“How many days between when you lost your tribe and you found me?” I asked.
She frowned, not understanding.
I picked up a rock and put it on the cave floor. “This day is when you left your tribe.”
Then I picked up another rock and placed it about two feet away. “This day is when you found me.”
Then I tapped several spots between the two rocks.
“How many days from this – ” I pointed at the first rock, then at the second. “ – to this?”
She thought for a second. “Five days.” She looked unsure. “…no, six. Six days.”
No wonder she’d been so ravenous when she’d seen the venison roasting over my fire.
As for finding her tribe, a six-day journey didn’t sound so bad on the face of it.
But we had been together roughly three weeks since she’d come into my life. That was almost four weeks from when she had gotten separated.
“Does your tribe move around a lot?” I asked.
Lelia frowned. “Move around?”
“Do they stay in one place, or do they go from one place to a new place?”
She shrugged. “If place is good, they stay. But we left home when skiris attacked.”
Leave aside the absolutely mind-boggling question of How the fuck are we going to find them out there amongst thousands of square miles of wilderness?
Instead, focus on the second worst question of How far could they have traveled away from us by now?
Worst case scenario: if her tribe had been continually on the move, they could potentially be more than 30 days’ walking distance away.
During the six days after Lelia got lost, if the tribe had marched east while Lelia went west, that was 12 days’ difference… and then another three weeks of marching east made over 30. (Seeing as Lelia stayed in one place, but they might have kept moving.)
Even worse than that, though, was they might keep moving east. If they kept going just a little slower than the two of us could follow, it could take us months to find them. If they kept going at the same speed or even a bit faster, we would never catch them.
I didn’t think any of that was likely, though. Humans don’t move relentlessly unless they have a reason – like escaping enemies or searching out food. Other species were like that, too. Sure, birds and dolphins and chimps and all sorts of other animals might move around season to season, but they tended to stay in one place for as long as possible.
I doubted these elf women were that much different. Lelia herself had said that her people tended to stay in one place.
It’s just too much effort to constantly be on the move. You expend too much energy, and that’s not sustainable, especially if you haven’t foraged enough food or caught enough game to keep going. As soon as they were relatively sure they were safe from the skiris, Lelia’s tribe would have slowed down to rest.
So it wasn’t like they were going to keep moving every day… but they still could have already gone pretty far. And they might keep moving slowly, which would just put more distance between them and Lelia and me.
Now on to the absolute worst problem: how to find them in the first place.
I mean, they could have gone in virtually any direction. North, south, east, west…
But there was no use worrying about that until we got a better view of the surrounding area. Lelia and I would have to go find a bird’s-eye view of the terrain and figure out which way her tribe would have been most likely to head.
Unfortunately, my cave just wasn’t high enough to see much more than the treetops closest to me, plus any mountain ranges dozens of miles away in the distance. Anything between the two was… well, I couldn’t see it from the cave.
There were far more dangerous things to consider, too.
“What about the skiris?” I asked.
Lelia shook her head. “They have home. They do not leave home much.”
I remembered what she said about how it was odd that the skiris had attacked them after so many years of leaving them alone.
We not know why skiris attack. We lived with them for very long time with no fighting… many, many, many years… not friends, but no killing… and then they attack. Very strange.
“Are you sure the skiris won’t leave home and start hunting us?”
“…no,” she admitted. “Not sure…”
“And what about the wolves?” I asked.
Lelia thought for a second, then conceded: “Wolves are problem.”
Great.
We talked a bit more, then proceeded to the baby-making.
I was happy to temporarily forget all the obstacles set up against us, but I knew what we had to do tomorrow:
Go do some reconnaissance.
16
The next morning, I set out to finally get a better view of the land around me.
It might help to paint a mental picture of the terrain first, though.
As I’ve said, I initially woke up in this weird-ass place on top of a small mountain, with a peak about 500 feet taller than the spot I woke up.
On either side of that mountain peak were two ridges, almost like cliffs. So I basically woke up at the bottom of a gorge.
The sun set somewhere behind the 500-ft mountain, so I was going to call that the west (even though I was on an entirely new planet and I had no idea if the sun actually set in the west here). Which meant that my cave was in the southern cliff face.
The southern cliff face was about 150 feet tall, which meant that if I could climb up to the top, I could get far enough above the treetops to see what was out there. No need to scale a 500-foot mountain just for the view. If the cliff didn’t work well enough, I could tackle the mountain later.
I explained to Lelia as best I could that I was going to climb up the cliff face – with the starting point
