got back to the shelter under the rock ledge, where the rest of their stuff waited, untouched. That first night they had been able to do no more than huddle together under a heap of skins.
The next morning Dreamer was woken by the baby kicking. She was flooded with a strange mixture of relief and fear. Her baby was alive, but could her ruined body stand the birth? And, when it came, who would help her? She had wept then, her tears mingling with the blood on her hands.
Reacher had stirred, and, waking, cried out with pain. When Dreamer pulled back the skins that covered her legs, the stink of her swollen wound made Dreamer recoil. Dreamer knew little medicine; that was the priest’s job, and the senior women. But she should have cleaned the wound before they slept, maybe sucked out the poison. She would always regret that she had not tried to treat Reacher’s wound on that first night.
The priest’s ember had not survived the night. It had not been until the fourth night that she had finally succeeded in building a fire, with a roughly made thong bow. The ember she carried now was a relic of that first blaze. With its help, they had survived the long days and nights since.
Now, as the fire’s warmth built, Reacher tried to get up. Dreamer handed her the water skin. Reacher drank only a little, looking as pale as the moon for which she had been named. ‘I am hungry,’ she said. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Me and the baby.’ Dreamer dug in her pack. Reacher rarely spoke about anything but food - food and pain. She never asked where they were. It didn’t matter, Dreamer supposed. They were nowhere. ‘I set the traps. Maybe we’ll have squirrel tomorrow. In the meantime, here are the snails. Do you remember when we caught them?’
She set a couple of snails on a stone before Reacher. The girl watched them dubiously. The snails barely stirred in their shells. Dreamer had carried them for three days; you had to starve a snail before eating it, to let any poisonous plants it might have eaten work through its system. Dreamer hammered them with a rock, and the shells crunched. Reacher started pulling away smashed shell from moist, sluggishly squirming flesh.
‘And worms,’ Dreamer said. ‘Fresh and warm, out of the ground.’ She dropped the creatures on Reacher’s stone.
‘Do we have any walnuts?’
‘We finished those days ago.’
Reacher put a worm in her mouth. ‘I’d like meat.’
‘I know.’
‘Hare would do. Deer, or a steak from a bison.’
They might get hare or gopher or vole, but there would be no deer or bison. She forced a smile. ‘Imagine it’s deer. Remember the way Elk Tracker used to make her stew?’ This old woman had had a way of boiling the meat in a big bowl chipped from stone, with dried herbs she collected, and the juice squeezed from the gall bladder of a young horse, an addition that brought out the flavour like no other. Reacher looked at the worm curling on her palm. ‘Close your eyes and imagine. Mmm. Thank you, Elk Tracker.’
‘Thank you,’ whispered Reacher.
That was that for the food. Reacher didn’t even finish what she’d been given.
‘Come on,’ Dreamer said. ‘Let’s take a look at your leg, and then we’ll sleep.’ She put a wooden cup of water over the fire to heat up, and shifted so she could get to Reacher’s injury.
‘How is the baby?’
‘I felt her kick today. She kicks hard. I think she likes to play.’
A ghost of a smile touched Reacher’s face. They had somehow decided between them that the baby would be a girl; Reacher would be disappointed if it wasn’t. ‘Does she laugh?’
‘I—Yes, she laughs. I can feel it . . .’
Dreamer lifted back the hide wrap from the wounded leg and scraped away the sphagnum moss she had applied that morning, now a bloody mass. The flesh around the wound was black, greenish in places. Away from the wound itself the leg was swollen from hip to ankle, the skin a bruised purple.
Dreamer went to work cleaning the wound, with a bit of cloth dipped in the hot water.
She remembered how, when she had been small, younger than Reacher now, there had been a hunter with a wound like this; he had been alone in the forest for days. The priest, grim-faced, hadn’t tried to treat the wound at all. He had made the women hold the hunter down, and