Stone Age Mama

Chapter Sixteen - Irreplaceable

-Summer-

The headache stayed with Belbet that day, so much so she didn’t even notice Eefim’s absence until midway through breakfast. She paused, putting down the bowl of snake-and-vegetable chunks for a second. “Where did Eefim go?”

“Sent him to get us more chickens,” Deenat explained. This sent a surge of panic through Belbet’s belly, as she remembered the thrashing in the water and Eefim’s shriek.

“Is that a good idea?” Belbet asked, frustration at her sister’s dismissal of Eefim’s safety rising. “He could be attacked. He could get hurt!”

Deenat raised a white eyebrow. “He’s strong. He’ll get back here, and if he’s hurt we can help him.”

This did nothing to slow the annoyance. Belbet set down her bowl, standing up. “If you don’t want to keep your child safe, then that’s fine. But I’m going to go look for him.”

“You won’t find him.” Kaion declared, and for a second, Belbet stared at him in terror, before he continued, “He’s been gone for hours, and you have no idea which directions he went. You could pass each other by. He’s a capable hunter, and he took down a snake woman. He can handle himself.”

“He's eleven!” Belbet found herself shrieking, her voice echoing off the cliffside and into the forest around him. Four pairs of wide eyes stared at her and she suddenly felt as if she was standing naked in front of a class full of teenagers. “He’s a child. He should be protected, even if you think he’s strong and capable. Because what happens when he’s not strong enough? Or not capable enough? Or when those things don’t matter and he gets hurt anyway?”

The two other adults flicked glances at each other, and an old frustration bubbled up in Victoria’s mind. They thought she was being hysterical. This was just like when her brother had let the youngest go off in a park all by herself, and she was lost for hours. She’d been furious then, but her brother had laughed it off.

Belbet’s lips thinned into a tight line, her eyes narrowing. “You two treat that boy like he’s replaceable. Like if he doesn’t survive, we can always just make another one. Well, there will never be another Eefim, even if we pass his name along. He is one of a kind, and you will regret, deeply, if and when he dies. Especially if one little action on your part could have prevented it.”

Her hissed words seemed to have an effect because Deenat suddenly couldn’t look her in the eyes. Kaion was staring at her with a stormy expression too. Belbet felt the stir of a growl in the back of her throat, so she turned away, searching through the bone pile. She ignored the heat of their gazes on her back and pulled out the leg-bones of the chicken they’d eaten a while ago.

These, she took a stone knife to, sawing off the edges so the hollow tube was left. She then dug a little hole in the top of one side of the bone and began blowing through the edge, before adjusting the hole, digging bits out, and shaping it. If her children were going to fuss around in the forest without supervision, damn if she wasn’t going to give them a way of summoning help from far away.

Her whistle took her frustrated annoyance well, and eventually, it was capable of making a piercing shriek. It took some ingenuity and a bit of help from Deenat. When she noticed Belbet getting frustrated, the pale woman had brought over a small ball of dark sticky substance. “Here. Try this. It might help hold a piece of wood. If you do that, the wind will pass through in a different way. It might be louder that way.”

Belbet’s frustrations melted away in the sight of her sister being so helpful. She sighed, the remaining space left with tired achiness. “...It’s a whistle. It’s meant to be heard over long distances. If we give them to the kids, they can call for help even if we’re not near them.”

“What was that noise?” Eefim called, walking through the dark woods and into camp. “I could hear it a long way back.” He was carrying three hares tied to his furs, and two living, flapping chickens shrieking in his hand. Belbet blinked back in surprise, relief flooding her.

Deenat explained to her son what Belbet was making, while Belbet took away the chickens to put in their little chicken pen. The three chickens seemed to get along, for the most part, picking at the food. Belbet wasn’t able to actually pet them, they ran away from her when she tried. So she left them to their devices and turned back to her nephew.

She wrapped the boy into a hug that he seemed surprised to be getting. “I’m glad you’re safe. Please be careful and take this whistle with you when you leave the village. And if you could help me carve some more for your little cousins, I’d be grateful.”

