Summer Read online

  As Gia put things away, she couldn’t help but wonder what Agan had to tell her. As soon as she’d emptied her hands, she went back out. As she approached Agan, she went to sit down beside her grandmother, saying, “What’s this about?” But as she put her hand down to sit, her eyes caught on something where she usually sat.

  Her eyes widened. It was a little basket, lined with grass. And it had four good-sized eggs in it! Eggs were a real delicacy because finding and getting to nests when they had eggs in them was so difficult. She looked up at Agan, “What’s this?!”

  “Oh, that?” Agan said nonchalantly, “Just something Pell brought by and left for you.”

  “Where’d he get them?!” Gia asked, picturing her new mate risking life and limb to climb some tree or cliff and raid a nest.

  Then she remembered that Pell had a big basket with five healthy looking pigeons living in it…

  Chapter Four

  Pell, Gia, Manute, Woday and Gurix stood on the trail that went down the creek to the main river, and from there west to the sea. They’d decided to leave for the River Fork market area earlier than usual. They would take their trade goods with them and hide them near the trading grounds, then go on down the river to the sea, looking for lost members of Aganstribe. They’d stop at River Fork again on their way back and do their trading then. They thought there’d be less risk of someone finding and stealing their goods if they hid them before the trade meeting when no one was in the area, rather than trying to hide them when a lot of people were around, during or after the market.

  Manute was going, partly because he—like his sister Gia—wanted to find any lost members of his tribe, and partly because he thought a journey to the sea would be interesting.

  Woday and Gurix had declared their intention to mate. Woday wanted to move back downriver to his home at River Falls. He thought what he’d learned from Pell and the other members of the Cold Springs tribe would give him a major boost in status there. Especially if he was successful with some bone settings. Gurix wasn’t sure she wanted to move so far away from everyone she’d ever known. After all, her brother and parents were still part of the Aldans. However, there was some appeal to the prestige she and her new mate would have, bringing Pell’s new ideas to the falls people. But, before she’d agree to mate Woday and move so far, she wanted to learn what his people were like.

  Most of the rest of the tribe planned to meet them at River Fork with more trade goods in about three hands of days. Agan said she was too old to go to the meeting. Pell thought it was more likely because she found the necessity of riding a travois humiliating. Deltin and Panute would stay with her, but the most surprising thing was that Pont had volunteered to stay and help her, as well as feeding Ginja for Pell. Agan had been teaching Pont some of her knowledge of herbs and he freely admitted his own knowledge had been pitiful before. Privately, Pell hoped he’d learn enough to go somewhere and serve as an actual medicine man, rather than the joke he’d been with the Aldans. Perhaps he could even rejoin the Aldans now that he’d become, not only helpful, but pleasant.

  Everyone was saying excited goodbyes. Pell was retying the cords holding goods on one of the travois when Yadin came out pulling the travois he and Deltin had built for their trade goods, mostly hafted axes, flint tools, and spear throwers.

  Pell looked up and said, “I thought you didn’t want to come. You didn’t think we could hide your stuff well enough?”

  Yadin said gruffly, “Yeah, I’m still worried about it. But I’ve always said I wanted to visit the sea. This seems like the best chance I’m ever going to get. We’ll just have to hide the trade goods with great care.” He lifted an eyebrow, “At least mine.”

  “Great!” Pell said, glad to have the older man and all his experience with them on this trip. He glanced over at his mother, wondering if she was upset that Yadin, her new mate-to-be, was going off without her, but she was carrying a bundle she gave Yadin to take with him. Probably traveling food, he thought, deciding she looked happy.

  ***

  Woday hadn’t traveled with travois before. He was in the lead with his travois when they came to the first stream they’d have to cross. He stopped, staring at it with a puzzled expression on his face. He said over his shoulder, “We can’t cross this with the travois! Our trade goods’ll get wet.”

  As he stood staring at the stream with an alarmed expression on his face, his travois suddenly shifted in his hands. When he looked back, Pell was standing there holding up the back ends of the shafts he’d been dragging. “Oh,” he snorted. “I guess I should have been able to figure this out by myself, shouldn’t I?”

  They took turns carrying the travois across. After they crossed the second stream, Woday turned to Pell and said, “Remember, the tree with the honey in it’s up here a little further. I thought some honey would be nice to take with us on this trip, maybe to trade, but especially to eat.”

  Putting on an exasperated tone, Pell said, “Now you think of this?! We don’t have anything to carry honey in!”

  “Oh,” Woday ducked his head in embarrassment, “I brought one of Donte’s pots.”

  “Well,” Pell said with a big smile, “that’s a great idea then.”

  Shortly after that they were smoking the beehive and excitedly scooping honey into the pot Woday got off his travois. Gia wanted to empty out a pot she had powdered hemp in so they could get more honey. “The hemp’s not that valuable for trade. Besides, I could fold the hemp into one of the skins Manute asked us to trade for him.”

