Havah by Tosca Lee Page A

I saw an altogether different sight: The snake—could it be the very one? But there was its belly, still distended—lay dead, its head flattened as though struck by the hoof of an animal.
    This I took as my sign.
    I sang the rest of the day and welcomed Adam to my arms that night.
     
     
    “HAVE YOU NOTICED,” ADAM said one day, “how strange the animals have grown?”
    I wanted to say of course I had noticed—this was no news. Since before we left the valley, when Dvash had bared her teeth to me, I had known it. But it was not just her. They had been skittish and strange everywhere outside the valley. The jackal ran away, the hare skittered along the ground as though it were a shadow, the deer kept to themselves, and I had not seen a bear in days—and then only from a distance.
    “But it isn’t just the animals,” I said. “The ground must be different as well. Everything that grows from it seems not quite as right as it was.”
    He was quiet for some time before he said, “The antlers that I brought back in those first days—a buck did not drop them. That day I was near the wood, and I found them.” He did not look at me.
    “But you just now said the buck did not drop them.”
    He was carving, which had been his habit in the evening as it required no more light than that which the fire gave off—or the moon, when it was full enough.
    “The buck was dead, the belly ripped open, eaten to the bone. So much of it was gone that I couldn’t even save the hide.”
    I lurched toward the opening of the cave. After I had emptied my stomach on the path outside and taken some water from the basket—it was leaking, I could tell, and tomorrow I must treat it with pitch—I settled back onto my mat and said vehemently, “Good. I want no more of hides.” Couldn’t he see that I hated them? I would throw them away were the wind not occasionally unkind and the nights cooler than we were accustomed to.
    He shook his head. “We must have clothes. Haven’t you noticed that the nights are cooler?”
    “Of course I have,” I snapped. Had I not come to just the same conclusion? Did he think I had no brain—made of the same stuff as his?
    “We need more clothes and coverings for our feet,” he said. “I’ve lost track of the times I’ve cut mine on stones, and there are the insects and creatures.” I thought of the snake. I had not mentioned it to him.
    He laid down his carving with a sigh and stretched out on the sleeping mat, his arms behind his head. He was leaner now, the angles of his face sleek, his limbs sinewy as those of the great cat. I, too, had grown thinner, the child in my belly not even making the smallest bump yet.
    I moved to lay next to him, to smooth back his hair and peer into his face, searching there for traces of the boy who had given birth to this man. I could not see the blue of his eyes in the dimness of the cave, even with the fire. I wished, fiercely, in that moment that I could.
    “Isha,” he said softly. “Is it too terrible? To live here as we do, I mean. I will do anything to bring you comfort, only never lay as you did those first days, as one dying—”
    I shushed him softly, stroked back the hair from his face. “No. It is not too terrible.” In that moment I told the truth.
     
     
    WE RIGOROUSLY STUDIED THE changing vegetation around us. Every day the soil seemed to thrust up strange new life. Some of it was vile to touch, as the nettle, or to eat, as the bitter melon. We found other uses for them eventually. Where once we had eaten anything that came from the earth, we had to use caution now. Where once we had never worried about the supply of food, we began to mark the progression of seasons, the bloom and wane of fruit trees and shrubs and vine.
    We dried and parched and stored grain and legume, nut and seed. We had done these things before, but the animals had become thieves; more than once I found holes chewed through the baskets in the back of the cave, our small