When Alex had the fire going, he examined the pile of rocks they were making. He moved and stacked them so they formed a small river rock wall.
“When we get enough rocks, what then?”
“First,” Lanta-eh said, wiping a stray lock of hair off her forehead, “we will not find enough rocks today for what I need. Once we do, though, we are going to move them to Winten-ah.”
Alex winced. The pile of stones was already too big for twenty men to carry. If this was just the beginning, it was going to turn into a big project.
“And then,” Lanta-eh continued, “we’re going to carry them to Prata-ah. To the very top. That’s where I really need them.”
The thought of carrying tons of rocks from the river to the top of a mountain many miles away was enough for Alex to sit down by the fire.
“Dadda?” Sanda-eh said. “You okay?”
Alex had been making good progress in teaching her English along with Winten-ah and the universal language. One interesting side effect was that she didn’t always keep them straight in her mind. She might start a sentence in Winten-ah, and end it with an Americanized “okay.”
She was so adorable, with such an outsize personality, that Alex had noticed some of the phrases she was particularly fond of—yeah, okie-dokie, and huh-uh in particular—had begun to be popular in the tribe. That amused Alex no end, as he had tried to introduce a few words where there were no Winten-ah equivalents for years and had met with nothing but failure.
“I am fine. I just was feeling tired in advance, which is no way to be, is it?”
“No!” Sanda-eh agreed, though it was likely she had no idea what she was agreeing to.
In early spring, the sun set early, and it soon became evident that Lanta-eh was not going to be satisfied with the number of rocks she was able to find in a single day. They warmed themselves by the fire as the sun dipped low in the sky, then headed back to Winten-ah.
“Why did we hike this, instead of bringing the horses?” Alex asked.
“I thought you could use the exercise,” Lanta-eh said mischievously. “I know you are the kind of person who likes to hurry through everything, but I think it’s better this time to just slow down and enjoy the process. We will be at the end of it soon enough, and we might wish then that we had stretched these days out and enjoyed them more.”
Chastened, Alex took the words to heart.
For the next week he, Sanda-eh, Lanta-eh, and Monda-ak set out for the river before first light and arrived home after dark. What had once been a small vacation from their habitual life became a habit of its own.
The small rock fence that Alex had started, grew. As it did, he became more meticulous in the way he stacked the rocks. It was not unusual for him to take an entire section down to remove a single rock that didn’t quite fit.
Lanta-eh was amused.
“You do remember that we are going to carry those back to the cliffside, then on to Prata-ah, don’t you?”
“I have to do something to amuse myself while you collect your rocks,” Alex retorted.
Finally, at the end of the eighth day, when they turned for home, Lanta-eh said, “This is enough. On to the next.”
Next was a three-part operation. First, getting the pile relocated to the field in front of the cliff, then to Prata-ah, then to the top of Prata-ah.
When Alex had grasped how big the job was going to be, he had sent Wenta-eh to Danta-ah to ask another favor. Winten-ah only had a single cart, but ten horses. With a single cart, Alex calculated it would take months to get the rocks back to Winten-ah, let alone the top of Prata-ah.
As always, Harta-ak and Versa-eh came through for Alex. On the day Lanta-eh said she had enough rocks, Wenta-eh rode up to the river, trailing three new horses and three bigger, stronger carts.
“The horses need to go back, but Klipta-ak said he made the carts for you as a gift. Oh, and to tell you that whatever you might need, he will build it.”
As it turned out, with four horses and a team of men, it only took four days to move the stones to the field in front of the cliffside.
Another four days got them to the base of Prata-ah, once the site of Alex’s battle with Klipta-ak and the Lasta-ah.
From there, it was nothing but sweat and labor. The trail up the mountain was too steep for either horses or wagons, so it came down to manpower. Alex dreaded the thought of how many trips it would take.
He needn’t have worried. Like an Amish barn raising, the Winten-ah showed up in force. Everyone who could walk hiked to Prata-ah and carried rocks up to the top. Those who were weak or injured built fires and cooked a feast for when the work was done. Hundreds of hands made the work go quickly.
Alex noticed that no one ever asked what the rocks were for.
Whatever The Chosen One asks for, she gets. Alex immediately dismissed this as an unworthy thought. He had known her since she was a young girl, and had never seen her be anything but kind and attentive to others.
The job, which Alex had believed would take several days, was done by early afternoon, and it was all accomplished with a smile.
On his last trip up the hill, Alex looked at the pile of rocks and tried to envision what the whole enterprise had been for.
A fort? Too small. A lookout tower? Would have been easier with wood.
He finally did the thing that was hardest for him—to give up on knowing and wait patiently for the answer.
Chapter Thirty-FourSignal Boost
Lanta-eh suggested they take the next day off and rest before they launched into the next phase of her plan. Alex was happy to agree. There was
