Chapter Twenty-Two - Apple Picking

-Summer-

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The tree branches, thin and wirey as they were, were laden and heavy with small green apples. Picking one told Belbet with just a squeeze that they weren’t ripe, or even close to ripe. But for what she needed them for, this would be perfectly fine. She nodded to herself, putting the unripe fruit in the basket on her back.

“Okay, we’re not going to collect a lot of this fruit today. Just about half a basket will do. Most of this isn’t ripe yet, so look for fruit that has red on it, if at all available. We’ll have to come back later in the season when they’re ripe.” She grinned, pointing at the branches, “But! We’re going to collect a bunch of applewood. The wood makes meat taste really good when it’s smoked with it!”

Dahnei made a sound of wonderment, while Eefim grinned. “How much should we collect?”

“Hmmm… Let’s each get a bundle of sticks about as big around as Mohniit’s waist, and tie it to our baskets. That should be enough for a little while.” Belbet stated.

It took them a good two hours to cut enough branches and collect the apples. Then, Deenat lead them to the east, away from the river, and towards the almond grove. Upon arriving, Belbet was quite happy to see these trees heavy with the unmolested almond fruits too. Green little balls, high up in the trees branches, and she lifted Mohniit onto her shoulders so that he could reach up and pick them (and handfuls of leaves as well, but who was counting?).

It took a while for everyone to get the hang of picking them, but soon they had a rhythm going, and baskets were slowly filling up. Belbet was quite surprised to see that it was, in fact, Eefim who grew bored first and wandered off. She didn’t bother wrangling him in, because they had plenty of hands for this job, and he was probably going to hunt, which would get them more fur for winter.

Another hour passed before she saw the boy again, as he came charging out of the woodland brush, calling (in a happy tone, because if he wasn’t, she’d have panicked) for his aunt and mother to follow him. Looking down at the basket she and Mohniit had been filling, she figured it wouldn’t hurt to let themselves be distracted for a little bit before lunch.

“What is it?” Deenat asked, frowning at her son. Really, she ruined her pretty face when she did that, but Belbet wasn’t going to bring that up just now.

“I found deer tracks! A lot of them! And some other tracks I’ve never seen before!” He cried, excitement bouncing on his toes. “Come on, follow me!”

Packing up the little ones and the baskets onto their shoulders, Belbet and Deenat followed their enthusiastic child into the woods. However, even Belbet could tell that the area was starting to thin out somewhat. An odd, horrible smell started to grow, and Belbet had to wonder what had died, or at the very least, used the bathroom. After about fifteenish minutes, the trees thinned to a few every feet, then to one or two every foot, and then it spaced out into what was-

Her foot slid into some mud and she found herself shuddering at the feeling. The grasses had grown tall around them, reaching her shoulder easily. She tightened her hand around Dahnei’s, and hefted her son (and his rather heavy basket) onto her hip. Deenat, realizing what was bothering her, came forward and took Dahnei’s hand. This let Belbet resettle the child carefully.

The mud sucked at their feet, and drew Belbet’s attention. Sure enough, like Eefim, she saw the various tracks, all different, curving in and around the grasses. She also saw water rising up in the tracks that were particularly deep. She looked up at her nephew who was trotting ahead of them with thick, wet slapping sounds. The mud was even wetter where he was standing.

“Careful.” Deenat warned. “Don’t fall.”

“Look!” Mohniit cried, tugging at Belbet’s hair painfully. Hissing in pain, Belbet turned to look and found herself frozen.

There, across the muddy field of tall grasses, stood what could only be called a horse. Well, it did look different from Victoria’s knowledge of horses, striped and spotted like a tapir as it was. It was also stubbier, its nose and neck wider than Victoria had ever seen on a horse. But it had four legs, and it was chewing on the grasses. The dark tan of its fur blended with the dead and dying stalks of grass, the white and brown spots and stripes breaking up its shape in the distance.

Another joined it, coming out of the trees. And then another. “It’s.. It’s a herd.” Belbet breathed. “That’s a herd of horses.”

“Horses?” Dahnei questioned, her eyes never leaving the big herbivores who, for the most part, were staying on their side of the muddy plane.

“Yes. Big, four legged animals. If we can get some babies and raise them, they can be very useful. They run faster and farther than humans ever could, and they can pull and carry far more.” Belbet answered. “We’ll need to keep watch on them. They probably come-”

She watched as several of them lowered their head down to the roots of the grasses. It caught her attention because it was… well, unexpected. Why would they go for the roots whent here was tasty grass leaves up above? And plenty of them?

