Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1953 (11 page)

           
Sam, left alone, took his rifle in
his hands and studied it with thoughtful eyes.

           
Giluhda’s furious pounding and
trampling had bent the barrel into a curve like a tightly strung bow, and the
wooden parts of the weapon had been splintered and broken. The clamps that held
the barrel to the stock were badly sprung, and Sam pried them loose with the
blade of his knife. He stowed the broken stock and grip at the rear of the
cave—he would need those pieces for a pattern when he whittled new wooden parts
for the repaired weapon. When the barrel was free, he used his knife point to
loosen screws and detach the trigger and the lock mechanism. These, at least,
were not damaged, though he would have to put in a new flint.

           
Then he picked up the tongs and
fitted wooden handles into the openings.

           
Otter was back within ten minutes.
He held up two squirrels, each transfixed by an arrow.

           
“We can boil them,” he said in quiet
triumph.

           
“How?”
Sam
asked him. “We do not have a pot.”

           
“We have that.” Otter pointed to a
deeply punched hole in the rocky floor. “It is big enough for a pot. Go on with
making your medicine. I will make mine, and boil the squirrels.”

           
He put charcoal into the hearth of
the forge, and thrust six or eight round stones into it. Then he squatted down
to skin and
clean
the squirrels. When they were
dressed and cut into small pieces, he laid them in the hollow of the rock and
poured in two gourdfuls of water.

           
Next he returned to the fire,
pushing his brown face close to examine the heating stones. Finally he took
Sam’s tongs and lifted out one stone after another, dropping them into the
water among the pieces of squirrel meat.

           
Those hot stones sizzled and steamed
in the water, and as they cooled Otter tonged them out, replacing them with hot
ones. Sam stopped in his own work to watch. Before long he could hear the
rhythmic sound of bubbling, boiling water.

           
“Your medicine is good,” grinned
Sam. “It smells good, anyway.”

           
After many stones had been heated
and dropped in, the squirrel stew was done. The two friends picked out tender
boiled pieces with their knives, and scooped up broth in big clam shells from
the river. It was a welcome change from roast venison.

           
When the last bone of the boiled
squirrels had been polished and thrown away, they returned to the forge. The
hardest and most important work remained to be done. Sam put in more pieces of
black charcoal, worked the bellows, and succeeded in making his fire hotter
than ever before. Finally he brought the rifle barrel and shoved it into the
midst of the glowing mass.

           
He and Otter took turns at the
bellows. Sam heaped on more and more fuel, and watched the steel barrel glow
red, then pallid, then an incandescent white. While Otter pumped furiously away
at the two sticks, Sam snatched up his tongs, seized the bright length of
metal, and shifted it to his anvil stone. Fiercely but skilfully, he smote upon
it with his hammer.

           
Under his blows, the curve grew
less. As the steel darkened once more, it hardened, and Sam thrust it back into
the heart of the burning charcoal, scooped on more fuel and signalled Otter to
increase the wind from the bellows. He pounded the curve straighter, reheated,
pounded,
heated
yet again.

           
The sun had dropped down toward the
horizon when Sam finally drew the often-hammered barrel from the anvil and
walked out to the river. He plunged the barrel into the water to cool it.

           
He would temper it later, as best he
knew how, but at the moment he wanted to make a close examination. To his eyes
that gun barrel was as straight as he could hope to make it in his crude
smithy.

           
He returned to the cave. Otter came
out, carrying the bone-pointed spear, as Sam went in. Sitting down, Sam picked
up his ramrod and laid it along the barrel.

           
He could hardly restrain a cry of
excited joy. The work had been done well. That length of steel had been
straightened—well, almost straightened. It would serve, at close quarters,
against Giluhda. He put the end of the ramrod to the muzzle, to test the
inside.

           
The ramrod would not go in. Sam
frowned, and examined the muzzle. Then the frown left his
face,
and he looked only blank and tired and utterly defeated.

           
The bore of the rifle, that had been
perfectly round to receive and send out bullets, was now an oval. It had been
pushed in upon itself when the metal was hot and the hammer falling upon it.
Sam lowered the useless barrel across his knees and bowed his head.

           
“I was a fool to think I could do
it,” he said in bitter despair.

           
Eagle Wing, his enemy at
Twilight
Town
, had spoken the truth. The wonderful fire-weapon
of the white man, on which the Twilight People had fastened such hopes, would
never strike Giluhda down. Perhaps a skilled gunsmith, with special tools and
deep knowledge, might have repaired the damage, might have made the gun shoot
again. But he, Sam Ward, a blacksmith’s apprentice with a stone hammer and a
stone anvil, could not do it.

           
Bitterly he flung the barrel to the
rocky floor. It clanked musically.

           
“Is the work done?”

           
Otter was coming back. In one hand
he carried the bone-pointed spear, in the other two shining fish.

           
“We can rest from eating meat,” he
said, displaying his catch. “These fish swam where the river is not deep.
Standing on the bank above them, I speared two.”

           
Sam stared dully at his friend. “You
stood above them?” he repeated, rather foolishly.

           
“Yes. I stood like this, with my
spear ready. A fish came just underneath the point, and I stabbed down hard.”

