Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6) (47 page)

The hunters fell to hacking the boar up into pieces small enough to carry back. Somehow Pell was not surprised to find that he had been assigned to carry the intestines. Everyone else was packed up and had started back before he finished squeezing out their contents and had coiled them into some kind of a mess that he could carry. He thought to himself that it was good thing summer wasn’t here; he’d be covered with flies. Of course, during the good hunting of summer they usually didn’t bother with intestines. He set out, up into the little valley leading back to the Aldans’ cave, hiking rapidly to catch up with the others.

When they came in sight of the cave the women saw them carrying haunches of boar and began to celebrate. Then Tonday cried out and came running out toward the group. She had seen that Gontra wasn’t carrying anything, rather just shambling along holding his one hand in the other. She took in the drugged look in Gontra’s eyes and began wailing even before looking at his finger. Gontra tried to console her in his own gruff way, but even in his glazed over state, his own apprehension was easily evident. In a few minutes, Tonday’s hysterics degenerated. She half lay, half sat at Gontra’s feet, tearing at her hair. The other women and children came out to the group and soon Gontra and Tonday’s little daughter Tila was adding her own hysteria to the mix. Though she was too little to understand what was wrong, she readily picked up her mother’s distress.

Pont’s woman Lessa sat down with Tonday and began to comfort her, stroking her hair and singing one of her soothing chants. Pont soon thereafter marched Gontra up to the cave and laid him out on the furs that he and Lessa shared. Lessa brought a still sobbing Tonday up a little later. Pell found himself assigned to slicing up the intestines he had carried back. This was a tedious job but he managed to situate himself so that he could watch what the healer was doing with Gontra.

When Gontra seemed deeply under the influence of Pont’s hemp concoction, the healer began to examine his finger. Pell was relieved to see that the finger was maintaining a good color. Pont wiggled it around a little, looking at it from different angles, then he grasped it and pulled vigorously. Gontra woke immediately from his sleep with incoherent eyes wide in agony. He flailed around, striking the healer repeatedly on the back, then finally shoving Pont violently aside. All eyes, attracted by the commotion, now focused on Gontra’s finger. It remained deformed! Pell felt a sick feeling rising in his throat. He thought to himself that Pont had just pulled straight. With both Pell’s finger and the rabbit’s leg, Pell had first bent the member even farther in the direction of its deformity before being able to slip it back into place. “Pont…” he ventured.

Pont looked up at Pell with a murderous expression in his beady eyes. Pell found his words dying in his throat. Sheepishly he went back to cutting up the intestine.

Pont sat back down next to Gontra who lay dozing again. Pell realized that Pont had been careful to position himself between Pell and Gontra to obstruct Pell’s view. Pont began to chant and took a little of his hemp mixture himself. Pell continued to work on his task while he contemplated the strange paradox that required that the deformity be made worse before it could be made better. He wondered whether the healer might know about the phenomenon and would therefore try that maneuver next. His reveries were interrupted by another episode of flailing and screaming from Gontra. This episode again ended with the healer bowled over but this time Gontra was on his feet staring wide eyed at his own finger. Pell saw that the finger remained as crooked as ever. With a cry Gontra bolted out of the cave and into the night. Pont lay cursing on the floor of the cave, holding grimly to the small of his back. Roley got to his feet, took his good spear and followed Gontra out into the night. Tonday collapsed to the floor, sobbing hysterically. Pell thought in dismay that Gontra, injured, weaponless and drugged, made an easy victim for the large cats that prowled the night. Hopefully Roley would be able to bring him back soon.

They began to eat the pig but the normally happy mood that accompanied the feasting after a big kill was clouded with a somber pall. Before they finished, Roley came back, a shambling Gontra in tow. Moods improved, but Gontra’s deformed finger and Tonday’s persistent sobbing damped any festivities for the rest of the night. No one started telling stories. Certainly, no one was going to drum on Gontra’s log
this
night. After eating, Gontra who had sobered considerably, went to speak to the healer. An argument erupted and it became apparent from Pont’s shouting that the healer attributed the persistent deformity of Gontra’s finger to poor patient cooperation. Pell expected Gontra to be angry but Gontra soon took another dose of hemp and lay down again on the healer’s furs. Several times during the evening, bellows of agony erupted from that part of the cave, the last episode waking Pell from a sound sleep with his heart pounding in his chest.

