Chapter 5: Salt

The salt was in the mud where the deer drank.

Jory had watched the herd lick the same grey bank every dawn for a week.

On the eighth day he went down with a flat stone and a hide bag and scraped it.

He tasted a pinch on his fingertip and nearly wept.

"Salt," he told Bix, who was trailing him with a stick. "That is salt."

"Salt," Bix said, with deep suspicion.

"We are going to eat so well."

By evening he had the boar rubbed down with salt and a green-wood fire banked to coals.

He turned the ribs on a spit over the pit for most of an hour.

The smell went out across the river.

The pride started arriving a little after dark.

They came in twos and threes, pretending they were passing, and settled in the grass beyond the Hollow with their noses lifted.

Sabra's two got there first, Kiri and her little brother.

Kiri was five and her brother was three, both golden-haired and fearless.

They stopped dead at the sight of Bix on the rock with a rib in his fist.

"What's that?" Kiri demanded.

"Mine," Bix said.

"Can I have some?"

"No."

Kiri's little brother bit Bix.

Bix bit him back, and all three went over in the grass in a tangle of small shrieking limbs.

Nobody seemed worried.

"They'll sort it out," Sabra said, appearing at Jory's shoulder with her arms folded. "Is that salt?"

"It is," Jory said.

"I haven't had salt since I was a cub. Where did you find it?"

"The deer lick."

Sabra looked at him, and then at the ribs, and then at the pit, and her face changed.

"Give me one," she said.

He gave her one.

She bit into it and went completely still, and her eyes closed.

Behind her, the king arrived.

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