- Caroline -

“But we do have that,” Xark’on says with a puzzled frown and takes his sledgehammer out of his belt.

“Oh, you think that might work for breaking this?”

He frowns. “Yes. It’s a hammer!”

I stare at his sledgehammer as if I see it for the first time. “A hammer? How do they work?”

“Well, I ... I hold it like this, and then I swing ... oh, I see what you’re doing. Very funny.”

I smile and slap his upper arm. “Hey, I needed revenge after your spoon thing. But this didn’t work as well as yours. I don’t think I’m done. You should expect more bullshit from me. Okay, don’t swing it too hard or you’ll break everything inside. Just make a hole about here. You like holes, right?”

“Some of them.” He barely touches his huge hammer to the clay kiln, and it breaks a hole in it the clay that takes the whole chimney with it to the ground with a dry crash and a white dust cloud.

“That might have been a little too hard,” he muses.

“No, no. It’s fine. I need that white dust for ... something.”

I remove the broken pieces of the kiln and take out the still warm. pots one by one. “One broken. One more broken. This is ... whole! Yay! Broken. Whole. Whole. Whole. Whole. Broken. Whole!”

Only four of the pots have cracked during firing, which is much better than I’d expected. We now have six small pots that I will give to Xark’on after I complete my plan number two from yesterday.

If I complete it.

I fill one of them with the dry, white clay powder and wrap them in a sack I’ve borrowed from Xark’on. “I’m done. You need anything in your forge?”

At that moment, there’s a sound from the groove again. This time it sounds just like a crying baby. And dammit if it doesn’t really make me want to go and check.

“Troga again,” Xark’on says darkly. “Don’t go near the furrow. We’ll walk to the trap in a circle.”

I get my spear and the bag of pots, and then we walk fast into the jungle again. The eerie sound of a little baby in distress rings in my ears long after we can’t hear it anymore. Hearing that night and day would drive you totally crazy. I now absolutely get that Xark’on’s tribesmen want to keep their distance. That sound is creepy because it’s so damn realistic.

I keep close to Xark’on and his bubble of safety, so I almost crash into his back when he suddenly stops. I peer over his shoulder.

Ah. That’s just a sophiasaurus, the first dinosaur any of us saw on this planet, named after its discoverer, Sophia. It’s a weird thing, and it’s huge, but as far as we know, it’s not too dangerous. This one has its side to us and is busy gnawing on something. One big eye swivels to take us in, and the gnawing suddenly stops as if the dino was caught doing something embarrassing.

Xark’on takes my wrist and backs off very calmly, which is a tactic that meets with my full approval. The dino slowly starts gnawing again, and we pull back until it’s hidden by the foliage. Then we take a new course and walk a big circle around it.

I really like how defensively Xark’on is maneuvering in his jungle. I know guys who would have attacked that thing for no reason just so I could see how cool he is. Xark’on isn’t out to impress anyone, and that just makes him so damn impressive. Strange how that works.

We’re getting close to the hole he’s digging, and before we exit the jungle and enter the clearing, he stops and listens. I do too. This is too close to Troga’s trench for comfort.

But there’s no dragon in sight, and we don’t hear any of her creepy noises.

Xark’on takes his shovel off his shoulder, climbs down into the shallow hole, then digs down and throws the first shovelful of dirt up over the edge.

I walk over to him. “It’s better, right?”

He digs more dirt out. “It’s much better. It will be finished before I’d planned.”

I look around. Now that I know what this project is, I see the surroundings with fresh eyes.

“How will you get the dragon to fall down there? When it’s done, I mean?”

He gives me a sideways glance that I can’t quite interpret, and then he just keeps digging. I guess maybe he hasn’t thought about that. It’s cool, I’ll help him figure it out.

Finally he speaks. “Will you go to your cave now?”

“I will go today. I have something to do first.”

He keeps digging, and I can see he’s really getting the hang if it. With his huge size and immense strength, his digging isn’t much slower than what a full-size Caterpillar excavator could do.

I put the little pots on the ground and then walk around ripping a handful of leaves off all the various bushes and trees I can see and reach. Then I rip them into small shreds and place them in the pots, one type of leaf in each pot. I pour a little water into the pots and then build a small fire close to the hole Xark’on’s digging.