Eefim, stunned, nodded. It seemed that he was so confused by this sudden affection that he forgot to ask about the new word. Belbet let go, patting his hair, before heading to check on the tiles. He turned to his mother and tilted his head, “Aunt seems… odd.”

Deenat sighed, shaking her head. Her own hands were still whittling away on the bone-beads she was making. “Your aunt did not sleep well. And babies always make a woman prone to anger.”

Eefim’s face lightened as his eyebrows rose. “Oh. Okay.” He sat down next to his mother and began skinning and cleaning the rabbits. “...I think I could go after something bigger if I had help carrying it back.”

“Hm? Have you seen any signs?” Deenat asked.

“Deer tracks. Some bigger ones, too. Deer tracks, I think.”

Deenat leaned back, feeling along the edges of the beads, and nodded. “That sounds like a good use of the day. Breakfast is over there, I’ll finish dressing the hares. You eat, and then you and I will go.”

Eefim grinned and rushed off to get his food. On the way, he passed Dahnei, showing Belbet a circle she’d tied in some thin rope. Belbet smiled brightly. “You know, you can use things like this to trap animals. That way, you don’t have to hunt as much. You should practice, see what works.”

Belbet didn’t know enough about traps to be able to recreate them, other than perhaps the box-one, with the stick that holds it up. Victoria had seen it enough in cartoons to maybe be able to recreate that. Dahnei perked up at the mission and nodded, already undoing the knot so she could try something new.

The otter woman sighed, rubbing at one of her own fuzzy ears in a gesture she realized only after starting was self-soothing. She’d realized, after the first two or so cups of willow bark tea that, while they were helpful, a single cup of tea every couple of hours wasn’t going to overdose them. Victoria could tell that the cup of tea had much less of a pain-relief quality than the acetaminophen tablets she’d taken in her own world.

Getting up and letting Dahnei be, she headed for their little field. She clearly needed some time to sort herself out, if her temper was any indication. So, she took out her frustrations on the weeds, pulling up long strains of grass that couldn’t possibly be the little buds she knew were waiting just below the surface. If she let herself, she could imagine a sort of thanks from the little curled lives below the surface. She allowed herself the fancy of imagining her own energy, the light curled in her belly, reaching out to caress them in return. It soothed her, somehow, and after a rather long time, she sighed and felt better.

Removing herself from their fields, she looked to the sundial, although the heat itself told her it was just past noon without her having to look. She felt overheated, sweat sticky on her skin, but when she turned her thoughts towards going to the river to bathe, a soft fear stopped her. She shook her head and then her shoulders, as if shaking off the robe of that fear.

“Naptime, I think.” She called out, catching her little son up in her arms. He cried out in annoyance as he was taken away from the hole he was digging in the ground, but settled soon enough as Belbet rubbed his back.

“Are we no-” Dahnei started to ask, only to pause, and then shake her head. “Nevermind.” She left the half-done knots of her research on the ground and followed her mother.

“I’ll stay out here,” Deenat said, and Belbet accepted that without fuss.

It took several moments for Belbet to feel comfortable enough to settle, spent moving the hay around to try and get it more comfortable. But the more she moved it, the less comfortable it felt, and she grew frustrated and annoyed that it wasn’t just a soft mattress like Victoria remembered.

Eventually, her frustration lost to her exhaustion and she huffed, lying down. This allowed her worried babies to finally lay down and rest too. Dahnei didn’t say anything, sensing that the annoyance leaking off her mother could easily turn on her instead. Even Mohniit kept quiet, settling in with little fuss.

Her dreams left her unsettled, stark white towers of glass and steel striking at the sky. The world Victoria had known was devoid of life, no plants, no people. Nothing but those skyscrapers scraped clean of anything but metal and glass. She wandered among them, lost and desperate. She couldn’t find what she was looking for.

What was she looking for? She was unsure. In the dream, it felt important, impossible to live without. She wandered the streets, between the bones of civilization, searching for what she was missing.

She woke with a sense of loss, and her children slumbering at her side. Sweaty and stifled from the heat of the day, she gently extracted herself from the pile of limbs, and exited the hut.

