[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

she did not have the hand for it. The resemblance was there, of course, but the fine quality was certainly
not. Yet hers was obviously made by one using the same knapping technique as had the maker of the
chert spear point.
Was this some lost kinsman, a descendant of one of the clans that had moved away, back in the times of
the grandmothers? She sighed, thinking of her joy if such a one had come when she was younger and
cared for living.
These years of solitude would not have been. Perhaps she might have traveled with him to his own
village. There she might have found another husband and produced children to fill the vast emptiness left
in her heart after her escape from the Long-Heads.
"Too late," she murmured.
He looked up and caught her gaze, almost as if reading her thoughts. Setting her spear back in its proper
place, he returned to roasting his rabbit, saving tender bits that she knew at once must be meant for the
child.
She rose painfully and went into the cave, returning with one of her clay-lined baskets. She had fired it,
upside down over a slow blaze, and it held liquid. She could boil the rabbit into broth, and it would be
good for the small one when he woke.
The sun was overhead, making the task of tending the fire uncomfortable. The man motioned for her to
go into the cave with the sick child. I will tend the fire and heat the stones, his gestures said to her.
This was one used to cooperating with people, and she found that she had forgotten much of that ability.
Groaning to her feet, she did as he suggested. Once lying on her bed pile in the chill of the cave, she
closed her eyes.
"I will save this little one," she murmured to the smoke-stained vault above her. "I will send him, with his
uncle or whatever that man is to him to live a long life. Perhaps they will remember Holasheeta on her
mountain ridge."
She almost chuckled at the thought. "But if they do not, my spirit will remember them, when I sit with my
kin in the Other Place."
For six suns Do-na-ti rested on the ridge with the ancient woman, watching carefully as she dosed and
tended the living totem for his own child. He learned a great deal from her, and he particularly noted the
plants she used, the roots, the leaves, the woody stalks and bark.
Patience was hard, for he knew that E-lo-ni would soon bear his son, and he wanted desperately to be
there when the women came out of the birth hut to give him that news. It was a pain in his heart to be so
far away; yet if this was the thing he must do, then he would not allow himself to fret.
A hunter must cultivate his ability to wait, and this was good training, even though he had already killed
his badger and played the dog in the Great Hunt. He would find it easy now to lie amid the tules beside a
stream, waiting for game to come down to drink.
He must tell himself that the child's health was the game he hunted. He must keep his heart from yearning
toward the summer village, where E-lo-ni might even now be in labor.
It would have helped if he could talk with the old woman, but the few words they managed to share
referred only to tools and work to be done. Discussing anything more complex was impossible.
So he gathered deadwood along the ridge and down the slopes on the side away from the cliff. He went
down to find Holasheeta's stream and killed an antelope, after a long wait. Scraping that hide, rubbing it
thoroughly with sand and ash, beating it until it softened all took days of work and diverted his mind
from his impatience.
Small Gift grew sicker, his skin turning grayish, his fragile ribs showing plainly, where before he had been
solidly plump. Worry gnawed at Do-na-ti's mind, and he found himself driven to find even more work to
distract him.
He made a new door flap for Holasheeta, one that would keep out even the most blustery of winter
winds. He ranged far down the ridge, gathering all the fallen deadwood he could find and even breaking
down branches that had been damaged but that had not yet lost their grip on the parent trees. Higher and
higher beside the cavern door and along its rear wall, where it would not get wet, he piled pine and
juniper and alder and, from lower down, oak.
He mended the woman's old sandals which she had woven from juniper bark and yucca fiber. He found
broken rock and lined her winter fire pit inside the cave, digging out a large enough hole so that she could
set her cooking utensils very near the blaze. He cleaned away the debris that had accumulated around her
living area bones and sticks and terrapin shells from meals that she must have eaten years before.
Staying busy was the only way he could hold himself in check, he knew, and by the time he understood
that the infant had reached a desperate point in his fight for life, Do-na-ti had Holasheeta's home in better
order than it had ever been.
All that time, he had kept an eye on the condition of Totem-Gift. Now the child was thin, his body dry
and hot. His eyes seemed gummed shut, and he hadn't the strength to whimper. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]