Chapter 26

It must have been awful for her and thinking about it still nearly made me sick. We had her now though and she was safe and would soon be well fed. The hard part would be explaining that her grandfather had died from the ache in his chest, but we had it to do. We spent the next few hours just sort of hoping we could think of something to cheer her up.

The pups finally did the deal for us after we let them out to play. The pups and the other children that is. Hell, all we'd needed to do in the first place was put them together. She couldn't understand a word they said, but it didn't seem to matter in the least. In fact they had a grand game of trying to figure out what each other's words meant. Christy was delighted to find out they had the same words as her for puppy and dog, which she thought Missy was.

When supper was ready I asked Christy if she'd sit with me and let me feed her.

"I'm old enough to feed myself," she said, but then smiled at me and agreed.

After we'd eaten I told her about her grandfather. She didn't start crying again but she did seem near to it.

"I knew he'd died all along, but I didn't want to be here alone and so I told myself he was just sleeping. Where is he now?"

"We buried him when we found the plane. Do you want to see where?"

"Yes, can we go? Is it far?"

"No, it's just down there a little way," I said, pointing.

I got up and we headed toward it.

"Did you fly his plane away?"

"Yes, I took it to our home."

"Where are we?"

"That's something I don't know. I do know we are not in the same time we're from. The storm moved us way back into the past. There are no roads, or streets, or stores, or anything like that here."

"Oh. How do you have food then?"

"We hunt it, the meat, and we gather the fruits and things like that."

"I wish I'd known about things like that. I got very hungry before you found me. I'm full now though. Those ladies are all very good cooks. Is one of them your wife?"

"Things are different in this time. They are all my wives," I said, feeling a storm coming on.

"Oh, are you Mormons?"

"No sugar, and we're not really Christians either. You see, in this place Jesus won't even be born for eight thousand more years."

"Oh. I think I see now, kinda. How are we going to get back to your house? I didn't see any cars or trucks or anything but that big helicopter without any rotors on it."

"We're going to have to ride back, on the horses."

"I've never ridden a horse before."

"Don't worry. We'll teach you how tomorrow."

"This back in time stuff might not be so bad then," she said, and giggled.

We'd reached the grave then and she was a little surprised to see that we'd put up a cross to mark it. She was quiet for a few minutes and then turned away and we headed back. She asked a few more questions and I did the best I could to make things sound like one big party. Hell, in my view they were. It wasn't like we had to go to work or anything.

By bedtime for the kids Christy and Cinqua were big time buddies. They bundled up in the furs together and Missy snuggled down with them. I hoped I could remember not to get any of the women too excited tonight. We didn't want to wake the kids and have them laughing at our antics.

The next morning I was up first and Christy was up next. I showed her where the women had been doing their business and then slipped off to take care of some of my own. When I came back she was talking to Chris about the puppies as she called them.

"You know that they're really just baby wolves don't you?" Chris asked.

"No. I didn't know it. I thought they were just German Sheppards or something. They don't seem wild."

"The pups aren't wild actually, but Missy was wild when we caught her. We bribed her into staying with us and behaving by feeding her all she would eat. I think she likes being a substitute dog by now. How do you think you'll like living with us?"

"I already know I'll like it much better than living by myself like I was. I know I'll miss gramma though, but there's nothing we can do about that. I'm just here now and there's no way to go back. I'll just have to make the best of it like you and Jack and Mary had to. The horses will probably make it easier," Christy said, and then giggled.

"You think you'll like having horses to ride?"

"Yes, I've always wanted one but we lived in Anchorage and there wasn't room to keep one where we were. It's probably better for gramma that way. Now that we're gone she's going to need her friends. I'm sorry she'll be so sad. I'm going to try not to be though."

It was a pretty mature attitude I thought, and I hoped she'd be able to pull it off. We'd help her all we could but I knew it would still be tough.

Soon enough the food was ready, eaten, and it was time to get Christy started learning to ride. I saddled the smallest and gentlest horse for her and gave her the opening speech. A well trained horse was the best teaching aid at this point and I knew the children had this one well in hand. It had been Cinqua's taxi lately but Cinqua could handle something a little more challenging by now.

