Bonesetter 2 -Winter- (21 page)

“But I didn’t even know about basket traps then!” Woday said exasperatedly.

Pell shook his head sadly, “I’m told a good apprentice plans for the future.”

Wide-eyed, Woday wondered if Pell really believed he should have anticipated…

Pell broke into a broad smile, slapped Woday on the shoulder and said, “Don’t be so delicate. I haven’t been able to tease anyone for months so I’m taking it all out on you.”

A wash of relief flooded over Woday, then he drew himself up and said pompously, “You’re not
supposed
to tease your elders.”

Pell laughed as they walked along, then said as if he were sad, “
Everybody’s
my elder except Falin and Boro. Falin’s too
young
to tease and Boro’s been sick.” He shook his head mournfully, “And now you’re telling me I can’t even tease my apprentice?! What a sad world I live in.”

Woday snorted, “I’m sure you’ll get by… somehow.”

Pell surprised Woday by stopping off at a small meadow on their way down along the stream. He walked out to an area that was nearly bare and set down his loosely woven basket there. He said, “Do you see a rock I can use as a hammer?”

Puzzled, Woday looked around and found a stone a little bigger than his fist. He picked it up, “Will this one do?”

Pell nodded, pulling out a stake and pushing it through the loose weave of the basket from top to bottom. When Woday handed him the rock, he pounded the stake into the ground beneath the basket. Pell pounded another stake through the side of the basket near the opposite end, where the in-pointing reeds made the one way opening. He tugged and pulled on the basket as if to assure himself it was secure.

Woday tilted his head as he studied the basket. Inside, it had a small, shallow clay bowl attached to the bottom of it. “What’s the bowl for?”

“To hold the grain,” Pell said, untying the door at the end of the basket and reaching in with a little pouch to pour some grain into the bowl. Pulling his hand back out, he scattered a little more grain around the basket, then started retying the thongs to hold the door back in place.

Woday shook his head slowly in confusion, “I think as soon as you put it in the water, the grain’ll float away. You should glue the grain in place with some resin or something.”

Pell drew his head back as if surprised, “Oh! This is a
bird
trap, not a fish trap.” He grinned up at Woday, “
You’ve
got the fish trap. We’re leaving this thing here. We’ll check it on our way back.” He stood and started back toward the trail down along the stream.

Woday followed, feeling as if the ground had shifted under him a little bit. Now that Pell had called it a “bird trap” Woday could see how it could trap birds just like the “fish trap” trapped fish. What shook him was the fact that he hadn’t
recognized
that a slight modification of the fish trap could turn it into something suitable for birds.

They reached the little bend in the stream where they’d put the fish trap before. Pell stopped and looked around, then turned to Woday. “The first two times we put the trap in the water about there,” he said pointing. “Where do you think we should put it this time?”

Woday looked where Pell was pointing. The water flowed there, but not very quickly. He pointed to a quiet eddy and said, “I think if you put it in the really slow water, over there where it’s rocky, you might get more crayfish.”

“Oh, I liked the crayfish,” Pell said with a grin.

They undid the door and reached in to tie the fish guts to the wall of the basket. They did the door back up, tied it to the small rope Pell had left there from the other times and tossed the fish trap into the stream where Woday had suggested.

They watched from the vantage of the rock for a little while. Woday had been daydreaming when Pell nudged him. Speaking quietly, he said, “Look, there’s a crayfish investigating it.”

Woday saw another crayfish beginning to creep out toward the basket as well. “We might catch quite a few!” he said, feeling quite pleased.

Pell stood slowly, “Let’s leave this for a while and go see what’s happening with the bird trap.”

As they walked back up to the little meadow, Woday felt his mind tumbling like the stream they walked beside. Finally, he said, “Why do we need the basket trap for birds? It seems like it’s easier to make the trap with the bent sapling.”

“Yeah,” Pell said. “If they both catch the same number of birds, it’s crazy to spend a lot of time weaving baskets isn’t it?” Musingly, he continued, “But I think the basket trap might catch them uninjured. That might be useful.”

“What?! Why?”

Pell turned to look at him, “What if we kept the live birds around? We’d need a
huge
basket to keep them in. But if we did, we could feed them some grain to keep them alive, then, sometime in the middle of the winter, we could have fresh meat.”

Woday was so surprised that he stopped walking.

Pell stopped and turned to look at him curiously, “What do you think?”

Woday stared at Pell for a minute, then said, “I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be better if
we
ate the grain, instead of having the birds eating the grain and us eating the birds?”

Pell frowned a moment, then shrugged, “You’re probably right. I just thought it might be nice to have some grouse for a midwinter feast.”

“Well, that’s true. But if the birds ate a lot of grain… Um, the women complain that harvesting and preparing grain is a lot of work. They might be pretty unhappy if you took the grain they worked so hard to harvest, thresh, winnow, and hull; then
you
fed it to a bird!”

Pell’s eyes widened a little in surprise, then he grinned, “Oh! I think you just saved me from getting in a lot of trouble, didn’t you?” He frowned, “Though, I think a lot of the work is in threshing and the hulling of the grain. Do you think we could just toss the birds the un-threshed sheaves? I’m pretty sure that no one threshes or hulls the seeds that birds normally eat.”

Surprised to be asked questions on a topic of which he had virtually no knowledge, Woday said, “
I
don’t know!” But then they rounded a copse into the meadow and saw that their new bird trap had two grouse in it. Woday turned to Pell and lifted an eyebrow, “I guess you could try it out with those two.”

Pell had just seen the bird trap himself. He grinned, “I guess we can.” He snorted, “
If
I can keep Gia from eating those two birds.” He gave Woday a knowing look, “She
really
likes grouse.”

