“That’ll take a lot of wood.” Grant looked through the barricade and frowned.
“You bet it will. But it will get us through the night. See here, give me the ax and six men with spears. I’ll lead the party.”
Kennedy shook his head. “It’s my job.”
“No, Bill,” Cowper said firmly. “I’ll lead it. You stay here and take care of the town.”
Before the day was over Cowper took two parties out and Bill and Rod led one each. They tried to pick lulls in the spate of animals but Bill’s party was caught on the bluff above, where it had been cutting wood and throwing it down past the cave. They were treed for two hours. The little valley had been cleaned out of dead wood months since; it was necessary to go into the forest above to find wood that would burn.
Cliff Pawley, hunter-in-chief, led a fifth party in the late afternoon, immediately broke the handle of the little ax. They returned with what they could gather with knives. While they were away one of the giant buck they called buffalo stampeded off the bluff, fell into camp, broke its neck. Four dopy joes were clinging to it. They were easy to kill as they would not let go.
Jimmy and Rod were on pike duty at the barricade. Jimmy glanced back at where a couple of girls were disposing of the carcasses. “Rod,” he said thoughtfully, we got it wrong. Those are stobor . . . the real stobor.”
“Huh?”
“The big babies we’ve been calling that aren’t ‘stobor.’ These things are what the Deacon warned us against.”
“Well . . . I don’t care what you call them as long as they’re dead. On your toes, boy; here they come again.”
Cowper ordered fires laid just before dark and was studying how to arrange one stretch so as not to endanger the flume when the matter was settled; the structure quivered and water ceased to flow. Upstream something had crashed into it and broken the flimsy pipe line.
The town had long since abandoned waterskins. Now they were caught with only a few liters in a pot used by the cooks, but it was a hardship rather than a danger; the urgent need was to get a ring of fire around’ them. There had already been half a dozen casualties no deaths but bites and slashings, almost all from the little carnivores contemptuously known as dopy joes. The community’s pool of antiseptics, depleted by months of use and utterly irreplaceable, had sunk so low that Bob Baxter used it only on major wounds.
When fuel had been stretched ready to burn in a long arc inside the barricade and down the bank to where it curved back under the cave, the results of a hard day’s work looked small; the stockpile was not much greater than the amount already spread out. Bill Kennedy looked at it. “It won’t last the night, Grant.”
“It’s got to, Bill. Light it.”
“If we pulled back from the fence and the bank, then cut over to the bluff what do you think?”
Cowper tried to figure what might be saved by the change. “It’s not much shorter. Uh, don’t light the downstream end unless they start curving back in on us. But let’s move; it’s getting dark.” He hurried to the cooking fire, got a brand and started setting the chain of fire. Kennedy helped and soon the townsite was surrounded on the exposed sides by blaze. Cowper chucked his torch into the fire and said, “Bill, better split the men into two watches and get the women up into the cave they can crowd in somehow.”
“You’ll have trouble getting thirty-odd women in there, Grant.”
“They can sit up all night. But send them up. Yes, and the wounded men, too.”
“Can do.” Kennedy started passing the word. Caroline came storming up, spear in hand
“Grant, what’s this nonsense about the girls having to go up to the cave? If you think you’re going to cut me out of the fun you had better think again!”
Cowper looked at her wearily. “Carol, I haven’t time to monkey. Shut your face and do as you are told.”