After and hour or so of practice Cinqua joined us on her new mount and I turned the two of them loose to practice. That would do more for Christy's horsemanship than anything else.

While they were riding I tried to help get everything else ready to move out. The travois packing was already done and the only thing left was hitching the draft eligible horses to the helicopter. For maneuverability we connected a short piece of one-inch chain to the helo's draw hook and then connected the horse's harness lines to the chain.

We'd already learned that steering the helicopter was not so easy without the engines running. That wasn't going to happen even though I was sure they would start right up. There was an emergency steering mechanism for the nose wheel and so we decided to use it.

My only other choice would be to remove the steering completely and cobble up something to manually steer the nose wheel from pulling it with the towlines. That would probably work better, but the manual emergency system would work now and I thought it would be good enough.

When we started on our way things worked well but slowly. The manual steering was slow, but it did well enough. Even though we'd piled almost all we could in the helo's cargo area it still wasn't much of a load for the twelve horses that were pulling it. It made me decide I needed to think up some way to make at least small wheels for the travois' dragging ends.

Getting started was the hardest part. We had to swing the helo wide so we could line up with the narrow but useable trail. We also had to keep a careful watch on where we were going, and I do mean exactly where. Twice we had to unhitch the team from the front, go to the back, and reverse our course to make room to dodge a tree we misjudged and weren't going to be able to miss.

Three other times the trees in the way were small so we cut them down and then cut them up for firewood, loading them onto empty travois who's former cargo was now in the helo. One of them was a hickory and was actually large enough that the unhitch, re-hitch, reverse, and then repeat would have been justified. Since it was hickory I went ahead and cut it down then cut it up for meat-smoking wood. It saved us the bother of fooling with the team and left one more hickory back home we could use later.

The human labor involved was actually less than fooling with the teams and the lucky horse that ended up with the load had been walking along without a load, so what the hell?

She didn't have to pull it far today anyhow. We stopped for supper and the night about an hour later. Unpacking for the night turned out to be no strain at all for me, or anyone else either really. The women had made sure to leave what we'd need for overnights loaded on top and easy to get to.

A few of them gathered wood and started a fire while the others spread furs and some cooked. The cooking held my attention for the moment, but I was also slightly interested in the fur spreading since it would be the location for my next duties. I could already tell I was going to enjoy them.

We were up, fed, and gone early the next morning, but from the pace we'd been making I knew we'd be spending at least two more nights on the trail as we liked to say in Texas. Hell, if we ran into many more trees we had to cut it might take even longer. Didn't really matter though since there was plenty of game running around and Missy was pretty good at helping hunt by now.

We stopped for lunch and a rest about noon. While the women were cooking Missy and I struck out into the woods to see if we could scare up some meat. We didn't have to have it but a deer or something near that size would be nice.

Missy smelled something she wanted to check on almost right away, but by now she'd learned charging ahead without me was a no no. That didn't mean she didn't let me know she was excited and anxious to be about her business. The trouble was she could move practically silently and with all the twigs and leaves on the forest floor I couldn't. She waited on me but it was plain she was impatient.

We were probably almost a mile from where we'd stopped when Missy slowed herself. She took a semi-stalking posture and only moved slowly. I realized she thought we were close so I stopped and brought out the binoculars to search ahead. I located her intended quarry within a minute or so but it wasn't something to eat, or not food anyway.

There were two Neanderthal women working their way in our direction, kinda. They didn't seem to know exactly where they were going nor did they seem in a hurry to get there. They spent most of their time looking around, as if keeping a sharp watch to keep from running across something they might not want to come across. They watched their back trail closely.

There was no point in approaching them because we couldn't communicate. I whispered to Missy to follow me and we went back to our trail stop. Missy wasn't happy about it and she wanted to turn right back around and go back when we made it to the break spot. I found Sahnay for a little conference. Mary, Chris, Mecha, Reela, and Keela joined us.

I explained what I'd seen and then had to do my best to describe the women to Sahnay. To me they'd looked younger than eighteen, but I wasn't the best judge of a Neanderthal woman's age. Despite what my uptime education had led me to believe about Neanderthals, none of them had seemed like monsters or high class apes to me.