Lelia looked shocked. “I did not say that!”
Whoa…
“You can use your cock on Oona,” Lelia said. “I would like her to enjoy your cock. But she is afraid of it because she thinks you will use cock magic on her like you did on me.”
Okay, this is just too fuckin’ weird for me right now…
“Can we just concentrate on getting away from the skiris right now?” I asked, gesturing at the monster lying dead in the snow.
“Oh, yes,” Lelia said, glancing at the skiris and reassessing our priorities.
“Is your tribe nearby?”
“Yes… although Oona is afraid to take us there.”
“Why?”
Lelia pointed at my crotch. “She is afraid you will use cock magic on – ”
“OKAY, got it,” I interrupted. “Can you tell her I won’t do that, and that she needs to take us to your tribe so we can leave before another skiris shows up?”
Lelia said something to Oona.
Oona regarded me suspiciously… then answered.
“She says yes, she will take us,” Lelia said happily.
“Good, let’s go, then.”
Lelia and I retied our snowshoes with new bindings, and set off through the woods with Oona.
I would have made snowshoes for Oona, but it would have taken time – time we didn’t have at the moment.
Not that she would have even agreed to wear them. She looked askance at the shoes at the beginning – although her attitude settled into something closer to wonder as we stayed on top of the snow and didn’t struggle nearly as much as she did. She really had to put forth a lot of effort to plow through the snowdrifts as we traveled down the mountain through the forest.
At one point Oona said something to Lelia.
“Can we stop, Jack?” Lelia asked.
“Sure.”
During our break, Oona stared and prodded at Lelia’s snowshoes, asked a few questions in her native tongue, and looked at me with more wonder and fear.
I guess she thought the snowshoes were part of my ‘cock magic’ or something.
If only women on Earth were that easy to impress.
21
We traveled with Oona through the woods and down the mountain. Along the way, Lelia asked her questions and then filled me in.
It seemed that Oona had been doing much the same job that Lelia had been tasked with: going out and finding a new source of food. Apparently the tribe had run into problems finding enough to eat.
Why?
Because the skiris were taking up resources, too – and more and more of them.
During her foraging trip, Oona had journeyed far from the tribe’s current location. During that time, she had run across a group of skiris – and the human who was ordering them around. She hadn’t understood anything the human had said – but she’d understood enough to tell that the human was bossing the skiris around.
Oona had been discovered, and the human vaklik had sent one of the skiris after her. The chase had lasted more than an hour, with the skiris nearly catching up to her –
Until Oona had run across us.
I wondered what would happen when the dead skiris was missed. Would the human send a search party after it?
Would he find our tracks and follow us to the tribe?
I couldn’t worry about that now, though. We had enough troubles as it was just getting to their location.
The trip was a long hike of seven hours. During Hour Two, I asked Lelia how far it was to the tribe, according to Oona.
“Far,” Lelia informed me after talking to her friend. “We spend night, maybe, get there tomorrow.”
“Because it’s so far?”
“No.” Lelia looked pityingly at her friend, then back at me. “Because Oona is slower than us.”
I realized that either Oona was going to die of exhaustion trying to keep up with me and Lelia, or we were going to have to spend the night to get back to the tribe. Which I did not want to have to do unless absolutely necessary – not with the possibility of another skiris on our tail.
So I sat down and did an absolutely shit job of crafting another pair of snowshoes as fast as possible.
But at the end, I had something Oona could wear.
I guess it was a measure of her exhaustion that she barely put up a protest when I had Lelia strap the shoes to her feet.
If the choice was trudging endlessly through three feet of snow, or succumbing to cock magic, she’d take the cock magic.
Once she got the hang of walking on the snowshoes, though, she was enthralled. She loved them.
Score one for cock magic.
We completed the rest of the hike in one day, all the way down into the lowest depths of the valley.
Like I said, it took us seven hours – so roughly seven miles. By the end of it, we were all worn out.
But we didn’t have to spend the night out in the open with abominable snowmen potentially tracking us down.
Best of all, the tribe was much closer than I’d anticipated. I had been mentally prepping myself for weeks of travel – and here it had only taken three days. Instead of a worst-case scenario, we’d lucked into a best-case scenario.
It was an even luckier break running into Oona, or we might have kept going north instead of east. Hell, we might have even run into the human and his skiris army.
At any rate, we reached the tribe’s camp just as the sun was setting behind the mountains. Shadows had nearly taken over the depths of the forest.
As soon as we drew near, a woman in head-to-toe furs stepped out from behind a tree. She was carrying a spear, though she wasn’t clutching it threateningly.
Instead, she stood there for a moment in shock – then dropped the spear and ran over to Lelia and hugged her tight, babbling emotionally in their shared language.
Lelia laughed, hugged her back, and said something in return. As a result, the sentry reached out a hand and touched Oona on the shoulder tenderly. Maybe Lelia had spoken about Oona nearly
