Bonesetter Page 9

  After a few more days, Tando and Donte discussed returning to the Aldans. Donte still felt that she should stay with Pell but with his trapping success, he felt newly confident that he would do okay for himself during the summer. “What I need is for you, and Tando if you can get him to help, to convince the tribe to take me back in. I’ll live through the summer, but I need to be back with the tribe by winter.”

  When they actually set out, Tando tried to give Pell a flint spear point. Pell stared at the offering with great desire but realized that the chances of his successfully hunting with a spear were small. “Tando, rather than the spear point, what I really need is your friendship. I beg your forgiveness for my part in breaking your arm. If you wish to repay me, and I do not feel that I deserve to be repaid, I would be most grateful for your help in getting the Aldans to accept me back. I don’t think I can survive the winter alone.”

  Tando appeared greatly uneasy. “Uh, Pell, I don’t think I can get Roley to take you back. At least not while Pont and Denit speak against you.”

  Pell’s spirits sank as he realized the truth of Tando’s words. He almost took the spear point but then reconsidered, again considering that he wasn’t going to be hunting with a spear. The charpoint spears would do for defense. “Just speak in my favor if an opportunity comes.”

  The afternoon that they left Pell, the she wolf reappeared. Pell had walked with Tando and Donte out of Cold Spring Ravine and seen them on their way, waving as they disappeared around the bend. As Pell walked sadly back to his lonely camp the wolf appeared out of the bush and, as if she’d never been gone, once again trotted alongside him, tongue lolling. Her limp was gone and she seemed none the worse for the wear, healthy though thin. Pell checked some of his snares on the way back to his “cave” and found a fat porcupine in one of them. He carefully skinned it and gave a portion of the carcass to the wolf. He considered whether he was mad to share his kill with a wild animal. He knew that the Aldans would think so, but his spirits had lifted tremendously at the reappearance of his friend. A wolf, but a friend nonetheless. A friend who had reappeared in the midst of Pell’s desolation upon being “deserted” by Donte and Tando.

  The next day Pell excitedly set about perfecting the art of trapping. The noose type snares were much easier to make and could be placed on almost any animal path. They didn’t require a narrow tunnel like the ones with the barbed sticks—any narrow area on a path followed by little animals would work. He set nooses up in many locations, from big ones on animal trails a little smaller than those that he walked himself, to smaller snares where animals passed through brambles, to very small ones on limbs where he saw squirrels running. The bottom part of the noose he suspended at what he felt would be chest height for the size animal he expected on that path and the rest of the noose he propped above. By sitting patiently and watching he saw a couple in action as animals ran down the path, obviously expecting to simply push the chest high “twig” aside and thoroughly ensnaring themselves by fighting the noose once it came snug about their necks. Sometimes a larger animal broke the nooses. From some of the stubs left behind, he deduced that ensnared animals sometimes chewed through the cord themselves—or perhaps some carnivore chewed through it to carry off Pell’s prize. Nonetheless, Pell found himself with more meat than he could eat and a large stack of furs.

  Having decided that he liked the flavor of the smoked meat, Pell began a system for smoking whatever he didn’t eat immediately. Donte and Tando had never seemed to notice the strips of meat, which had remained suspended in the back of the “cave” during their entire stay. Pell tasted some of it and at first he considered it useless, as it was very tough and difficult to chew. But it was still edible many many days after the kill!! Because of his fear of starvation, he hadn’t discarded it despite the difficulty in eating it. Then one day, having mixed it up with other smoked meat, he accidentally took a small bundle of the heavily smoked meat with him on the trail. He had traveled quite a distance that day and, being hungry with nothing else along, began gnawing on a piece. To his amazement, he found that after chewing the leathery meat for a while, it moistened up and became quite enjoyable. Thus with all the meat he was bringing in now he smoked some lightly and some for several days, until it was hard and tough. He soon found that when he smoked it too lightly it didn’t actually keep. After a while he became adept at telling by feel when it was smoked enough to store well.

