Yana hoped one was for her, and it was: Bunny threaded her way through the throng and offered Yana a cup. She reached eagerly to accept it, for the warmth on her hands as well as her innards. She blew across the surface and at the first careful sip wondered if Scan used Clodagh’s recipe or if it was the other way around.
“Could you see? Arc they going to make it?” she asked, nodding toward the corner.
Bunny nodded, her eyes dark with worry.
“Ours’ll recover a lot faster’n theirs, so there’ll be more questions an’ tribunals and inquests and stuff.”
Which Bunny felt were irrelevant, Yana decided. “Isn’t it just that your people are better acclimated?”
Bunny looked disgusted. “Of course they are and we try to explain that to them, but they”-the pronoun was used in contempt-“never admit the fact. Their people should somehow be better able to cope when most of ‘em’s never lived outside at all. And,” she added with perplexity in her voice, “that’s not the real problem anyway. The real problem is that they think they have to know everything about everything, and they don’t. Even we who live here don’t. But we know enough to pay attention to what the planet tells us, and they don’t seem to pay attention to nothin’.”
Yana sipped, letting the warmth thaw the ice in her blood. Maybe she would do better if she ran like the others did. She had done nothing but sit, and she was whacked-whereas Bunny’s face was ruddy with stimulation, and Sean hadn’t even looked puffed when he had grabbed the pack off her lap. Everyone in the room had settled down to what might be a long wait, one of many they endured with great patience. Yana felt her own running out, complicated by a growing sense of claustrophobia in a room packed with folk she didn’t know well enough to wait equably with. She shifted her feet restlessly, wondering if she could withdraw without giving offense. Not that that was so much a problem, since she doubted anyone would notice one less body in the room except with gratitude. A more realistic concern was whether she could make it through this bunch to the door. And if and when she did, what would she do then, back at her cold and lonely cabin? That half hour in Scan’s company had emphasized the disadvantages of solitude. She had felt oddly alive and on the alert in his company, the first time she had felt that way since Bry.
“Look, this might take hours,” Bunny said, and Yana glanced sharply at her. “I’ve got to tend the dogs.”
“Could I help, so I’ll know something about their care?” Yana asked, hoping to delay the onset of bleaker hours alone.
“Sure.” Bunny grinned, pleased at her offer. “It’s not all that hard.”
“If you say so,” Yana said, and bundled back up in her winter gear to walk beside the team as Bunny drove it back over to the kennels at her Aunt Moira’s.
It wasn’t hard, exactly, but it required Yana to concentrate as she followed Bunny’s example in removing the harness, checking it for wear, oiling it, and hanging it up properly, then checking the dogs’ paw pads for any cuts and applying an ointment concoction of Clodagh’s between the toes before chaining the animals up.
“You’re lucky,” Bunny told her. “I cleaned the dog yard and put down fresh straw this morning already, so you don’t have to do that part.”
Having shown her what to do, Bunny retrieved some pre-chopped chunks of fish and other meat from a barrel outside her door and went into the house. When Yana had finished the dogs, she went inside and saw that Bunny was boiling the preboned meat, mixing with it what looked like hardened bread dough and fat. She finally crumbled up some suspiciously familiar pink-and-green tablets that looked like vitamin-mineral supplements of the kind issued to company troops. While the mixture heated, Bunny thawed snow on the back of the stove. Once it was melted, she and Yana used the same container to water each of the dogs in turn. By then the mixture was cooked to Bunny’s liking, and they distributed it to the hungry animals.