I know which kind of firewood will burn with an invisible flame and very little smoke, which is always the safest fire in the jungle. It gives off less heat than more ordinary firewood too, but I don’t need that much of it now. Just enough heat to bring the water in the pots to a boil.

After an hour or so, I’ve boiled all the leaves and set them to cool. I’ve no particular expectations for this experiment. It probably won’t work. But it’s worth a shot.

I walk over to the hole, which is already twice as deep as when Xar’kon started digging today. It’s a wide hole, as it has to be if he expects to catch that dragon here. He’s lucky it doesn’t have wings.

Of course it’s not an actual dragon. But it looks so much like one, it’s freaky. And blood-freezingly scary.

No, I don’t want to think about that. I’ll rather just look at Xark’on. My eyes keep seeking him out anyway, so I might as well go with the flow.

He’s working with a calm determination, and I’m pretty sure he’s humming again. He’s sweaty now, and it makes his stripes an even brighter green. His muscles shine in the sunlight, and now that he’s using them all, they swell with blood and make him seem even bigger. A former boyfriend told me that. He would do a whole bunch of quick exercises every time he’d go somewhere, so everyone could see that he went to the gym.

That would never cross Xark’on’s mind. He’s never seen the inside of a gym, and every muscle he has is there because he’s been living a hard life in the jungle. The many scars are clear evidence of that.

And now he’s working to make life better for his whole tribe. All by himself.

It’s a little weird that he’s the only one. You’d think his whole tribe would be helping him, if getting rid of the dragon is so important to them. But from what we girls have been able to piece together, most tribesmen are very scared of going into the jungle, and most tribes are in decline. Only the strongest and best men in the tribes go into the woods alone. And Xark’on has to be the best man of his tribe. Maybe the best of all the tribes.

Even here, in a place where I was attacked by a raptor just a few days ago and where I know there’s a dragon not too far away, I feel safe as long as Xark’on is close. I’ve never felt safe before on this planet. And now I’m addicted to it.

The safety is helping me relax and find my way back to the Caroline I used to be, back on Earth, between the bouts of depression. That might be good or bad. On one hand, it’s wonderful to be able to let go of the fear. On the other hand, the pure, primitive fear and hardship on this planet seems to have kept the depression at bay. As if my body can only produce so many bad chemicals, and the past months it’s been too busy feverishly making fight-or-flight hormones to manufacture the depression shit. So now that I’m not quite as scared, maybe the depression will return.

Well, it’s not here yet, and I still don’t feel the gray apathy that precedes each bout. I’ll enjoy this time, with no depression and less fear, as much as I can.

Will that work without Xark’on? If I leave to go back to the cave, won’t I immediately plunge right back into the fear? He’s like an emotional lifeboat to me without even trying. He’s just living his life. And anyone who can live their life to the fullest on this planet has to be insanely strong.

I examine the contents of the pots now that they’ve cooled.

Nope. Nothing.

That’s fine. I didn’t expect anything anyway. But I still have time to test another batch. So I toss the water and leaves out from the pots and boil five new types of leaves.

Then I walk over to Xark’on in his hole. “Here. Drink some water.”

He takes the pouch and drinks greedily and then pours some over his head. “Thank you.”

I sit at the edge of the hole, dangling my legs. “Will you put some spikes at the bottom? So Troga dies?”

“Iron spikes,” he says. “I think she has a tough hide. Thin, long iron spikes that I will forge when the hole is dug. Many of them. Dug into the ground. It will kill her immediately.”

“Then your tribe will be back to normal.”

He starts digging again. “Then everything will change for the tribe.”

“How will things change?”

“They will get better.”

Okay. I guess taking an optimistic stance is one way to handle this jungle.

I take a sip of water. This is such a brutal planet, I can calmly talk about trapping and killing a large creature without feeling bad about it. It’s just the way of the jungle. Sometimes you have to kill to survive. I’ve done it myself when hunting turkeypig or not-sheep with my spear. The first time was really hard. Now, it doesn’t bother me that much. It just has to get done.

I look up at the sun. There’s still time for me to go back to the cave while there’s daylight. It’s not that far.

The thought of going back makes my heart sink in my chest. Back to the fear and the uncertainty and the vague hope that Bune will somehow magically give us a way to go home to Earth. Back to hearing other people, deeply in love, trying to be quiet while they’re having hot sex just a couple of feet away.

I actually don’t want to go.