They looked out on a palette that colored only from the brown end of the spectrum. Senta-eh pointed toward the forest. Typically, the forest was so dense that they couldn’t see past the first few feet of it. Now they could see all the way through to the clearing that was the domain of the ronit-ta—the dire wolves.
The trees were still standing, but they looked like lonely toothpicks jammed into the ground. The rest of the foliage of the forest—the underbrush, saplings, and berry bushes—were all gone as though they had never been there.
Alex and Sekun-ak shared a glance. It was a look that acknowledged that the tribe was in trouble.
Their food stores were already low.
Winter was coming.
There was no food of any type as far as their eyes could see.
Sekun-ak took a deep breath, held it, then slowly released it. “Let’s begin.”
They climbed back down to the biggest cave, where the rest of the tribe was just beginning to poke their heads out of the opening.
“First,” Sekun-ak said, “make sure everyone is all right.”
Alex and Senta-eh walked through the cave, laying a hand on the shoulder of each person they came to. They were all shaken, bitten, and exhausted, but they were alive.
In the far corner, Alex saw Drana-eh. Her eyes were closed. He hurried to her, knelt, and touched first her wizened hand, then her face. She was cool to the touch, but she had a small smile playing on her lips. Alex touched her throat and found no pulse. Her spirit had left her body.
“She lived long enough to see them again,” Alex observed.
“I am glad I will be dead long before we have to live through anything like that again.”
Alex didn’t like the thought of Senta-eh dying. He couldn’t imagine being in Kragdon-ah without her. Still, he understood what she meant. It wasn’t just the zisla-ta—which were horrifying—but surviving the devastation they left behind.
Alex picked Drana-eh up and cradled her. She felt as ethereal and light as the zisla-ta. He carried her through the cave and as he did, each person stopped him and touched her face.
Miraculously, Drana-eh was the only fatality on The Night of the Zisla-ta, as it came to be known. At least the only fatality at the time. Before the coming winter was done, it seemed inevitable that others would join her.
Alex and Senta-eh climbed a few levels down to inspect their new home. It was no longer new and wasn’t going to ever be a home as it stood. The spiders didn’t eat through the logs—they were too dense for that. However, the chinking had been destroyed and one shutter had apparently not been locked down. This gave the zisla-ta access to the interior, which was destroyed.
When Alex opened the door, he thought the bugs might once again pour out at him. All that was inside was dry corpses, though. Corpses, and what appeared to be eggs.
“Is this their life cycle then? Drop out of the sky like an avenging horde, eat until you can’t eat any more, lay your eggs and die?”
“Everything has a life-cycle, right? We don’t have any say in that, really.”
Alex ran his moccasin through the bodies and eggs on the floor, stirring up a cloud of brown dust motes.
“I don’t want to live in this now. I will burn what’s left of the furniture, take the logs down to the ground and we will start again.”
“Can we send for Klipta-ak first?” Senta-eh asked, barely able to hold the smile off her face.
Alex looked incredulous that anyone would challenge his building skills. Then he saw the expression on her face. He swept her into his arms, and held her tight.
“We are alive. That’s all that matters. Everything else can be rebuilt.”
Chapter Twenty-ThreeSurvival
The zisla-ta had destroyed almost everything that lived in a fifteen-mile swath. Unfortunately for the Winten-ah, they were smack in the middle of that path. That meant that they had to travel almost ten miles in either direction to get out of the complete devastation.
That devastation wasn’t a sharply delineated line, either. It was more of a ragged edge that ebbed and flowed.
All of the horses they had bred and traded so carefully were killed in the long night. There had simply not been any way they could protect them. In fact, the only four-legged creature who survived the night was Monda-ak.
Without horses, each trek to find fertile ground was long and hard. By the time a group of hunters made it to an area where animals still roamed freely, they were already a half-day’s hike away from home. Tracking, running down, killing, and field dressing an animal took the rest of the day. That left a long night of protecting their kill before they could haul it home.
Finding the roots and berries that were also a staple of their diet was equally challenging.
In the immediate aftermath, Alex worried about his friends Harta-ak and Versa-eh, and his allies in the village of Rinta-ah. Alex was aware how close to being completely wiped out the Winten-ah had been, and they had the caves to hide in. He couldn’t imagine how his friends might have survived in the open. Still, there was too much to be done to take time to travel and check on them.
The tribe had already been short on supplies when the spiders arrived. On top of that, winter came early. To Alex, it felt like they emerged from the cave and the next day, the first snowflake hit the ground.
The winter was brutally difficult. They had burned up all their available firewood to save themselves. They were so focused on their food supply that they didn’t want to give much manpower to gathering more. In the end, no Winten-ah starved or froze to death, but when the spring rains finally arrived, banishing the snows, everyone who emerged from the caves was thin to the point of emaciation.
Early in the spring, when the
