I pet her mane, loving the nearness of her, of the press of her skin to mine. "Lay-turr?" I echo. I do not know this word, but I suspect it means tomorrow. That we rest today and tomorrow I hunt again.
"Later," she agrees.
Very well. A day of rest, then.
7
RUKH
It is not a day of rest after all. The moment Har-loh and I eat a bite and wash it down with water, my mate gets to work. I thought that by leaving her behind, she would relax and sleep by the fire, waiting comfortably for me to return. This is not the truth, though. When I go into the cave we have claimed for ourselves, I see dried meat on every surface, the hides rolled up and the heads rotting in the corner of the cave. When I return to Har-loh's side, she is already hard at work, butchering the dvisti. She uses her small stone knife to hack it apart and to peel the skin away. She slices open the gut and pulls out the organs, then takes them to the water's edge to clean them out and hangs them to dry, too.
I cannot have my mate doing all this work, so I pitch in and help, and she tosses me a grateful look.
By the end of the day, I understand why my Har-loh is so tired. I understand now why she did not wish for me to run off into the mountains with the easy task of hunting. Preparing the meat and the fur is time-consuming, and messy, and exhausting. We work until the suns fall beyond the edge of the sky again and it grows dark. At the end of it, the skins are rolled up and bundled, and Har-loh makes motions that she will scrape them tomorrow. I think of all the skins waiting inside the cave, too. Of all the meat. Of the strips of reeds she dries so she can make something with them. Of the organs she carefully saves and gestures that she will make something with them.
It is very different from when I have hunted on my own. If I was hungry, I would kill something and eat it until there was no more meat. If I did not finish all of it, I would shove it into a snow bank and gnaw on the frozen meat the next day. I did not think about the future. But with Har-loh, we must think of many turns of the moon from now.
We must think of when our kit arrives. We must have everything ready.
HARLOW
Rukh stays after dark, and I'm so incredibly glad that he does.
I think his leaving before without saying a word was a misunderstanding. I don't think he hates me. I don't think he's tired of me. I think he's unused to having to discuss his actions with anyone else, so he didn't think anything of up and leaving. To him, it was no big deal. He doesn't realize how it looked to me. It just boils down to communication. We need to learn to talk to each other, and that starts with language. No matter how difficult it is, I've got to get more words into him and I need to learn how he thinks. We can figure this out.
Once the meat is cooked enough that it won't rot, we hang it in the cave to dry. There's an endless list of things to get done, and when the meat is all done, I work on getting the brains out of the skulls to use for the skins tomorrow. By the time I'm done, I'm so weary I want to fall over, and I barely have the strength to wash my hands before I collapse into the furs, exhausted. Rukh joins me and I curl up next to him and sleep like the dead.
When I wake up, the inside of the cave is cold and empty. I'm terrified that he's left again. "Rukh?"
"Har-loh," he calls back from outside.
Relief crashes over me and I fight back the sob that rises in my throat. I compose myself, shove my feet into my boots, and trot out to meet him. To my relief, my mate's there by the makeshift fire. He's got it going again, burning the rest of the massive log that didn't completely catch last night. I see he's spread a few more strips to dry, and there's a pouch for breakfast tea hanging over the fire.
On the sand, Rukh has one of the skins unrolled and he's busy scraping the underside.
He's here. He's here and he's helping me. He's not going anywhere. I'm so relieved I sink to my knees and choke up again.
"Har-loh?" Rukh gets up from his spot by the skin and moves to my side. I watch through my tears as he studies his gross, blood-covered hands, as if he wants to hug me but can't. He drops to a squat next to me instead, tilting his head so he can see my face. "Yes?"
It's the wrong word, but I know what he's asking. I manage a smile and wipe my eyes. "I'm fine. Just emotional. Probably the pregnancy." Or that there's just been a lot going on for the last while, but I can't really tell him that now. "Thank you for staying."
He watches me, then moves in and kisses the top of my head. "Tea?"
"Oh." I get all sentimental and blubbery again, but I hide it better this time. He knows the word for tea. "Tea would be great, thank you." With just that small gesture, everything seems right in the world again.
Having Rukh's help makes everything not seem quite so daunting. Before I know it, all the meat is smoked, all the furs are scraped and the brains rubbed into the underside of the skin. It's not the best job I've ever done on skins. I know there are more steps to be taken to ensure the skin is the softest it can be—lots of stretching and drying, stretching and drying. But our priority is quantity rather than quality—quality can come later.
When I finish with my last hide and look around, I don't see anything urgent that has to be done. For the first time in days, there's nothing so pressing that it can't wait until tomorrow.
I want to collapse with relief. Instead, I just wipe my sweaty brow and give a hearty sigh. "I think we're done for now, baby."
Rukh frowns at me and wipes at my brow with his thumbs. Oh. I must have smeared something. I glance down at my hands…and grimace. I am utterly disgusting. My fingernails are ringed with dirt, my skin is covered with dried bits of unnamable things, and I'm sweaty and nasty. I glance over at Rukh and it's the same for him. He's dirty, too, and his long hair is sticking to his skin.
Now that the worst of the work is done, there's nothing I want more than a hot bath. "Let's wash up, shall we?" I make a scrubbing motion at my mate, indicating cleaning. "Wash."
He nods. "Wash."
As we've worked side by side today, I've gone over basic words with him. Hide. Meat. Scrape. Rock. Wave. Sea. Anything I could point at or easily do, I gave words to, and Rukh repeated them. I'm not sure if he'll be able to recall everything that we went over, but I'm hoping that day by day, we'll fall into an easier understanding of one another.
I poke the fire, stoking it, while Rukh fills up both of our pouches with water to warm over the flames. There's a few smaller rocks that I keep warming near the fire that I slip into the heated water to warm things faster as Rukh disappears into the cave again. To my delight, he returns with my soap-berries. "Wash," he says again, and gestures at the small, dried fruits. "Repeat?"
He's asking for the word for them. "Soap-berry," I say, and add a few to the water. They've withered because I've had them for so long, but I'm hoping that heating them in the water will squeeze a bit of the cleansing juice out. If nothing else, we'll smell nice and fruity.
As the water warms, Rukh moves toward me. I smile at him, tired. I'm half-expecting another word question, but instead, he tugs at the laces on my tunic. "Wash," he murmurs. "Wash Har-loh."