Nevertheless, the People grew strong, rendering the carcasses of the kills, boiling fat from the bodies—poor though it might be after so much endless cold. Faces filled, limbs grew strong and hale.
One Who Cries laughed and sang, finding an outcrop of fine-grained quartzite from which to craft his long dart points. The finest flint knapper among the People, he studied the head-sized boulders, judging the stone with a practiced eye before driving off thick wedges of the rock. These primary flakes he quickly thinned with practiced strokes of his hammerstone.
"Good stuff!" he called to Singing Wolf. "Look, look how well the stone flakes, broad and flat with good control."
"Such little things make you happy." Singing Wolf shook his head.
"Uh-huh." And he couldn't deny the truth of that. He pulled his caribou antler from the pack, feeling the use-smoothed texture of the tool. He used it as a baton to shape a preform—a basic blank flaked off both sides into a thin lenticular shape. One Who Cries sang spirit songs as the baton snapped long thin flakes from the preform. One by one, he made a supply of preforms, most of which went into his pack for future use. From the lenticular shape, he could produce a variety of styles of tool including scrapers, knives, burins and gravers, or dart points as the need arose.
"Nice to see you working again." Singing Wolf settled himself to watch.
One Who Cries whistled loudly, feeling his soul swell. "A person's spirit goes into the stone, you know. There's wonder in that. Good tool stone, like this quartzite, or a fine chert, well, it takes soul better."
Having achieved the basic shape, One Who Cries used his antler and leather to carefully thin the point. He ground the sharp edges down with sandstone, preparing a platform—a purchase surface—for the antler tine. Doing so allowed him more control as he snapped long thin flakes from the point. When he finished, he had produced a parallel-sided point with a needle-sharp tip that just covered the breadth of his hand. He gave the base of the point a final grinding with the sandstone to keep the keen edges from severing the binding sinew when he hafted it to a foreshaft.
"Now there," he whispered in awe, "is a real beauty."
"And here's the shaft that will hold it." Singing Wolf raised a section of birch sapling to the sky, sighting along it for irregularities. Having collected three dozen, he laid them aside to prepare his tools. He re-formed thin sections of a waste flake from the pile at One Who Cries' feet, using an antler tine to create a steep-angled cutting edge along one margin of the stone. With that, he carefully peeled the bark from the shafts, smoothing the knots, using a bone-shaft wrench to straighten the rods over a low fire. The best of the specimens he split to hold One Who Cries' expertly crafted points.
"You know, for a while there, I thought we'd never have
the chance to do this again." One Who Cries stared at the wood, thoughtfully slipping his dart point into the groove.
"Wolf Dream, huh?"
One Who Cries grinned. "We're not dead yet, cousin."
Green Water, Laughing Sunshine, and the other women spent the growing days measuring hides carefully against the bodies of the People, sewing the closely tailored garments to fit. In a careful stitch, they closed the seams, leaving the hair inside to provide insulation and circulation to carry away deadly sweat.
"Now, you've got to do this right," Green Water explained to Red Star.
"These are just outer parkas?" Her eyes grew big.
"That's right. Undergarments, the ones that fit next to the skin, we'll have to wait and make from caribou fawn. But for these heavy cold-weather parkas, we have to use winter hides. See? The hair has to be tight. If we killed any later in the season, the hair would slip, fall out."
"So we have two parkas," Red Star observed soberly. "The outer parka goes with the hair out . . . and the under parka from the fawn hide goes hair in!"
Green Water reached over to ruffle her hair. "You're going to make the best of all, huh?"
"Yes!" Red Star giggled. "They're like shelters for each person. That's why they hang down almost to the knees, it makes a tent around you and the long boots come way up high inside."
"You won't freeze," Laughing Sunshine called, inspecting the parka she'd just finished. In all, the complete suit weighed just over ten pounds and could keep a human from freezing-even in the deepest biting cold of the Long Dark when a man's spit froze before it hit the ground.
"I'll be the best!" Red Star promised. "You'll see."
Green Water smiled, eyes closed to feel the sun on her face. "Yes, we'll see. Thanks to Wolf Dreamer."