The next morning broke to a persistent somber mood. Gontra’s finger remained deformed, but was now even more swollen and angry looking. Tonday, intermittently sobbing, refused to rise from her bedding. Pont denounced Gontra’s lack of cooperation to Roley in a stage whisper that was heard by everyone. Lessa tried to counter the mood with tea and soup that she brewed in two of Lenta’s big pots, chanting a pleasant tune while she was at it. It helped little, though the chronically hungry tribe gathered readily enough to eat.

Soon after downing some of the soup and tea Roley announced that everyone could hunt as they liked, he wasn’t organizing anything—then stalked from the cave, alone but for a couple of spears. Pell thought for moment about trying to join him, but before he could, Denit scrambled to his feet and ran out after his father. Pell certainly didn’t intend to go anywhere that Denit had headed, so he settled back down, hoping someone else would ask him to hunt with them.

With little ceremony, the hunters left in ones and twos and it soon became evident that no one was going to ask Pell to go with them. He unwrapped his fingers and flexed the pointer finger that had been dislocated. It was still somewhat swollen but hurt much less and seemed to be moving pretty well. He bound it along his long finger again, gathered his two char tipped spears and went out to hunt by himself.

The sky was dotted with small clouds but brisk winds cut under Pell’s furs with a cold bite. He stopped down at the little stream that ran below the cave and filled his water skin. The water was so frigid that he could hardly stand to put his hand in to fill the skin. When he brought the icy water skin out of the water he hung it outside his furs so it wouldn’t suck out all of his warmth. He meandered down toward the flats a while but when the flats actually came into view their sere grasses were empty of game. Besides, he thought to himself, the big game found on the flats wasn’t something he could hunt by himself

He found himself walking up the little gulch where Denit had killed the small boar. He walked up into it and came to the area where it was choked with brush. He contemplated the little hole in the brush that the pig had run into, become trapped and then was killed by Denit. It looked much like the small tunnel in the brush that went through to the other side. If only he could drive an animal up this ravine and have it try to get through that same dead end that looked like a passage. In fact as he looked at it he realized that it looked even more like a passage because many animals had wandered into it and then back out, leaving tracks looking like they had passed both ways. He went over to the tunnel that actually made a complete passage and crouched down to start through. He had gone in a few feet when he heard someone shout his name!

His first thought was that someone was calling a warning! He was crouched over in the narrow passage and when he heard the call he jerked upright, or tried to. He panicked and tried to back out but immediately stuck himself on one of his spears that he had been trailing behind himself in his left hand. The butt of the spear had caught in a root and the point stabbed him painfully in the back of the thigh. Even more panicked, he thrashed about for a few moments. When he realized he wasn’t in any immediate danger he calmed down, but it still took several minutes to disentangle himself and back out of the tunnel. Thank the gods that he hadn’t encountered some fierce predator in there! As he carefully backed out, he was thinking that he would never again enter such a restricted passage. When he finally got all of the way back out, he found Exen and Gontra waiting for him.

They seemed uncomfortable. Exen scuffed his foot and asked what Pell had been doing in the pile of brush.

“Trying to get through to the other side.”

“Why did you start making so much noise?”

“Um, I caught myself on some thorns.”

An uncomfortable silence stretched, then Gontra ventured, “Exen says that he saw you straighten out your own finger—that Pont didn’t do it.”

“No, Pont
didn’t
do it
! All
he did was give me hemp!” Pell was surprised at his own vehemence.

Another long gap in the conversation ensued. Gontra looked up into the sky and Pell found himself scuffing his own feet as well. Then Gontra asked, “Do you think you can show me how to straighten my finger?”

