Tribes of the Wasp Riders: A Post-Apocalypse Fable First Chronicle by A. C. Foster

Author:A. C. Foster [Foster, A. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

12

“Great Bear,” Kitchie said. “The sun is coming up. It is time we moved.”

I was alone under my sealskin coat. Kitchie was looking down at me in her leather armor. Rena and Thea were refilling the packs. Someone removed the ox hide roof while I slept. The sky wasn’t black anymore. The storm was gone. I could still see the brightest of the night stars as day began to drown out their sparkles.

“Where is Maya?” I asked.

“Pissing. Are you finally awake? Get up. We’ve all had our breakfast listening to the music of your snoring.”

She gave me a small kick in my side in case I felt like arguing about the time to get up.

“Breakfast is a drink of water and half a dried apple. Since there’s no game in the No Return to hunt, Maya says we are on short rations until we leave this place.” Looking around her, she added, “Which can’t be soon enough.”

I pulled on the fat woman’s pants watched as I did so by all three women. They weren’t dry from last night’s rain and felt like the legs were lined with ice. Thea handed me the leather flask of drinking water as Rena gave me my ration of apple.

Maya came back from her ankle deep wade into the river. “Are we ready?”

I swallowed the apple and pulled on my badger skin boots. “Where do I?” The four women looked at me. “I have to go.”

“Yes,” Kitchie said. “We all have to go.”

“He means he needs to pee,” Thea said. “The river is right there. Turn around. It hasn’t moved since last night.”

I heard Rena talking to Kitchie as I walked towards the riverbank.

“He needed to ask?”

When I finished, all four women were packed and ready to go; three with their bows and quivers of arrows, and Maya with her club. I picked up the last pack, slung it over a shoulder and reached for my axe.

Maya pointed with her club. “You see these creeks? We’ve crossed four since we hid the dugout.”

I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t a real question. Of course I saw the creeks.

“The Mantari could have paddled up any one of them, a dozen, maybe a hundred creeks between here and forever. We can’t tell which one and we haven’t enough provisions to search them.”

“I’m not going into that forest again,” Kitchie said. “One of you can go if you want. Not me.”

Ignoring Kitchie’s concerns, Maya continued talking. “We have three days’ worth of food left, four if we keep our stomachs more empty than full.” She pointed her war club upstream. “It’s a day’s fast hike back to the dugout and most of a day from there to our side of the river. We can spend another day,” she turned to point her club downstream, “looking for the Mantari. That will use up about half our provisions. Then we must turn around and go back. The water coming out of those creeks has a sour smell. We can’t drink that bile, and drinking straight from the river will give all of us the shits.

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