Bonesetter (3 page)

Pell found that if he kept his finger high in the air it didn’t throb as much.
It remained swollen but he could move it still, as he proved to himself over and over, despite the pain involved.
He found himself holding it next to his middle finger so that that good finger could protect it.
There was nothing but a thin gruel of roots to eat that day
.
Pell didn’t have the courage to get any himself the way
people had been looking at him but his mother
brought him a bowl of it and sat behind him grooming his hair while he ate.
He felt comforted by her actions but his stomach s
a
nk again
when
he saw the way people
looked
at him.
He could tell that many of them were
already
thinking of him as “ginja.” They didn’t want him eating their food
if
he would be cast out to die soon anyway.

The next day, having tired of holding the injured pointer finger and its neighboring middle finger together with his other hand, he bound them together with a thong.
At first he wrapped the two fingers together but had difficulty tying the fingers together with only
the
one
other
hand to work with.
Finally he managed to tie a small noose in a thong and slipped the loop around the base of the fingers.
Then he wrapped a few turns and cinched a couple of half hitches about the fingers.
He found that his hand could function almost normally with a short wrap
of thong
between each of the joints.
He decided that he should go out on a hunt so that the Aldans would see him
trying
to contribute.
He looked about for Boro but couldn’t find him.
Eventually he embarked on a hunt
all
by himself.

As he trudged up a little side valley toward the plateau above he knew in his heart that
t
his hunting trip would be a farce, but he waited until he was far from sight of the cave to try throwing with his injured hand.
As he had feared, the pain in his bound finger made him even clumsier than usual.
He practiced throwing for a while but soon realized that
there was even less chance than usual that he would
hit
anything
that day.
Nonetheless he trudged on.
It was a clear, windless, cold day without a cloud in the sky but in his tired and hungry state, he had no appreciation for its placid beauty.
Instead, he cringed from its cold bite, trying to draw into his furs.

Suddenly a white snow hare exploded from under his feet!
Daydreaming, he hadn’t noticed it until he had nearly stepped on it!
Pell was so frightened that he dropped the stone he held in his injured hand and nearly fell again.
The hare shot across the floor of the little ravine and disappeared.
Pell followed it half-heartedly to the spot where it disappeared and stood, looking around disconsolately.

Suddenly he recognized that he was standing beside a hole!
The rabbit had its own little cave!
He crouched down and reached into the hole as far as he could—no rabbit.
He sat by the hole and pondered.
If he waited long enough, would it have to come out?
Might he catch it then?

Who was he kidding?
He wasn’t fast enough to catch a rabbit!

Perhaps if he covered the hole with a fur?
No, then the rabbit just wouldn’t come out at all.
As he sat contemplating the problem, he unwound one of the thongs from his finger—the finger remained swollen but pink.
He could still wiggle it.
Daydreaming, he played with the thong a bit, tying
the
knots that he had learned.
While practicing the slip knot that he had used to start the wrap on his finger, he fumbled and dropped the thong.
When he
picked
it up, the loop in the end caught on a small stump next to the rabbit hole.
When he jerked on the thong the little noose that he had formed cinched tight
around
the stump.
He had to scoot down next to the stump and work it loose.

The idea came to him that he might make a similar loop catch around the rabbit somehow, and thereby slow it down enough that he could catch or club it.
He tied one end of the thong to the little stump next to the hole.
Then he propped the slip loop about the opening of the rabbit’s hole with bits of brush and twigs so that the opening in the noose was somewhat bigger than a rabbit’s head.
He got up and walked away from the hole while getting out another thong and rewrapping his fingers.
He stepped behind a boulder almost fifteen paces from the rabbit hole.
He picked out a stick to club the hare with and knelt down in a sprinter’s crouch to watch.
He envisioned the rabbit coming out and becoming briefly entangled in the loop.
While it was freeing itself, he would make a mad dash in with his club.

He waited almost an hour.
His excitement had faded and he was leaning on one haunch against the boulder when he saw
several
vulture
s
circling to the east. With a groan, he got up and started that way hoping that whatever held the vulture
s
’ interest remained edible.

When he got to the area the vulture
s
had been circling he found nothing.
Either the vulture had been deceived or some other scavenger had already dragged it away.

He thought disgustedly that the rabbit hole was out of his way back home.
Pell debated a minute but decided that he should at least salvage the thong he had left there.
There probably remained enough daylight.
He trudged back that way.

As he came around the corner he saw a puff of white about two feet from the hole!
He picked up a stone and crept closer—it was the rabbit!

He threw but missed as usual.
The rabbit didn’t move though!
As he came closer he saw the thong biting deeply into the rabbit’s neck.
After being caught, the rabbit’s violent thrashing had apparently broken its own neck
or strangled it
.

Pell was beside himself with excitement.
He had never successfully hunted before.
He’d contributed to group kills, sure, but he’d never killed an animal by himself.
He would gain status in the tribe when he brought home this rabbit
!
Status was something he desperately needed. He never considered trying to eat the rabbit himself.
No matter how hungry he was, the value of the nutrition in the rabbit could not
compare
to the value of at last being recognized as someone with the potential to become a hunter.

