Small meal that it was, the frog had given him a shot of energy; he used it to set off in a shambling trot back to shelter. To fire and family. As his numb feet struck the forest floor in an almost soundless rhythm, he hoped someone else had had better luck finding food.
-2-
ARIE’S FUNDAMENTAL INTENTION was dry clothes. She held a shirt above the fire, getting it as close to the low flames as she dared, turning it this way and that, constantly squeezing the fabric to gauge where the wettest spots still were. The smell of dirt and smoke thoroughly permeated everything they had, which was preferable to the pungent musk of their bodies. It was a trial, the smoke, irritating her into short coughing fits. Her lungs hadn’t fully recovered from the searing they’d taken escaping the fire at Granny’s house.
Once the five of them had set out in earnest, they made a concerted push into the forest, driven by mutual, unspoken urgency. For almost a week their prime concerns were food, shelter, and putting distance at their heels. A turn in the weather blindsided them. Curtains of fine rain blew in from the southwest. For two days, it fell in a heavy, inescapable mist.
On the third day of relentless drizzle, damp to the skin and miserably cold, they’d discovered a little cave at the crest of a hill. Its entrance was obscured from below by a shrubby thicket of sword ferns and huckleberry. The declivity wasn’t much more than a vertical bowl set into the side of a rocky cliff, but its stone sides curved forward to create the semblance of a low-ceilinged room. Curran and Renna had woven a rough mat of fir boughs to serve as a door and they’d all piled inside—hungry, wet, and grateful to be out of the weather.
That was yesterday. Now, with everyone else out hunting food, Arie attended her work in bare feet, relishing the radiant heat of the stones set around a small fire ring. Her own shoes were poked onto the ends of heavy branches that angled toward the flames. The cut ends of the green wood oozed fragrant pitch that left sticky spots on the inside soles and occasionally dripped into the flames with a momentary sizzle and flare of light.
There came a small sound outside the entrance of the shelter. “Don’t worry, it’s me,” said Renna. She pulled aside the door just enough to slip inside.
“Leave a vent, will you?” said Arie. “Let’s be rid of a little smoke.” She tossed Renna the dry shirt. “Change into this.”
Renna held the faded green flannel to her face. “Mm, warm. Thank you.”
She wore a wide-brimmed hat and a scarf wound around the lower half of her face so that only her eyes showed. A burlap tow sack hung heavy on her shoulder, and when she lifted it off and laid it near the back wall of the hut, it rattled. Off came the dripping hat and scarf. She shrugged out of Arie’s wool coat—a decent defense against the rain for quick trips, but now sodden. Finally, she stripped off the thermal undershirt she wore under everything.
Firelight reflected dully on the rock walls and lent a glow to Renna’s pale, damp skin. She scrubbed the flannel shirt over her face and arms like a towel and slipped it on.
“Appears there’s something in the bag,” said Arie.
“Acorns,” said Renna. “Enough for a meal, maybe.” She crouched at the fire, holding the shirtfront open, letting the flames warm her skin before she buttoned up. They were hungry and Renna was thin. Even so, her ribs were less prominent now than when she’d arrived in Arie’s attic with Handy, feverish and dog-chewed.
Arie was glad to see the fire raise a ruddy glow on the younger woman’s chest and cheeks. “How are your hands?”
“Not too bad. They tingle, is all.” She rubbed them briskly and tucked them in her armpits, forearms pressed across her bosom. “I didn’t find meat,” she said.
“It’s hard to come by in this weather,” said Arie. “Things hole up.” She checked her shoes, judged them not near as damp as they had been. “Let’s have your boots,” she said.
Renna blew on her hands and flexed them twice. “The acorn spot is that way,” she said, pointing with her elbow while she worked her bootlaces loose. “About five minutes. There are piles of them out there.”
“Which way?”
She glanced around. “That w—” The expression on Arie’s face, patient and inexorable, stopped her. Renna closed one eye and worked it out in her head. “East,” she said. “No, more southeast.” She nodded, seeming to confirm it for herself. “Southeast. There are three oak trees in an open spot. Huge. You can’t believe the heaps of nuts on the ground. They must be four inches deep. Hold on.”
She rapped her boots against the rock wall, knocking chunks of mud and dead leaves onto the ground at her feet, and handed them over.
“We’ll make mush of them,” Arie said, “if enough are useable.” She stretched Renna’s boots as wide as they’d go and balanced them on the drying sticks. In seconds, thin wisps of steam rose from the wet leather. Under the odor of forest and feet, the boots gave off the unmistakable scent of animal flesh—faint, sweet, almost meaty. Arie’s stomach tightened around a brief longing for solid, fatty protein.
“I hope Talus finds something for herself, at least,” Renna said. “I could feel her backbone this morning.”
“Bless her,” said Arie. “She’ll likely eat better than we will, all told.” She brushed her hands on the seat of her pants. “Bring the nuts here. Let’s see what’s usable.” Renna buttoned the shirt and rose from her crouch by the fire while Arie stepped just outside the shelter’s entrance.
It was at least fifteen degrees cooler outside and gooseflesh rashed across her bare arms. A redwood tree less than a foot from the rock entrance had a gnarled burl at its base, the lumpish bulge rising almost waist-high. Behind it, she had stashed a battered metal pail, now full to the brim with rainwater.
She leaned over the burl and grasped the pail’s wire handle. When she lifted, the still-mending scar tissue across her upper back and shoulder pulled taut. She winced, impatient with the pain and irritated at her inability to anticipate it. Powering through the discomfort, she hoisted the bucket up and over the burl. Rolling her head forward, she let gravity work the damaged tissues as long as she could bear it, ignoring the heavy, puckered sensation that never truly went away.
Even though the precipitation was still little more than heavy drizzle, the woods were electric with the sound of rain-spatter. The small, constant drip from every branch, twig, and leaf was a tiny pandemonium. Arie closed her eyes and listened anyway, hoping to hear Handy and Curran approach in the falling dusk, or to hear Talus’s livelier four-footed gait. There was only the sound of falling water, though, and Renna’s small movements inside the cave. Come home, she thought.
She tipped the pail and poured off enough rainwater to prevent it slopping out, set her jaw against the pull of her injured shoulder, and went inside.
Renna had the burlap sack pooled open in front of her, and the load of acorns glimmered in the fire’s light. She turned a fat brown nut in her fingertips, inspecting it closely before setting it in one of two small piles. She glanced up expectantly, saw it was Arie, and took another acorn from the sack.
“How are they?” Arie asked. She set the bucket at Renna’s knee. That expectant look was meant for Handy, she knew, and it pinged a similar echo of yearning in her own heart. Come home, she thought again. Oh, come home now. She wondered what instinct was at work here, stirring this bedrock desire that they be all denned together at sundown. A throwback survival imperative written in the genetic code, no doubt. In the dark, the entire tribe must be assembled and safe.
“Fifty-fifty, so far,” said Renna, turning one of the nuts between her fingers. “But it’s dark in here. I don’t know if I’m seeing all the worm holes.”