I do not know how many days I wandered alone. Being a woman, I didn't know the counting-words, and I had nothing to mark. All I know is that I had no hope left. Now I was truly as my grandmother had been, or so I thought.
I sat near the muddy edge of a trampled waterhole in the otherwise dry bed of a small river. My thoughts were nearly blank. I think I wanted to die, to get it over with. My family and everyone I knew were dead, they must be. We Wa!ilerrima have a way to know. In my dreams I had seen them die, those that I had seen with my eyes and those I had left when I ran into the night. I knew, and I wanted to be with them. I could not live much longer by myself. When the wind blew cold again, I would die. Maybe sooner. It was hard to wait.
Wind sang in the dying leaves of the low trees that grew on either side of the streambed. In my mind, it was a song of mourning. With my eyes closed I listened, and without thinking I joined my own voice to the wind's.
An eagle cried overhead. My song faltered. I opened my eyes. Shock stiffened my body--a man stood watching me, one of the tall folk.
He had one foot up on a boulder, leaning forward with his hands on his knee. I stared at him, unable to move. Now I would die. I thought to pull the hide, now wrapped and tucked as a crude garment, closer around me, but concealing my body further would serve no purpose.
The man said something. He slowly straightened his back and moved his hands out and away, open palms to the sky. I did not move. Then he behaved very strangely, or so I thought. He sat on the boulder.
For what felt like half a day, we sat facing each other across the waterhole in silence. I had stopped staring, only glancing up through my eyelashes. He did not stare either. His hands were clasped together, and he kept his gaze on them most of the time. I watched his face. He seemed to be thinking hard, his lips drawn in, jaws tensing, brows moving downward. When he looked directly at me, I saw that his eyes were a very dark gray. He seemed quite young, though since he was one of them, it was hard for me to judge his age. His beard was slight, boyish, but he gave an impression of greater maturity.
Why did he just sit there, when I knew he must be going to rape and kill me? I was tired of waiting. "Get on with it," I said.
His head jerked up. He spoke; it sounded like a question. I frowned back. He began to move. I lowered my head. He would do what he would do, my fate was not my own to claim. I heard him step around the waterhole. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his feet. He stopped a few paces from me and hunkered down. I wished he would just--
His hand came toward me, holding something small. It looked like dried meat. He said something, his voice quiet, not like any tall folk I had ever heard. I raised my head. He repeated one word--it sounded like "meat". He set the piece of meat on a flat stone, rose, and walked away.
For a few breaths I watched him. I looked at the food he had left. My stomach clenched at the thought of it. Meat!
I stretched out my arm and took it.
The man sat on the boulder again, watching me gnaw the meat. The taste of it brought tears to my eyes. I looked straight at him a few times. He smiled.