He nodded, mind wheeling.
"You gonna be there?"
"Y-yes."
White Calf lifted the packrat to stare thoughtfully into its dull eyes. "Best hunter among the People, huh? Looks like you sat on it!"
Without thinking, he admitted, "I did. It was going to get away again."
Three Toes whistled as he flaked a new point from a finely prepared translucent brown chert. From Knife River, far to the north, he'd traded for the superb material. With skilled hands, he scrubbed the edges of the tool on coarse sandstone grooved from years of such use. Testing the rounded edge with a thumb, he nodded and pulled a use-polished deer-antler baton from his pouch.
Still whistling, he sat back on his rock and began striking broad thinning flakes from the chert. Patterning his strokes with the skill of a master, he caught each flake as it came free, letting it drop with the delicate clinking chime of perfect stonework. Among the People, no one made better points. When Three Toes worked stone, his soul went into the crafting, permeating the very rock.
He sat before a smoldering sagebrush fire, a pile of jack-rabbit bones still blackening in the center of the stone-filled hearth. Two packs and a brush shelter lay at the peripheries of the camp. Here and there, cratered stipples in the soil marked spots where they'd twisted sage out of the ground for the fire. Sagebrush made a wonderful fire. From the moment it was placed on the coals, it virtually torched, flames leaping for the sky in a roar. Then the fine laminar structure of the hard dense wood collapsed and the coals burned for days. When stones were dropped on top to absorb and radiate the heat, a man could cook on such a fire for a long time, or roast meat, or pile a hand's thickness of dirt over the whole and sleep warm—even in the coldest of weather.
Three Toes paused to wipe sweat from his high forehead and look up at the point where Black Crow sat. He stopped short, missing the dark silhouette of Black Crow's figure against the sky. Game? Studying the slope, he finally spotted his friend winding down through the scrubby sage.
Returning to his whistling, Three Toes used his coarse sandstone to scrub the brittle edge off the long lanceolate point to make a platform. When the platform looked right, he wrapped his point in thick buffalo hide and pulled his elk brow-tine punch from the pouch. Placing the punch tip just so on the platform, he began pressing long thin flakes from the point to create the final edge and shape.
To the snap-snap of his flaking, his whistle mocked the meadowlarks and redwing blackbirds. He warbled like the finches and trilled like robins, eliciting responses from within the tall sage that clustered around the drainage under the terrace where they camped.
"Hungry Bull's coming," Black Crow called from the slope, his presence announced by cascading gravel and cobbles. "He's in a hurry."
Tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, Three Toes pressured a tiny flake from the fragile tip, leaving a razor-sharp edge. That done, he looked up.
"In a hurry? Maybe he found something?"
Black Crow trotted in his loose-limbed, swinging stride that made it look like all his joints were unhooked. Tall and lanky, he had lived about twenty-five winters. His face, like the rest of his body, had been stretched out of shape. His ugliest feature consisted of his long fleshy crooked nose. People joked that it looked like a long turd slapped haphazardly on his face. The other incongruity—considering Black Crow was the finest scout among the people—came from the slight sag of belly, with protruding navel, in an otherwise whip-thin body.
Black Crow walked to where the water skin hung in the shade of a particularly stubborn sagebrush that had repeatedly resisted their attempts to twist it out.
"We better hope so. Tracks make thin soup. I mean, there's nothing but dust and last year's buffalo sign."
"See anything else that looks like we could eat it?"
"Just tweety little birds—the ones you like to sound like. And I thought I saw some antelope out in the basin."
"Can't figure it. I mean, look out there. No water in the basin. Grass is brown and dead. You look around at the sky and all you see are those stringy little strands of thin clouds way up. How long's it been since it rained, huh? And no snow last winter." As he spoke, Three Toes resumed his careful pressure flaking, rolling the punch slightly in his hand as he finished the edge of the tool.
"Too long." Black Crow gulped water. "You know, if this keeps up, we're going to be living off packrats and mice. Think you can manage to Sing for a jackrabbit surround?"
"Ever hear this?" Three Toes lifted an eyebrow and reached into his pouch. Black Crow leaned down, curious, as Three Toes lifted a carved bone tube to his lips and blew.