Of Plagues

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By the next morning the cub was feverish and whimpering. The sounds and the scent were unbearable, yet they had to be borne just the same. Rowan's fledgling comfort of the night before evaporated beneath the onslaught, and he went about his duties on an almost visible cloud of gloom.

He did not bother to go out and find breakfast (the cub was certainly not interested in food, and its noises were making his own stomach twist), but he knew that his charge would need to eat something for its strength, so he took out another bunch of healing herbs and fed them to the cub one at a time, by force. It did not want to do anything but lie still. The bright curiousity which had lit its demeanor was gone, unseated by the lethargy of fever to the point where it neither ate the offered food nor protested having the limp leaves pushed into its mouth, and there were several times when Rowan felt the refractory urge to pause his feeding and put a hand across its mouth, to see if it was still breathing. Its once too-pale cheeks were now flushed a hectic colour of pink, but otherwise, it looked just dreary enough to be dead.

Breakfast finished, Rowan sat back on his haunches and tried to think of something else to do. He finally decided that if the cub was hot, and getting worse as the sickness made a deeper root, it would need both water and a shield to keep the cold air from its sweating body. Sweat was what cleansed the body from disease, but it could also break down natural defenses, if allowed to chill on the sick one's skin, and that would be hard to avoid with the winter winds blowing always in and out of the cave mouth. Bark might make a decent windbreak, but Rowan doubted that there was enough to be found in one piece.

Of course, a natural windbreak might work much better...

Scowling in deep thought, Rowan glanced at the rabbit skins on the wall. He was a hunter, and as such there was no shortage of animal skins in his home. Better to have them than to throw them away. He kept them all, scraped and cured, in the space behind his bed, from which place they generally melded into said bed and made up the substantial heap the cub was now lying on top of and underneath. If he could sew some of them together with catgut, the way he did his clothing, they would make a fine shield to hang against the wind. If fur could keep the wind off of an animal's skin, it could surely keep it out of his cave.

Water was a harder matter. The only water-proofed container in Rowan's den was the shallow, carven bowl the cub had used to hold the vegetables, because when Rowan wanted a drink he simply walked to the one of the nearby streams which flowed down into the river and got one. It would be foolishness to do the same with the cub. Carrying it through cold air in its condition could kill it.

Not, Rowan though dourly, that it wasn't going to die anyway.

But he had promised. He had promised the gods and he had promised the cub, and there was no going back now. Perhaps if he made another bowl... a bigger one. And in the meanwhile, perhaps he could smear some tree sap over the inner side of a scrap of fur and carry the water that way, though he would have to choose a non-poison tree, and be quick about returning each time if he didn't want the liquid to leak out. Sap, especially fresh sap, didn't usually make an impenetrable seal.

He checked on the cub again before getting to work, placing a palm over the flushed skin of the cub's forehead and cheeks to test his rising temperature. At the touch, Cub stirred the faintest bit and whimpered fretfully; it had fallen into a half-daze, half-doze a while before and was unhappy at being disturbed. Satisfied that his final preparations must begin at once, Rowan let it be.

Delving gingerly into the pile behind the cub, Rowan found a few furs of suitable size and a rolled ball of the gut he had dried in thin strips and saved; these he carried out into the middle of the floor and began stitching together in neat rows. It was difficult in the pale light from the cave mouth, but he knew that if he went any further toward the source of light, his fingers would soon feel frozen. Even as it was, the work went slowly, his joints cramping and his eyes straining to follow the ever-marching line of small, neat stitches which wrapped the furs together inch by inch.

When his fingers could take no more, he went out into the daylight, carrying a scrap of rabbit-skin with him, and gathered lump after lump of fresh pine-sap to smear on it. He walked to the nearest rivulet while he waterproofed it and there washed his hands with the numbing water, letting it spin away with its flow the sticky, stubborn residue before trapping some of it in the makeshift flask and heading back to the waiting cub.

He warmed a bit of the liquid in his hands and let it trickle into the cub's mouth, then repeated the action with another handful. The going was as slow as the sewing had been, but it was somehow more enjoyable, feeling the cub's warm, living mouth against his hand and knowing that its pain was easing with his work, if only a little. Sip by sip, he fed most of the water down the cub's throat, and when he had finished and all that was left over was the puddle on the floor where drops had escaped their container, he returned reluctantly to the work of making his curtain.

The light faded toward evening and the sewing slowed to a silent drone of toil. The cub drifted in and out of slumber, but even in dreams it seemed miserable, lying in its pool of covers and crying out a constant low complaint. When Rowan went to look in on it, placing his hand on the bed for balance, the furs felt damp with sweat under his palm. He went and got another flaskful of stream water to replace what had been lost.

That night, his unfinished curtain hung in a ragged vigil over the mouth of his den.

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But there was no time the next day to finish it. The cub's fever had worsened overnight, and it was all Rowan could do to keep it from sweating every drop of moisture from its small body. On one of his trips to the stream with his makeshift flask he found a good, sturdy piece of wood, and between times of tending to the cub he started to whittle it to shape. His fingers ached from the work, and from going outside too often; he could not get warm, though the partial curtain held out a great deal of the wind, as he had predicted it would. The cub cried continually with its nightmares until Rowan thought he might go quietly mad, but he did not, and when it started to cry in half-intelligible words, he made himself go in to it and soothe it rather than breaking its neck. It slipped eventually into a deep and almost death-like sleep, from which he did not bother to try waking it.

That day was very long.

There were far too many unknowns. He did not know what to plan for the future, he did not know what to do for the moment, and perhaps worst of all, he did not know what to expect. To his furthest knowledge, none of his brethren had ever tried to save someone ill with the Deathfever, so there was no traditional treatment; not even a known pattern that the illness followed, which would at least have allowed him to create his own makeshift regimen, though he was no healer and it might not be as effective as what a true healer would plan. He had nothing to go by; nothing to rely on. Only memories that dogged his steps and a cub who could not tell him what it wanted.

And now more than ever, he wondered. What would life be like if he had let his brother live? Would he feel so guilty if he had tried to nurse that smallest of their litter, if he had lost him as he must surely lose this other cub? Would his tribe even exist any longer? The Deathfever was contagious to an high degree, and there had indeed been whole tribes who had lost their lives before the enlightenment that was the killing-times. Even now, Rowan was running more than a small risk with his own life as he kept watch over the cub. But that, of course, was no great matter.

All that day, the questions plagued him. Unanswered questions from long ago; unanswerable questions about the future.

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