An idea struck her, and she knelt down, wetting her fingers with the water. Pressing it to her lips, she licked them, only to gasp in joy. “Salt! This is a salt marsh!” She cried, laughing joy tipping over her lips as she cleared the mud from her face. “We have to dig. We have to dig to collect the water here, and we have to boil it.”

Now Deenat was looking at her, her attention split between the large herbivores and her sister’s insane idea. “Is now really the time?”

“Oh yes. Very much so.” She set down her little son, and started cutting at the roots of some of the grass around them. “We need to make a large enough area that we can dig down. Help me cut away the grass. We can take it back with us and use it to make baskets. Dahnei, you help too.”

Confused, the little girl pulled out her own handaxe and began cutting at the thick, fibrous stalks, and, like her mother, tossing them into a pile in the mud. Mohniit joined the ceremonies by sitting on the ground, in the mud, and digging like his mother had said they should do.

Perhaps the thing that surprised Belbet the most was the sheer amount of snails she was finding. Small ones, no bigger than a fingernail, but so many of them as to be interesting. She told the children to put the snails in one of the baskets, and suddenly Mohniit had a new fun errand to do. He picked the snails off the grass and delivered them to the basket with a single minded joy that Belbet had to carefully not laugh at.

Another messy, busy few hours and Belbet had managed to get a fire going. She’d had Deenat run back to camp and bring one of their clay pots, while she and the children had dug a pit into the mud that was slowly filling with salty brackish water. Victoria’s hopes were so high that Belbet had to keep reminding herself that this salt would be nothing as clean and white as the salt of Victoria’s homeland. But the thought of having salt to cook with, to preserve things with, was too much for her not to be smiling the entire time.

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She’d pushed lunch off so long that the heat of the day, kept at bay by the mudwater, had made her children cranky. Mohniit and Dahnei both fell into fits at the minor inconveniences their particular jobs raised. Dahnei began to cry when a stalk of grass whipped her in the face instead of being cut as she’d intended. Mohniit gave a frustrated shriek when he dropped a handful of snails and they started escaping before he could pick them up properly.

Pulling her crying children into a hug, she shooshed them gently, although her own frustration bubbled beneath the surface. “We’ll take a break, alright? We’ll eat, and drink, and then we can play in the mud some.”

This seemed to quiet their fits into sniffles, and she took out the cakes she’d made that morning and handed them out. Even with muddy hands, the food was still delicious after the hard work. Their little lunch break was joined by the horses, who seemed to have decided this was a good foraging area. Did they come here often? Was this common grazing ground for them? Belbet certainly hoped so.

After a nice break where she helped the children build mudcastles, they turned their attention back to the mudhole, only to discover something interesting.

“Mama, what are those?” Dahnei asked, pointing at what was clearly three hand-sized crabs crawling over and around each other in their salt water hole.

“Those… are crabs.” Belbet explained, frowning. “Most of them are edible, so we should catch them. But we can’t let them die before we cook them, or they taste different.”

“How are we supposed to bring them back alive?” Eefim asked, his lips pursed. The kid had a point. Victoria had only ever seen them alive in tanks in a restaurant, with little rubber bands around their pincers. And these didn’t seem like they’d be amenable to staying in a basket that wasn’t sealed somehow.

Belbet thought for a moment. “...Dahnei, think you can weave us a lid for the basket quickly?”

The girl nodded, and got started right away, weaving a little square of the green grasses around them. Belbet didn’t watch her do it, instead dropping their clay pot over top of the crabs to keep the three of them from escaping. Then, she began digging another water hole, not too far away from the one the crabs had claimed. Luckily, water seeped into that hole as well.

By the time Dahnei had finished the basket lid, about two hours later, the sky was turning orange with dusk, and Belbet was ready to start boiling the first pot of water. So, picking up a sturdy stick, she knocked the pot over, disorienting the three crabs who scuttled this way and that.

It took a lot of corralling with sticks and poking at them, but eventually, Belbet got one of the crabs to grab her stick enough she could fling him into the almond basket. Dahnei, whose job was to close the lid until the next crab was ready, slammed the lid she’d made down on top of it before it could climb out.

Unfortunately, when she opened it so that Belbet could throw in the second crab she found, the first one was close enough to the edge that it managed to climb out onto the side. Belbet panicked, crying “Close the lid!”

