I make a noise of frustration. How do I make her understand that it is my responsibility to make sure that she is fed and warm? That I am a poor mate if I cannot keep her comfortable? I indicate the hides on the animals. "Fur. Har-loh fur. No brrrr." I mock-shiver. "Rukh mate, Har-loh fur." I nod, as if this answers everything.
She shakes her head again. "Stay," she says in the soft voice again. "Tired. Rukh tired. Har-loh tired. Fur later." She moves toward me and wraps her arms around my torso, pressing her cheek against my chest. She is warm and soft, and I am a weak, weak male. Stay at her side? I would like nothing more.
I pet her mane, loving the nearness of her, of the press of her skin to mine. "Lay-turr?" I echo. I do not know this word, but I suspect it means tomorrow. That we rest today and tomorrow I hunt again.
"Later," she agrees.
Very well. A day of rest, then.
7
RUKH
It is not a day of rest after all. The moment Har-loh and I eat a bite and wash it down with water, my mate gets to work. I thought that by leaving her behind, she would relax and sleep by the fire, waiting comfortably for me to return. This is not the truth, though. When I go into the cave we have claimed for ourselves, I see dried meat on every surface, the hides rolled up and the heads rotting in the corner of the cave. When I return to Har-loh's side, she is already hard at work, butchering the dvisti. She uses her small stone knife to hack it apart and to peel the skin away. She slices open the gut and pulls out the organs, then takes them to the water's edge to clean them out and hangs them to dry, too.
I cannot have my mate doing all this work, so I pitch in and help, and she tosses me a grateful look.
By the end of the day, I understand why my Har-loh is so tired. I understand now why she did not wish for me to run off into the mountains with the easy task of hunting. Preparing the meat and the fur is time-consuming, and messy, and exhausting. We work until the suns fall beyond the edge of the sky again and it grows dark. At the end of it, the skins are rolled up and bundled, and Har-loh makes motions that she will scrape them tomorrow. I think of all the skins waiting inside the cave, too. Of all the meat. Of the strips of reeds she dries so she can make something with them. Of the organs she carefully saves and gestures that she will make something with them.
It is very different from when I have hunted on my own. If I was hungry, I would kill something and eat it until there was no more meat. If I did not finish all of it, I would shove it into a snow bank and gnaw on the frozen meat the next day. I did not think about the future. But with Har-loh, we must think of many turns of the moon from now.
We must think of when our kit arrives. We must have everything ready.
HARLOW
Rukh stays after dark, and I'm so incredibly glad that he does.
I think his leaving before without saying a word was a misunderstanding. I don't think he hates me. I don't think he's tired of me. I think he's unused to having to discuss his actions with anyone else, so he didn't think anything of up and leaving. To him, it was no big deal. He doesn't realize how it looked to me. It just boils down to communication. We need to learn to talk to each other, and that starts with language. No matter how difficult it is, I've got to get more words into him and I need to learn how he thinks. We can figure this out.
Once the meat is cooked enough that it won't rot, we hang it in the cave to dry. There's an endless list of things to get done, and when the meat is all done, I work on getting the brains out of the skulls to use for the skins tomorrow. By the time I'm done, I'm so weary I want to fall over, and I barely have the strength to wash my hands before I collapse into the furs, exhausted. Rukh joins me and I curl up next to him and sleep like the dead.
When I wake up, the inside of the cave is cold and empty. I'm terrified that he's left again. "Rukh?"
"Har-loh," he calls back from outside.
Relief crashes over me and I fight back the sob that rises in my throat. I compose myself, shove my feet into my boots, and trot out to meet him. To my relief, my mate's there by the makeshift fire. He's got it going again, burning the rest of the massive log that didn't completely catch last night. I see he's spread a few more strips to dry, and there's a pouch for breakfast tea hanging over the fire.