The Gift

The next morning I awoke alone in the egg pit, I carefully stood and went into the main chamber, the woman was dressed and was busy filling a basket with hide and grass, Callum greeted me with a bowl of berries, he told me she had woken up and checked on her eggs before dressing. I hadn’t missed much. He told her we needed to get back to the village and we’d have to possibly explain where we had been. She stared at us and went to the egg pit with the basket. We got up to leave and thanked her for taking us in, when she returned she handed me the basket, inside was one of the eggs. I took it and she guested a rocking motion with her arms, like one would do when settling a baby. We tried to return it to her but she would not have it, I put the basket down only for her to follow us with it. We thanked her for it and accepted this what must have been precious to her.

When we arrived back in the village we had not been missed. The people were too hungry or tired to notice anything outside of their own lives. Callum dug a hole under our bed, down to the soft soil where we placed the egg surrounded by the grass. I went to the hunters and told them that in the woods there were berries, I lied about having a dream after praying to the gods. It was good enough for the shamans and a few hunters were sent, sure enough they found berry bushes growing not far from a felled tree.

Two weeks later we went back to the woman’s burrow to find it empty, the hides, candle and eggs were gone, it looked like it had been abandoned long ago.

We kept the egg warm and watched as the black faded and the shell turned a deep red, the egg also grew slightly larger.