Chapter 5: What Was Eaten

The sun was climbing over the ridge, and the warm wind in the hollow was already getting thin.

Lois felt it on the back of her neck.

She stood up in the cave, holding the empty thermos, and looked at the woman who had cried over her daughter's face.

Kesh stood too, with Ilu on her hip, and the two women measured each other across the dying coals.

Lois was a head taller and twice as wide.

Kesh was lean as a rope, with scarred hands and a stare.

Neither of them knew a single word of the other's tongue.

Kesh stepped forward and took the hem of Lois's quilted coat between two fingers.

She rubbed it, wondering, and then touched the zipper pull and the soft puff of the stuffing.

Then she touched Lois's cheek, quickly.

"Warm," Kesh said, in Ilu's English, with a terrible accent.

"Yes," said Lois. "Warm."

Something passed over Kesh's face that Lois could not read.

It looked, strangely, like relief and grief at once.

Ilu tugged at Lois's sleeve and said "Mar" in a small, worried voice, then pointed to the tunnel.

"I have to go, sweetheart," Lois said. "The door is closing."

She pointed to the sun, then to the hole, then to herself, then held up one finger and drew an arc through the air.

Tomorrow, when the sun comes up.

Ilu understood.

Her chin wobbled, and then she put her arms around Lois's neck so tightly that Lois's glasses bent.

"Tomorrow," Lois said into her hair. "I promise. Eat everything."

She unslung the tote bag and set it by Kesh's feet, and tapped it, and pointed at the old man and the boy.

Then she dropped to her knees at the hollow and crawled into the dark.

She heard Ilu say her name one more time, thin and hopeful, behind her.

She did not look back, because if she looked back, she would take the girl with her.

The tribe's winter camp was an hour's walk down the valley, in a bowl of rock beside the frozen river.

Kesh made the old man a sledge of hides and a pair of poles and dragged him herself.

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