I gave her a questioning look.
“You’ll see. Wait. Oh my god,” she said.
I burst out laughing, and she laughed, too.
About ten minutes later, she plucked the berries and pine needles off the rock and placed them on another indented rock, like a bowl. Then she carried the makeshift platter over and held it out to me.
I frowned at her. “Do we eat these?”
“Yes, eat.” She plucked one of the berries off the rock, popped it in her mouth, and began to chew.
I followed her lead and picked up a berry. It was hot to the touch, so I blew on it to cool it down. Then I popped it in my mouth and bit down.
Son of a bitch – the starches inside the berry had been cooked to the exact consistency of a baked potato. The orange skin was crispy but with no real taste – but the roasted pine needles added a smoky, spicy flavor to it.
“Wow, that’s good,” I said as I reached for another.
“Wow?” she asked, perplexed.
“It means REALLY good.”
“Ahhh… wow!” she said with a big smile.
We’d work on the subtleties of ‘wow’ later. Right now, I had appetizers to eat.
I gobbled down the warm berries, and even followed her lead and ate the cooked pine needles. They were crispy and delicious – and salty! Maybe this was a good enough source for sodium.
Lelia fixed another batch of the berries, which we both wolfed down once they was through.
I kept carving the bow, whittling it down enough to make it pliable, but being careful to keep the wood thick enough to retain its strength.
I was less than halfway through when the meat was finally ready.
We ate it with the crisped pine needles – perfection. It was like ‘add your own rub as you go’ barbecue.
“This is delicious,” I told her.
Lelia cocked her head to one side. “Delicious?”
I took a bite of meat with the pine needles, smacked my lips, and went, “Mmmm-MM! Delicious!”
She laughed, then nodded as she took a bite of her own. “Delicious!”
After we had eaten our fill, I went back to working on the bow.
Lelia didn’t have anything else to do, so she just sat there in the cave, watching me. We continued our English lessons, with me adding in another layer of complexity, like ‘I grab the rock’ and ‘I am holding the knife.’
She had a bit more trouble with the nuances of things like that, but she was making progress at lightspeed compared with what I could have done with her language.
It was dark outside the cave when I finally was satisfied with the bow. Then I started whittling down one of the pieces of hardwood into an arrow.
When I finally finished, I held up a relatively straight shaft of wood for her inspection.
“Oh my god,” she said in the same tone of voice as a bratty teenager – although her face was hopeful and curious. She obviously wasn’t quite clear on the correct intonation yet.
I just laughed. “Okay, just wait a second.”
“Wait a second?”
I put my hand up to stop her, since I didn’t really want to get into explaining seconds and minutes and other ways to measure time just yet.
She sat there expectantly as I got some climbing rope from my backpack. I tied one end to the notch I’d cut in the top end of the bow, then I measured out the length I would need and cut it off. Then I grunted as I stretched the rope and tied the bottom of the rope to the bottom of the bow.
Now, climbing rope was just elastic enough to make a great bowstring – but it was about a quarter inch in diameter, a bit too big to be effective with a real arrow. But I could experiment with fraying the rope and using more slender strands of it later. What I had now would serve well enough for a demonstration.
I got my arrow and used the knife to make a notch in the end of it.
“Bow,” I said, holding up the wooden handle.
“String,” I said, plucking the climbing rope and letting it twang.
“Arrow,” I said, holding up the wooden stick.
Then I nocked the arrow, pulled back, and let it go.
It actually flew fairly straight and with a good deal of force, and clacked! solidly against the far wall of the cave.
You would have thought Lelia had just seen me shoot fireworks out of my ass.
“WOW!” she yelled, her eyes wide. “WOW, WOW, WOW!”
I laughed out loud at her reaction. Guess she hadn’t seen a bow and arrow before.
“It’ll be better with some feathers on the end and an arrowhead,” I said.
She frowned at me. “Arrowhead?”
“Yeah, uh… like your spear,” I said as I walked over and retrieved her weapon.
I pointed at the sharp obsidian spear head.
“Like this, but small,” I said, and pinched my thumb and forefinger together like I was squishing an invisible marshmallow.
A light went off in her eyes. She scrambled across the cave and retrieved the stick, then brought it back.
“Arrow,” she said, holding it up.
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
She pointed at the spear head, then at the blunt end of my arrow.
“Arrowhead.”
“Yes. Very good.”
“Whoa,” she said, holding up a hand to tell me to wait, and then scrambled towards the front of the cave.
I watched as she searched among the rocks and boulders near the entrance, back along the far wall. After a few seconds, she came back with two different types of rock.
One was flat and seemed to have striations in it, like a rocky form of mica. The other was a fist-sized stone that tapered to a point.
She placed the flat rock lengthways on the ground so it was standing up, and then she lined up the point of the granite rock – raised it up – and swung down hard.
CRACK!
The flat rock split right down the middle of the layers, exactly like peeling apart mica – except the layers were glittering black inside.
I watched in awe as
