A story from Hearthbend
Hare and Owl
About 10 minutes
The hollow
The mammoth's cry rolled across the hollow. Aren felt it in his teeth.
His father put a hand on his spear and lowered the point.
“Wait.”
Across the yellow grass, hunters were appearing along the opposite ridge. Someone raised an arm. A call answered from the river. All five bands were in place.
For three days they had been arriving with children, dogs, rolled hides and things to trade. Now the drying frames stood empty beside camp. That morning there had been ice on the wash water. Before winter, those frames needed meat.
Aren was twenty. By evening, if the people who had watched him thought he was ready, he would have a name to carry as an adult. Some of the others waiting were younger. He knew exactly which ones.
His older brother leaned close.
“Don't hold it so tight.”
“I'm not.”
His brother looked at his knuckles.
Aren loosened them.
Above the hunters, his friend Rowan crouched beside the spare spears. Aren tried a smile. Rowan made a worse one back.
Then the call came, and everyone began to move.
The people on the other side
Rowan followed along the shoulder of the hollow, carrying the spares. He was eighteen. Until today, their bindings had been work he did beside his mother, Iva. Now strangers were taking them down toward an animal that could crush a person without seeming to notice.
One older hunter tested a spear, nodded and left.
Rowan rubbed his thumb across the next binding.
Below him, Aren called, “You're meant to keep up.”
Rowan hurried. From the shoulder he could see something the others couldn't: hunters from Flintwater, across the hollow, had stopped behind a tongue of higher ground. To join the others, they would have to pass too close to the bull.
Rowan raised a hand. Wait.
The bull swung toward Aren's father. There was a sharp crack.
Dain jumped back. His broken spear struck the grass where his foot had been.
Rowan pulled a spare from the bundle. For a moment the ground between them looked impossibly wide. Then Dain looked up and held out his hand.
Rowan ran.
The shaft caught in the bundle. He hauled at it, swore, pulled again. Then Dain had it, and Rowan was scrambling uphill with the bull's bellow behind him.
At the top he fell onto both hands, got up and turned.
Dain stood beside Aren's brother again. The spear was steady.
Rowan crouched over the remaining spares. He had dirt in his mouth.
Across the hollow, the stranded hunters were still waiting.
The way round
For the first time that day, Aren could see a place to put his spear.
His father was moving. His brother was moving. If Aren went with them, he might get the moment he had been imagining all morning.
Then the hunter across the hollow called again.
Aren knew another way. He and Rowan had walked it the day before: a shallow cut behind the rise, leading to a broad slope. The waiting party could reach the hollow without passing the bull.
He looked back at the animal.
Then he lowered his spear.
“I'm going round,” he shouted, pointing. “There's a cut behind them.”
The older hunter directing his side saw where he meant and waved him on.
Aren ran past Rowan.
“Keep watching.”
“Where are you—”
“The way we came yesterday.”
For several breaths there was only grass, his own feet, and the sound of the hunt happening without him.
He came out above the waiting party.
“Back this way. It comes down farther along.”
The older man looked at the cut.
“You've walked it?”
“Yes.”
“Go, then.”
Aren led them through. At the open slope he turned and saw Rowan on the opposite shoulder, one hand still raised.
He lifted his spear so his friend could see.
Rowan counted the people behind him. The last was still climbing past the lip of the cut.
Below, experienced hunters waited. Dain waited. Aren's brother waited. Rowan's arm was shaking, but he kept it up.
The last hunter stumbled, steadied himself and reached the others.
Rowan lowered his hand and shouted.
Calls passed around the hollow. The river party advanced. The bull wheeled toward the people coming down the slope, and a tusk swept through the place Aren had just been standing. The older hunter caught his shoulder and dragged him clear.
On the other side, Dain and Aren's brother struck. The bull turned and came uphill.
Rowan backed away with the spares. The earth thudded beneath him.
Then the mammoth's forelegs buckled.
Its weight hit the slope and rolled back into the hollow. One tusk tore a furrow through the grass. People shouted to keep clear. When it was safe to approach, the hunters went in together.
At last the trunk lay still.
They waited for another breath.
None came.
Then voices broke out around the hollow, calling names, laughing, calling again.
Aren reached Rowan and caught him around the shoulders, nearly knocking the spears from his arms.
“We got it.”
Rowan nodded. His mouth was too dry to answer.
“We got it.”
Rowan laughed then. He got one arm free and gripped the back of Aren's neck.
Below them, Dain raised his open hand toward him. Rowan lifted his in answer.
The names
They didn't go straight to the naming.
First came the blades and carrying hides. By evening Aren's arms hurt, the first strips of meat hung on the frames, and the work was still going on. He had eaten a hot piece too quickly and burned the roof of his mouth. It hurt every time he smiled.
