He trotted down the slope toward Moon, still walking up the rising valley to where a rocky outcrop emerged above the trees. He caught his breath with pleasure as he watched the grace with which she moved, seeming to slip from tree to tree. He looked back. Nothing. He caught up with her as she came to the base of the rock cliff, where the sun shone full on a grassy bank and into the shallow recess beneath the overhanging rock. That would keep them dry from rain, and he heard the trickle of water. There was no dung beneath the rock, no sign of bear or even foxes. He put down his pack, took out the pouch, and set his tinder to dry. Deep in the crevice beneath the overhang, windblown twigs and dried leaves would provide him more. He looked carefully for signs of earlier fires. None. He followed the sound of the water and found a small spring trickling from the side of the rock, a scatter of stones around it. One by one, he carried four of them back to the overhang and set them in a loose square to make a hearth, while Moon refilled the water skin.
“Here?” he asked her. She nodded. Here. Swiftly they gathered fallen wood, still damp from the storm, but they stacked it along the back of the overhang where the sun and air would dry it. He took the thongs from his sack, cut them into lengths for his traps, and they strolled together to the warren where he had seen the rabbits. She left him setting traps, and came back with his sack full of young cob nuts, and they strolled back to the rock, a soft shyness growing between them, with the sun still warm and strong in their faces.
When they reached the overhang, she stood unmoving for a long moment, her eyes unseeing on the rock. And then, saying quietly, “This is still damp,” she lifted her tunic over her head and laid it casually on the hearthstones. As he gazed down the long slim length of her back to the perfect flaring curve of her hips, she turned her head slowly and looked over her shoulder at his rapt face. He could not read the flashing look in her eyes, but he moved in a daze toward her, his eyes dreamy but his heart pounding, and stretched out his arms to embrace her. Fast as a fish, she turned into his chest and buried her face in his neck.
“Yours is still damp too,” she murmured, and untied his belt and lifted his tunic and they drew it off together. Then she lifted the knife thong from his neck, and there was only the magical smoothness of her against him and he sank to his knees to run his face against the firm high breasts, and feel his lips drawn to the perfect rosebuds that tipped them. She sank down to join him, and her arms were very strong around him and the fresh young grass rippled warmly around them in the gentle breeze.
It was the next day that they found the cave. They had risen from the grass as the sun began to fall, and made a fire. Deer left her feeding it with the sun-dried wood, and went to look at his traps. He brought back a plump rabbit, and Moon took his knife to skin it and they roasted it on a spit. He kept stretching out his hand to touch her, unable to bear this separation of their flesh, and while they ate she entwined her legs with his and leaned against him, feeding him choice morsels until the hunger of their bellies was appeased and another, fiercer hunger took its place.
When he woke at dawn, the dear, soft length of her against him, he began thinking of all the things he must do. She must have skins to keep her warm, skins to lie on, skins to sling on tripods of sticks that could hold water and be warmed by hot stones. That meant more skins to make the rawhide thongs. And then she must have a tent, which meant more skins and more thongs again. And skins meant reindeer. He must make a bow this day, with the short length of thong that remained to him after making the traps. Arrows he could harden in the fire, but he must find flint and perfect his clumsy skill to make scrapers for her to clean the skins. She would need a knife to cut her food, sharp-pointed awls that could make holes in the skins that she could then sew together with a needle made from reindeer bone. He was thinking of all the tools that he had taken for granted and left far behind in the village, and did not notice her awaken until her hand slipped softly around his neck and pulled him to her.
There were two more rabbits in the traps, and he blew the fire back into life as she skinned them. She began to roast the meat as he went to the stand of saplings by the spring, bending and flexing them to find one sturdy enough to make his bow. His thong was short and his arrows without flintheads, so the bow must be the stronger. His ax cut it down and trimmed it, and then he cut down two more long ones, using creeper to tie their ends together. He leaned them against the rock. The meat they did not eat could hang up there, safe enough from foxes. There was a pine beyond the spring, and he scraped off the resin with his knife, and back at the fire transferred it to one of the hearthstones to soften.
