I was beginning to think that avalanche was the best goddamn thing that could have possibly happened to me.
25
It continued like that every night – a different woman, or sometimes two, would join Lelia and me. It was incredible. Dreams without dreaming, a fantasy come true.
The only woman who wouldn’t sleep with me was Oona, probably because she still didn’t trust me. She had seen another white male human leading the skiris, and she still feared me because of it.
That was alright, though.
I had more than I could handle.
I asked Lelia one morning why she was sharing me.
She just smiled and touched my face. “I know you love me.”
“That’s true, I do, but… back where I come from, women don’t normally do this.”
She shrugged. “It is for the good of the tribe.”
“Okay, but – ”
“And we need babies.”
Whoa –
“What?” I asked, stunned.
“We need babies to make tribe bigger.”
I stared at her, my mouth open wide.
She frowned. “You said you make baby with Lelia.”
“I did, yes, but – ”
Now she was getting angry. “Did you lie?”
I realized that when she’d said You make baby with Lelia? after we’d first slept together, she wasn’t being hypothetical – and she meant now rather than later.
“NO, I didn’t lie – but is now really the best time?” I asked, irritated.
“Why not best time now?” she asked, confused.
“The skiris and the vaklik – they’re trying to kill us – we’re running away from them – we could die – ”
“Jack, we could die any day. Can die every day. There is never ‘best time.’ There is only now.”
Wow.
Didn’t expect to get a philosophical lesson thrown at me by a blue elf.
“I’m… not even sure we can have children together…”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Look – you have blue skin, I have white,” I said as I grabbed her hand and held it next to mine. Then I touched the tops of one of her ears. “Your ears are pointed; mine aren’t.”
She shrugged dismissively. “You are a man. I am a woman. We can make baby,” she said confidently.
I sighed. I wasn’t about to get into DNA and chromosome mismatches – that was beyond my ability to explain at the moment. And it would just confuse her.
Lelia was essentially a woman straight out of the Stone Age. How do you explain about something so small that a person can’t see it, and never will be able to?
Moreover, how do you expect them to believe you? They would have to take everything you said on complete and total faith.
Not gonna happen. Especially when you’re arguing against something they want to believe is true.
In Lelia’s case, she wanted to believe we could have children together.
…could we?
The truth was, whether we could or not, that wasn’t the real issue.
“You want me to make babies with the entire tribe, though?” I asked.
She nodded somberly. “Yes. You do not want to?”
I stopped to consider that question.
I’d never even had one child back on Earth – and here she was asking me to father five by different women.
It was… odd, to say the least.
Well, odd for me.
Maybe not odd for her at all. This was a different world, a different people, with different customs and beliefs. Maybe those customs and beliefs kept her people alive.
And being with five different women every few nights certainly had its allure.
But having children?
Was I ready for that?
She interpreted my pause as not wanting what she wanted.
“You don’t!” she cried out, her face upset, her voice panicky.
I grabbed her and pulled her to me before she could back away.
“No, that’s not it. I’m just… I’m not sure I would make a good father,” I said somberly.
She frowned. “‘Make’ a good father? What does this mean?”
“It means I don’t know if I would BE a good father.”
She smiled and touched my face tenderly. “You keep me safe… you love me. You will keep children safe, and you will love them. You will be a good father.”
In the face of her quiet surety and kindness, there was nothing to do but smile and give in.
“Okay,” I whispered.
And then we kissed.
26
Whether there were children on the way or not, there was still a lot left to be done.
Number one priority: if we wanted to move fast, snowshoes would help a lot. And not the ragtag, ass-backwards, janky ones we’d been wearing so far.
Real snowshoes, ones that didn’t rely on being stuffed with tree limbs.
So I set about trying to figure out how to create better ones.
The frames were the problem. The strings crisscrossing the bottom were simple enough: strips made from deer skin. That was just a matter of catching more deer and tanning their hides.
But the frames were a bitch.
I had no axe to cut down a tree. And even if I could find a freshly fallen one, I had no tools to cut out a cross-section. And carving out a frame whole, from one piece of wood, would take forever.
And I didn’t have forever. I needed to make at least seven pairs – one for me, Lelia, Oona, Fieria, Hala, Mazaria, and Teeka. They needed to be relatively quick to make, and relatively simple to replace. I mean, I didn’t want to invest a week into each frame, only to have to replace it if it broke.
In the end, I figured it out because of the bows I was making for the women… and because of the hide they prepared from a deer.
The hide came first.
I explained to Lelia that I was going to need a lot of strings for our new snowshoes, and it would be better if we could remove the fur. She agreed, and as soon as we killed our first deer, Hala was tasked with removing the fur.
It was an arduous process of scraping it off with a tool they made from bone. I could tell that it was going to take hours and hours, and would probably end up damaging the hide.
“Why don’t we soak it first?” I suggested.
“Soak?” Lelia asked.
“Put it