  Pell became especially ecstatic with a new discovery. He had made another stew with meat, vegetables and a little too much salt. Of course he ate it anyway, but unable to eat it all he smoked the remaining meat. To his delight, he really liked the salty taste of the tough leathery material this batch produced. He took to soaking all of his meat in salty water before smoking it.

  Needing less time to hunt, Pell set about fixing up his shelter. His improvements at first focused on trying to stop the wind from blowing through so briskly. At first, he tried dragging up some brush and piling it just outside his mud “drip lips.” Though it slowed the wind some, it didn’t really help much. He needed a tighter fit so he started leaning poles up against his “drip lip” across most of the opening leaving only a small door. When some of the poles were unsteady, he stuck them in place with more mud at the bottom. When that worked, he put mud at the tops of the poles as well. There weren’t many straight poles available so there were significant gaps between them. He wedged smaller sticks into those holes. Then he began using mud to stick some of the poles together and to hold the little sticks in place. That worked so well that he began using mud to hold grass in even smaller holes. Eventually he wound up with an entire wall slathered in mud and grass that he had carried up from the stream in a large leather pouch. It got a lot of sun in the mornings and soon the sun had baked it to a hard finish. Now he had a real “cave.” Unfortunately, it trapped too much smoke in its well-enclosed space. At first, he moved his fire near the entrance as the Aldans had placed theirs. But then it didn’t smoke his meat well because the smoke didn’t “pool” on the little shelf anywhere before escaping the cave. He considered this for a while, finally breaking open a place in the wall at the top of the left end where the smoke could escape. Smoke still pooled in the upper back recess to smoke his meat. In addition, the hole improved the air circulation and also brought in some light. This was nice as the wall he had added to close in the cave had made it dark like a real cave. The only opening big enough to get in and out of was the “door” at the right end of his little area of the overhang.

  Pell still kept his meat in the back of the cave but after it was smoked enough, he wrapped it in leather to keep it from smoking even more. This didn’t seal it as tight as he wanted and slowly even the lightly smoked meat dried out to become leathery like the heavily smoked jerky. To keep the meat from drying out he began washing out intestines and stuffing bits of the smoked meat into them. This worked even better when he also stuffed in bits of fat, which kept the meat moister. He tied them off at the length of his fingers. He wrapped these “fingers,” as he called his sausages, and his heavily smoked meat into some of his skins and covered entire packages of meat with dirt in the back of the cave. Tasting them occasionally over the next few weeks convinced him they were keeping well and that burying them kept them from becoming too heavily smoked. He was especially delighted with the fatty “fingers” which, to him were among the finest delicacies he had ever eaten. He also felt fairly confident that his packages would not be raided in his absence by animals as the burial kept the meat smell to a minimum and the smoky smell, if not the small banked fire he always left going, he thought would deter scavengers.

  The animals he had snared provided him with tendons and skins to make thongs for more snares and he soon had a regular production scheme going. In the morning he would eat and set out to check his snares from the night before, picking up the snares and whatever bounty they had provided. Because he never seemed to do well with a snare left twice in the same location, he would move on
to set out snares in new locations. As he walked his trap lines, he was constantly on the lookout for plants with edible roots and leaves. By midmorning he would be back in camp to skin his catch, then cut the meat into strips and begin soaking it in a pouch of salty water. The meat taken out of the pouch went to the back of the cave to smoke. Intestines were washed out and put in the salty water too. Skins he scraped, then rubbed with salty dirt and brains as he had seen the women do, though he wished he had watched more closely as his skins came out tough and stiff. Then he would eat, stuff some fingers, work on his shelter, repair or prepare snaring nooses and eventually set out in the late afternoon to recheck his trap line again.

  The wolf made his rounds of the trap lines with him. Pell was thrilled to have a friend along and took to having long conversations with her, now that he didn’t need to be silent on his “hunt.” As opposed to when he had been really trying to hunt and the wolf had been quite helpful, she was of little use while running his trap line. He began calling her “Ginja” and eventually stopped calling her “Gimpy” at all. However, remembering the big cat that had treed him, he felt safer with her around. Despite her nickname, Pell didn’t truly feel that she was useless. He kept her away from the traps, as he feared that her scent would warn their quarry and was pleasantly surprised to find that she quickly learned to stay back until he had emptied a snare. Especially, she stayed away when he was setting a new snare.

