The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [127]
It was the next day that they found the cave. They had risen from the grass as the sun began to fall, and made a fire. Deer left her feeding it with the sun-dried wood, and went to look at his traps. He brought back a plump rabbit, and Moon took his knife to skin it and they roasted it on a spit. He kept stretching out his hand to touch her, unable to bear this separation of their flesh, and while they ate she entwined her legs with his and leaned against him, feeding him choice morsels until the hunger of their bellies was appeased and another, fiercer hunger took its place.
When he woke at dawn, the dear, soft length of her against him, he began thinking of all the things he must do. She must have skins to keep her warm, skins to lie on, skins to sling on tripods of sticks that could hold water and be warmed by hot stones. That meant more skins to make the rawhide thongs. And then she must have a tent, which meant more skins and more thongs again. And skins meant reindeer. He must make a bow this day, with the short length of thong that remained to him after making the traps. Arrows he could harden in the fire, but he must find flint and perfect his clumsy skill to make scrapers for her to clean the skins. She would need a knife to cut her food, sharp-pointed awls that could make holes in the skins that she could then sew together with a needle made from reindeer bone. He was thinking of all the tools that he had taken for granted and left far behind in the village, and did not notice her awaken until her hand slipped softly around his neck and pulled him to her.
There were two more rabbits in the traps, and he blew the fire back into life as she skinned them. She began to roast the meat as he went to the stand of saplings by the spring, bending and flexing them to find one sturdy enough to make his bow. His thong was short and his arrows without flintheads, so the bow must be the stronger. His ax cut it down and trimmed it, and then he cut down two more long ones, using creeper to tie their ends together. He leaned them against the rock. The meat they did not eat could hang up there, safe enough from foxes. There was a pine beyond the spring, and he scraped off the resin with his knife, and back at the fire transferred it to one of the hearthstones to soften.
“I would climb the other ridge today, and see what is to be seen there before exploring to the end of this valley,” he said. “Our valley.”
“We must look for flint,” she said, rising to sling the uneaten rabbit on the poles. “I need a knife and scrapers.” Then she took his ax and cut herself a long, stout sapling, trimming to a rough point.
He sat by the fire to shape the ends of his bow and carve the notches for his string as she fed him. He stood to test it, drawing it almost to his shoulder. Now the arrows. He cut four of the straightest saplings, pointed their ends, and showed her how to harden them in the fire, using spit to stop them burning. Then he sliced the thin grooves into their ends for the feathers he had collected, coated the quills with the soft pine resin and slid them home. As he finished, he saw that she was hardening the point of the spear she had made for herself.
His new bow over his shoulder, and Moon on his arm with her spear over her shoulder, they set off down the slope to the stream. It ran fast and babbled, almost wide enough to jump. He paused on the bank, looking to the stillness under the trees for the ripples that would tell where the fish lay. The stream narrowed just below them, and there were stones enough to build a loose dam to trap them, and willows to weave into a light fence that he could use to trap the fish as he splashed them downstream to the dam. More willows could make