Snakebit

A couple of chapters from a work in progress

I wanted to do something for a reader cookie today, and wrote a couple of chapters out of order. This is from a middle-grade boy’s book I started a while back, tentatively titled The Quiet Gentleman. Bil and John are recent arrivals to planet, having been born and bred in space, living their lives on a space station and sometimes space ships, until their parents perished in an accident, and they came to live with their uncle, Dr. Tom Hasty, on the planet Ade.

This was also prompted from a spare prompt over at More Odds Than Ends, which is a handy way to spark an idea when you need one! You can also take part in the prompt challenge weekly, if you are trying to get in the habit of writing but find it difficult to get started.

Cubs

John walked alongside Lanre. He was taking almost two steps to the tall man’s every stride, but that was ok. Lanre was moving slowly and carefully through the scrub, following a faint trail worn by animals. Bil was ahead of them and moving much faster. He was not interested in the things Lanre was showing John by silent hand signals, like the tufts of hair caught on a branch. Coarse and brown, it was over John’s head, so it was one of the large game animals. Once John knew to look for it, he saw it all over, and wondered if the animal had been using the brush like a comb to remove its old coat while it passed through on the trail.

John did appreciate that a larger herd moving through here had stunted the growth enough he could walk beside Lanre and see the man’s hands move. They had been warned to be quiet, or they might frighten their quarry off. Even Bil wanted to see the cubs. They had left the house before breakfast, even though the den wasn’t far, Lanre told their uncle. During the heat of the day it would be uncomfortable to walk in the bush, and besides, the cheetahs always took siesta. Lanre had winked broadly with this comment.

Lanre held up a hand, and John stopped. Bill kept going ahead of them. Lanre pointed, and John saw a small hole in the ground with a little mound besides it. Lanre’s big dark hands mimed a small creature with ears hopping up on the mound, and John nodded understanding. He’d seen drawings and photos of the hares in his books. They had come here with humans, and adapted very well to the planet-side

Bil had realized they weren’t moving behind him, and had turned around. He had his hands on his hips, and John felt a little squeeze on his heart as he recognized a pose their mother had often taken. Beside him, he felt rather than heard Lanre silently laughing before he started to move up the trail again.

“How much further?” Bil whispered as they reached him.

Lanre put a finger to his lips, then held up six fingers to indicate the time they still needed to travel. Bil subsided. It wasn’t that far.

In the dust where his brother hadn't yet walked, John could see tracks, and he pointed at them. Two-toed ungulate, he thought. He looked up at Lanre, who pulled some of the hairs from a twig and held them up, nodding. The tracks were from the same animal. John wondered if they would see it, and then decided he really didn’t want to, because it would be much larger than he was, and there was no easy way to run away from the game trail.

Bil scampered ahead again, and around a twist in the trail, where the ground sloped away from a huge tree, one of the opened-umbrella shaped Acacia trees. Lanre had told him that each tree had it’s own spirit, and when they had been planted, his people had sung to them until their roots took hold. Thousands of trees had been planted, and carefully watered for the first season, when the settlement was being established. All the trees on the veldt were descended from, or even one of those ancestor-trees. John looked up at Lanre, then pointed at the tree. Lanre held up a single finger. This was one of the originals, then.

John studied it with awe. The trunk was so big that he, Lanre, his uncle, and Bil all together couldn’t have linked hands around it. Lanre flicked his fingers, and John realized that his brother was out of sight. Lanre’s face was calm, but John wondered if their Uncle’s friend was upset with the boys.

John had to trot to keep up with the long-legged stride of the grownup, now, as Lanre hastened along the trail to where they had last seen Bil. The trail dipped downward, and wound among big boulders once over the shoulder of the ravine. The scrub was thinner here, but John couldn’t see his brother. Lanre made the hand gesture to stop, so John did immediately, barely breathing, while Lanre signalled with a cupped hand behind his ear that he was listening. John heard what he heard - the scuffle of movement slightly below them. Bil came into view, having been hidden by a pile of rocks. He looked up at them. Lanre signalled for him to stay still, then set off along the path again. Once they caught up with the older boy, Lanre signed for him to walk behind. Bil and John trailed him down the slope.

The path was often narrow as it wound between rocks, here, and the scrub was gone. Instead there were low plants and prickly things like cactus, but not the chubby round sort John expected from pictures. He watched Lanre closely, so when the signal came to stop,and drop into a crouch to edge around the last rock, he was ready for it. Lanre took his shoulder and helped him maneuver into the shelter of the rock. John peeped around the edge of it, and could see a flat space, with water ripples in the mud, and a shimmer of water beyond that. They had reached a watering hole at the bottom of the ravine.

Sprawled on a low rock, her black-tipped tail twitching slightly, was a cheetah.

John could feel his brother leaning against him, and his heart beating, but he didn’t look around. He didn’t want to take his eyes off the beautiful creature. After he stared at her for a long time, he realized that the pile of rocks below her was actually her cubs, sleeping in a pile. He counted four, he thought. One’s ear twitched as a fly landed on it, but they were very still.

