Doggerlander

Chapter 6

Eret's hand slipped forward and the leaf shaped blade sliced across the side of his thumb and he shouted down at his hands in anger. Arna sat up the dune wall above her brother and Sil, the boys having decided they'd fashion hooked spear tips with their remaining shards of aurochs bones. The trio sat laboring above a calm pool which at its far end broke into foaming white plains where the incoming currents of the sea clapped over submerged stones. Heat and a balmy stink rose from the rocks ringing the shore side of the pool, scorching the rocks white under the sun like large and misshapen skulls. Arna gazed down at the boys' shoulders, already brown after just a few days since returning to the shore, as the boys filed out their hooks with the delicate care of a bird threading its nest. Eret looked up to the sun and sky wincing and whipped his cut hand back in forth.

"You hurt, Eret?" Arna asked form above.

"Stop watching me. Go," Eret snapped over his shoulder.

Sil stopped filing and studied Eret, his hand, and glanced up the slope toward Arna. He shrugged his shoulders and returned to the task of his hook.

"If it cut, put it in the water, Eret," Arna said, resting her chin on her knees while she watched her brother. He bit his lip and looked purposefully away from the dark blood welling from his wound. Without word or acknowledgement, Eret set his blade and bone aside and crawled to the edge of the pool where he dipped his hand below the surface.

"Shake it, Eret," Arna called.

"Shhh!" Eret hissed over his shoulder. Sil smiled up toward Arna and blew away the fine dust of the bone which had collected around his hand and wrist.

When the sun had risen high and the boys had fashioned their hooks as they'd imagined them, they set off to find shafts straight and sturdy among the accumulated snags of driftwood. Arna lay on her side, her head rested on her outstretched arm, as she watched the two figures whitened and in the distance and heat, their bodies blurring against great snarl of blanched limbs and trunks washed ashore. She saw them scamper up the side of the pile and begin tossing down viable pieces, the light clacking noise of the wood reaching her a moment after she'd already seen the impact. Sil and Eret's voices called to one another, they were shouting over the wind, but their words broke and dissipated in their aerial span to Arna who could only discern their sounds. Eret's voice sounded shrill, not so different from the gulls' calls; Sil's was more like a man's but at times squawked like the birds as well.

They returned to the pool where Arna had drifted into dozing and was shook back awake by the loud clatter of the boys unloading the staffs near where she lay. "Eret, you sound like a gull," she said dreamily, shielding her eyes from the glare of the pool. Sil snorted and Eret again told her to be quiet. She sat back up and watched as the boys notched out ends of their chosen shafts, inserted the long straight ends of their hooks into the burrow and wound twine up and down in a tight spiral, cinching the bone within. Sil rose and stepped out onto the shelf ringing the pool and stalked around its perimeter scanning among the basins and kelp beds below. Eret hopped up on the shelf and circled the pool in the other direction and both boys moved with their new hooked spears angled outward above the surface of the pool. Sil waved toward Eret and pointed out away from the shelf, beyond the reach of either boy's spear. They met at the far side of the shelf and Sil leaned in and whispered something to Eret who nodded and the boys parted and with great care they both stepped from the shelf and lowered into the deeper water of the pool which rose up past their knees. They moved toward a point back nearer the shore, both closing from either side of whatever it was Sil had spotted beneath the surface. Their movements slowed so much that standing in the calm current of the pool with their forms blackened by the radiant reflection of the sun at their backs, they both looked to be of the rocks.