Eric Flint - Time spike

Andy thought Jenny could play a key role in solidifying the alliance.

Leaving aside the fact that the Cherokees respected her medical knowledge, Jenny was the most experienced person in the group when it came to dealing with other cultures. So, she stayed behind. And did her best to control the knot in her stomach. The first order of business was not to be rude. Susan Fisher would have come here for a reason. "Can I be of help, Susan?" She forced herself to turn her head from looking at the horizon where the expedition had gone to the woman next to her. She had to look down, too. Fisher was a tiny woman, although Jenny was sure she would be strong as an ox. In her endurance, at least. She'd watched the woman-her, and several other Cherokee women-working a mortar and pestle for hours, grinding the nutmeal. Her knarled hands were wide and calloused. Her hair, still black, framed a face that was at least fifty. She was obviously a woman who had worked hard all her life, and it showed. But her voice was soft. Almost musical. "Eat, first. You ate nothing this morning."

The medicine woman handed Jenny a small piece of some sort of food.

"It is not much for taste. It should have dried berries in it, but we haven't found any berries. It will fill you, though." "What is it?"

Jenny asked, curious. She really couldn't tell what the stuff was.

Dried meat of some kind, obviously, was one major ingredient. But it didn't feel like jerky. She took an experimental bite. Didn't taste like jerky, either. "Pemmican. I'd say it was the Cherokee version of it, but that's probably silly. There's not a single thing in it we would have used back home." Pemmican. Jenny knew what it was, theoretically, but had never eaten any in her life. Never seen any, so far as she could remember. It was a concentrated food that, in one form or another, had been used by many tribes in North America. And then, later, adopted by European explorers, trappers and fur traders.

It was a mixture of rendered animal fat, dried meat, and berries.

Grains and seeds could be added too, if she remembered correctly. The combination sounded a little gross, especially the rendered fat, but pemmican was a concentrated food supply that would last without spoiling for a long time, and was quite nutritious. It would be a valuable addition to their resources. As for the taste… Best not to go there. "It's good," she said. "It's fucking terrible. We need berries. And the fat's not right. You want bone marrow fat for good pemmican, and there's not enough in these lizards. So we had to make do. The meat…" The little woman shook her head. "Lizard meat.

Deer would be much better. But it'll do, for the meantime." Jenny nodded, forcing herself to continue chewing. Food was important to a people. They were emotionally attached to their diet and took offense when foreigners criticized their eating habits. But she had a feeling the pemmican was going to be one of those things she would have a hard time getting used to, even if Susan and the other women found berries or a substitute. But maybe not, if the fat were different. She thought it was the rendered fat that gave it that rather nasty taste. Perhaps fat taken from mammal bone marrow would be different. After all, sheliked the grasshoppers. Because of the years she'd spent in South America, Jenny was far more cosmopolitan in her culinary tastes than the prison guards; most of whom, like Andy himself, had been born and raised in southern Illinois or nearby. There were any number of good things to be said about the men and women from small towns and cities in America's heartland. An adventurous spirit when it came to food was not one of them. As she'd already figured out from watching Fisher in the various discussions that had taken place, the little woman was not one for idle chit-chat or beating around the bush. "The captain. Andy Blacklock. He is your husband?" Jenny gave a small sigh. Women always wanted to know who you were paired with and how tight that bond was.

