Page 67 of Moon Chosen

He’d gotten done with the water, and was circling around her, huffing and looking at the door expectantly.

“Okay, you have to go out. We have to do this differently now. We have to be even more careful than before—before when Leda was alive.” Mari led Rigel slowly through the brambles, and then made him remain concealed within the thorny thicket while she went ahead and searched the night for dangers. The crescent moon was low in a clear sky. The forest was still. Mari hurried back to Rigel and held her arms open. “Up!” she called to him, and Rigel trotted quickly to her, springing up into her waiting arms. “We have to practice this a lot so that I can keep lifting you. I can’t let you walk around outside our burrow. I can’t take any chance of them finding you.” She carried him far enough away from the burrow, putting him down so that he could relieve himself. Only then did she consider exactly from whom she must stay hidden. “Everyone,” she told the young canine as he watched her with his intelligent amber gaze. “We have to hide from the Companions looking for you, and we have to hide from Sora and the rest of the Scratchers.” Mari drew a long, sad breath and let it out slowly, feeling the weight of reality settling heavily on her shoulders. “We don’t have any friends. Rigel, I don’t think we can trust anyone.”

The pup came to where she was sitting and put his head on her shoulder, sighing and leaning into her, flooding her with feelings of warmth and love and acceptance.

“You’re right. We can trust each other, and that’s enough.” Mari put her arms around Rigel and buried her face in the thick, soft fur of his neck.

The pup held very still, sharing his warmth and his love with his Companion. It was only when his stomach growled ferociously that Mari stirred.

“Hungry. You have to be hungry. Mama smoked some rabbit for us. I can make stew and we’ll—” Mari’s words ran out.We’ll what? Mama’s not here.Mari shook her head. “No. I won’t think about that. We’ll eat. That’s all I have to think about right now.” A skittering sound in the brush behind them had Mari standing and calling, “Up, Rigel!” She held her pup close, drawing strength from him even though her body was exhausted and her mind mired in sadness.

It was while she was preparing their stew that Mari decided to change everything.

“We used to sleep most of the day and stay up, waiting for Mama, most of the night. We can’t do that anymore, Rigel.” Mari kept up a steady stream of her thoughts spoken aloud as she cut carrots and onions for the stew. “Only males mad with Night Fever go out alone at night. And—and we don’t have Mama to wait up for anymore.” Mari paused, blinking hard against the tears that threatened to drown her. “We’ll set snares and check them during the day. We’ll tend our gardens and harvest vegetables and fruits and herbs during the day. We’ll do all the things we used to do with Mama at night during the day. And then, Rigel, at night we’ll be here, in our burrow, asleep and safe.”

Rigel sat close to her, watching her intently while she talked. Gone was the puppy-like mischievousness that used to have him poking his nose where it shouldn’t be, and grabbing anything from a carrot to a slingshot rock to chew on. In the course of one day and night, Rigel had shed his puppyish playfulness; replacing it was the somber, listening demeanor of an adult Shepherd.

Mari told herself that the change in Rigel was a good thing, though the truth was that in the most secret part of her she mourned the loss of her puppy.

“Okay, your stew is ready. Here you go.” Mari ladled out Rigel’s portion, and then, noting his eagerness and the hollow look his belly suddenly had, she added more to the bowl, and kept filling the silence in the burrow with the sound of her voice as she continued to stir the stew, cooking it more thoroughly for her potion.

“So, where were we? That’s right. We’re going out during the day. Yes, I know that daylight has its own dangers. Someone from the Clan might see me, and if the sun is shining just right they might see my skin glow.” She stopped mid-stir of the stew as a new and freeing thought came to her. “Rigel, I don’t care if they see me!” The pup stopped eating and cocked his head at her. “Don’t you understand? Mama always worried about the Clan finding out about me because she was afraid we’d be banished and she wanted me to be accepted by the other Earth Walkers. All of that has changed now. I’m not going to follow Mama as the next Moon Woman. I’m not part of the Weaver Clan. I’ve never really been part of Mama’s Clan. So, I don’t care if someone sees me and thinks my hair is too light or my skin glows in the sun because I’ve already banished myself!”

Mari stood there, holding the ladle and staring into the steaming stew while she tried to let her new life settle through her skin and into her soul. She wouldn’t go out of her way to flaunt what she was to the Earth Walkers, but she also wouldn’t avoid the daylight as she had been doing for most of her life. She’d be careful. She’d stay away from the Gathering Sites and the Clan’s burrows, but she was finished with hiding from the sun.

