I didn’t see Sheela around, so I tiptoed over to Hope. The parasaur was lying curled up in her little home, but she was awake and lifted her head up as I walked toward her.
“Hey girl,” I said as I ran my hands over her snout and pressed my forehead against her. “Sorry about last night. You didn’t seem worried,”
She let out a soft toot and then shook her head slowly so that my face rubbed against her’s.
“Did you see Sheela?” I asked her as I patted under her chin.
Hope surprised me by turning toward the door and letting out a soft toot. I saw that the rope locking the gate was actually off, and I grabbed a spear before moving toward it.
The open clearing on the other side of our walls looked even more chaotic than inside our fort. There were even more bodies out here, more feathers, and almost a lake of blood at one spot some fifty yards from us. It had been World War Dino out here, but it was clear who was the winner: the distant cave where we once lived still had orange birds at the mouth, but there were a lot less of them roosting than before.
I saw Sheela off to my left. She had one of the leaf baskets on the ground next to her, and she was kneeling with her back to me.
“Hey,” I said as I walked up behind her.
“Hello, Victor. Did you sleep well?” Her lips curved into a slight smile, and I could see her sharp cat-teeth.
“Yeah,” I said as I looked down at her hands. She was butchering one of the pterodactyls with a small flint blade, but her cuts were focused on the legs and wings of the animal. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Sinew,” she replied as she gestured to the basket. She had the large cylinder almost half-way filled with the wet, bloody bands, and I realized that every corpse within twenty feet of her had been operated on.
“Good thinking. Trel will be happy if we can get her all of these.” I gestured to the almost endless bodies in the clearing. “Why didn’t you work on the ones inside of the camp first?”
“Those are already ours,” she said with a shrug. “I fear that scavengers will descend upon this spot soon, so I wanted to claim what I could for us.”
“Yeah,” I said as I reached into my shirt pocket for my own blade. It was actually surprisingly simple to make razor sharp stone knives. Their blades didn’t last for long, but I’d gotten skilled at breaking the right kind of rocks at the right kind of angles and then sharpening them again.
“We’ll need to get clay soon, but let’s fill up the basket as much as we can until everyone else wakes up. Can you show me where to cut?”
“Of course,” Sheela answered. “But perhaps this is a better use of our time than getting clay.”
“Hmmm,” I said as I turned her recommendation over in my head. “We still need to get clay soon. This is a great windfall, but if we spend the day cutting out sinew, then Galmine won’t be doing much. If we take an hour and get clay, she will be able to work on that project and teach Kacerie. Then you and I can go back to doing this.”
“I will obey your orders,” Sheela said with her usual shrug.
“It’s not really my orders,” I said with a laugh. “More like my wishes. Do you like it when I order you around?”
“I do,” she said as she turned toward me. Her eyes stared into mine, and I felt my heart start to hammer in my chest.
“So teach me how to cut their tendons and ligaments out,” I whispered. Then she blinked, nodded, and pointed to the wing of the pterodactyl she was working on.
“Cut here,” she said as she drew her small flint blade across the inside part of the wing arm. “Then pull the skin aside. This is the wing tendon.” Sheela then moved her blade to the ends of the wing joint and used the knife to pry the wide band off the bone. Then she cut it free with a quick jerk of her arm.
“Simple enough,” I said as I reached for the other wing.
We worked for a few minutes in silence, and I watched her gather the sinew from the creature’s legs. It wasn’t really as gruesome as I thought it would be, and I knew that the long rubbery bands would be able to help us build better bows and building materials. Maybe even a better saddle.
“Sheela, you were talking about your husband yesterday, and--”
“Victor,” Sheela interrupted. “I misspoke yesterday. I am honor bound to my husband, and I made it sound to you as if I was not happy with him. That is not the case.”
“Ahh,” I said as I tried not to let my disappointment show on my face. “I get it. Don’t worry. I don’t think negatively about you at all.”
“You do not?” she asked.
“No!” I said with a laugh. “In case you haven’t noticed, I really like you. I enjoy the time we spend together, and I wish I could make you happy.”
The blond woman stared at me for a few seconds. “You are a good man, Victor Shelby. I am honored to know you.”
“I’m honored to know you, Sheela. I don’t want to offend you, but I think your husband is a--”
“Please,” she interrupted me again with a wave of her bloody hand. “I do not wish to speak poorly of him. He is how he is, and I am who I am. I am here now, and I am thankful to have a purpose. Let us change the subject.”
“Alright,” I said with a sigh.
“I have something important to ask you.”
“Yeah?”
“Before you were brought to this planet, you mentioned that you had captured a small reptile at a party.”
“It was a poisonous snake.”
“We have such creatures on my world. Can you give me details about how you captured it?”
“Uhh. The snake? What do you mean? I just scooped it up into a box that the woman at the party laid over it.” My memories jumped back to Lacey’s party, and I wondered if my high school crush had thought about me not ever coming back to her party.
“It was that simple? It did not bite you?” Sheela turned to me and the interest was evident in her cat eyes.
“Yeah. It tried to bite me, but I moved my hand out of the way and grabbed it.”
“Ahh, so they are slow? The snakes in my world are very fast.”
“No, it was fast,” I said. “This one was a rattlesnake. The end of its tail makes a noise to warn other animals not to mess with it.”
“So the rattlesnake shook its tail, then tried to bite you? You had a warning?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why are you so interested?”
“It was something Galmine said last night,” Sheela said as she cut out another tendon.
“About what?”
“You once told me you never had any warrior training. Is that true?”
“Well, I took a bit of martial arts when I was a kid. Most kids do, but I started helping my parents around their clinic and--”
“They cared for animals, correct?” Sheela turned to me.
“Look, just come out and say what you mean to say.” I stood up from the pterodactyl corpse I was working on and crossed my arms.
“Victor, I do not know what I wish to say yet. That is why I am asking you questions. Were you ever bit while working for your parents?”
“Uhhh,” I said as I thought back. I’d always been great with animals, and I’d been around them almost my whole life, but Sheela had just made a strange observation. “No. I’ve actually never been bitten. Or really scratched by an animal.”
“Yet you’ve worked with them often?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just lucky. I always wore protective equipment on my hands and--”
“No,” Sheela said. “There is something else going on. Galmine said that you have ‘fought many dinosaurs and never been beaten.’ It was an interesting comment for her to make.”
“I’m just lucky,” I said. “I don’t know where you are going with this. Galmine’s statement is kinda… like obvious. If I had gotten killed by a dinosaur, I wouldn’t be here. Then she wouldn’t have said that about me. This is survivor bias logic stuff.”