She tried to shove the errant crab into the basket before the lid closed, only to miss and end up smacking the lid off and out of Dahnei’s hands. The girl cried out in surprise, and the second crab also escaped the basket, sliding down the other side of the woven grass.

“They’re getting away!” Eefim cried, frowning. He crowded close too, using a stick to reach out and shove the first crab towards the opening, while Belbet attempted the same with her crab. They ended up shoving the crabs against each other, which let them use their waving claws to grab onto the edge of the basket.

“Crab!” Mohniit’s little voice immediately snapped Belbet’s attention to him.

“No!” Belbet cried, too late as Mohniit snatched up the third crab by one of its arms. He’d managed to capture one pincer, but the other came up and cruelly grabbed at Mohniit’s face, catching his hair as he jerked out of the way with a shriek. Luckily, the baby dropped the crab, which instead of pinching him scuttled towards freedom.

One crab gone, two chances left. Belbet turned her attention back to the two that were fighting her and Eefim’s attentions. She gave a soft growl, and decided to do something stupid. She snatched one of the crabs with the hand that wasn’t holding the stick. This of course, had immediate repercussions, the pinchy kind. She bit back her scream as the pincers of the beast snipped into her flesh, but she couldn’t fight back the instinctive urge to fling it off of her.

Two crabs gone. One to go.

Her hand dripped blood, the pain a hot flash in her mind, but she pushed it down because she could see Eefim about to pull the same stupid stunt. “Don’t!” Goodness, she was yelling quite a lot today, “It’ll pinch you too. Grab it from the back, behind it’s legs.”

Maybe picking it up like that would help? She hoped so, otherwise, her own painful lesson would mean nothing. And, sure enough, when he picked the escaping crab up this way, it was almost docile. He put it back in the basket, and put the lid over it, and there it was. They had a live crab.

“Good job.” Belbet smiled, trying not to be angry over how painful the treating of her little cut would be. The only mud they had available was full of salt, and their clothing was covered in it, so there was no chance of cleaning the wound.

After the painful experience of treating her little wound, she turned her attention back to the boiling pot, happy to see that the mud at the bottom was starting to crackle and dry. She anticipated some decent (if silty) salt. While they waited for the salt to boil down, she set the children on collecting more snails and grass. The sound of her cries of earlier pain had startled off the horses, which filled her with regret.

Soon, Deenat insisted it was time to go back. Belbet grumbled, the heat and the pain of her finger, combined with the fact that they hadn’t boiled nearly enough muddy water for it to turn into salt, meant her plan had gone completely off the rails. But Deenat was right, they didn’t want to get caught out here at night. So Belbet put Eefim on the job of marking trees, so they’d know how to get back here.

They made their slow way back, packs laden with their treasures, and arrived just as the sun began to slip beneath the horizon. Belbet sent the kids to go wash off the worst of the salt mud before it started getting itchy, while she set up the clay pot with the salt-mud to boil. She added more water, from their boiled stock, so that it might help clear some of that brackish mud. Around her, the others were slowly working through the before-bed chores too.

The chickens put away, the meat checked and moved to the storage room, the treasures they’d brought back sorted and put away too. Belbet took a few moments to pour some boiling water into one of their smaller clay jars, a drinking jar that hadn’t quite shaped right. She swirled the boiling water around to sterilize the inside of the jar.

Then, pouring out the boiling water into the mud-water, she cut up some apples into chunks, spooned some honey in, poured water over them, and then tied an animal skin over the top as tight as she could with some twine. This, she set inside the storage hut where it was less likely to get knocked over.

Kaion raised an inquisitive eyebrow at it, and Belbet smiled, “You’ll see in a few weeks.”

“Mama!” Mohniit cried, running forward on surprisingly steady legs for a two year old, and wrapping his arms around his mama’s thigh. Belbet smiled, running a hand along his ears.

“Yes?” She asked, having learned by now the difference between his “Mama!”’s. This one meant he wanted something.

“Noise!” the boy cried, and Belbet looked at him, an eyebrow raised. “Noise! Noise words!”

Clearly what he wanted was something he didn’t have the words for. She dropped into a crouch, surprised at how agile this body was and how little her knees protested such an action. “Hm… Words and noise… Did someone say something you want me to say?”

A whine and head shake was her answer, so she continued, “Is it something you want me to do?”

A nod, and a tug at her hair. “Noise! Words! Noisy words!”

“...Noisy words…” It clicked, and she smiled, “Singing? Like when the snake lady came? You want me to sing?”

This lit the child up like Christmas, and he was bouncing and clapping his hands.

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