Acorn stopped beside Elk Ivory. “Personally, I hope we find the village empty so we can camp and eat. I’m starving. Which trail are you taking?”
She massaged her forehead a moment. “Do you truly believe that any living human being would make camp in a destroyed village?”
“You mean you don’t think Blue Raven would.”
“Would you?”
He considered the question. “No. At least not a village destroyed by my people. I’d be afraid the ghosts would rise up from the corpses and tear my souls from my body.”
“So would I.”
Acorn scratched his neck. “So. Where would you make camp?”
Elk Ivory scanned the shimmering grayness of hill and valley. To the north, a dark shroud of clouds billowed into the star-strewn sky, and she could smell snow in the wind. By morning, the land would be a trackless expanse of pure white. “You have hunted elk, Acorn. Where do they bed down?”
He shrugged. “When I have seen them, which isn’t often, it is always high on the hillside. They choose a point overlooking the main trails where they can keep watch. They seem to know when they’re being hunted.”
“Most intelligent animals sense the hunter’s presence.” She propped her hands on her hips. Patches of snow lingered on the northern slopes. They blazed like white fire tonight. “I am not going to join the surround. I think I will scout the hilltops.”
Acorn briskly ruffled the ridge of hair on his head, a sign of irritation. “Jumping Badger will accuse you of disobeying his orders. When we get home, the matrons—”
“If we get home, I will worry about it then.” She gestured toward the easternmost hilltop. “In the meantime, I will be there. Searching.”
“Very well,” he said through a sigh. “When the excitement is over around the village, I will come looking for you.”
“Don’t bother,” she answered. “I will find you.” And she stepped off the well-worn trail into the grass, heading across the moonlit meadow.
Twenty-Five
Wren finished washing their bowls out with snow, and headed back for the shelter. They’d made it by leaning fallen saplings around a large boulder. The front of the boulder had been scooped out by winters of rain and wind, leaving a lip of overhanging stone on top. It made for a perfect campsite. They had laid poles on three sides of the boulder, which meant they had to move some to the side when they wanted to come in or go out. Eight hands high, the shelter stretched fifteen hands long and about eight wide. An adult would have a hard time fitting in, but it had turned out to be perfect for two children.
She clutched the clean dishes to the front of her dark blue shirt, moved the shelter poles aside, and crawled in. The firelit warmth struck her painfully. Rumbler sat in the middle of the shelter before the low flames, his back against the boulder. He looked sad and lost. Wren moved the poles back into place, sealing the warmth in.
Firelight flickered over Rumbler’s short black hair, and downcast face. Once they’d built up the flames, the shelter had warmed quickly. Rumbler’s fox-fur cape and his mittens rested in the corner to his left. The pale blue shirt he wore, decorated with whelk and columella shell beads, looked fresh down to his hips, but then it bore a coating of dried mud.
Wren stowed the clean dishes in her pack and slumped against the boulder beside him. He hadn’t said a word through supper.
“Rumbler? Let me check your hands. The spruce-needle tea is steaming. I think we should clean them.”
Pus had soaked two of the black strips of cloth that wrapped his fingers, and it worried her. She’d been washing out the cloths in spruce-needle tea every night and drying them before the fire so they would be fresh in the morning, but the Shadow Spirits had entered the wounded fingers anyway.
Rumbler studied the bandages, then held them out to her.
Wren reached for her folded deer-hide cape and gently laid his hands on top of it. “This won’t take long, Rumbler, then you can go to sleep. I know you must be very tired. After I found out … I—I slept all the time.”
He concentrated on his hands. “Mossybill … he ruined them. Just like Marmot’s hands. They’ll never work right again.”
“I know, Rumbler.” She carefully unwrapped the fingers, and laid the strips of cloth aside. “But at least they look better.” The cauterized flesh had shrunken around the protruding bones and, in most cases, healed well. But the stubs of his two little fingers remained red and swollen.
When Wren lifted the right little finger to get a better look at it, Rumbler flinched.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and turned it gently. “The Shadow Spirits have made a whole village in here, Rumbler. I wish I had listened more carefully when old Bogbean gave her Teachings on Healing plants, then I would know what to—”