           
“Stabbed down?” Sam mumbled. Then
his voice rose.
“Stabbed down—with a spear!”

           
Jumping to his feet, he caught the
fish and the spear from Otter’s hands. He looked at the holes in the scaly
bodies, at the sharp bone point. His eyes shone.

           
“That’s what we will do!” he cried.
“We’ll stab Giluhda!”

           
Otter shook his shaved head. His
scalp lock stirred.

           
“I thought you were making your
fire-weapon good again—” he began.

           
“We
will
use the
fire-weapon!” Sam shouted. “It will make us a spear—big and sharp enough to
strike from above and stab Giluhda!”

bone-tipped
stabbing spear in Sam’s hand, at the gun
barrel on the floor, and finally to the forge. At last he spoke.

           
“I know what you think,” he said
slowly. “You want to make a big head for a spear. The stuff of the fire-weapon
would be better than stone for that. It would stab through, without breaking on
a bone. But you and I are not strong enough to lift a spear as big and heavy as
that. We cannot make it stab through Giluhda’s hide and bones.”

           
“We will find the strength somewhere
else,” Sam announced with renewed confidence. “Think of how you kill other
things besides fish. How is a fox killed?”
142

           
“I take a heavy log,” Otter said,
“and I use a stick to hold one end of the log up, off the ground. Under this
end that is held up, I put a piece of meat that a fox will like. I fasten a
string to the meat, and the other end of the string to the stick. I fix it so
that, when the fox takes the meat and pulls the string, the stick comes away.
The log drops on the fox.”

           
“That is what white men call a
deadfall,” Sam told him. “In some way we will make a deadfall to drop down on
Giluhda. But instead of a heavy log fixed to fall on him, we will use the big
spear I am going to make.”

           
He stooped for the gun barrel,
carried it to the forge, and shoved it deep in among the still glowing coals.
He emptied half a basket of charcoal upon it.

           
“Help me, brother,” he urged. “Make
the wind blow hard to give our fire much heat.”

           
“We will eat first,” said Otter.

           
He cleaned the two fish, and thrust
green twigs through them from gill to tail. Then he balanced them at the far
end of the forge fire to toast.

           
“Make the wind blow,” Sam begged
him. “A hot fire will cook those fish much quicker.”

           
Otter smiled slightly in
understanding, and took hold of the sticks with which the bellows were churned.
He worked them to a smart rhythm, and watched the steel grow hotter and hotter
in the midst of the bright coals. Sam watched too, his tongs in hand. Again and
again he shifted the barrel in the heat. At the right moment he gripped it,
swung it from the fire to the anvil, and began to pound at one end of it.

           
The metal, softened by the high
temperature, yielded under the judicious blows of the stone hammer. Sam began
to taper the muzzle of his rifle, to shape it into a point. It cooled to
hardness, and he looked with satisfaction at the progress of the work.

           
“Eat now,” Otter coaxed him. “The
fish are well cooked.”

           
Thus urged, Sam left his work, but
for only
long
enough to gulp down his portion, with a
big drink of water from the gourd. Then he returned to the forge fire, and
chafed until Otter finished eating, too, and joined him. Then, while Otter
pumped the bellows, Sam supervised the heating of his metal to glowing pallor
once more. He lifted it out and shaped the point more sharply and evenly.

           
“When I’ve finished, I’ll have to
temper it in tallow,” he muttered to himself in English.

           
“What do you say?” asked Otter.

           
“I say that there is yet another
medicine to be made. I will show you later, when we are through making the
spear head.”

           
With Otter ever at the bellows, Sam
heated the other end of the barrel. He belabored it on the anvil, flattening it
by degrees. Slowly but steadily, he achieved the shape he wanted.

           
Finished, the spear head was
somewhat shorter than the gun barrel had been, and in outline it was a narrow
triangle. From its keen point it widened backward to a flat base fully five
inches across. Along the sides near that base, Sam had hammered out notches, to
receive secure lashings. The edges of the triangle he beat flat and sharp.

           
He set it aside to cool, and yawned
wearily. He had worked far into the night. Otter smiled and gestured him toward
his bed.

           
Again Sam slept a deep, tired
slumber, and again he wakened with the entrance of sunlight through the door of
the cave. Otter was studying the big spear head.

           
“What is the new medicine you talked
about last night?” Otter asked.

           
“We will need deer fat,” said Sam.
“All that we can cut from the meat.
If you will get the fat,
I will make another thing that we need.”

           
He brought wet clay from the river’s
edge. There he saw big round tracks, of a shape and size that he recognized at
once. Otter looked, too, and his dark face grew grave.

           
“Giluhda came again in the night,”
said Otter. “I think he stood outside the cave, but he knew he could not get
in. I think he knows us by our smell. I think he remembers that we hurt him in
that fight by the drinking place.”

           
“We will hurt him again, in another
fight,” said Sam confidently.

