When her neck was covered in sumac paste, Nianki broke a larchit stem and smeared the clear sap on her leg wound. It stung, but not as badly as washing it had.
In the distance, she saw the rain begin as a wall of mist sweeping across the savanna. Lightning crackled in the clouds, sometimes breaking out and striking the parched earth. Deer and birds fled before the storm. The sight of so much game made Nianki’s empty stomach growl. She chewed more sumac, which was oily and pungent; it dampened her desire for food.
The sighing wind rose to a drone as the storm came closer. Whirlwinds of dust danced by, chased by an army of errant leaves. Nianki flinched as a bolt of blue-white lightning stabbed the ground a few hundred paces away. Dry grass flashed into fire, only to be doused by the ensuing downpour.
The rain finally reached her, and she huddled deeper into the cleft of the tree. Rain raked over her, the cold droplets feeling like a lash of thorns. Nianki threw her good arm across her face to shield it from the driving spray. As she peered over her own elbow at the storm, she heard the drumming of massed hooves above the gusting wind. A herd of elk was stampeding. Her hunting instincts aroused, Nianki pushed herself up for a better view.
Elk were accustomed to thunderstorms — thunder alone wasn’t enough to send them trampling over the plain. Something else must have frightened them.
She saw no smoke. No grass fire could survive in the downpour anyway. Nianki braced herself against the tree and stared through the rain at the oncoming herd.
There! Topping a slight rise, a huge, winged shape came swooping after the terrified elk. Nianki gaped in wonder. Tapered, leathery wings rose in a high arc, the tips almost touching, and swept down again to brush the storm-tossed grass. The monster had a thick, streamlined body and a serpentine neck and tail. Its scaly hide had a shiny reddish-gold cast.
All she could think of was her father’s tales about “stormbirds,” huge flying creatures who lived in the sky and brought violent tempests in their wake. Nianki never imagined a monster like this could actually exist, much less fly with such speed and precision.
So rapt was her attention on the stormbird that she forgot the elk herd was bearing down on her. All of a sudden, a wall of brown bodies, antlers, and churning hooves came over the low hill just two hundred paces away — aiming straight at Nianki. There was no way she could outrun them, so she ducked behind the old cedar and fervently hoped the herd would split around this slight obstacle.
The stormbird opened is massive jaws, revealing fangs as long as Nianki’s forearm. Its snake-like eyes rolled back in its head.
A bolt of lightning erupted from its throat.
Stones and dirt flew, and the blast flung Nianki to the ground. She rolled over, expecting at any moment to be trampled by elk or seared by lightning. The ground heaved and shuddered for some moments, gradually settling down. Nianki raised her head.
The herd had split around the cedar tree and was rushing madly for the horizon. Charred carcasses littered the plain, and a smoking rent in the earth thirty paces long lay within spitting distance of Nianki’s tree.
Shaken, she hauled herself to her feet as the stormbird swept overhead. The air from its beating wings washed cold over her.
The monstrous snake-head darted down and snatched up one burned elk after another. It gulped the carcasses down amid a loud snapping of bones. Flapping its wings hard, the stormbird circled and gained height. Rain streamed down Nianki’s face as she watched it climb.
The monster glided in a wide half-circle, and for the first time noticed Nianki. Eyes the size of sunflowers peered down at her. She thought it would strike her with its lightning, but the monster held its turn and flapped away after the quickly disappearing herd. It looked back once, dropping its long neck in order to peer under its own wing.
Soaked to the skin and shivering, Nianki stood there long after the monster had vanished. The past few days had been a revelation. She who thought she knew so much about nature, about the world of the plains, had suffered two rude shocks. First, the pack of misshapen predators that had killed her family — now this! Had the world turned inside out? Were there spirits and monsters behind every tree, beyond every hill?
The smell of burned meat penetrated her reverie. She wandered among the charred remains of eight large animals, a head here, a haunch there. Hungry as she was, she couldn’t bring herself to take any of the stormbird’s leavings. She’d heard of people who burned their meat with fire, but the idea disgusted her. Meat should be eaten fresh or dried, not burned. Only scavengers ate charred food.
Yet, Nianki’s stomach writhed with hunger, sending shooting pains through her gut. Weak and injured as she was, she couldn’t hunt her own game. She needed food to regain her strength — and there was food all around her, though blackened and smelling of fire. Swallowing hard, she slid to her knees beside a still smoking haunch.
Life’s a struggle, Oto always said. If you knock down an anthill every morning, the ants will build it back by evening. The ants had no choice, if they wanted to live, and neither did Nianki. She wrenched off the elk’s leg, hoping the flesh closer to bone might be less burned.
No luck. The lightning had blackened the poor beast right through to the marrow. Nianki sighed and chewed in silence as the rain continued to drench her and the dark, empty savanna.
She wandered south. Her fever got worse, and she lost track of the passage of time as she slept more by day and walked by night. Perhaps four days after seeing the stormbird — she couldn’t remember exactly how long it had been — Nianki found the cold remains of a hunter’s camp. They ate well, these hunters. She found the bones of a slaughtered pig, a pile of wild grape stems, and a broken birch-bark box that once held salmon jerky. She licked the grease from the bark box and gnawed the cast-off pig bones. It was her first food since the burned elk.
Barks and thin howls announced the arrival of a pack of wild dogs. Nianki feared the dogs more than she would a bear or big cat. Bigger predators were wary of humans and their cunning ways, but dogs were stupid and fearless.
She rooted in the debris left behind by the other hunters, thinking to find the boar’s leg bone or some other suitable club. She had better luck than she dared hope.
Tossed in the grass with the offal was a stone-headed spear. The shaft was broken midway, but the careless owner had thrown it away, flint head and all. Nianki held up the shortened spear and examined it by the failing light. The milky gray flint was finely knapped and quite sharp.
Just holding a spear, even a broken one, filled Nianki with new strength. When the dog pack’s scouts yelped close by, she howled back at them, daring them to attack. There followed only the sound of crickets, singing in the twilight. When she next heard the dogs they were farther away. For the first time in many days, Nianki smiled.
Moving on, she found a swampy water hole. With her new spear she gigged a few fat frogs, then dug some tender cane shoots out of the malodorous black mud. She crouched on a stone by the water hole, washing the shoots and gnawing on them.
The food and her weapon gave her new confidence. She walked all night, and just before dawn she smelled smoke. A thin smudge rose from a pine copse ahead.
Hunters in these parts often slept with a slow fire going, feeding it with resinous green pine. The resulting smoke kept mosquitoes away and usually warned off prowling scavengers.
Still limping on her mangled leg, Nianki crept up on the strangers’ camp. She saw two man-sized lumps on the ground, a smoldering heap of pine boughs between them. A hide bag hung from a tree branch, out of reach of badgers and rats. On the other side of the camp a tripod of sticks stood with a bark box balanced carefully on top. Soundlessly, Nianki entered the camp and sat down on the upwind side of the fire.