She crested the last hill and looked down into the little glen where her worn tent was pitched. Nearly home and safe, she told herself. Useless to think of those lost days in that far-off place. As useless to think of Benu’s folk, a hundred hills and valleys from here. She started down the long hill, nearly stumbling in her weariness. Her lips were dry and she longed to lick them, but knew they would only crack in the cold. Nearly home. Halfway down the hill, she halted and stared. Something was wrong. Her heart slowed its beating.
No smoke rose from the tent’s smoke flap. Frost was heavy on the flap, showing that no residual heat clung there. The pieces of broken branches she had left by the tent for firewood were undisturbed. The still gray tent reminded her of scraped hides swinging in the wind. Dead and empty.
She ran. Her numbed feet felt the shock as they hit the frozen ground and plowed on through the loose snow. ‘Kerlew!’ she called, but her voice was dry and cracked as a dead leaf. It floated weightlessly away from her. A wolverine, guessed a part of her. A wolverine was afraid of nothing. It would not hesitate to enter a human’s tent and attack a ten-year-old boy. Or perhaps he had gone outside the tent to relieve himself and wandered off. He never paid attention to tying his hood tightly, or putting on extra leggings. In this cold it wouldn’t take long. The cold could do it, even if he didn’t run into the wolves she had heard this morning. Hadn’t she herself assured him that they were on the other side of the ridge, and no threat to them? Would wolves kill a child? They’d kill a calf that wandered from the herd. What about a calvish boy, all long awkward legs and flapping helpless hands?
It took her forever to reach the tent and burst inside. Her lungs and mouth hurt from the frozen air she dragged in with every breath. No matter. Where was the boy? ‘Kerlew?’ she asked breathlessly. The ashes were gray on the hearth stones. Nothing moved. Her life thudded to a slow halt in her breast, fell endlessly into the cold pit of her belly. The only sign of the boy was the bundle of hides on his pallet. Thoughts of bears and wolverines, of wolves, and of bands of wandering hunters sometimes more brutish than any animal rushed through her mind. And she had left Kerlew alone to face such things. Her throat closed. The dead hare slipped unnoticed from her hand.
‘Kerlew!’ she cried again, the sound ripping the stillness of the tent. She slipped her bow from her shoulder and gripped it. Tracks. Perhaps he had left some tracks. But as she lifted the tent flap, a tiny clucking came to her ears. She turned her head sharply, saw the pile of furs on his pallet stir. Stepping forward, she jerked the furs back, to reveal Kerlew on his side, talking softly to a smooth stone in his hand. Relief was overwhelmed and lost in the sudden rage she felt.
‘What are you doing? Why is the fire out?’ she demanded angrily.
‘I forgot to put wood on,’ he replied, not stirring. He stroked the rock in his hand, not even looking up at her. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I got under all the hides and stayed warm.’
Tillu stared down at him, feeling the cold eating through her clothing, feeling the hunger that would have to wait to be satisfied, but, most of all, feeling the despair that her son awakened in her. Would he always be this way, waiting for her to come home and care for him, heedless and helpless in the world around him? She didn’t move, she didn’t speak, she only looked on him, wondering what was missing in the boy, what she had failed to teach him, what it was that kept him from belonging to this world. She tried so desperately to make him right. But nothing changed him. He couldn’t even see his own wrongness. All her waiting, all her efforts at teaching him were useless. Lost in the swirling hopelessness, she stared at her only child.
‘Aren’t you going to start the fire?’ Kerlew demanded petulantly. He tugged at the covers she had pulled away. ‘It’s getting colder and I’m hungry. Is that all you killed today?’
The old rage, the rage she had thought left behind with his baby years, rose in her. The unfairness of this burden chafed and burned her soul. She towered over him, her anger giving her strength. With one hand she seized his shirt front, dragged him from the blankets to his feet. She all but threw him at the cold hearth stones. He staggered sideways, caught his balance awkwardly, and then suddenly crouched down, cowering before her.
‘No!’ The word ripped her throat. ‘No! I am not going to fix the fire! You are! You, the fool that let it go out! Even the youngest babe of Benu’s folk knows that the fire must be always tended. Without the fire we cannot live! But you, old enough to hunt, if you were not so stupid, you let the fire go out while you huddle like a baby and fondle some stupid rock. Give me that thing!’
She wrenched the reddish stone, polished by Kerlew’s touch, from his frantic grip and flung it through the tent door. Kerlew’s face went white. The stone vanished into the snow and Kerlew cried out. He dove after it, but she caught him by the back of his shirt and dragged him back, to dump him roughly on the cold earth by the hearth. She was shaking with rage and despair. This was her son, her boy who would soon be a man? This crouching creature that wept with anger because she had thrown a stone from the tent? It was unbearable.
‘I want my rock!’ he screamed furiously. He tried to rise from his place by the hearth, but she shoved him back. She snatched down the leather bag that held the dry tinder high above the earth floor. She flung it at him. The boy cried out as the bag slapped him and fell to the floor. She followed it with the fire-bow. She had no flint and strike-stone.
‘Make the fire!’ she commanded in a voice that shook the tent. ‘Now!’
‘I can’t. I don’t know how. I want my rock!’ He scrabbled away, but she seized him by the scruff of his shirt and dragged him back. Tears streaked his face.
‘You try. Now. You’ve seen me do it a thousand times. Now you try. Now!’
‘I can’t! I can’t! I want my rock! It was my rock, not yours.’ There was fear in his voice as well as defiance, and any other time it would have melted Tillu’s anger. But she was too cold, too hungry, and too tired of being the entire support of his world. She knelt behind him and seized his thin wrists, forced his hands to the tools. His hands were limp. He would not pick them up.
‘Pick them up! Right now, Kerlew! You pick them up and you try! Do you think I will always be here for you, to come home and make the fires and cook the food? What if I had gotten lost today? What if a bear had killed me, or I had fallen and broken a leg? Would you sit in this tent and cry, “I can’t!” until you froze or starved? Would you? Would you sit and stroke a rock until you died? Would you? What if I hadn’t come back today?’
The boy craned his neck to look over his shoulder at her. His mouth hung open and his closely set eyes goggled at her in terror. ‘Not come back? You not come back? Kerlew alone?’ His fear had reverted him to babyishness. His mouth hung askew, his bottom lip trembling wetly as he stared at her in mindless fear. Tillu was ruthless.
‘That’s right. Tillu not come back. Now you try. Try!’
The boy took up the implements awkwardly, waved them about helplessly, and then tried to fit them together. She held her anger as he made three faltering tries, then slapped his hands aside. ‘Fool! Like this. Your top hand here, like this. Your other hand here, on the bow. Try!’
He shrank from her touch, but she seized him roughly and put his hands in place. He moved the bow awkwardly, his hand bent in toward his wrist as he sawed back and forth. The stick, trapped in the loop of the bow string, moved unevenly, dancing out of its nest, spending the heat of its friction as it skittered over the face of the wood. Tillu reached past him to set it firmly in place.
‘Try!’ she rebuked him again. There was no encouragement in her voice, only command.
‘Ma-a,’ he began pleading, but she jerked herself away from him,