Later Pell would wonder why he was surprised at the question, in retrospect it seemed so obvious that they had followed him out of sight of the rest of the tribe to ask that very question—certainly a question Pell would have been asking if he was in their place. Nonetheless he
was
caught by surprise and said nothing for a few moments. Later he would also be angry that they
hadn’t
asked him in front of other members of the tribe, but at the moment he was glad that they
hadn’t
asked in front of the healer. Pont surely would have been furious.

“I could try,” he said.

Gontra’s shoulders dropped in relief. “Good!” he said, and held his hand out to Pell.

Pell started back. The finger was quite swollen and still angled back, the same as Pell’s had been. It looked quite repugnant. He reached out to touch it then remembered how Gontra had flailed at Pont the night before, knocking the healer away several times and completely over on one occasion. He drew his hands back.

“Come on boy!” Gontra almost shouted. He shook the hand in Pell’s face. “Do it. Do it now!”

Pell suddenly recognized that Gontra was frightened! Frightened of the pain that was surely to come but even more frightened of the finger remaining the way it was. Nonetheless Pell started back again. “No! You’ll knock me down like you did Pont!”

Gontra shrunk in on himself. “No I won’t. Come on, you’ve got to do it for me,” he whined in a petulant voice. Pell thought, with some surprise, that Gontra sounded like a child.

“No! You’ve got to at least chew some hemp first, so it doesn’t hurt so badly. Before I fixed my own finger, I chewed some of Pont’s.”

“Oh, yeah.” Gontra mumbled. He scrabbled about in his pouch with his good hand. “Pont gave me some for the pain.”

Pell saw Gontra grimace when he bumped his bad finger trying to hold the pouch open with that hand. Pell’s own finger hadn’t seemed that sensitive, even before Pont gave him the hemp leaves. Was it because of all the manipulations that the healer had performed on Gontra’s finger the previous night? It could be, but Pell remembered that his own finger had been so numb with the cold that he could hardly feel it anyway. Should he wait until nighttime and send Gontra out into the cold?

His hand bumped the skin full of ice cold water hanging by his side, just outside his furs. Maybe he could numb Gontra’s hand with the cold water in the skin? When he poured some out of the waterskin and onto his own hand, he found that the water had warmed up considerably, at least as compared to how it had felt in the creek.

He looked up to find Gontra stuffing his mouth with hemp leaves. “Wait! Spit those back out. We’re not ready yet.”

Gontra spit them back into his good hand with a look of puzzlement/anger. “What now?”

“We need to go back to the stream.”

“The stream? Why?”

“Your hand needs to be cold. You can hold it in the water a while.”

Gontra didn’t want his hand cold, certainly not as cold as it would get in the stream. Nonetheless while he argued they all walked back toward the cave. Then having resigned himself to putting his hand in the cold water, he began to argue for going to a section of the stream a ways below the cave. He and Exen were glancing about and suddenly Pell realized that they didn’t want to be seen with Pell. Pell felt a little disturbed by this unwillingness to lower their status by association with him, but on the other hand, he wasn’t sure he wanted the healer to see him with them either. Or other members of the tribe, what if he failed to “set” Gontra’s finger? After a few moments consideration he agreed to go to the little swimming hole downstream from the cave.

Shortly before they arrived at the hole Pell had Gontra begin chewing the wad of hemp he still carried in his good hand. When they got to the hole he already had a drugged appearance. Pell had him crouch at the edge of the hole and immerse his hand to the wrist. He was surprised at how readily Gontra acquiesced, but attributed it to the hemp. Gontra shortly began to complain about holding his hand in the cold water. Pell didn’t blame him but insisted that he keep it in. After another minute or so Gontra pulled it out of the water of his own accord, complaining loudly and in a slurred voice about how he could hardly feel his hand. Pell saw that the whole hand had blanched white but made him put it back in the water anyway. He sat down next to Gontra and wiped sweaty palms on his furs. He wondered why his hands would be sweaty on a cold day like this one. He saw Gontra trembling and thought he was about to pull his hand back out again. “OK, take it out and give it to me.”