- Caroline -

I apply a little more of the aloe-like gel from the twigs I got, but it seems like he’s healing fine.

I crawl into the hammock, trying to retain some degree of dignity while the hammock swings wildly from my clumsy attempts. I never had much experience with these things. I finally figure out that I should enter it butt first, and then I’m able to keep my balance and feel safer.

I stretch out and get comfortable. This feels more luxurious than the not-sheep fur I sleep on back at the cave.

I notice there’s a fur here too. It doesn’t really get that cold in this jungle, but I put it over my feet, which tend to get cold regardless of the temperature.

I was a little worried the hammock would smell of rancid dinosaur fats, but it’s been expertly cured and the only scent is Xark’on’s. Dry and fresh and manly.

I take a deep breath and relax. This has been a weird day, and I’m totally drained. For some reason, I don’t feel unsafe her with Xark’on. His almost total disinterest in me helps, I think. If he didn’t have that persistent, twitching bulge in his pants and his occasional stolen glances at my chest and hips, I’d think he didn’t notice me at all.

Tap, tap, tap goes his stick on the large skin canvas. The light from the torch flickers over his face and the picture. He’s the very image of peaceful concentration and determination.

Then he starts to hum softly, just like back at his mysterious project.

- - -

A terrible screech rings through the hut, and I yelp as the shock makes me twitch so hard the hammock turns over, and I fall to the floor in a heap of limbs.

I stay down, sticking close to the floor and looking up as my own heartbeat thunders in my ears.

It’s daylight, so I must have been sleeping for hours before I was so rudely awakened. And I know what that screech was: dactyls.

Xark’on comes walking around the tree trunk. “Ah. Caroline chooses to sleep on the floor.”

He seems pretty unconcerned, so I look around once more and get to my feet. “I didn’t sleep there. Fell after loud scream.”

“The irox sometimes fly by, promising vengeance,” he says and takes the hammock down. “They can’t forget what this house was used for.”

I rub my butt, which hit the floor first. “Uh-huh. Does that happen every morning?”

“No. It’s been a long time since last.”

“They know I’m here,” I state and look out at the bright green jungle down there, squinting against the sunlight.

“Perhaps. You do seem to attract the Bigs.”

“Right.” I stretch and yawn. Normally, I have all kinds of little aches when I get up from sleeping on the ground, but today I feel pretty good. I’m genuinely rested, despite my rude awakening. This place is pretty calming, somehow.

Xark’on climbs into a hole in the ceiling, which is where he jumped down from last night when he surprised me at an embarrassing moment. That has to be his food store.

He jumps down again, landing with surprising softness for such a big man. “I think it’s time the alien woman had something more to eat. Slept many hours into the day.”

I glance at his painting. Something about it still strikes me as wrong. But I can see that he’s filled out the jungle a little more with his incredibly labor-intensive technique. That must have taken him a good few hours.

He gets the fire going, and I wish I could be of more help to him. I’m starting to feel like a freeloader. All I do is embarrass myself and watch him work.

This time, he makes a simple stew from leaves and roots and turkeypig meat, and I recognize all the ingredients because I’ve used them myself. We girls seem to have discovered just about all the edible things in this jungle, along with the things the cavemen have shown us. Would I be able to identify all the veggies in the produce aisle at the supermarket back on Earth? Probably not. I’ve already adapted more to certain aspect of this planet than Earth. How long do you have to be in a completely different world before you’re more at home there than where you came from?

Sure, some things about this life suit me better than Earth. The much slower pace, for one thing. The appreciation of the little brights spots there are in every day, if you look closely enough. Life seems more immediate here, more fragile and much less certain. I wouldn’t say it makes me appreciate it more, but the lack of Zoloft here hasn’t actually made things that much worse. I can sometimes feel the depression tug at the edges of my consciousness like it would back home, even on antidepressants. But at least here I know what’s bringing me down.

