite, Hannah was happy to leave the worrying over food and group dynamics problems to Claire.

  An hour later, it was clear that the fish had barely made a dent in her hunger. Her stomach was already demanding more.

  * * *

  The next day dawned long after Hannah had woken. She lay, listening to Zach cough sporadically, and sent out a long psychic message to game, inviting them closer. It wouldn’t work—she wasn’t at all new-age in her thinking—but that didn’t stop her from trying.

  Claire switched up the teams, and she assigned one to morning exploration and one to afternoon. She and Hannah were both with the afternoon team, and Hannah helped her with fishing in the morning. Or rather, Hannah helped by sitting on a grass mat on the ice, ten yards back from Claire, holding onto the rope tied around her waist in case she fell in. By the igloo, Rex was working with rope, and Nari, Bob, and Zach were making mittens for everyone. The people out hunting for game were all wearing the ones Nari had already made. Nari had selected hides of Laina’s with the longest fur, and the mittens were warm and comfortable. Everyone had tried them on and praised the sewing team.

  The cold from the ice seeped up through the grass mat. The breeze was picking up too, and Hannah soon began to have images of crawling into the igloo and burying herself beneath a mound of hides. Claire sat patiently, but she was having no luck. She had a few plant-based flies she’d made, and Hannah saw her changing her lure more than once. Nothing worked.

  As she waited, trying to be as patient as Claire, her mind wandered over the months of time travel. It dawned on her that she’d learned to roll with some awful punches. Could a person become used to death and danger? Was it permanently damaging to the human psyche? She wondered about all those thousands of generations of human beings, going so far back in time, living the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, trying to stay on the right side of the kill/be killed equation.

  Some people in the 21st century lived like this too—maybe most of them—suffering with constant war, or terrible poverty, with almost unimaginable disparity of power and income between the ruling royalty and the starving peasants, or in places where malaria or cholera took one of every three or four people they knew or where potable water was no certain resource. They soldiered on somehow. They doubtless found reasons to laugh. They found moments to make love, or there wouldn’t be generation after generation of them. They didn’t run to the therapist every time they had a trauma. Life was trauma, and they soldiered on anyway.

  “I give up,” Claire said, scooting back from the open water, startling Hannah out of her reverie. “It just isn’t happening. Maybe if it clouds up more.”

  Hannah looked up and saw more clouds had gathered in the short time she’d been zoning out. “Okay, I have you on the rope.” She gripped it more tightly.

  “It’s pretty solid right here,” Claire said, but she took the precaution of crawling a couple yards away from the hole before risking standing. “I didn’t feel a single nibble. Until I do, I don’t know if there are even fish in here. Maybe I’m being an idiot by dangling a line into a sterile lake.”

  “You could never be an idiot,” Hannah said. “And we have to eat. So we have to try every way of getting fed that we know.”

  “The others will be back soon,” Claire said, looking at the sky again as she paused by Hannah. Hannah looked up and was surprised to see it was nearly noon. She had really spaced out there, for longer than she realized. She coiled the rope while Claire untied herself. Together, they returned to the others.

  “Let’s all take a break inside the igloo and warm up for a few minutes,” Claire said.

  “Time for my exercises first,” Nari said.

  Claire leaned the fishing pole against their gear. “Come on in when you’re done.”

  Everyone else followed Claire inside, but Hannah took a minute to watch Nari.

  “Am I doing them wrong?”

  “Heck, I don’t know. I’m trusting Ted on this, but it looks right to me. That and five bucks will buy you a cup of coffee.”

  “I hate coffee, but I suppose I’d pay at least that for one right now, just to drink something hot. I’m cold,” she said, as she stretched her arm as far overhead as she could.

  “How are the mittens coming?”

  “Almost done with a pair for everyone. I’m also going to try gloves, using the thinnest scraps that aren’t good for anything else. I’d like one or two pair of fingerless ones, you know, like for me when I’m sewing. Or for whoever else might be doing close work.”

  “Great idea.”

  “I wish we had more hides. Really, everyone needs a warm jacket, fur-lined collar, all of that.” She changed to a new exercise and frowned.

  “Does that one hurt?”

  “No, I was just thinking how many hides we’re using as blankets, and how many we could spare. Maybe I could make a single jacket with a fur collar, and we could share it.”

  “If we find game, we can have more hides.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be
wasteful.”

  “No, we wouldn’t be. Even if we found a whole herd of something and killed ten of them, with this weather, we could bury meat in a snow bank and it’d keep. When we leave, something will find whatever we leave behind. Even maggots eating it would be fine, the ecosystem working as it should.”

  Nari said, “My leg now.” She put her hand on the igloo wall and bent over as far as she could. “Okay, that hurts.”

  “Don’t push it. Take it in small increments. You want slight discomfort, right? Not outright pain.”

  “Ted said some of his PT hurt.”

  “True, but Ted had a sports medicine person standing right over him. You have me, and I don’t even qualify as an assistant paramedic. I’m just the first aid gal.”

  “You told me I have grown to be more than what I was. I think that you have too, and part of that’s being a medic,” Nari said. “I can do the ankle exercise inside. You look cold.”

  “You’re a good person, Nari,” Hannah said.

  “Thanks. So are you.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Don’t be silly.” She was on hands and knees, about to crawl into the igloo entrance and stopped, looking back. “There’s not something wrong, is there? Are you upset about anything?”

  “No. I’m fine. Hungry, but fine.”

  They waited in the igloo for the others to return, sitting in the light of a pinesap candle, and when they heard the voices outside, everyone crawled back out.

  “Nothing,” Ted said. “Sorry.”

  “Not a sign,” said Jodi, moving to Zach’s side and leaning against him.

  Claire said, “No fish either. Okay, everybody gather around for a meal of meat and nuts. The second group will go out after lunch.”

  “Watch the weather,” Laina said. “A storm is coming, I think.”

  Everyone looked up at the gathering clouds. They were higher than yesterday’s. “You think snow?” Bob said. “Looks like it to me too, now that I think of it.”