The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [38]
“I’d prefer to make a fire and cook it,” he said when he came back, then waited, as if expecting Chala to tell him no.
She shrugged. “If you wish.” She was in favor of anything that made Richon eat more eagerly.
Richon gathered wood, though he seemed to have no idea what wood would burn well and what would not. Chala had watched humans build fires before and remembered which trees were too pungent and which would burn more cleanly, but he must never have paid attention.
Chala did not try to tell him what to do. After all, what better lesson was there than doing it wrong the first time?
She knew that from her own experience as a hound, when she had first attacked a snake and thought it dead. While she had been crouched over it, trying to decide which end to eat first, it had revived enough to rise up and bite her in the face.
She had stomped on it thoroughly afterward, decapitating it with the claws on her hind legs. Only then had she tried to eat it, though the taste was not what she might have wished for, and she could hardly open her mouth by then to chew. She had stayed away from the pack for a few days, until her face looked normal again in a stream, and refused to tell any of the other pups of her encounter with the snake.
She knew at least two other wild hounds that had done the same thing she had and learned the same lesson, for they had stayed away from the pack for nearly the same length of time and come back as quiet and sobered as she had been. None of them made the same mistake again, with a snake or any other kill. And it was her opinion that they became the best fighters in the pack. Later, when she became lead female, she made sure that she always had them flanking her in a fight, for they were the most vicious and the most sure.
Richon would have to learn the same way.
Someone had been protecting him from seeing the consequences of his mistakes. Not a parent, Chala thought. For a parent wishes a child to live long and healthy and to make other children, to continue the line. Those who wish a child to die early because they did not care about the future of the pack might choose otherwise, however.
Chala would have to watch carefully when they returned to Richon’s people to discover who it was who had treated Richon in this way. There were advantages in having a hound at his side who looked like a woman. Chala could see that Richon needed her here.
Richon had gathered a pile of sticks and started to build his fire with the smaller ones. He had found a rock to strike against his knife. It took him some twenty minutes until he had a spark large enough to catch his sticks on fire. He had not thought to get anything that would catch fire better than a stick, like bark or cattail.
Even so, the fire smoldered, and he looked up at her, his face alight with triumph.
She smiled back at him.
He built the fire up too fast and nearly smothered it, but took some of the top branches off and blew on it to get it going once more. Then he added fuel more slowly the second time.
Good.
But Chala continued to hold back because he did not wait long enough for coals to form and instead put the partridge on a spit above the flames, so that the skin turned black and the partridge itself fell into the fire when the supporting beams to the spit were burned through.
Richon swore, then leaped into the fire to pull the partridge carcass out. His eyebrows singed, he pulled off one of the legs. It was still raw inside, but he shrugged and ate it anyway. It was only halfway through that he seemed to remember that Chala was there. Sheepishly he offered her the last of the feast.
She shook her head.
“You are angry with me?” asked Richon. “Because I was too eager to feed myself first?”
“No, of course not. Why should I be angry with that?” She thought of the first time the bear had taken her back to the cave and killed a rabbit for her, then refused to eat his share.
There were ways in which she realized she preferred the boy. He had every right to eat what he had caught himself. And no reason to think of her