Chapter 7

I have learned much in these days that I am here. There is water always ready for drinking or washing, there is much food in a box where it is always cold, there is a thing that cooks without fire and other things that make light and heat without fire, there are tools to use for eating, there is clothing in such plenty as I have never beheld, there is so much else that it strains the mind.

And there are thin sheets of some substance much lighter and more flexible than bark on which men may draw, such drawing as I never before see, many drawings and other symbols, and all are held together in some fashion. The woman, Linda, shows me these drawings when I tell her about aurochs that hurt me.

Each of the drawings shows an animal, and most of them I have not seen. She asks is it this animal, and that one, and the other, but none are right. I look further, and come to a different kind of drawings, not so true in detail as the others, but then I see picture of aurochs and I tell her.

She looks at me in shock. Do her people not hunt animals so large as aurochs? I turn to another drawing and show her mammoth and in pride tell her I hunt this one, too. She shows even greater shock. If her people have made all of these things that I see here they must be a great people indeed, and I am pleased that at least I can show her something that my people do that hers cannot.

I continue to look at the fine drawings, and now I see many animals that look like those I know. Sometimes the drawings are not entirely right, but this is a small thing compared to their beauty. I think some artist must have taken many years to create them, or perhaps many working together because the styles are not the same as the pictures she showed first.

So much do I concentrate on the pictures before me that I do not realize the woman is no longer beside me until I see her rush out of the dwelling. She has only the same clothing she wears here where it is warm, and I do not understand. I go over to what I have learned they call a door and look after her.

Ah. She goes to where I have left my spearpack when I awoke. That is good, it was careless of me to have forgotten it, in time the snow would damage the pack and might warp the spears themselves. I am glad she has thought to retrieve it.

She examines it and then touches the spears, and she turns back to see me in the door. She is looking at me very strangely, though. Have I done something ill? In the time we have been together she has been mostly easy, we have spent hours as she has taught me her speech so that I can even speak a little now. It is no speech I have ever heard before, but so much here is strange that this seems a small thing.