The string of meat slices swung up from my hand and caught on the stub of a broken branch. I flicked it off and swung it again. And each time saw how we might cross the river!
There was plenty of scrub and trees, but we had no axe. If there had been any logs, the flood had swept them away. Wondering how we might build a raft, I skinned a rabbit. For some reason I remembered how Taur did it, making only two cuts. Sleeve-skinning, he called it. He once stuck in a hollow straw, sewed the cuts tight, and blew up the skin. Squirting out the air with a dreadful squeak he chased Jak and Jess. Barking, shouting, snapping, all three.
I took some bits of rabbitskin, and made a ball of them, sewing them inside a larger piece, Nip chased and rolled and snapped at it. Her needle teeth tore it open, and the ball fell to bits. A strip of rabbitskin dangling from her jaws, Nip looked at me. “I’ll make you another,” I laughed, and had my second idea.
That evening, I split some goat bones. Most of the time, they broke in the wrong places, but there were several fine, long splinters. I had to wait for daylight before I could finish drilling eyes in three of them.
I also split some hard scrub wood and made needles of the slivers. Eyes were even harder to make in the wood, and I succeeded only with two. Beside the great, rough needle I had used for sewing Nip’s ball, they were fine and sharp.
While after more goats, I surprised a hind which ran on to my arrow. The venison ate well, Jak cracking bones into the night, Nip’s belly swollen like a little ball. We had meat for several days, a deerskin, and tendons enough for what I was planning.
The goatskins had dried. I sewed them tight, making the holes with a sharp bone, drawing the needles through with their fine threads of tendon. As the skins dried out even more, the thread dried, too. The stitches pulled the cuts so tight I tried one skin and found it would hold water. Now I knew we must succeed!
Across the river a stag wandered unafraid, coat turning red. Carrying his antlers high. Coming into his prime. A few heavy frosts, the annual mating would begin, and he would lose condition. We must cross the river while there was fat on the stags. The best meat to dry for winter.
We soon had twelve goatskins. Within a few days, they were sewn tight. As soon as I had my idea, I took care to skin the carcasses with the least amount of cutting, punching the skin away from the flesh, inserting my arm and punching further, until I could work off most of the skin, almost like rabbits. It meant less sewing.
The last job was the hardest. I sewed up the cuts on a goatskin, inserting and stitching a hollow stem in one leg. At first I blew too long, got dizzy, and had to lie down. Next time I had a plug ready and took my time. At last the skin stayed blown up, an awkward-looking, headless carcass. Left in the sun, it swelled hard.
I stitched and blew up all the goatskins and fastened them inside a framework of saplings, lashed together with plaited flax. We had a raft which floated high! I put Jak and Nip aboard and tried it in the shallows. Nip rolled her eyes, and whimpered, but Jak balanced and barked as if remembering our journey down the lake.
Upstream of our camp, the river swung around a sharp bend. The stretch below cut back in this side. I took the long rope I had plaited and tested my idea with a little raft of branches. When I stood out on the bend and pulled on the rope, the raft swung across the current. It worked even better once, and I pulled it back and found a branch had come loose and hung below the others. The current pressing on that branch had pushed the little raft faster towards the other side. The harder I pulled on the rope, the better it worked.
“The raft can’t get away, because of the rope,” I told Jak and Nip. “It’s got to go somewhere, so it shoots across the other side. The branch underneath makes it go even faster.”
Jak looked thoughtful. Nip looked at him and back at me.
I made a blade of flattened wood and lashed it under the goatskin raft. If it didn’t work, we would just swing into the middle of the river, and I could pull the raft back and try again. I thought of what would happen if the rope broke, and spent several days plaiting a heavier one.
As I worked, my mind filled with pictures of Lutha. Her brown knees, their rounded smoothness lifted in her canoe, her large eyes. I heard her calling me: “Idiot!” I was sure she had kissed me, that night in the dark. I wanted to see her again, convince the other women we were friendly. Getting across the river was the first step.
Early one morning I fastened the raft to the tree at the point. Jak and Nip I tied on board. My spear, bow, arrows. A rabbitskin bag with konny berries. Another with cooked meat in a pack. Everything lashed tight. I was pushing off when something whistled past my ear, hit the sapling framework and struck a goatskin. Air hissed out.
Shouts. Shove off! Grab my paddle – a looped length of sapling and a sleeve of goatskin. Men running. Jak barks. Nip yaps. Spears falling. I let the rope run out. It tightens, and I pull. The blade of wood beneath the raft drums. I throw myself face down, hang on.
Like a stone in the end of a sling, we swing towards the middle of the river. Two men out on the point. One holds the other’s legs. He throws himself towards the branch where the rope is tied. I half-kneel and fire, but the arrow falls short. The raft thumps across the waves towards the other side. My second arrow hits one man, but the other is slashing, slashing.
I hear shrieks of joy, see their prancing triumph, and what I should have noticed before. Tall nodding smoke signals of the Salt Men. The rope goes slack. Our swing across the river stops. We spin, hurtle downstream, carried like a feather on the back of that turbulent animal to where it disappears bellowing under the mountain.