know what direction to shoot in when I hear the bell ring.
I carve up the ice bear’s pelt and place it on the ground by the fire, over the grass where the fire melted away the snow. Catherine can have that to sleep on. I don’t need a soft bed, I’m used to sleeping in a net on my ship in zero-g. The solid ground is plenty luxurious enough for me.
I decide to shape a bow. Anything I make from branches won’t be very good. I won’t have time to properly cure it, and I admit I don’t really know how to make it good enough to function as a viable weapon. Instead, I use one of the recipes in the matter shaper, feeding it raw wood to shape with so I don’t waste any of the shaping matter.
It spits me out two really nice bows, and I string them with the string I already shaped. The string is nearly unbreakable. I can only cut it with the nano-blade on my wrist tool. String this strong will work perfectly for a bow string.
“When I’m done with everything,” I tell her, “you’ll learn to use this.”
I shape some arrows and let her take it. “See if you can figure out on your own.”
I almost hope she can’t, I realize. I want to teach her. I want to feel that rush of providing for her. Hell, I almost don’t want her to be able to learn, so that she is totally reliant on me.
I fight back the feeling, focusing on the task at hand.
My fear is that the tribes will find us. I don’t know exactly how far I walked after crashing. When we first arrived at this camp, though, I could still see smoke on the horizon from the crash. We’re not really that far away.
Do the tribes know what it means when they see flaming metal? Do they think a rock just fell out of the sky? Do they think it was a god? Will they just look at the wreckage, shrug, and walk away? Or will they want to know who or what landed on their planet, and come looking for it?
I don’t know enough about them to make any accurate prediction, but I do know that any of those are real possibilities. I have to assume the worst: That they’ll come looking for us. So I will prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
As the days pass, I feel more and more safe in our shelter. We’re covered by trees, and if no one came to look for us soon after landing, then what would send them to come looking for us now?
I don’t even have to hunt. The ice bear I killed has enough meat on it to last us a few weeks, so I don’t have to worry that moving around to hunt will give us away.
We keep the fires small so they don’t give off a lot of smoke.
I keep my distance from her. It was hard at first, going from talking to her all the time while she was frozen on the ship to barely talking to her at all on this planet. But I manage it.
I fall into a routine that doesn’t require me to talk to her much at all. I decided to replace the bell traps one by one with snares. The bells were ideal as a quick way of setting up a perimeter, but snares are better--both for ice bears or any other wild animals--or for Cygnians.
“So,” she says one morning, “aren’t we going to practice with the bow?”
I’d forgotten about it. I scowl at her. Training her with the bow will mean interacting with her.
“I haven’t seen you practicing.”
“I tried a few times,” she says. “I can’t even hit a tree.”
“Show me.”
She picks up the bow, awkwardly nocks an arrow, and pulls back. She only pulls back half as much as she needs to. She lets go and the arrow flops limply forward, swerving and going off at an odd angle.
“You have to pull back harder.”
“Harder? How could I pull any harder than that? It took me a week to get it back that far.”
I pick up the bow and show her. I pull it back all the way, effortlessly, and loose the arrow into the tree. It hits the thick trunk dead center, exactly where I aimed it.
“I can’t pull it back that far,” she says. “I’m not strong enough.”
That horrible feeling hits me. That warmth