As morning yielded gradually first to early, then to late afternoon, the
three had still seen or heard nothing of the mantis. Exhausted by his
seasonal battle with the mating spiders, he lay unmoving and death-like
in the larger cave below them, buried in the deep, recuperative sleep of
an insect.
With time hanging heavy around them, Kalus and the girl were given the
chance, denied them by the turbulence of previous days, to study each
other more closely, and to ask, if they would, the unspoken questions
that had been forming in their minds. Kalus had finished with the
carcass by mid-day---cutting and shaping the skin, sharpening the ribs
against the rock to make bone needles---but showed no sign of interest
in talk, moving instead to look out from the entrance, apparently deep
in thought. Sylviana watched him there in the sunlight, with the wolf
sleeping peacefully beside her, as she gently stroked his fur.
For the most part she studied his primitive attire, crudely made, but
not without a certain atavistic grace. His primary garment consisted of
a large skin, possibly that of a buck, cut and worn like a sleeveless,
thigh-length coat. Worn with the fur side in, it closed in a narrowing
V across his chest, and was bound about the waist by a band of tied
leather.
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