           
He brought back his clay and Otter
gazed with new mystification as Sam modelled a sort of trough near his anvil,
longer than the rifle barrel and some six inches across and almost as deep. In
this he built a fire of light kindling, to dry and harden the clay. Then he
joined Otter beside the forge, and picked up some pieces of fat that Otter had
cut from the venison. He spiked them on a twig and propped them close enough to
the burning charcoal to fry. Then he took one of the water gourds, carefully
slit it in half, and put the two bowls thus formed under the pieces of dripping
fat. The grease trickled down into the bowls.

           
“When the bowls are full, empty them
into the clay thing I made,” he directed Otter. He examined the trough, and
found it hard enough for his purpose. He scooped out the ashes and dusted it
clean.

           
“We will need something else,” said
Sam.
“A big handle for the spear.
Bring that stone
tomahawk you made, and we will find one.”

           
Otter picked up the tomahawk and
followed him outside. Sam looked here and there among the trees. Finally he
struck his hand against a tall sapling, with gray, scaly bark and long leaves
in bunches.

           
“This ash tree is strong and tough,”
said Sam. “It is what we will take.”

           
By turns they hacked with the stone
tomahawk until the sapling fell. Then they trimmed away the branches and
chopped off the tapering upper end, so that they had a stout pole fully twelve
feet long. The butt end was five inches through, and the smaller end three
inches. They dragged it back to the cave.

           
“We must have rawhide for tying the
head in place, too,” volunteered Otter.

           
They examined the skin of the
bellows, but it was soaked with oil to keep it soft, and it would not do. Otter
took his bow and departed to hunt. Sam returned to trying out grease from the
deer fat. As the bowls grew full, he poured their contents into the trough. At
last he had enough grease, but he had used all the fat. In the trough it
hardened into a solid, tallowlike mass.

           
Otter came back before
noon
. Upon his shoulders he carried the body of
another deer.

           
“We can use the hide from this to
tie the spear head,” he said. “I killed the deer at the drinking place. I saw
something near there.”

           
“What did you see?” asked Sam.

           
“The big maple where you climbed is
marked all around with Giluhda’s tracks. I saw where he had pushed and pulled
to try to break the tree down. I think when he sees that maple tree, his heart
grows bad. He remembers that you climbed there, and he wants to hurt you. He
comes there all the time, I think.”

           
“That is good,” said Sam. “We will
know where to find him.”

           
Once more he took the spear head in
his tongs and returned it to the fire, building up the charcoal above it. Otter
took the sticks and pumped a steady breeze to increase the heat. Sam watched the
steel grow darkly red,
then
turn in color to a
near-yellow.

           
“Now!” he cried, and snatched it
from the fire and thrust it deep into the trough of tallow.

           
There was a great hissing cloud of
smelly vapor, and both he and Otter moved back, coughing. They waited, while
the smoke grew less and thinned away.

           
“Burn evergreen boughs to drive away
that smell,” requested Sam. “Now I think we have what we want.”

           
When the spear head had cooled, he
fished it out of the tallow. Handling it, he took it by the tip and one corner
of the base. He tested it by pulling. It bent like a sword blade. It was nicely
tempered.

           
“Eat,” Otter was inviting him again,
and they had a good dinner of venison.

           
Afterward, Sam sat down and took the
smaller end of the ash pole across his knee. With his knife he whittled a deep,
narrow notch in it, and into this he worried a small splinter of rock. Then,
with the stone hammer, he drove in this splinter like a wedge. It made the
beginning of a split. He widened the gap with another chip of rock, and then a
third. Gradually he separated the tough ash wood, increasing the split for
fully two feet.

           
Now he slipped the base of the spear
head into this opening. He fitted it carefully, and pried out the last of his
makeshift stone wedges. The wood closed back, like hungry jaws, gripping snugly
on the steel.

           
Meanwhile, Otter had been cutting
long strips from the fresh hide of the deer he had killed at the drinking
place. With these they bound the wood tightly, running their thongs through the
notches in the steel and around and around. They made hard knots, and tested
the strength of the whole lashing. Finally they bore the great spear outside
and hoisted it across two forks of a tree, where the sun could strike the skin.

           
Then they rested. Sam sliced the
remainder of the venison into thin sheets and hung it to cure in a smudgy fire
of bark from a dead hickory tree. Otter speared more fish. In the late
afternoon they went down to the river, to swim and dive and to wash away the
smoky grime of the forge fire. Their muscles relaxed gratefully.

           
At sundown they carried the spear
back into the cave. The rawhide lashings were completely dry, and they had
contracted forcibly. The big spear head was as firmly fastened into the end of
the ash haft as though it had grown there.

           
“Brother, it is a good spear,” said
Otter, lifting it in both his hands. “Your medicine is a strong medicine. Now
your work is done.”

           
“No, there is more to do,” said Sam.
“Tomorrow we will do it, to make a way to put that spear into Giluhda’s body
and kill him.”

           
Otter thought a moment. Then he
asked: “Shall I go back to
Twilight
Town
? I can talk to my friends. I can ask them
to help us.”

           
“We will not need their help,”
insisted Sam firmly. “Let them stay safely in the town. It is my work to kifi
Giluhda.”

           
“It is my work, too,” said Otter,
leaning the spear against the wall. “I am tired from all we have done, though.”