The ‘testing against the elements’ part was a continuation of everything I’ve described already, but it was made a whole lot more fun with a partner in crime. Lelia taught me much more about the environment I’d so unceremoniously been plunked into.
She showed me how a specific tree could be harvested for its sap, which was sweet like maple syrup, but with a citrusy tang to it.
For another tree, we dug down beneath the snow until we found its roots, many of which were exposed above the soil. The tree appeared to reproduce by sending out runners and budding asexually, and the small buds – which resembled toadstools – were tasty and filling.
And she took me further down the mountains and deeper into the forest, where smaller wildlife began appearing. Our first foray yielded five small animals that looked like squirrels, which we roasted over the fire that night.
When I asked her about birds, though – which I had to pantomime by putting my hands together and flapping the ‘wings’ – she looked confused. Not at what I was depicting, but how to answer the question.
“Birds… later,” she said, obviously struggling to find a word to describe why there weren’t any around.
I thought for a minute how best to describe what I wanted to get across. I figured a picture might be best.
We were standing in the woods outside after a fresh snowfall, so I had plenty of drawing canvas to work with.
I made a crude line drawing of a landscape with jagged mountains, then pointed up at the mountains around us, then back at the drawing. “Mountains up there… are same mountains here. Understand?”
She nodded. “Mountains,” she said, then pointed up at the real ones, then down at my drawing.
Okay, we had that much established, at least.
Then I drew two little stick figures – one with two curls of long hair on her shoulders, the other bald. “Lelia and Jack,” I said, pointing back and forth from us to the little stick figures.
She smirked a little, then held out a hand. “Stop.”
Stop?
She bent over, got a handful of snow, and began rolling something in her palm.
Then she plucked a twig off a nearby tree.
Finally she put two round globes on the chest of the long-haired stick lady…
…and the twig standing up from the crotch of the other stick man.
“Lelia and Jack,” she said with a big grin.
I burst out laughing, and she giggled along with me.
It was a pretty damn good joke, especially for two people who didn’t even share a single word in common just a few days before.
It didn’t hurt my ego that she’d given me an, ahem, very substantial twig compared to the rest of my stick-figure body. My line-drawing self could have definitely worked in stick-person porn.
“Lelia and Jack,” I agreed.
Then I fished my headlamp out of my pocket. It was one of the things that had amazed her most when I first showed it to her. She had played with it for several minutes, shining it all over the inside of the cave. I couldn’t quite get across the idea that the battery would run out, though, so she’d gotten a bit cross when I’d taken it away from her.
I clicked the light on and shined it down on the snow. Then I pointed up at the sun.
“Sun,” I said, pointing both above us and at the headlamp.
“Sun,” she agreed.
I moved the headlamp in an arc over the drawings, until the light dropped down to the ground on the other side of the ‘mountain’ – at which point I turned it off.
I then grabbed the low-hanging limb of a fir tree and covered the drawing with it, casting a shadow over the snow.
“Night,” I said.
“Ahhh… night,” she said.
Then I brought the headlamp over to the left side of the drawing and pushed it down in the snow. I turned it back on and slowly lifted it over the snow to simulate dawn.
“Morning,” I said.
“Good morning!” she said with a big smile. Every time we woke, ‘good morning’ was our customary greeting.
Well, that and sex.
“Yes,” I said, then made the headlamp sun move in an arc over the drawing until it set and I turned it off. “Day.”
“No sun, night. Sun, day,” she said.
“Yes!” I exclaimed happily. She got it.
Now for the interesting part.
“One day, two days, three days, four days, five days…”
I continued to count.
“…29, 30 days. Birds here in 30 days?”
She looked up in the air as though figuring something out. Then she shook her head. “One hundred days.”
100 was as far as I’d taught her so far.
So about three months – or what would have been three months back on Earth.
Maybe the birds had migrated… gone south for the winter… or whatever direction birds went for warmer climes.
Then she surprised me again, in more ways than one.
“Two… hundred days?” she asked tentatively.
That was impressive. She had made the deductive leap by using one and two and applying it to multiples of hundreds.
But it also meant that we wouldn’t be seeing any birds for over six months.
Fuck.
This was going to be a long-ass winter…
I showed her some other things, too, besides just my stick-figure map.
One was I reenacted how I had caught the buck using my rope. Or I tried to, anyway.
I wasn’t about to jump out of a tree to impress her, so I made do with a little twig-like version of myself jumping out of a two-foot-tall fir.
And to represent my quarry, I made a tiny buck with sticks for legs, a snowball for a body, and a smaller snowball head with stick antlers.
She didn’t get it at first – but when I made the stick-man jump off the tree, then closed the rope around the wooden leg and hauled Frosty the Snow Deer up into the air (at which point he promptly fell apart), her mouth dropped open in amazement.
“No,” she said in shock.
“Yes!” I said with a big grin.
“No!” she said, grinning
