Reflected Echo by Teresa Grabs

Author:Teresa Grabs [Grabs, Teresa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-14T08:00:00+00:00

Twelve

With a new-found resolve, Echo quickly dumped everything out of the backpack, replaced the cup and hammer, and ran to the oasis. Prints in the sand and soft dirt between her cave and the oasis sent a new jolt of fear surging through her body. The creatures had to be almost as large as she was, if not larger. After a quick drink from the spring, she harvested the remaining strawberries, whether they were ripe or not, and pulled all the carrots she could find. She rested her full backpack next to a fallen tree, took another long drink, wiped her brow, and got to work.

“You’ve done so much for me, Charlie,” she said, looking around at the oasis. “It’s my turn to protect you.”

As she sat wondering how she was going to do that, she absentmindedly tapped a small stick on the ground until it became wedged in the dirt and pulled out of her hand.

“That’s it!” She pulled the stick out and looked at its now blunt tip. “I got it!”

Echo raced around the oasis and stripped the trees of any low-hanging branches she could break off. The bark peeled off a smaller tree quite easily. Branches in one pile, bark in another, and any vines or tough, stringy plants and leaves in another. She jogged back to the cave with her full backpack and a small bundle of branches to a waiting Charlie.

“I got it all worked out, Charlie,” she said, tossing the branches by the cave entrance, and setting out a fresh pile of strawberries for him. “I’ll make us a door!”

Five trips later, now midafternoon, she brought the last of the collected materials from the oasis. Charlie went with her on the last trip which made it seem so much shorter and quicker than the others. Finally resting, she sat by the cave entrance eating carrots and admired the pile of branches and lashing materials.

“First things first, though,” she told Charlie. “Have to make a weapon. Something better than me flinging an old hammer around my head.” She chuckled picturing what she must have looked like that morning.

She lined up the branches by length and picked five strong, straight, sturdy ones to turn into spears like the stick she had played with. Using the hammer, she pounded and molded the tips into as sharp of a point as she could. They were still blunt, but she hoped they would cause puncture damage to anything that tried to hurt her or Charlie. If she ever found a knife or sharp stone, she could shave them into sharp tips. That took longer than she had expected. Sweat dripped from her forehead as the late afternoon sun warmed the cave.

“This’ll make a very nice home this winter, won’t it, Charlie?”

She paced outside the cave entrance, held up branches to the cave entrance, and laid them on the ground in an overlapping pattern. Echo fabricated an unlashed barrier that would become the cave’s nighttime door. Using strips of cloth and twine she found in Michael’s cave, she weaved and lashed the gate into a sturdy barrier.

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