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might take a long time to find it, but I
believe we can. Our families helped us to escape, and now we must
do everything in our power to help them.”
    Jok said, “I think many
Lalocks would want to join us if we could give them a reason to
hope there might be a way to escape from the priests and a place to
escape to.”
    “ We must find a place,” Lela
added, “where everyone can live without fear of being killed by
those who believe differently.”
    They all agreed that this
would be their lifelong goal. This new village would be a place
where everyone would have the right to think and believe as he or
she wanted. Everyone would have the right to worship as he or she
wishes and love the man or woman he or she wants without having to
undergo religious practices that cause so much pain.
    They talked until the last
light faded, and the distant hills were just shadows, and then
banked their fire so it would last through the night. They would
all remember this day.
     
    ***

Chapter 11
    Lox
     
    The sun blazed with a
blinding light as it peeked over the horizon. The two couples awoke
rested and feeling good, but very hungry. Zen tied a strip of skin
to a rock, climbed down from the cliff and returned with a supply
of wood.
    “If you girls will rekindle
the fire,” Zen said, “Jok and I will get something for our morning
meal.”
    The two young men gathered
their weapons and went back to a place near the river where Jok
remembered seeing fruit growing on trees. They picked the fruit and
also killed a buck, quartered and skinned it. They had accomplished
what they came for and decided to return by taking a different
route.
    As they walked near the
wall of a canyon, they heard a muffled moan.
    “ That sounded like a human,”
Zen said.
    “ Nah, can’t be; we’re the
only ones here.”
    “ There! I heard it
again!”
    “ Yeah, I heard it, too.
Let’s look, but be ready for anything. There’s no telling what that
might be.”
    They followed the sound to
a cave and cautiously looked in. A wounded man had barricaded
himself behind a wall of rocks. Barely clinging to life, he had
been seriously injured by some kind of animal, but had managed to
drag himself into this small cave. When he saw Zen and Jok, his
eyes grew wide and his lower jaw dropped.
    The man spoke words in a
language they couldn’t understand. He was small, no bigger than
Lela or Ador, and his skin and eyes were brown. Jok gave him a
drink of water and he tried to smile, but he was very
weak.
    “ What are we going to do
with him?” Zen asked.
    “ I don’t know,” Jok replied.
“We can’t leave him here to die.”
    “ He’s small. If you’ll carry
our food, I’ll carry him back to our camp. Perhaps if we feed him
and get him warm, he might recover.”
    “ He’s very sick, but I think
we should try.”
    As Zen started to carry him
out from the rock enclosure, the man began to complain. He was
pointing at an object lying in the corner of his cave, a stick that
had been shaped by making the ends smaller than the middle.
Something that looked like the sinew of an animal was tied to pull
the stick into an arc. To please the man, Zen retrieved the
stick.
    But he wanted something
else. Beside the stick was a bundle of tiny spears with stone tips
at one end, and a feather attached in a slot at the other end.
Since the man insisted, Zen picked up the spears. The injured man
looked satisfied, smiled and nodded. Jok and Zen washed him off in
the river and carried him and his things to where the girls were
waiting.
    Zen had to set the man down
when they got to the base of the cliff; he couldn’t endure the pain
of being dragged up the rocks. So the girls brought the fire down
to him, made him a bed with straw and skins and laid him on it
while the men cooked the deer.
    Ador and Lela didn’t know
what to think of the little man. He was too small to be afraid of,
so they cleansed his wounds. The claw and teeth marks on his legs
were red and irritated. Ador