For half a minute after the scraping footsteps died away inside the high cleft, nobody in the gallery moved.
Then Chaska let her breath out in a long whistle, sagged against the limestone wall until her cargo frame clinked on the rock, and wiped her forehead with her sleeve.
“Not even a thank-you wave,” she muttered, squinting up at the empty shelf in the dim gray gloom. “Two tablespoons of prime tallow oil, a good brass mirror-bracket bent into crab-claws, and ten years off my life-span, and she doesn’t even toss us a dead cave-beetle for supper.”
“She didn’t eat us,” Ashaun said practically, unhooking the dented, tooth-punctured camp kettle from her belt to see if it would still hold snow when they reached the surface. “From a six-hundred-pound lizard with acid spit, that counts as a warm embrace.”
Chaska glanced down at Pip, half-expecting the creature to be staring wistfully up at the rubble bank or tapping a foot to follow its star-bellied patient into the den.
Pip was not looking at the upper shelf at all.
Once the young predator was safely tucked behind its mother’s leg and out of reach of floodwater, Pip had lost interest in the cleft completely. It did not creep toward the rubble slope or make its three-tone flute whistle to call the little beast back. Helping a choking animal out of a ditch had not turned the predator into a friend or a duty; the job was done, the creature had gone…