Lanre squeezed his shoulder, and John twisted his head around to look up at the man. Lanre was giving him a big white grin. John grinned back. They stayed a little longer, but John could feel his legs going to sleep in the cramped position, so when Bil moved away, and then Lanre tugged John’s shoulder to let him know it was time to leave, he wasn’t unhappy that he could move again. The mother cheetah had looked at them, done a slow blink, then kept up her scan of the area without taking alarm. John wondered why she didn’t consider them a threat. Was it because they were boys, like her cubs?

Careless

John had questions boiling up inside him he wanted to ask Lanre, but he knew that if he started to chatter he would upset the cheetah family, so he quietly followed behind up the trail. Bil had once again run ahead. Lanre didn’t seem worried, so John tried not to be as well. He wasn’t having as much trouble with the idea of no roof overhead, but planets were strange and dangerous places. He wanted to stay close to Lanre, who was the expert. Lanre had been born here, after all, and spent his own childhood running around in the bush. John had listened avidly to stories when Lanre and his Uncle Tom started reminiscing after the evening meal.

Bil, on the other hand, never seemed to mind the sky, and was always in a hurry. Being older than John might also help him be more confident, John thought. The baby was a label he felt he’d never shake off. Bil was four years older, and John would just never catch up. Like now, on the trail, as he stayed behind Lanre, and got glimpses of Bil scrambling up between the boulders.

They were almost back in the scrub at the crest of the hill when Bil let out a yell and dropped out of sight. Lanre broke into a run. John did his best to keep up, but there was no way he could move that fast. He settled for toiling up the steepening hill, his legs burning, panting the whole way.

He came around that last corner, in sight of the Acacia, to find Bil lying on the path. Lanre was cutting his boot off with a quick motion, and then gently tugging it off Bil’s foot. As John got closer, he could see that Bil’s leg was starting to swell.

Lanre had pulled off his day pack, and now he reached into a pocket and pulled out a small injector. He pressed it to Bil’s calf, and John could hear the hiss of the injection.

“What happened?” John asked.

“Snake bit me.” Bil gasped. “Little brown... Don’t know where it went.”

“It probably died after biting you.” John crossed his arms over his chest and glared down at his brother. He had no idea he looked a lot like their dead father, but Bil’s eyes got wide.

Lanre laughed. “He has run to hide, not dead. This is a universal antivenin, which means of course it is not good for everything. Some snakes, well,” he shrugged. “There is nothing to do. Come, now.”

He pushed Bil’s boot back on his foot. A faded red bandana wrapped around his ankle and took the place of the missing bootlace.

“We want good circulations. Do you see?” He pointed at the twin red marks on Bil’s calf, above his boot and sock.

John looked, and nodded.

“And it may have been a dry bite, just a warning, you know, stay off my personal body.” Lanre joked while he helped Bil to his feet. “Now, we practice going slowly, not running without seeing where the feet land. Eh?”

“Yeah.” Bil’s lips were pressed together tightly and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “I don’t want to do that again.”

“Good,” Lanre patted him on the back, then put his pack back on and got up. “Go on. I shall introduce you to the tree, on the way back. I know him.”

John realized that Lanre was upset, because usually his command of Galactic was very precise, even better than Uncle Tom’s. John walked ahead of Bil, and looked over his shoulder. “I’ll find it first, if there’s another snake.”

“No more snakes.” Lanre said firmly. “We go back to the truck after we say hello to grandfather tree.”

Bil limped, but didn’t complain, so John led the way up the trail, until he came to a very narrow path that broke through the scrub into a small clearing around the base of the big trunk. John tipped his head up and looked far overhead into the canopy of the Acacia.

“Drink.” Lanre said, taking his water bottle and a long pull out of it to set the example. When they had all taken a drink, he pressed his hands together and made a little bow towards the tree. “Grandfather Kayin, I present Bil, and John, children of my brother in spirit Tom. See them.”

“Now,” Lanre looked down at the boys. “You must say hello.”

Bil and John both put their hands together as he had done, and chorused “Hello Grandfather Kayin.”

“We must go, grandfather, young Bil has angered a viper this day. We return.” Lanre bowed again, so the boys did, too.

Then they worked back to the trail.

“Lanre?” John asked after a couple of minutes. He was in the lead again, keeping a close eye on the dusty trail.

“Yes?”

“What does Kayin mean?”

“Celebrate. His is a happy spirit, and he was glad to meet you. He approves of children.”

“Oh.” John wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

Bil spoke up. “I thought I heard a chuckle.”

“Very good!” Lanre said, “and now, there is the truck.”

“Oh, bloody good.” John heard his brother mutter.

Bil was pale, and limping, but carrying on bravely. Lanre helped him into the truck, putting him in the middle of the bench seat, while John got the window. Lanre made them drink more water, then they started out for home.

John split his attention between Bil, who was leaning back with his eyes closed and blue shadows under them, and the neverending fascination with the wind-rippled grasses through the window.

Home. They were going home.