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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 91: Slade 281
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 102
Slade was loath to leave the comfort bubble and return to the icy world beyond its invisible walls. He stared out across the white wasteland.
“We’re going to need food,” he said. “And water.”
Shella hung her head.
“Oh, not your fault. Joe takes food with him. I’m pretty sure Lauren and Derek carry water. It’s just--well, I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t find it. This is a very different world for us. We need water. I mean, I’ve eaten some of the snow, but there’s not a lot of water in it. Everything needs water.”
His eyes suddenly glazed over, and he said, “Even those monster elephants.”
“You don’t think,” Shella asked, “they get their water from the snow?”
“They were pushing the snow aside to reach the grass, but they weren’t eating the snow, only the grass. Elephants find pools or rivers or lakes, suck water into their trunks, and squirt it in their mouths. I can’t imagine that mammoths are different in that regard, given that they have the same kinds of trunks. That means they either know where water is, or know how to find it.”
She nodded. “So, assuming they don’t have maps,” she teased, “how do you think they find it?”
He shrugged and shook his head. He had no clue how elephants could find water. Somehow he thought maybe they could smell it, or maybe they could hear it. He couldn’t do either of those things. But what did he know about water?
He thought back to when he and Lauren were living off the land back in the parakeet valley. There was a lake surrounded by a meadow at the bottom of the slopes coming down from mountains on one side and hills on the other. Wait, there was something to that: the lake was at the bottom. Water flows downhill.
“If there’s water here,” he said, “that is, running water or pooled water, melted fresh drinkable water, it’s going to be at the bottom of the hills. We must be walking on high ground. The question is, how do we find the low ground?”
“I think that would be obvious,” Shella says. “We head downhill.”
Slade agreed. The current problem was they were in the middle of a vast white plain.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #531: Versers Roam. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