“I would climb the other ridge today, and see what is to be seen there before exploring to the end of this valley,” he said. “Our valley.”
“We must look for flint,” she said, rising to sling the uneaten rabbit on the poles. “I need a knife and scrapers.” Then she took his ax and cut herself a long, stout sapling, trimming to a rough point.
He sat by the fire to shape the ends of his bow and carve the notches for his string as she fed him. He stood to test it, drawing it almost to his shoulder. Now the arrows. He cut four of the straightest saplings, pointed their ends, and showed her how to harden them in the fire, using spit to stop them burning. Then he sliced the thin grooves into their ends for the feathers he had collected, coated the quills with the soft pine resin and slid them home. As he finished, he saw that she was hardening the point of the spear she had made for herself.
His new bow over his shoulder, and Moon on his arm with her spear over her shoulder, they set off down the slope to the stream. It ran fast and babbled, almost wide enough to jump. He paused on the bank, looking to the stillness under the trees for the ripples that would tell where the fish lay. The stream narrowed just below them, and there were stones enough to build a loose dam to trap them, and willows to weave into a light fence that he could use to trap the fish as he splashed them downstream to the dam. More willows could make a loose basket and Moon could then scoop out the trapped fish. Then he saw the reddened clay by the rocks, and the darker earth that would flow when it was burned, and he felt the promise of color that lay trapped within them and he felt a yearning to be at his work again. And then he heard her call lightly to him, and he turned to see her rushing to the stream, her eyes intent as she gathered her legs for a great leap that took her almost across the stream to fall just a little short, and land, splashing and laughing, in the water.
He waded across, picked up her fallen spear and held her, her face and hair wet as they had been in the storm and on the river, in what seemed now to be another and barely remembered life. Gently he moved his face toward her, and licked the beads of water from her eyebrows, from her cheeks, and then from her lips. They opened and he felt her warm tongue on his own lips, her hands on him, and they fell to the warm bank and into each other again, into a world so perfectly new and theirs that he was sure no one before them had ever known it before.
“I can weave baskets from the willows to catch fish,” she said much later. And he squeezed her proudly, feeling happier than he had ever been, and they rose and began their climb up the shoulder of the hill to the ridge. Carefully skirting the skyline and taking cover in some shrubs, he looked across and saw the great river glinting to his left. The great tangled dam of trees was half gone, the river running placidly, and no other movement to be seen save for the darting of the birds. She squeezed his hand in relief. Each of them had been thinking privately about the danger of pursuit.
They turned along the ridgeline to their right, aiming for the head of their valley through knots of trees and sudden hollows, welling springs that rose and bubbled and disappeared back into the earth. They crossed another rabbit warren on a warm and sun-baked slope, which took them up to a rolling plateau from which they looked down across the stream to see the rock outcrop where they had made their camp. Gray and bare but rounded, with no jagged peaks, the rock continued on the far side of the valley before rising toward them. They followed the gentle rise of the plateau, walking easily on the soft grassland, until they reached a soft crest and saw range after range of hills rolling away from them dappled with trees and the distant movement of game. None seemed near, but he saw a scattering of reindeer dung and moved forward to probe the dropping. They were still warm inside. The beasts were close. Not sure enough of his own skills to track them, he took his bow from his shoulder and an arrow from his sack and began trotting with his face into the wind, into a thin screen of low and stunted trees. The winds could be fierce up here.
They scented the deer before they saw them, one stag to their left and three does with their young grazing the shrubs ahead. Moon froze. He crept forward, notching his bow, and thinking he would have time for but one shot. Unless he hit one of the young, and the doe stayed. He had known since he made the arrows that they would not be strong enough for a kill, even if he were sure enough of his skill to aim for the heart. He would have to try for a belly shot, and the long running chase until the beast died.
The stag’s head rose in suspicion but scented nothing and saw no movement. It bent again to the soft grass. Deer’s breathing felt very loud in his ears as he found space in the undergrowth to stand and draw the bow. The doe was perhaps twenty paces away, her young one a still target as it muzzled at her belly. He sighted and released the string, hearing the sharp sigh of the arrow’s flight and the stag’s warning bark as the beasts turned