The days are chock full of things that just have to get done, there are occasional moments of sheer terror, and then there’s the community with the girls, where we all have our good and less good days, and everybody understands and accepts that. There’s no pretense in a primitive life like this, and I think that’s taken a load off my mind. Heck, I’d go home in a heartbeat if I could. But that wish is not as intense in me now as it was the first few months.

“Do you know how to leave this planet?” I ask on an impulse. Because why not? This quiet guy could know all kinds of things he’s not saying.

“The Plood,” Xark’on says. “They have large machines that can travel among the stars. They took our women, so it’s said. Perhaps they will take you too.”

“I don’t think that’s a good way,” I say, remembering that Aurora found the wreckage of the saucer that brought us here. Those Plood won’t abduct anyone ever again. “Do you know of some other way to fly away from here?”

He sends a short glance towards Bune, then thinks for a moment, which somehow makes me hope that maybe he does know.

“They say,” he says, “that when we die, our spirit goes to the Ancestors. I don’t know how that is for women. But I do know that women die. Then you will fly away.”

Hope duly crushed. “Your shaman told you that?”

“The shaman told us many things that don’t ring true. And some that make sense. And some that at first seemed ridiculous but which are now revealed to be accurate.” He glances at my chest.

“Did your shaman show the young boys what a woman’s body looks like on a wooden doll?”

“He did. That’s one of the things that seemed ridiculous.”

“I had a hunch it might be.”

The stew has boiled for a few minutes, and Xark’on pours some of it onto a leaf from the hollowed-out stone that serves as his cooking pot. I’ve seen no clay stuff here in his tree house.

A branch with leaves still on it hangs from the ceiling, and Xark’on reaches up and breaks a twig off it then hands it to me. I’ve seen the cavemen at the cave do that too, before they’re shown the super futuristic invention known as a ‘spoon’. I break the twig in half and use it to eat by pushing the stew into my mouth directly from the leaf. Yeah, this household needs some improvements.

The stew is tasty, and I drink a little of his precious water before I stand up. “I have to go home now. Thank you very much for helping me, Warrior Xark’on. You are of course invited to come with me to my tribe.”

I’d actually love to come walking back to the cave with this guy in tow, just cool and calm, like it’s nothing special. The girls would be impressed. Their cavemen are cool and strong, but not like this one.

He gets up too. “I will come with you. To the place I dropped my hammer. I can protect you from the Bigs that far. Then you can make your way to your tribe on your own.”

He places the rocks on the fire like last night and goes to the hanging ropes.

I follow, a little disappointed. Well, at least our tribe has a new ally now. Maybe. Well, he’s not totally hostile, which has to count for something.

I step up on the wooden bar on my rope.

“Just a moment,” Xark’on says and disappears. Then he returns with something wrapped up in a thin dinosaur skin. “These are sometimes used by the tribesmen to defend against irox. I suppose they might work fine against other Bigs too. Provided they’re not too large,” he adds thoughtfully.

I unwrap the mysterious objects. They are three polished iron disks about the size of a DVD, cut to resemble six-pointed stars. I’m not sure what exactly they are. “They’re beautiful. Thank you.”

“May I?” He reaches out and takes one star between two fingers. He then shifts his grip to hold it in his palm, and then he throws it at the wall. The star makes a cruel, saw-like buzzz as it shoots through the air and penetrates the wood until half of it is buried.

“Gosh,” I exclaim. “That’s very sharp!”

He retrieves the star, having to use considerable force to pull it out of the wall.

“Yes,” he says as he puts it back with the other three. “It must be kept sharp. And your hand must be accurate. Some tribesmen can kill irox a hundred hands distant with these.”

I carefully wrap the stars back up and put the pack into my large pocket. “Thank you.”

I will never be able to use them, of course. The edges are razor sharp, and I’m more likely to slice off a finger than cause any kind of harm to a dinosaur. But it’s a nice thought and a decent conversation piece for when I get home to the girls.

I take a last look at the spectacular view from up here. Then I get up on the bar again, and Xark’on lowers me down through the floor of the tree house. I look up, trying to look past the house so I can see how high up the crown of the tree is. But I can’t spot it until I’m almost down by the leafy crowns of the other trees. Then I see the bright green fir-like top of the mighty tree. It has to be three hundred feet tall, and the tree house is built two thirds up the length of it.

