Brena

Brena stared at the bear, torn between fear and awe. Her tribe used bear hides for rugs and hangings, for door curtains and room dividers, so she knew that bears were large, but she had never encountered one in person. Those lifeless skins hadn’t prepared her for the immensity of a live bear. As large as an aurochs bull, but with sharp teeth, the bear had thick honey colored fur that darkened to cinnamon around its haunches. Black ooze dripped from the arrow wound in its hind leg.

“Girls,” Brena said, “Walk until you are out of sight, then find your sister and run to the clanhold as fast as you can.”

“But Mama, what about you?”

“Go.”

For once, to her relief, Gwenika did as she was told and ran away through the woods.

Slung over her shoulder, Brena wore a bark fiber sack where she kept a number of useful things: herbs, a water skin, a rock-like lump of sugar, another of salt, various elixirs in stoppered jars no bigger than a finger.