She found it late in the evening, and the sundial suggested it was near ten at night. She sighed, looking around their home. Kaion had apparently continued to form the tiles industriously, now surrounded by the clay things. Looking at the little campfire they were proofing the tiles around, she counted. Six were drying there, six had dried yesterday… this was going to go so slow that it’d take them weeks to get enough.

Her next stop was the smoker to check its contents. The sizzle and smell of the cooking meat was nice, although the warmth from the device was uncomfortable, even in the summer evening. She checked the embers, and sure enough, the fire she’d built up to last a good four to five hours was near-burnt-out.

Deenat and Eefim came out of the woods then, laden heavy with- “Is that a Beaver?!” Belbet couldn’t help but cry out, because to Victoria, it was absolutely huge. The thing had to have weighed as much as a grown woman. The victorious hunters dropped the dead beast near the campfire, the heavy thud and crack of its bones shaking the attention of the rest of their farm.

“Yes. We found it by the river. We counted at least twenty of them, and this one is fat.” Deenat explained.

Belbet perked up at the mention of fat, even as Kaion frowned, “We do not need more meat. We have too much as it is.”

“No, but we need the fat!” Belbet cried, laughing. “There is so much we can do with this! We need to render down the fat and store it. The meat can be smoked with the snake meat. Ah, we’ll need a bigger kiln for the tiles too. It’s like a smoker, but the smoke comes out the top instead of the side like we made.”

She didn’t notice that her ramblings drew Deenat and Kaion to look at each other with relief. Eefim, however, did. He said nothing and just continued cutting the beaverskin off of his prey. Belbet began outlining a place to build the bigger kiln while waiting for her nephew to finish parting out the beast.

Then, she took one of their cisterns and dumped out the water, setting it upside down to dry it, so that she could safely store the rendered down animal fat in there. Belbet’s excitement was making her jittery, so she turned that energy next to stirring up the mud for the kiln too.

She only stopped when Deenat called her over to the fire in the dark. “While we were out, we found some more things you might be interested in.” Deenat pulled several new things out of her net bag, including an apple, a sunflower head full of seeds, and several hardshell nuts. Belbet couldn’t help but grin, immediately snatching up a rock to begin bashing the shells open.

The unholy glee in her face was enough for her family to shrink back and let her. The shells creaked and cracked and revealed almonds. Belbet immediately shoved one in her mouth, crunching at it, only to choke and spit out the almond meat entirely. She pulled a gulp of water into her mouth, swishing it and spitting it onto the ground. “Okay… Okay, these are bitter. Which means they’re poisonous. We can’t eat these without doing something to them first.”

Belbet bit her lip, considering. “...boiling or roasting them is the best option. We need to see if we can find any that are sweet, instead of bitter. We can collect these in the meantime, we just have to make sure the children don’t eat any. As few as six of these-” She held up the little nut, “Can kill a small child. It’d take a lot to kill an adult, but only six to make an adult hurt. And even one can kill a baby in the womb.”

Deenat seemed worried about the idea of such a thing. “Should we keep gathering them then? It might be dangerous.”

Belbet smiled, “They’re basically a replacement for meat. Plus, they can be made into bread. We’ll just need some baskets, and to teach the kids to stay away.”

Deenat nodded, and then paused and looked around, “Where are-”

Her question was answered as the hut door opened and a sleepy Dahnei and Mohniit clambered out of it. Belbet looked up and her eyes softened at the sight of her sleepy gremlins. “Hello, babies.” She called, and the two made a beeline for her, burrowing into her sides. She laughed, before picking up one cracked open almond and holding it up for Dahnei and Mohniit to see. “These are bitter almonds. They’re a nut. They come in these green shells-” Here she picked up one of the green shells and showed them. “We do not eat these until they have been cooked. Understand?”

Dahnei nodded, “Poison until cooked. Right.”

“Once cooked, though, they can be used for all sorts of things. Flour for bread, a paste to go on bread, a replacement for meat, if done right it can even be turned into oil to make your skin soft and beautiful. It probably just came ripe, which means we need to pick as much as we possibly can because they store well and will last all through winter in their shells.”