hers as they softly brushed her cheeks ... her lips ... her throat. Con moved closer so their lips lightly touched. There was an exquisite delicacy in the way their mouths met in a subtle caress. Then, in a rush of passion, they pressed their lips together and kissed. Con moved so Rick could embrace her more completely.
'Anybody hungry?' asked Joe loudly. Without waiting for an answer, he said, 'I know you are, Con. Rick, I bet you're peckish, too. Long day ahead of us, a very long day.' Rick sat up so abruptly that he pulled the poncho off them. Joe acted as if nothing had happened at all. He sat up and calmly put on the hide parka. 'I'm going to gather some more wood. Rick, could you work your trick with the fire? Con, some hot broth would be nice.'
As soon as Joe left, Con giggled at Rick's discomforted look. She quickly kissed him, and said, 'I see we have a chaperon.'
'He said he was going to be your papa,' said Rick. 'Now I know what he meant.'
'Joe's sweet,' said Con, 'but Daddy never cared what I did.' Rick soon had the fire going. Con cut up the scraps from last night's dinner, which were as cold as if they had been refrigerated, and put them in the pot to boil. Joe returned with an armload of wood. 'Rick,' he said, 'could you give me a hand? I've got more piled up in the grove.'
'Sure.'
Once they were away from the ledge, Joe turned to Rick. 'I know you love Con, just don't love her to death.'
'What?'
'Don't do anything that will compromise her health.
Sometimes, when things look bleak, men and women behave recklessly. For her sake, promise me you won't. Do you know what I mean, or do I have to spell it out?'
Rick blushed. 'I get it.'
Joe looked at him with sympathy and understanding. 'If you truly love her, you'll wait.'
'I'll wait.'
LIFE IN THE canyon quickly fell into a routine of prepar-ing for the trip to the sea. Joe, with his antipathy for nightstalkers, spent most of each day hunting them, while Rick and Con dedicated their time to preserving his catches. The damp air made smoking the meat the only means to accomplish that. They cut all the meat they didn't need for their immediate use into thin strips and hung them from a rack above a fire. Keeping the fire going proved to be the most time-consuming task for Rick and Con. Once all the fallen wood was gathered, branches had to be broken or hacked from the trees. It was grueling work in the frigid rain. The gun would have made the work easy, but they dared not use it. Its solar recharger was ineffective in the dim light, and the gun's depleting charge was too vital to be wasted on jobs that could be accomplished by brute force.
Besides these daily chores, each took on other tasks. Con scraped the Tyrannosaur skin and stretched it out near the fire to dry. Afterward, she and Rick chewed the stiff hide until it was soft and flexible; then Con tailored it using sinew and a bone awl. Rick cut down three stout hardwood saplings and fashioned them into spears, hard-ening their whittled points in the fire. He constructed a sturdy stone meat cache on the back of the ledge for their growing store of dried meat. Joe built a low stone wall around the sleeping area to serve as a windbreak.
Initially, Con felt almost like a newlywed setting up house. That romantic notion quickly passed, worn down by the grind of survival under hard conditions. At night, there was no privacy at all. The daytime, when she and Rick were alone together, was filled with toil in harsh weather. Fatigue, hunger, and cold marked her days. She was often irritable and withdrawn. While Rick remained affectionate, Con questioned her desirability. Bathing was a frigid ordeal she avoided. She was dirty and smelled of wood smoke and clothes that were never changed. She had sores and rashes. Her hands were raw and calloused. All the twenty-first-century ideals of beauty and hygiene—white teeth, smooth legs, clear skin, glossy hair—were unattainable. Feeling worn and un-lovely quenched her ardor. Romance became a distant dream, like a full belly and warm feet.
Con's domestic feelings found other outlets. In antic-ipation of their journey, she began to fashion jackets by stuffing a layer of nightstalker down between two shirts and sewing them together. She obtained thread by pains- takingly unraveling a scrap of cloth. She carved an eye-less needle from bone and patiently pushed the thread through the cloth for each stitch. The resulting garments were warm, but greasy feeling, and the shafts of the feathers made them prickly. Nevertheless, they quickly became indispensable clothing as the weather changed.
It was changing for the worse. The rain diminished and became a frigid drizzle. It's dank chill penetrated their clothes. Only fire kept it at bay, yet wood was too diffi-cult to cut to maintain more than a meager blaze. Con rationed the wood and built a decent fire only when Joe returned, chilled and wet, from the day's hunt. It was the one time of the day when she was truly warm. The cold made Con reflect that her life had become even harder than her legendary ancestor's.
'I had to walk miles downriver for this one,' he said to Rick after a daylong hunt.
'Just as I feared,' said Rick. 'Game's getting scarce.'
'It's more than that,' said Joe. 'They're still around.