  Weeks passed and Pell resigned himself to the fact that Tando and Donte were not going to talk Roley into letting him back into the Aldans. This brought on a lonely depression, especially as he thought about the oncoming winter and his certain death.

  As time passed and his store of smoked meat accumulated, however, he began to contemplate the possibility that he might be able to survive a winter by himself! With some surprise he realized that he already had as much meat stored as would have been his share of what the Aldans usually stored in their big hunts right around the first freeze of winter. And, he had months to go before winter came! Of course, he wasn’t sure that his smoked meat would last all the way through the winter, but the tough meat that had been heavily smoked seemed to have kept so far without any change at all!

  He knew he would need to find grains and roots to store, as eating only meat led to sickness. There didn’t seem to be any grain growing in his area. Donte had shown him some grasses she said would have grain later but he worried that he hadn’t seen any yet. The tubers he did find were small and it didn’t seem like he would ever find enough to last a winter. As he thought more of it, despite his surprisingly large stores of meat, things still looked pretty grim.

  Pell was coming back into camp late one afternoon when he was startled by a shout. “Pell, look out!”

  He looked up to see a figure casting a spear at him and dove into the bushes beside the path. The spear flew overhead to clatter onto the path behind him. Pell scrambled through the brush to the other side and crouching, regained his feet. To his dismay he realized he had dropped his own spear. The shout had sounded like Tando but who had tried to kill him? How had Tando managed to arrive at the same time as whoever was attacking him? How many were there? Why were they after him? Was it Pont? What in the Spirits should he do next? He must escape! Pell had dropped to his knees to crawl further into the bush when he heard Tando calling again. “Pell, come on out, I scared it away.”

  Scared what away? Pell slowly raised his head and peered over the brush to see Tando standing there with a huge grin. He looked quite proud of himself. Where was the guy who threw the spear at him? “Tando, what happened to the other guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy who threw the spear at me.”

  “No one threw a spear at you. I threw a spear at a wolf that was sneaking up behind you.”

  “Spirits! Did you hit her?!”

  “Her? I didn’t see a woman. Where was she? Anyway, I didn’t hit anyone. I did frighten away that wolf. It was a big one.”

  Pell began to clamber back over the brush to the path. How was he going to explain Ginja to Tando? “Tando….”

  “Yes?”

  “Uh, the uhhh, the uh wolf you see, she’s…the wolf is… my friend.” He finished lamely.

  Tando stared at Pell like he had just grown a horn. “The wolf is what?”

  “She’s my friend. Don’t hurt her, OK?”

  By the look of Tando’s expression, it appeared that he thought Pell had grown several horns. Pell looked around for Ginja and saw her slinking about in the brush some distance away. “Ginja, come.” He said this while unconsciously pulling a piece of the heavily smoked meat out of his pouch and waving it down low.

  To Tando’s amazement, the wolf began to slink nearer, though warily. As it got closer he could see the hair standing up on its back and it bared its teeth in Tando’s direction. Finally it came right up to Pell and took something out of his hand. It lowered slowly down to its belly and began chewing on whatever Pell had given it, all the time with its attention focused on Tando and its fur still raised.

  Pell turned back to Tando. “How is your wrist?” he said eyeing Tando’s arm cautiously. It looked swollen but, to his relief, it still appeared to be fairly straight. The wooden splint remained in place but the straps appeared to be loose.

  “What? Oh it’s great!” Tando slid the splint out from under the loose leather straps and wiggled his wrist back and forth a little, flexing his fingers expansively. It’s kinda stiff but it hardly hurts at all anymore. “I didn’t know if I should take your “healing stick” off of it yet. I feel safer with it on but it feels good to take it off and move my hand around some too.”