  Pell shook his head. With some pride Woday heard him say, “Woday says that in his tribe they never take all the bees’ honey. They say the bees could starve if you steal all the food they’ve saved up. If you only take part of their honey, then they’re still there making more honey the next time you want some.” Pell shrugged, “I’ve been thinking this is really important. The idea that, if you ate every rabbit, then there wouldn’t be any left to make more rabbits. I worry that the same thing might happen when we try to harvest every root vegetable or every piece of fruit. Fortunately, if we’re right about fruit, we might be able to eat all the fruit as long as we leave the seeds behind.” He looked around the little group, “But since the roots don’t seem to have seeds in them, I don’t know where new root vegetables come from. I’m a little worried that if we pull up every carrot, there might not be any carrots in the future.”

  As they started on their way again there was some discussion of Pell’s ideas and concerns, but since they were traveling single file on the trail and pulling four travois, the six people were pretty widely separated. Carrying on much of a conversation became almost impossible.

  They were rotating the four travois among the six people so no one had to pull a travois all the time. At one point, Gia found herself and Yadin walking beside Pell at the head of their little column. Pell liked to ask people about their special areas of expertise. Yadin was well known as a scout, hunter, and tracker in his old tribe. Pell was querying him about those skills.

  Pell had started out by asking Yadin about scouting for game but had rapidly become more interested in the idea of tracking it. It sounded like an extremely difficult skill to learn. Yadin explained that it encompassed carefully watching the trail for hoof or paw prints and watching the brush along the trail for broken twigs, or leaves that had been knocked down.

  The leaves were important because ones that had fallen recently remained green. That way you could tell whether you were following a new or old trail.

  Yadin started pointing out things on the trail they were following. Things Gia would never have noticed. An old and dried splatter in the dust where some animal had urinated many days ago. Another that was faintly damp and thus more recent.

  Scat from different animals which Yadin claimed to be able recognize, proclaiming that this one had come from a deer, those from rabbits, and more that came from a lion. Scat also dried with time to tell you how long ago it had been dropped.

  In a
reas where the ground was soft, he directed their attention to prints in the dirt, noting which were old and which were new; which were on top of another set of prints. He noted human footprints, shod and unshod; and even that the spacing between them showed that that one had been running and that the others came from a man who’d been walking.

  Gia found it fascinating, but thought her mind was full enough with her herbal knowledge. She didn’t think she needed to stuff it with tracking lore.

  ***

  Just like the time he’d traveled with Tando and Donte to River Fork, they didn’t encounter anyone on their trip. Pell suspected that people lived up some of the tributaries they were fording on their way along the main river. He’d thought that surely they’d encounter some of those people on this trip, but it didn’t happen. He decided it wasn’t really that surprising; the Cold Springs group usually stayed up near their cave. They only went down to the main river occasionally, usually to try to catch fish.

  Woday brought a fish basket on his travois and put it in the river while they slept. The meal was exciting because of the addition of a bit of honey to traveling food consisting of greens they’d picked along the way and smoked meat from home.

  The fish trap was successful which meant they were able to eat a couple of sizable fish for their morning meal before they started their trek again.

  When they were nearly to River Fork, Yadin had them stop while he trotted off on a small side trail. When he returned, he had them all follow him up the little side trail a way. They rearranged their goods, packing things they would take on their trip to the sea into packs they would carry. Then they turned around and carried their travois one at a time back along the trail they’d come on. Pell realized this was to keep it from being obvious where they’d left the trail. Yadin and Manute carefully stepped through a small gap in the brush. Pell and Woday then carefully lifted each travois and passed them to Yadin and Manute who carried them to the hiding place Yadin’d found.

  Once Yadin was satisfied, they got back on the trail. Wading across the substantial tributary that joined the main river to create River Fork was something Pell hadn’t considered as a problem until they came to it. However, Gia and Manute had crossed it many times on their way to trade. They led the group upstream to an area with slower moving water and a sandy bottom. Nonetheless, as they held their packs above their heads and waded across, they were chest deep in several spots. The water wasn’t that deep on Pell because of his height, but considering the pressure of the water flow and the soft footing, he was somewhat surprised no one fell and soaked their travel gear.

  Climbing out into the warm summer sunshine after being immersed in the cool water was very pleasant.

  Gia got excited as they approached a smaller branch of the river. It was the one Aganstribe had lived on. “I wonder if anyone from the tribe came back and to live in the old cave?” she said with hopeful anticipation.

  However, when they’d made their way up the little canyon to the cave, it was empty. Pell could immediately see how it’d been a wonderful place to live. The water flowed by just below it. Rather than Boro trekking across the meadow to fill a water skin, he could just lower a pot on a rope into the water and pull it back up. Gia pointed out a small shelf off the trail downstream from the cave where people had voided their bladder and bowels directly into a rapidly flowing part of the stream. There wouldn’t be a stinking place like the one near the Cold Springs cave, he thought.

  Standing in the cave and looking out over the water, he could imagine the river, risen to the level of the cave floor or higher, flooding in to sweep people and goods away. The way the ravine widened so much in the area in front of Cold Springs cave means a flood would have to be massive before the water would rise up to the level of the cave, he thought. He continued the thought with, As nice as living here might be, I think we should stay where we are.

