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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 88: Takano 112
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 28
Tommy sat on the shore looking out over the lake. This place was a lot like home, she thought--not in all the ways she remembered when she thought of home, like hot baths and internet access and shopping malls, but in the climate. They got ice on the lakes most years, but not usually very thick, and usually gone in a couple days. Every few years there would be a big freeze, and the ice would get thick enough that towns would allow skating A friend of hers once told her about going to Lake Placid in upstate New York and driving snowmobiles on the lake and riding a toboggan down a ramp and out onto the ice like it was some amusement park ride. She had talked about seeing snow plows driving on the surface clearing the snow to make space for small airplanes to take off and land. There was nothing like that back home in Delaware. This was much more like Delaware. There had been ice briefly from time to time, but it vanished quickly.
It would be nice to bring fish back into the diet, but not yet. She remembered Lauren telling of wading into a lake to spear fish immediately after the first rainstorm had washed away all the snow and announced the coming of spring, and how she had had to teach herself tricks to keep herself warm. No, it was not quite spring yet. The snow might be melting, but all that icy water was still finding its way into the lake. If she waded into that, would she ever warm up again?
Rising, she headed back toward her nest, not hurriedly. With the return of the herds someone will bring her venison, and while she was a bit tired of venison she was also reminded of Lauren’s story about the quail. She had since found it in her Bible, and when she found it she read it a few times, to remind her that they needed to be thankful for what they did have instead of complaining about what they wanted.
Nearing her clearing she realized there was a commotion ahead. Although in her mind she thought she should quicken her steps, she actually hesitated. One of the young men spotted her, and came running toward her.
“Come quick!” he said. “It’s Boronir.”
At that she did hurry, and found the burly fighter and hunter, one of the original team leaders who had been a tennan in one of the old tribes, lying by her fire very badly injured.
“Go get Davey,” she told the boy, and he took off at a run. “What happened?” she asked the wounded man.
“I was a fool,” he said. “Everyone has such admiration for Davey since he killed that wolf--they even call him Davey Wolfkiller. I wanted to be admired, too. So I went to see if I could find and kill that lion.”
It struck Tommy that the admiration people have for Davey had little to do with him being a wolf killer, and also that Davey’s bow was better than any other in the camp, but neither of those things were going to be helpful right now.
“A lion did this?” she asked. He weakly shook his head.
“No.” He was struggling, and she tried to quiet him, but he seemed to want to tell her. “It was much larger than a lion, larger than the buck Lauren killed when we first arrived. It was dark, huge, bulky, furred, with teeth and claws. I should not have shot it; my arrow did little more than anger it, and it came for me. I passed out, and it apparently decided it did not want to eat me so it left me for dead. I’m not sure how I managed to get back here, but I--”
He closed his eyes. Davey arrived. “What happened?” he asked.
“Apparently Boronir picked a fight with a bear.”
He examined the patient. “Not good. Lost a lot of blood, probably still bleeding inside. Call his family?”
“I don’t think he has any. Varlax would know,” she said, spotting the woman approaching.
“What happened?” she called, and her husband answered.
“Boronir fought a bear. He’s not going to last the night, I think. It’s a credit to him that he managed to get this far. Does he have any family?”
“No. I think he wanted to get married, but he was a bit too surly to get along with most of us.”
“Have you got a spare blanket?”
Reluctant to wrap her bedding around a bleeding and dying man, Tommy said, “I’ve got a tanned deer hide; will that do?”
“Bring it,” and as Tommy produced the hide Davey carefully wrapped the dying man in it. “Kids, stoke the fire, and bring more wood. We should probably keep a vigil. What do you folk do with your dead?”
They looked at each other.
“We haven’t had a death since we’ve been out here,” Tommy said.
“We use to give them to the god wah-stee,” Varlax offered. It took Tommy a moment to work out that this was how they pronounced the word spelled “waste”, that they had tossed the body into the trash receptacles for recycling. It seemed somehow cruel to her, unfeeling, but it was probably quite efficient for that world. She shuddered as she wondered what was made from recycled bodies.
“In my world,” she said, “we usually had funerals, gatherings of friends and family to remember the good things about the deceased. Then we would either bury the body or burn it, but I think if you don’t have what we called a crematorium, a place with a really hot furnace, you couldn’t burn the bones, so you still wound up burying them. We set aside special places called cemeteries for that, and set up stones with the names of the dead carved into them to mark their places. People would visit these graves of their dead loved ones, sometimes leaving flowers behind, to remember them.”
She looked at Varlax. “But I’m not on the council. It will, I think, be up to you to decide what we do with our dead.”
She sat on one of the log seats around her campfire, looking at Boronir, and said to no one in particular, “I’ll take the first watch. We don’t want scavengers getting at his body. Send someone to relieve me sometime, and arrange to keep someone watching until we know what we’re going to do with him.”
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #510: Versers Debate. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