  Pell was surprised that Tando thought of the stick as something that made the bone heal rather than just something to hold the wrist straight while it healed. He realized, he hadn’t explained to Tando why he had strapped the stick to him, it had simply seemed obvious. “I guess it’s OK to have it off then. But why are you back? I’m happy to see you of course, but has something happened?” Pell didn’t say it aloud, but he was hoping against all hope that they had come to tell him that Roley had agreed to take Pell back into the Aldans.

  Without taking his eyes off the wolf lying at Pell’s feet, Tando said, “It’s my mate Tellgif. She was sick when Donte and I found the Aldans at the summer hunting area. She started coughing, then she became very hot. Then she alternated from hot and sweating to cold and clammy. She would cough up terrible looking stuff and keep coughing in great wracking heaves until she was exhausted. She became weaker until she couldn’t stand and she’s been that way ever since. All Pont’s medicines and rituals haven’t made her any better. Sometimes he does things that seem to make her even worse. At some of his ceremonies, he makes her breathe smoke. When she does, it seems like she’ll never stop coughing. He says she’s coughing up the evil spirits but it doesn’t seem like it helps, instead she seems weaker. When we first rejoined the Aldans, I pretended that my arm had been straightened in a fall into a stream. Of course, Pont claimed that that was because he’d been praying to the water spirits for me. I didn’t object at first but one night Pont had us all chewing hemp in one of his ceremonies for Tellgif. I… got kind of crazy like people do when they chew hemp. When Tellgif seemed to get even sicker during the ceremony I went berserk. I flew into a rage and started calling him a liar. I told them all that I had gone to you! I told them that you fixed my arm when Pont couldn’t! I was crazy I guess.

  I thought that they would throw Pont out and take you in as their medicine man instead. But they didn’t. Pont went into a rage, cast a death spell on me and then they threw me out. He said that if they didn’t, the whole tribe would die just like Tellgif! And they just accepted it! Can you believe it? Thinking back over the years I’ve been in the Aldans, I’m not sure Pont has ever made anyone better who wouldn’t have gotten better anyway! He just claims that those who do get better, got better because he did this or that.

  Anyway, Donte was the only one who
stood by me and, since she came with me, now she’s exiled too. Tellgif was so sick I was afraid to bring her with us, so she’s still there.” He looked down at his feet and mumbled, “I was afraid to leave her too, but Donte pointed out that it would be better to get you quickly so that you can heal her before she gets too much sicker.”

  “So I can what!?”

  “You know, make her better.”

  “Tando, I don’t know anything about healing! I only know one trick, and that one’s only good for putting bones back in place.”

  “She’s coughing stuff up.”

  “I don’t know anything about coughing.”

  “She doesn’t eat. She’s hot, then she’s cold. She says it hurts here.” As he said the last Tando pointed to his chest.

  “I don’t know anything to do for people who are hot and can’t eat Tando.”

  “Still you’re a better healer than Pont. All he ever does is give more hemp!”

  “Sometimes he mixes in other herbs.” Pell couldn’t really believe he was defending Pont but he desperately didn’t want to become involved in Tellgif’s illness.

  “Yeah.” There was a long pause in which they both looked everywhere but at each other.

  “Pell, will you try to help Tellgif?”

  Pell was stunned. “How, Tando? I have no idea what to do to help her!”

  “Please Pell? I’m begging you.”

  Frustrated Pell said, “I have to think. Let’s go back to the campsite.”

  As they walked back to Pell’s cave Tando practically babbled. He’d already stopped by Pell’s campsite and thought that the way that Pell had made a cave out of his overhang was very exciting. He wondered whether something similar could be done elsewhere, such as the Aldans’ drafty winter cave. He and Donte had talked about Pell’s healing powers and were sure that he could do something about Tellgif’s illness. He and Donte had discussed how they could establish their own little tribe here at Cold Springs Ravine, just the four of them with Tando as the hunter, Pell as the healer and Donte and Tellgif as the gatherers. The winters would be rough but others would probably join them as soon as the word got out about Pell’s healing powers.