When they called for the young people, Rowan had to tell him twice.
Aren's brother spoke for him. So did the man who had followed him through the cut.
“And came down with us,” the man said. “We nearly had to carry him back up by his ears.”
“You pulled my shoulder.”
“Your ears were too far away.”
People laughed. Aren could still feel the grip.
Dain looked at his son.
“Finds a Way.”
From beside the fire, Aren's grandmother Nala nodded.
“Hare.”
Aren opened his mouth.
“Yes, Hare,” she said. “I've watched you run.”
His father's face was tired and filthy. He was smiling without trying to hide it.
“I'll carry it,” Aren said.
The name passed to another fire, joined to his own, spoken by people who had barely known him that morning.
Then Dain held up the spear Rowan had brought him.
“Made this ready. Brought it when I needed it. Kept his eyes on the people I couldn't see.”
Iva's hands were clasped in her lap.
“Hears the Quiet,” she said. “Owl.”
Rowan looked at his mother for so long that Aren almost nudged him.
“Yes,” Rowan said. “That one.”
When they sat down, Aren leaned close.
“You took your time.”
“I was waiting to see if they'd give me Hare.”
Aren laughed hard enough to hurt his mouth.
Whose fire?
Aren's mother, Sela, caught them before they could go anywhere else.
“Sit. Both of you.”
“We just sat.”
“Then you're good at it.”
She put food into their hands. People passed portions over shoulders and around sleeping babies. Beyond the firelight, others were still cutting and carrying. Tomorrow the work would begin again.
Aren settled against Rowan's shoulder while Nala told how the mammoths had broken the ice and how the first people had climbed out of warm river clay.
In her story there had once been six hearths. On the first cold night, one went out. Voices called from the other fires. People moved closer together and made room.
By morning, those who had lost their hearth had found places beside the people who welcomed them. Five fires remained.
“You saw me coming out?” Aren asked Rowan.
Rowan nodded.
“I thought we'd missed it.”
“I waited.”
“I know. Thanks.”
Rowan offered him the better of the two pieces in his hand. Aren took it.
When Nala asked, “Whose fire kept you warm?” Aren looked beyond his own family. The man who had caught his shoulder raised a hand from across the light.
Aren waved back.
The first winter
Above the roofs
That winter, paths joined Hearthbend's houses to Reedbank's. A borrowed tool could come home by a route involving three households and a meal.
Rowan was repairing something beside Sela's hearth when Aren appeared.
“Leave that a moment.”
Outside, light spread across the sky.
Pale folds opened above the roofs. Rowan leaned back to follow them. Another stretch brightened farther away; he couldn't take in both at once. The roof he helped mend and passed beneath every day looked small.
Aren stood with his head tipped back. For once, he had brought Rowan to something without immediately saying what he thought of it.
They stayed until Rowan shivered hard enough to interrupt his breath.
Aren grinned, imitated the noise and held the doorway open.
“Come on. We can look again after you've warmed up.”
Rowan followed him inside.
The next winter
What the walk meant
A year later, in another winter camp, Rowan asked Aren to walk with him.
He had chosen a sheltered path where they could speak without being overheard. He brought a piece of cord he didn't need, wound it around his fingers, then put it on a flat stone.
“Did you want to show me something?” Aren asked.
“I wanted to tell you something.”
Aren waited.
“When you ask me to walk with you,” Rowan said, “I've started hoping you mean something different.”
He kept his hands at his sides.
“I want to be with you. As more than your friend.”
He lifted his chin so Aren would hear.
“I'm in love with you.”
For a moment Aren thought Rowan must mean somebody else. Then he understood.
“I didn't know.”
“I know you didn't.”
Aren searched for an answer that wouldn't hurt. The searching was beginning to look like hope.
“I love being your friend,” he said. “But I don't feel that kind of love for you. I want a woman as my partner.”
He couldn't leave the rest uncertain.
“I can't be the man you're hoping for.”
Rowan pressed a fist against his chest. There had been a future he sometimes let himself imagine: their things kept together, Aren returning and looking for him first. He could remember imagining it. He couldn't go there now.
“Would you like me to stay?” Aren asked.
Rowan shook his head.
“Not now.”
Aren let him go.
The next evening, Rowan took an unfinished repair to his mother's corner. Iva moved her things aside. He sat beside her without beginning.
“Can I just sit here?”
“Yes.”
“I told Aren. I wanted him to want me.”
Iva waited.
“He doesn't.”
She took the repair from him and put her arm around his shoulders. Rowan leaned into her, eyes shut. Beyond the screen, a child asked for the end of a story again. Someone began it differently and was corrected.
For now, the repair could wait.
