Project Purple

52 - The Goatwench

"Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!"

Their ex-team leader cried the Hakka war chant over and over again-as if summoning help from the mountainsides or from the sky-as Henri walked him back to the hut with Buford and Tiffany.

No help came for him, and three of his fingers had severe frostbite.

"They'll have to be amputated."

He curled his lip at Henri, "You like that, don't you?"

"You have acute hypothermia-What I 'like' has little to do with it."

Buford reattached his leash, so that he was once more secure to the fat log in the corner, and he flopped his head about, "They want you to eat me, you dumb twats! They want you to be... No, they're expecting you to be just as intolerant as your ancestors. They are waiting for you, the Great Americans, as a grand denouement, to chow down on each other!"

The four survivors, Henri, Buford, Heidi, and Tiffany, looked at him with scant interest, like he was merely a noisy insect about to expire.

He didn't appreciate the inattention: "Americans, the only nation to sink from barbarism to complete degeneration without the so-called interval of what we refer to as A CIVILIZATION!"

Henri, stoking the small flames of a new fire, turned to the others: "What's eating him?"

The ex-team leader erupted into the piercing hyena laugh, pointing a finger at Henri. "That wry sense of humor-it didn't come through at all in your interviews."

"Relax," she said softly.

"And why should I relax, love?"

Henri sighed. "The adrenaline toughens the meat."

Caught off guard, he blinked. He was quiet for a long while afterwards. And he didn't speak, even when she removed his three diseased digits that evening, tossing them into the snow outside.

***

She left to hunt while it was still dark, though the ensuing dawn light had been unkind; she could find no animal tracks.

Mornings were cold, as low as fifty degrees below zero (they reckoned), and there were only a few hours of murky daylight now. Henri had metabolized most of her body fat, and, like the others, she was having great difficulty staying warm. But the hunting went on, and she accounted for the varying wind directions, before leaning into a big tree that sat on the edge of a small field, hoping to get lucky, to catch anything-anything at all.

Buford had put three slugs into a moose, but the thing just lumbered into the trees, as if unaware it had been assaulted.

Henri focused on the smaller creatures, and while scanning the snow for movement, she ran a hand through her hair, and then gawked in wonder at the clump of her own curls that came out now with so little effort. Also, her gums wouldn't stop bleeding.

"It's the scurvy," Tiffany had noted with her usual bookish curiosity.

They were all starving. Everyone knew the symptoms of anorexia nervosa that was associated with their restricted food intake and malnutrition-The fatigue, the sudden fainting, the coldness.

Henri had the taste of blood in her mouth that she couldn't wash out, but she kept on, maintaining a stubborn countenance. She knew the others had taken something from the hopelessness, some breed of aggression that had more power than anything else in the world.