Shaken, she hauled herself to her feet as the stormbird swept overhead. The air from its beating wings washed cold over her.
The monstrous snake-head darted down and snatched up one burned elk after another. It gulped the carcasses down amid a loud snapping of bones. Flapping its wings hard, the stormbird circled and gained height. Rain streamed down Nianki’s face as she watched it climb.
The monster glided in a wide half-circle, and for the first time noticed Nianki. Eyes the size of sunflowers peered down at her. She thought it would strike her with its lightning, but the monster held its turn and flapped away after the quickly disappearing herd. It looked back once, dropping its long neck in order to peer under its own wing.
Soaked to the skin and shivering, Nianki stood there long after the monster had vanished. The past few days had been a revelation. She who thought she knew so much about nature, about the world of the plains, had suffered two rude shocks. First, the pack of misshapen predators that had killed her family — now this! Had the world turned inside out? Were there spirits and monsters behind every tree, beyond every hill?
The smell of burned meat penetrated her reverie. She wandered among the charred remains of eight large animals, a head here, a haunch there. Hungry as she was, she couldn’t bring herself to take any of the stormbird’s leavings. She’d heard of people who burned their meat with fire, but the idea disgusted her. Meat should be eaten fresh or dried, not burned. Only scavengers ate charred food.
Yet, Nianki’s stomach writhed with hunger, sending shooting pains through her gut. Weak and injured as she was, she couldn’t hunt her own game. She needed food to regain her strength — and there was food all around her, though blackened and smelling of fire. Swallowing hard, she slid to her knees beside a still smoking haunch.
Life’s a struggle, Oto always said. If you knock down an anthill every morning, the ants will build it back by evening. The ants had no choice, if they wanted to live, and neither did Nianki. She wrenched off the elk’s leg, hoping the flesh closer to bone might be less burned.
No luck. The lightning had blackened the poor beast right through to the marrow. Nianki sighed and chewed in silence as the rain continued to drench her and the dark, empty savanna.
She wandered south. Her fever got worse, and she lost track of the passage of time as she slept more by day and walked by night. Perhaps four days after seeing the stormbird — she couldn’t remember exactly how long it had been — Nianki found the cold remains of a hunter’s camp. They ate well, these hunters. She found the bones of a slaughtered pig, a pile of wild grape stems, and a broken birch-bark box that once held salmon jerky. She licked the grease from the bark box and gnawed the cast-off pig bones. It was her first food since the burned elk.
Barks and thin howls announced the arrival of a pack of wild dogs. Nianki feared the dogs more than she would a bear or big cat. Bigger predators were wary of humans and their cunning ways, but dogs were stupid and fearless.
She rooted in the debris left behind by the other hunters, thinking to find the boar’s leg bone or some other suitable club. She had better luck than she dared hope.
Tossed in the grass with the offal was a stone-headed spear. The shaft was broken midway, but the careless owner had thrown it away, flint head and all. Nianki held up the shortened spear and examined it by the failing light. The milky gray flint was finely knapped and quite sharp.
Just holding a spear, even a broken one, filled Nianki with new strength. When the dog pack’s scouts yelped close by, she howled back at them, daring them to attack. There followed only the sound of crickets, singing in the twilight. When she next heard the dogs they were farther away. For the first time in many days, Nianki smiled.
Moving on, she found a swampy water hole. With her new spear she gigged a few fat frogs, then dug some tender cane shoots out of the malodorous black mud. She crouched on a stone by the water hole, washing the shoots and gnawing on them.
The food and her weapon gave her new confidence. She walked all night, and just before dawn she smelled smoke. A thin smudge rose from a pine copse ahead.
Hunters in these parts often slept with a slow fire going, feeding it with resinous green pine. The resulting smoke kept mosquitoes away and usually warned off prowling scavengers.
Still limping on her mangled leg, Nianki crept up on the strangers’ camp. She saw two man-sized lumps on the ground, a smoldering heap of pine boughs between them. A hide bag hung from a tree branch, out of reach of badgers and rats. On the other side of the camp a tripod of sticks stood with a bark box balanced carefully on top. Soundlessly, Nianki entered the camp and sat down on the upwind side of the fire.
One of the men, a tall fellow with bare brown shoulders, rolled over on his back. He began to snore loudly. His companion stirred.
“Shh!” the sleepy man hissed, throwing a convenient pine cone at his snoring friend. It landed nowhere near him.
The snorer rasped on. The one who’d thrown the pine cone gave a disgusted sigh and rolled to his feet. He had a cape wrapped around himself — soft elk hide studded with a crow-feather collar — and he hitched this up around his shoulders. He shuffled toward his friend, unaware of Nianki.
“Pakito, turn over!” he said fiercely. The snoring man remained heedless. His snores were so loud Nianki thought he’d scare away all the game within a day’s walk.
“Pakito! You worthless pile of ox dung!” The caped man aimed a kick at the snorer’s hip. No gentle nudge, it rolled the clueless offender over on his face.
“Ow!” he yelped, sitting up and blowing brown pine needles out of his mouth. “Pa’alu! Did you kick me?”
“I did! You were snoring again.”
“Is that any way to treat your brother?”
“You’re lucky I didn’t use an axe.”
Nianki let out a brief, sharp laugh. Both men started and stared, noticing her for the first time.
“If I were a panther,” she said, “you’d both be feeding my kits by now.”
“Who are you?” demanded Pa’alu, the caped one. Nianki ignored the question. Pakito, taller by a head than his brother and broader in the chest, tucked his feet under him and faced Nianki. He had a round face and dark brown eyes.
“You look like you’ve been fighting a panther,” he observed pleasantly. “Since you’re here, you must have won.”
Pa’alu was staring at the short spear in her hand. “Your weapon — may I see it?” he asked. She held it out for his inspection, but did not relinquish it. Pa’alu’s eyes widened and he said, “Pakito! You said you lost your spear when the boar’s mate ran off with it. How did this — this scarred one get it?”
“My name’s Nianki. I found this a night’s walk from here.”
Pa’alu rounded on his brother. “You threw away your spear!”
“It was broken,” the big man said sullenly.
“It has a good head of gray mountain flint! The shaft could have been replaced!”
Pakito gave an exaggerated shrug, saying nothing. Nianki decided the strapping fellow was actually the younger of the two, no more than seventeen or eighteen seasons old. Pa’alu seemed a few years older.
“It was a bad luck spear anyway,” Pakito finally said. “It never hit anything.”
With a shake of her head at such thinking, Nianki reversed her grip and hurled the shortened weapon at Pakito’s feet. It struck at his toes. He yelped and fell over backward. Pa’alu snatched up his own spear and held it high, ready to impale Nianki. She sat quietly, hugging her knees.
Pakito got up, visibly shaken, but exclaimed triumphantly, “You see! He missed me, as close as he was!”
Pa’alu snorted, but his eyes never left Nianki.
She slowly stood, saying, “I’m a she, giant. And you have a cut between the first two toes of your right foot.”
Pakito lifted his foot, grabbed it in both hands and spread his toes apart. A crimson bead oozed from the tiny cut.
“I’m bleeding!” Pakito sat down heavily and blew on his toes. His brown eyes looked accusingly at Nianki.
Pa’alu grinned. “You have a plainsman’s eye,” he said approvingly. “Where’d you learn to throw a spear like that?”
