The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [128]
He waded across, picked up her fallen spear and held her, her face and hair wet as they had been in the storm and on the river, in what seemed now to be another and barely remembered life. Gently he moved his face toward her, and licked the beads of water from her eyebrows, from her cheeks, and then from her lips. They opened and he felt her warm tongue on his own lips, her hands on him, and they fell to the warm bank and into each other again, into a world so perfectly new and theirs that he was sure no one before them had ever known it before.
“I can weave baskets from the willows to catch fish,” she said much later. And he squeezed her proudly, feeling happier than he had ever been, and they rose and began their climb up the shoulder of the hill to the ridge. Carefully skirting the skyline and taking cover in some shrubs, he looked across and saw the great river glinting to his left. The great tangled dam of trees was half gone, the river running placidly, and no other movement to be seen save for the darting of the birds. She squeezed his hand in relief. Each of them had been thinking privately about the danger of pursuit.
They turned along the ridgeline to their right, aiming for the head of their valley through knots of trees and sudden hollows, welling springs that rose and bubbled and disappeared back into the earth. They crossed another rabbit warren on a warm and sun-baked slope, which took them up to a rolling plateau from which they looked down across the stream to see the rock outcrop where they had made their camp. Gray and bare but rounded, with no jagged peaks, the rock continued on the far side of the valley before rising toward them. They followed the gentle rise of the plateau, walking easily on the soft grassland, until they reached a soft crest and saw range after range of hills rolling away from them dappled with trees and the distant movement of game. None seemed near, but he saw a scattering of reindeer dung and moved forward to probe the dropping. They were still warm inside. The beasts were close. Not sure enough of his own skills to track them, he took his bow from his shoulder and an arrow from his sack and began trotting with his face into the wind, into a thin screen of low and stunted trees. The winds could be fierce up here.
They scented the deer before they saw them, one stag to their left and three does with their young grazing the shrubs ahead. Moon froze. He crept forward, notching his bow, and thinking he would have time for but one shot. Unless he hit one of the young, and the doe stayed. He had known since he made the arrows that they would not be strong enough for a kill, even if he were sure enough of his skill to aim for the heart. He would have to try for a belly shot, and the long running chase until the beast died.
The stag’s head rose in suspicion but scented nothing and saw no movement. It bent again to the soft grass. Deer’s breathing felt very loud in his ears as he found space in the undergrowth to stand and draw the bow. The doe was perhaps twenty paces away, her young one a still target as it muzzled at her belly. He sighted and released the string, hearing the sharp sigh of the arrow’s flight and the stag’s warning bark as the beasts turned and fled, leaving the young one frozen in shock, its mother’s milk still wet on its face and his arrow high and deep in its belly, just below its back. The rear legs collapsed, and it began bleating, its shoulders moving in jerks as it tried to turn to follow its mother. She halted and turned, and took