On the third day, Jadhar developed a fever. He curled in a fetal position and shivered. Shan warmed him as best she could and wiped his head and chest with water to bring his body temperature down. When his fever finally broke sometime that night, he woke and drank a quart of water and fell under again.
Then, over the following days, Jadhar recovered. He ate more, regained his strength, and managed to get up and explore. The first thing he did was inspect the wreckage of his fighter. This made him pensive, as if he only then understood his situation and what his future was going to be. After that, he walked off and Shan didn't see him the rest of the day.
During those first few days, the two survivors spent little time together. They each explored their new environment and gathered what supplies they could. Shan harvested the tall grass and boiled some and they ate it. Then she dried some and wove it into a makeshift mattress and blanket. He carried more scrap metal up and expanded their home.
The truce between them was uneasy and neither knew how to bridge it.
Then Shan made a decision: she taught him English. She pointed to things in their environment and named them. At first he just looked at her and said nothing. But then he started repeating them back to her. He understood what she was doing. And he picked up the words quickly.
Later she started speaking to him at length, about any number of topics, about herself, about her family, about Earth and the Defense Force, and about her hopes and dreams for the future - or rather what her dreams had been before she had been marooned here. She knew he was assimilating the words, she had no idea how much of it he understood, probably none at first, but in time he was answering with simple one or two word comments.
And the dirz tried teaching Shan his language, he followed her lead and pointed to things and named them, but that did not go quite so well. She had little patience and got frustrated easily. She had an aptitude for survival skills: foraging, starting a fire, building tools, but she did not have a head for language. One name for things was enough.
Before she knew it, thirty days had passed on that barren rock. During that time, they learned to communicate and to live in a semblance of peace despite their differences.
On the one hand, she appreciated his skill set and it was nice having another set of eyes and help with the daily chores.
But it was unsettling living with an alien that was responsible for the deaths of so many humans. She hated depending on him but at the same time she grew to appreciate his company, unbelievable as that sounded.
One day Shan decided to explore beyond the valley. She went up the ridge to the crest and stared out over the flatlands beyond. It was a plain of rock and dust and some grass that extended a great distance. At its far end she could see mountains rising from the plain. They looked huge, far taller than the ridge they inhabited. There was snow on their peaks.
She had no intention of going that far, not all the way to the mountains, but she decided to see what the plain had to offer.
It took some time to pick her way down the slope, the rocks here were loose in places and the footing treacherous. And when she reached the rim of scree at the base, she had to slide and hope for the best.
Fortunately nothing stupid happened and she reached level ground and began her march.
Walking an endless wasteland of rock under a dark red sky with only a tiny sun's feeble light through the clouds, she imagined she was in Welke's Christian version of Purgatory.
She passed clumps of razor sharp grass and hedges of brush with a tangle of branches and thorns. Then she came to a dry river bed with a tiny trickle of muddy water. Then, past the opposite bank, she saw them. Hundreds of them. A herd of some herbivore grazing on the grass.
They were four legged creatures, bulbous bodies, long legs with three toes and a long neck with a narrow head and little horns. They had tails that kind of swished back and forth as Earth animals do. Their fur was long and shaggy, light brown laced with black and navy.
They moved in clumps among the thickets of grass, their heads down eating, some up and alert.
Shan stood and watched them, dared not get any closer for fear of scaring them and starting a stampede.
She considered this new information. A source of meat. Something more than minnows. And a source of furs. She imagined sleeping on a blanket of that long hair.
But it also presented a challenge. She could try digging a pit and trapping one. Then she imagined herself shooting one with a bow and arrow. That sounded pretty cool. She didn't know how to make a bow and arrow, but she did have experience with archery. It might take a few tries, but it was possible she could make something that would bring one of these animals down.
Then she noticed something else, the grass they were eating was different than what she had seen before. Perhaps this kind was more edible. So she waited. And when the herd passed, she went out and gathered some. Then she gathered some of their droppings as well.
Encumbered with her new supplies, she returned to the ridge and the tense relationship with her new companion.
*
That night she used the dung as fuel and made a fire. Then she used a scrap of the fighter's cowl to hold some water and set if over the fire to boil the grass.
While she waited for it to cook, she spoke her thoughts aloud. "I saw some animals on the plain today. A whole herd of them."
He looked up from his work. He was sharpening a shard of metal from the wreckage into a knife.
She continued, "I don't suppose you know how to make a bow."
Nothing.
She mimed knocking an arrow and drawing a bow.
"Bow," he said, trying the word.
"Yeah. It'd come in real handy getting us some meat. Not to mention their fur for bedding. I don't know about you, but it gets cold here at night."
"Cold." He agreed.
Later, after their meal and after the fire died out and the sun set and they were in the shelter, she felt Jadhar move closer to her. She felt his body press against her back and his arms wrap around her.
"Warm," he said in her ear.
Shan was tense for a moment, then she made the decision to let go of her anger and to accept his gesture. There was something calming about his presence, his being here with her. He seemed to take his situation in stride and showed little stress or worry. Unlike Shan, who snapped at little things and lived in a constant state of high strung nerves.
That night Shan slept well for the first time since the crash.
*
The next day the two of them worked together and made a bow and a single arrow. They used a length of carbon fiber rod from one of the wing ailerons from the dirz fighter. It was already slightly curved as it followed the arc of the wing. That they found anything at all, was a miracle as far as Shan was concerned.
Then they notched each end and used some of the wiring for the string. They used another piece of the carbon fiber for the shaft of the arrow and Jadhar sharpened another shard of metal for the arrowhead.
Both the bow and the arrow were crude, but Shan had shot a bow in her academy training as part of an archaic weapons course. She thought it would have the strength to bring down one of the animals.
"I got a good feeling about this," Shan said.
"Will work." Jadhar nodded.
They strung it and Shan took it and knocked the arrow and drew and held it a second and fired. The arrow flew cockeyed, clattered off the stones and the head broke off.
That sucked.