It didn't matter what race or what religion or what part of the world they came from. She forced herself to give Fisher a smile. She knew it was a pathetic imitation of the real thing. But it was the best she could do. She knew why women asked. It was because at some instinctual level women knew it was important. It was what kept the human race going. "No, he isn't. I'm a widow. My husband died almost three years ago. Andy and I… We just met very recently, right after the Quiver. Ah, the Great Wind." That was the Cherokee term for the disaster. "And things have been so hard-pressed since that we haven't been able to decide… Well. To be truthful, we haven't really even talked about it." They hadn't even had sex yet. Partly because of the pressure; partly because there'd been so little privacy; but mostly, she thought, because both she and Andy understood that once they took that step everything would lock in. She didn't think Andy was nervous about that. She certainly wasn't, she'd come to realize at least a week ago. Still, it made both of them a bit cautious. The bar had been raised very high, so to speak. She regretted it now. If she'd known Andy would be leaving to fight a war, she'd have ended the dilly-dallying. She might never see him again. Fisher nodded. "Smart woman. Three years is a good time to wait between husbands. I waited three years after my first husband died before I went and got another." Fisher sat quietly for a while, watching the children trying to coax a small, furred creature down from a tree. The creature was having none of it. "How did your husband die?" Normally, Jenny would have resented the blunt question, coming from someone who was almost a complete stranger. But the medicine woman wasn't prying; she was trying to get to know her. And the only way to know who a person was today was to know what things had happened in their past. "My husband was a doctor, and we were working in Brazil, down in South America.

We'd been there for a little over two years. We were scheduled to stay until the end of the third year, but we became infested with one of the local parasites. As soon as we realized what was wrong, we came home, back to the states. But it didn't help. There was nothing anyone could do for him. He was gone in less than four days. I was sick for months, and off work for a year." "You had no children?" Jenny shook her head. Fisher took her hand and gave it a squeeze. "Stephen McQuade has explained to me that the world you came from was very different than our own. I am curious. He says a nurse in your time is not the nurse of my own." Jenny started to laugh. "Oh, heavens. Yes, he's right. Things have changed a lot. I still give baths, and help a patient to the bathroom, but I do a lot more than that. I've probably had more education than the best physician working in the most modern hospital in the eighteen hundreds." Fisher nodded. "Hospitals are where the whites go to die." Jenny knew that wasn't prejudice. Fisher was right. Until very recently, historically speaking-certainly in Susan's stretch of the nineteenth century-hospitals were death houses.

To start with, they were usually filthy. The care was frequently worse than no care at all, since it consisted of things like bleeding that often made the patient's condition worse. A person actually had less of a chance to survive if they entered one than if they stayed home and weathered it with nothing but the help of a friend or family member. And the death rate in childbirth of wealthier women who used doctors was far worse than that of poorer women who just used the help of a midwife. "You do not make your own medicines, though, he said.

That seems strange to me." "No." She decided not to try to explain, right now, all the complexities of a modern medical and pharmaceutical industry. "In my day, that was specialized work. It was done by doctors called 'pharmacists.' " The American Medical Association would scream bloody murder if they heard that. But the AMA wasn't here and Jenny's opinion had always been that a good pharmacist was worth ten mediocre doctors anyway. "I know a few of the old remedies, but not many. And"-she waved at the woods around them-"those I do know, I don't know how to find." Fisher nodded. "Yes. It is the same for me. I know some of the old ways, but not all. And the plants I used are now gone." They sat silent, grieving for their losses. Fisher for her small herb garden, and Jenny for her telephone and pharmacy. "If there is fat left over after making the pemmican I will make an oil to keep away the insects. I do not know if it will work with these strange bugs, but I will try just the same. This place is so different from home, but it is also the same in many ways. There is a bog not too far away. A half-day's walk from here. It will be very useful." Jenny's estimate of the little Cherokee woman's medical skills went up steeply. It would be foolish-really foolish-to underestimate Susan Fisher. Because she was right. Bog-water and moss were the two most sterile things on the planet now. Her mind was racing. A bog was the first step. It would give them sterile dressings and an antibacterial rinse. Her thoughts twisted and turned. "Sea water. Do you know how far we are from the ocean?" In a pinch seawater would work as an I.V. solution for short-term stabilization of a patient. Doctors, caught in the middle of battle without their usual supplies had resorted to ocean water. It hadn't worked as well as whole blood or plasma, but it had saved a lot of lives. Salt water had also saved more than one burn victim. Fisher shook her head. "We have not seen the ocean. Not even any big lakes." "That's okay. There has to be an ocean. In fact, Jeff Edelman says the world today probably has a higher sea level. There was even a big sea some of the time, he says, in the center of-"