Instead, she formed her body into a tight ball to try to get warm. In that position, she bit into the raw meat. It was tough and stringy. Tearing off a piece with her teeth was difficult. The flavor was not pleasant. The flesh was strongly gamy, with the odor and metallic aftertaste of stale blood. Con chewed thoroughly before swallowing. Despite her hunger, she felt like gagging. 'I need to eat this. It may be a while before Rick and Joe find me.' Con used the tooth to slice though the muscle, making it easier to chew. Methodically and stoically, she devoured a pound of the meat. Afterward, like a wild carnivore, she lay in a semistupor as her heavy meal digested.
Con's thoughts drifted from question to question.
She forced her thoughts to happy outcomes. 'They'll come for me. I know they will.' She imagined running to hug Joe and Rick. 'They'll say, 'We thought you were dead.' And I'll answer, 'Takes more than a little water to kill me!' And Joe will say something smart. And Rick will gaze into my eyes like he
'did on the beach.' She envisioned telling them all about her narrow escape as they walked back to the plane. They'd arrive to find that the water-softened earth was easy to dig. 'No .. . they'll have already dug it out. I'll step in and we'll fly away.'
In an effort to realize this happy vision, Con climbed again to the rainy hilltop. The sky was darker than before, and the view was even more limited. The rain muffled her hoarse cries. She returned to her shelter more chilled and more discouraged.
Before an utterly black night enveloped the world, Con made three more fruitless and disheartening trips to the hilltop. By the last visit, her voice was barely audible. She forced herself to eat more meat before settling in for the dark hours ahead. Con stuffed mud into the cracks in the stone wall and decided her damp shirt would keep her warmer if it sealed the doorway. She set it in place by feel since it had become too dark to see. Then, curling into a tight ball, she tried to sleep. Eventually, she suc-ceeded and dreamed of kissing Rick on a warm sunny beach as the world ended.
WATER FOUND ITS way into Con's den and woke her. It was absolutely dark outside, but her ears told her the rain was falling heavily again. She stuck her hand out into the night and found it was colder than before. She had no idea where the rain had penetrated her defenses. In the dark, there was no point in venturing into the downpour to investigate. 'Best to wait for light.' Until then, she was resigned to endure the puddle that was forming be-neath her.
She ate some and drank a little from the puddle outside her doorway. Awake, she pondered a new dilemma—she was losing her voice. Every time she spoke to herself, it was evident. 'How will I call for help?' She recalled that hikers were advised to carry whistles because their un-natural pitch attracted attention in the wild. 'That's use-less information.' She wished she had learned how to whistle. She pursed her lips and blew, but the skill that had eluded her for eighteen years still did so. Con pon-dered if there was some other way she could signal Joe and Rick. She recalled a lecture about aboriginal art that discussed musical instruments. She remembered flutes made from wood . .. clay . . . reeds . . . and bone.
'Bone!' The lecturer had shown a picture of a man piping a tune on his enemy's arm bone. 'I could make a flute!'
Groping in the dark, Con found the Tyrannosaur's forearm and the tooth. She worked by feel to strip away the skin and muscle around the two bones of the arm. Deciding that the smaller of the two bones would make a likely flute, she set to work using the serrated tooth to saw off the bone's ends. The hard tooth enamel cut through the softer bone, but only slowly. Not being able to see hampered her. She did not finish the job until dim light returned to the sky. By then, both ends of the bone were scored all the way around. Placing the bone on the ground, she set the tooth edge in the scored groove and struck it like a chisel with her stone. The tooth broke through the bone into the marrow. Con turned the bone and repeated the process until the end of the bone fell off. She did the same to the other end. The result of her labors was a seven-inch-long marrow-filled cylinder about an inch and a half in diameter. Con gouged some of the marrow out with her fingernail and ate it. The fat it contained produced a pleasing sen-sation in her mouth. She got out as much as she could with her finger, eating it all greedily. Then she splintered the other bone, using two rocks from her wall. She ate the marrow in that bone also, but what she really wanted was the splinters. She used one to clean the remaining marrow from the cylinder and to scrape its interior walls. She looked through the hollow cylinder and judged its walls were still too rough.
Con removed the lace from her shoe and threaded it through the hollow bone. Then she pushed mud into the bone to serve as an abrasive and, clamping the bone with her teeth, pulled the lace back and forth with her hands. She polished her bone flute in this manner until the lace frayed and snapped so many times she could no longer tie together a usable length. She washed the bone clean in the puddle and inspected the inside. It looked smooth.
'Now I'll see if it was all worth it.' Con put her lips to the bone and blew across the open end like the man pictured in the lecture. The sound of wind came out, nothing more. Con tried different ways of blowing, and sometimes the windy sound would rise in pitch. She con-tinued to experiment until, for a fraction of a second, she produced a tone. It took many tries before she made the tone again. 'At least I know it works.' She practiced until she found just the right lip shape and position to consis-tently produce a note. Then she worked on volume. After a while, she could blow the note loudly whenever she picked up the flute.
Con emerged from her shelter into a torrential rain. If it hadn't been cold, she would have appreciated how the rain washed the mud from her body. She took her wet tee shirt and put it on before trying to waterproof her shelter. The trench she had dug to divert the rain had clogged, and a puddle had formed against the back of the Tyran-nosaur. She redug the trench, draining the puddle. Only when that task was finished, did she set about signaling with her flute.
The rain had turned the view from the hilltop into one of unbroken gray. Even the river below was invisible. Con pressed the top of the flute against her lower lip, formed her upper lip into the correct shape, and blew. She moved the flute slightly until a clear tone issued forth. /