  Manute was climbing up to the escape cave where he’d taken Agan and Falin on the night of the flood. He wanted see if there was anything of value left up there. Or perhaps, some signs that a survivor’d returned and lived up there rather than down in the main cave.

  Yadin, Woday, and Gurix looked around curiously and made a few remarks on how it would be a nice place to live. However, Pell could tell they weren’t terribly interested and would rather get on their way. He wondered how much longer Gia’d want to stay. Even though they now knew that more people had survived the flood than they’d thought, there was little doubt that many people from her old tribe had died here. He wondered if she might want to stay to hold a ceremony or something.

  He looked around for her, wondering how she was dealing with the loss of hope that a group of her old tribe might have returned to live in the cave. She was studying a smooth area of the wall. He walked over to her and saw she was looking at something that’d been scratched on the rock. He could picture someone using a harder rock to scratch the wall and, having had the thought, immediately looked down at the floor of the cave where he saw a fist-sized black rock. Squatting down, he picked it up and scraped it over the wall of the cave. As he’d thought it might, it left a scratch on the wall much like those Gia was looking at. He looked up at her and saw her eyes on him.

  She waved at the marks she’d been examining, “Someone made these marks.” She looked down, “The same way you made that one, right?”

  Pell nodded. He couldn’t imagine the scratches forming by accident. “What do they mean?” he asked.

  She looked frustrated, “I wish I knew.” She pointed to some semi parallel wavy lines, “Do you think these are supposed to be snakes?”

  “Maybe they’re waves on the river?”

  “Oh… And maybe there are more of them over to the right because the river’s getting wider downstream?”

  “Maybe?” Pell frowned at the scratches and pointed just below the wavy lines and pretty far to the right, “Though I don’t have any idea what this circle means then.” He cocked his head to one side, “Marks like these could be really useful if we all agreed on what they meant.”

  “Yeah,” Gia said. But then after a moment, she said dispiritedly, “But how would we get people to agree?”

  “We could…” Pell said slowly as he thought about it, “agree on what they meant for our own little tribe.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eyes, trying not to grin, “Then when we go trading, you could mark them on a big leather and hang it up behind you. When people asked what it meant, you could teach them… they’d love having you teach them.”

  Gia frowned, “Why would they care if it was me?”

  “Because you’re so pretty…” Pell broke off to dodge when she tried to thump his shoulder.

  Manute stepped into the cave, interrupting their little conversation. “There’s nothing up at the small cave. No recent ashes in the fire pit either. I don’t think anyone’s been here since last fall.” He paused to study them, Pell grinning and Gia trying to look angry even though she obviously wasn’t. He narrowed his eyes, thinking she looked more pleased than angry. “What’s going on?”

  Gia waved at the marks on the cave wall. “These are new since we lived here. Pell thinks someone scratched them into the wall with that rock…” she paused to point down at the rock Pell had used for his own scratches. “We think they mean something, but we’re not sure what. Any ideas?”

  “Manute stared at the marks for a few hundred heartbeats, then shrugged, “Gia’s hair?”

  Pell snorted with delight, “So, it’s a message about the world’s most beautiful hair?!” He dodged as Gia aimed another swing at his shoulder.

  Blushing a little, Gia strode over and picked up her pack, “We’d just as well be on our way. You guys obviously aren’t going to learn anything more here!”

  ***

  They were wading across another small tributary when someone called out, “Ho, strangers. Where are you from?”

  Pell looked that direction and saw a young man with a spear, presumably out hunting for
his tribe. Pell turned to Woday, “Why don’t you talk to him. We’re getting close to the falls so he must be from one of your neighboring tribes.”

  Woday shrugged and called out to the man, “I’m Woday of the falls people, traveling with some friends from Aganstribe and the Cold Springs tribe. Are you from the Upper River people?” In an aside to Pell, he quietly said, “We call the next tribe above the falls the Upper River people.”

  The young man called back, “Yes, we’re the ones you call the Upper River people, though we call ourselves Zurgenspeople after our leader… I thought all but two people of Aganstribe died in the big flood last year?”

  “No, six people from the tribe traveled to Cold Springs in the east, seeking treatment for injuries. If there are two others that survived the flood, where do they live now?”

  The young man shrugged, “I heard a woman lives with the falls people and a man lives with some of the people below the falls. Why would someone from Aganstribe travel to Cold Springs for treatment?” Then, evidently a realization struck him. He said, “Oh, their own healers must’ve been killed in the flood as well, yes?”

  “No, the healers survived,” Woday said, “but Cold Springs has a famous bonesetter.” He ignored Pell’s snort and continued, “Because those six from Aganstribe included a woman with a broken leg and a mangled hand, they decided to go to see him.”

  “Are the people from Aganstribe moving back to their old cave then?”

  “No, they think the cave’s too dangerous. They’re planning to continue living with the Cold Springs tribe in the east.”

  “That’s too bad. We liked being able to call on their medicine women for help…” After a momentary pause, he asked, “Where are you going then?”

  “We just recently heard about the two survivors living further down the river. We’re traveling all the way to the sea to be sure there aren’t any other Aganstribe survivors. We’ll ask them if they want to rejoin Aganstribe.