***

Yadin enthusiastically followed Manute and Deltin as they started off on their hunt. He hoped to learn how they were so successful hunting small game. However, they led him up onto the big plateau above the ravine and, after surveying the possibilities, began discussing how they might manage to spear one of the big animals grazing up there.

Yadin listened for a little while, thinking that there might be something special about the way they hunted big animals as well, but the ideas they discussed were similar to ones he’d used when hunting with the Oppos. Eventually, Yadin said, “I was hoping to learn how you managed to kill rabbits, hedgehogs and squirrels almost every hunt.”

Manute and Deltin looked at one another, then Manute said, “Um, we’d need Pell for that.”

Yadin sighed, “And I suppose he’d tell me to ask Agan if it’s okay to teach me that secret?”

Deltin laughed, “You’re probably right about that.”

“I know he’s good at throwing rocks. Did he teach you guys some trick for throwing, something that makes you so accurate you can hit little animals?”

Manute widened his eyes, “You’re trying to trip us up and get us to tell you his secret!” he said with a grin. Then he gave Yadin a considering look, “But, without giving it away, I
can
tell you that it doesn’t involve throwing rocks.” He laughed, “Pell may be good at a lot of things, but throwing—either rocks or spears—isn’t one of them.”

Startled, Yadin schooled his face to stillness, not wanting to show his surprise. After all, he’d
watched
Pell throwing rocks at that stand of small trees! He
knew
Pell was good, why didn’t these guys?
Is Pell hiding his ability? Or—
Yadin’d seen a number of young men quickly improve their coordination during their adolescence—
could that
have happened to Pell?
“When’s the last time you went hunting with him?”

Manute looked up as he thought about it, “Way back in the summer.” He glanced at Deltin, “And I don’t think Pell’s ever gone hunting with Deltin. To tell the truth, I think he avoids going hunting because he’s embarrassed about the way he throws.” Manute shrugged, “I’d be embarrassed, if I threw that badly. But, he really shouldn’t be. There are so many other things he’s good at that
any
tribe would be happy to have him, even if he couldn’t throw at all!”

Deltin said, “It’s true, he’s never been hunting with me and I’d swear he’s avoided getting in any situation where he might have to throw in front of me.” He shrugged, “I don’t know how he thinks he’s ever going to get better if he doesn’t practice.”

“These young people today, they never want to practice,” Yadin said, like he usually did when such sentiments came up.

However, he was very thoughtful as they continued onward, wondering what was really going on in Cold Springs.

***

Woday and Pell headed back down the small river to where they’d placed their fishing basket. When they’d crept out onto the rock to look down at the fish trap, they saw it had a lot of crayfish climbing over the outside! Pell frowned saying, “I hope there’re some inside too.” He started pulling on the rope to drag the basket back up to them.

Woday watched as the basket rose toward them. The crayfish clinging to the outside of it stayed in place, though they looked a little agitated. “Maybe the ones on the outside will keep clinging to the basket and we can catch them after we get them up here on the rock.” However, to his disappointment, when the basket broke the surface, most of the crayfish dropped off and fell back into the water.

Pell lifted the basket out onto the rock and peered in through the more loosely woven door. “There’s a bunch of them inside too!” He turned to Woday and arched happy eyebrows, “Crayfish tonight!”

Starting back toward the cave, they left the crayfish in the basket as the most convenient way to transport them without getting bitten. They stopped at the little meadow to get the grouse. As Pell wiggled out the stakes that were holding the bird trap in place, he turned to Woday, “Do you think that if we put a big shallow basket on a sturdy branch for a handle…” He trailed off, apparently lost in thought.

Woday finally said, “What?!”

Pell said, “If we lifted the fish trap up near the surface, but stopped before it came out of the water, maybe we could slide the big shallow basket underneath the fish trap?”

Woday blinked in puzzlement, “What good would that do?”

“Well, when the fish trap came up out of the water and the crayfish dropped off, they’d fall into our big shallow basket.”

“Oh…” Woday said, thunderstruck. He frowned, “Do you think that would work?”

Pell shrugged, “I don’t know. I think it’s worth a try.”

“Sure,” Woday said with a nod.

Pell grinned at him, “So, there’s an apprentice type job for you. Cut a forked limb off a tree, fit a shallow basket into the fork and bind it there. Next time we try to catch crayfish, we’ll try it out.”

“Okay,” Woday said, thinking how much he hated using hand axes. He usually smashed his fingers at least a few times.

When Woday and Pell arrived back at the cave, Woday expected people to be excited about the grouse and the crayfish they were carrying. Instead, the women were upset. Donte had had them turning the grain to keep it dry and they’d found droppings. Donte turned to Pell, her hands on her hips. “Mice! Maybe rats. They’re eating our grain! We made tight lids for our old taller baskets. These shallow baskets may be keeping the grain from spoiling, but they’re not keeping the mice from eating it!”

Pell tilted his head and looked at them curiously, “I thought that the mice used to chew holes in your old baskets and eat the grain anyway?”

“Well… yes,” Donte admitted, “but we could patch the holes.”

Gia looked around at their food store and said exasperatedly, “Are we going to have to weave lids for
all
these shallow baskets?!”

Woday looked at Pell, wondering how he’d respond. In his tribe at the Falls, the men got angry when the women confronted them like this. Especially when the women yelled at them about some problem that couldn’t be solved. Everyone knew nothing could be done about mice. Instead, Pell had a kind of distant look on his face. After a moment, Pell smiled and said, “Woday and I were just talking about how we might keep these grouse in a big basket and feed them grain. Then, later in the winter, we could have some grouse for a feast.”