Pell threw the rabbit over his shoulder and started back jauntily.
He contemplated in his mind his reception back at the cave and how he would describe his hunt.
An unerring stone that struck the rabbit dead in its tracks?
Suddenly Pell stopped on the trail as he realized that the hare’s carcass showed no evidence of being struck by a stone.

He took it down from his shoulder and looked at it for a moment then ran his fingers over it, pondering his story.
For an instant he considered describing how he had actually ensnared the animal. But, no one would believe him—besides
,
the prestige of his “perfectly cast stone” would be lost forever.
After more contemplation he lay the animal down, backed up a few paces and cast a stone at its prostrate form.

He missed!

Disgusted, he threw several more times and was about to walk over and manually strike the rabbit with a rock when a throw
finally struck
its hindquarters.
He reexamined the carcass.
The portion of the hind limb just below the knee was deformed, with the lower leg sticking out at an angle.
It reminded him of his deformed finger from the day of his fall.
He pondered this for a while, then tugged on it but was unable to
get it back out to normal
length.
Then he pulled as hard as he could.
Still when he let go it remained shortened and angulated.
He thought back to how he had bent his finger back when he had tried to rip it off his hand.
Only when he bent it backwards had
his finger slipped back into place.

As he had bent his finger, so he bent the rabbit’s leg in the same direction it was already deformed, bending it beyond ninety degrees.
Then, rather than pulling on it to make it longer, he “pushed” the apex of the angle out, as he had when trying to rip off his finger.
To his delight the hare’s bone crunched slightly, then felt as if something slipped back into place.
When he straightened out the angle in the limb, it held its length and lay nearly straight!
With a little push, he straightened it the rest of the way.
He pulled it back out to the side and it fell apart again.
He felt it carefully.
He could tell the bones weren’t in contact like they should be because when he pushed on them the limb shortened.
In addition it was floppy and tended to lie in a bent position.
He reduced the fracture again using his trick of bending it more before trying to bring it back out to length.
It worked again!
He displaced it again and tried reducing it in a number of other ways.
None of them worked!
No matter how he pulled and tugged, it wouldn’t go back into place until he first bent it
back at an angle
.
He was very puzzled by the whole thing, not realizing that he had discovered a “bonesetting” principle—a principle that would still be in use thousands
and thousands
of years later.
He wanted to cut the leg open
to
try to find out
why
it worked but knew that if he brought the rabbit back to the cave cut open, someone would think he had eaten part of it without sharing.
After a moment’s consideration he shook the leg back out of place, put the rabbit back over his shoulder and resumed his way home.
The forest thickened and the game trail he was on led slowly back to the little valley where the Aldans’ cave lay.

When he arrived back at the cave, Pell’s mother Donte was the first to see him.
She greeted him first with a little wave but shortly thereafter with a loud cry when she recognized that he had a snow hare draped over his shoulder.

Donte appeared more excited than Pell about the kill.
He realized that she too, was worried that her son might be declared “ginja” if he didn’t develop hunting skills soon.
Such being the case she intended to broadcast his success to the rest of their little community as strongly as possible.

He was grateful for her efforts, as the questions her excitement generated provided him a ready opportunity for a little bragging.
He soon found himself repeating himself in the details of his “throw” which, though a little off, broke the rabbit’s leg so that he readily caught it and then broke its neck.
The snow hare’s pelt, intermediate between winter white and summer gray-brown, had soon been removed.
The carcass itself was gutted, broken up and thrown into one of Lenta’s pots with some water and grain and the bowl full of blood that had been drained from the animal.
Then the clay pot was set into the fire.
The guts were split, washed, chopped and placed back into the pot also.
Though the brains would
normally
be used to cure the hide they also were scooped out into the pot. At this time of year
nothing
that was potentially edible missed it’s opportunity to become part of the “soup.”

Though one rabbit among the twenty-two of them living in the cave wasn’t much, it was better than they’d had in several days, so everyone was excited.
Just as it was getting dark Gontra and Bonat came in with another hare that Gontra had killed and everyone’s spirits rose even further.
To his disappointment the spotlight shifted away from Pell when Gontra arrived, but later Tando came in and when he heard of Pell’s kill, congratulated him warmly.
Tando’s excellent reputation as a hunter gave the kind words even more meaning.
Pell sat down to eat with an intense glow of happiness.

Pell managed to retrieve the broken thighbone from the stewpot and covertly examined it between sucking any remaining marrow from it.
With all the flesh gone he could see the fracture just above the knee, and put it in and out of place with ease.
No funny maneuvers were required to reduce it.
After pondering a while he decided that it must be the overlying flesh that constrained the
“
bonesetting
”
to such a funny maneuver.
Perhaps later that summer he could break a rabbit’s leg and cut into the flesh to understand it better.