A stray thought wound through her inner monologue.I didn’t hide from the sun at the creek, and fire came to me. I lit the forest on fire. How? How did I do that?Mari shook herself.Later. Think of it later. Not now.She began dishing up stew for herself as she continued thinking aloud.

“I do have to be careful that no one finds us here, but this burrow is something that Mama and I have been hiding my entire life.” There were all sorts of checks and balances for keeping their burrow’s location secret, and Mari knew all of them as well as she knew how to make a two-dimensional sketch seem to live and breathe. “And I have to make sure that no one ever finds you—hurts you—takes you away from me.” Mari drew several deep breaths to steady herself. “Hiding. You’re going to practice hiding until you are so good at it that you can appear and disappear like smoke.”

Rigel sneezed and went back to crunching rabbit bones. Mari would have smiled at him, but she wasn’t able to make the corners of her mouth lift.

What’s next? What happens after we hunt and gather and take care of the daily tasks of living? Then what do we do? How do we fill our lives?

Mari didn’t realize she’d frozen again and had been staring motionless into the cauldron of stew until Rigel whined and pressed against her leg.

“Sorry,” she said quickly, refilling his bowl. Then she sat beside him with her own dinner. “Here’s what we’ll do next. We’ll move ahead one day, and then another, and then another. Together.” Resolutely, Mari lifted her wooden spoon, forcing herself to take first one bite, then another, and then another. She ignored the tears that tracked down her cheeks and the terrible ache in her heart.

***

It was surprising how simple it was for Mari to change their sleeping pattern and the habits that went along with it. Perhaps part of the reason she slept so easily and soundly was because the only escape she had from the sadness that filled her days was in her dreams. Only when she dreamed was Leda still alive. Only when she dreamed was Mari happy and Rigel a playful pup again.

The screams began not long past dusk the seventh night after Leda’s death. As had become her habit, Mari had closed and barred the door at sunset and was just completing the first of the new snares she had designed to catch live rabbits. Rigel was chewing contentedly on a venison bone Mari had scavenged from a fresh kill she’d made just that morning. The first scream was so feral that Mari almost discounted it as her brain automatically processed the sound as animal rather than human.

The second scream was closer. It was also more clearly human. Rigel dropped his bone, growling low in his throat.

“Stay close to me,” Mari told him, though she needn’t have said anything. Unless they were practicing his hiding skills, the Shepherd never strayed from her side, always keeping her in his sight. Mari unbarred the door and the two of them crept out, maneuvering through the winding, bramble-covered pathway that snaked around the burrow. Mari and Rigel didn’t leave the protection of the thicket. Instead they paused just inside its boundary, listening.

The next screams were more distant, with each succeeding scream drifting farther and farther away. Mari kept listening until there was nothing left to hear, and then she and Rigel returned to the burrow, barring the door once more.

Mari took up her charcoal pencil and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper. The pencil felt almost foreign in her hand, and she realized with a start of surprise that she hadn’t sketched anything since the day of Leda’s death. Suddenly her vision was flooded with images of her mother—her smile, her gentle hands, the thickness of her hair, the tenderness in her gray eyes—and she shook with the effort not to put those images on paper.

“This first. Then Mama. Then I’ll sketch Mama,” Mari said. Clutching the charcoal she started making notes about the screams. She realized she should have counted them, and made a separate note to herself about that—COUNT THE SCREAMS NEXT TIME. Then she went on, writing about the direction the sounds seemed to come from, how long they lasted, and how it sounded like it was only one person screaming, and that it had definitely been a male voice.

“We’ll stay away from the southeast tomorrow,” she told Rigel. “We usually don’t go far in that direction anyway because of the Gathering Site and burrows down there, but there are also wild berries that should be ripe about now. We’ll find them in the north, or we’ll do without them.” Mari made an additional note about the berries, adding a reminder to search elsewhere for them.

And then she chose a new sheet of blank paper. She ran her hand over the smooth surface as she closed her eyes and let an image of her mother come to her. When she was ready, she opened her eyes and began to sketch.

Mari finished quickly. As if she’d just awakened from one of her dreams, she blinked, rubbed her eyes, and then looked down at her creation.