I can’t imagine how the men in Xark’on’s tribe built that thing. How did they get up there? And how, when they saw this monster of a tree, was their first thought ‘hey, let’s build a tree house way up that smooth trunk with no obvious ways of climbing it’?

I pass down through the canopy of leaves, and immediately it gets darker and more humid. That tree house really had a nice microclimate.

I hit the ground and step off the bar. Xark’on must have felt it, because now the rope and the bar disappear up again fast.

So, now I’m alone in the jungle again. My heart sinks in my chest.

Then there’s a rustle from the leaves up there as Xark'on comes down, falling much faster than I did.

He lands in a perfect display of control and strength, not to mention leg muscles. Then he ties the rope to the hook in the tree and walks off with no further ceremony.

I have to scramble to follow him before he disappears in among the trees. It’s like he has an invisible bubble of safety around him, and I want to be in that bubble. I feel it much more strongly than yesterday. Maybe because the contrast between the safe tree house and the deadly jungle is so powerful.

Today, Xark’on is carrying a sack over his shoulder, and he has another hammer in his belt. But this one is much smaller. It’s not clear to me how he’ll get his sledgehammer back from the dragon, but hopefully that monster is long gone when we get that far.

As far as I can tell, we’re walking a different route today than the way we came. Which makes sense, because the other way leads right back to the dragon.

I haven’t thought much about that monster, strangely. That tree house kind of took most of my attention. 'Troga', Xark’on said, using the word as the name of one individual, not as a species or a whole bunch of related monsters. I don’t know if that’s important. Maybe there’s just one of them, and not a nest or a brood or flock or whatever you call something as nightmarish as a gang of dragons. It was a weird creature, different from the lumbering and reptile-like dinos we keep coming across. They can’t spew fire, for one thing. And it felt different somehow. Maybe that’s why it had a name of its own.

At least it seems to stay in that trench with the round walls close to where Xark’on is digging his secret hole. I’ve never seen or heard of it before from the other tribes, so maybe it tends to stay home. Well, it’s another thing to tell the girls.

Xark’on will sometimes turn around and check that I’m still there, and occasionally his eyes find mine, and he gives me a little smile.

His bulge comes and goes, looks like. The rest of him is very steady. He walks quietly and with measured moves, making him look like a tiger prowling for prey, patrolling its territory. The stripes only enhance that impression. He’s like a creature perfectly suited to his environment, a predator that masters this deadly jungle and all its dangers.

Since I met him only yesterday, he’s done a whole lot of things that have impressed me. He even shielded me from that dragon’s flame, and I haven’t really thanked him for that. But strangely, the thing that made me admire him the most was when he was backing us away from the dino we met later. I honestly expected him to attack it with his bare hands, because that seems to be the basic mode of operation for the cavemen. Backing down when that’s the smartest thing to do requires both brains and common sense. And the ability to put pride aside, which is not exactly the first quality I’d associate with a guy Xark’on’s age. He looks like he’s in his late twenties, but he’s an alien, so I can’t be that sure. He acts like a man much more experienced, certainly.

We keep walking through the humid jungle, and I marvel at how sure Xark’on walks. You can’t see the sun from down here, so how he finds his way is pretty impressive.

So is his little butt in those tight pants. I can’t imagine the firmness of that thing. It’s very attractive, and it gives me something to focus on while I walk after him.

I’m being creepy again, but that can’t be helped right now.

The jungle gets less dense, and then we’re at a little clearing with a pond in the middle surrounded by rocks. It’s fed by a little stream that flows quietly out of the jungle. The water looks clear enough, but I don’t trust anything on this planet. Especially not after Aurora told us about that monster that lived in that lake.

Xark’on looks around the clearing and then squats by the water and scoops some water into his hand and drinks it.

“Is this closest source of water to house in tree?” I ask quietly.