It has taken me most of the morning, but I finally manage to use a chunk of flint to chop down a small evergreen tree. The tree is only about two feet tall, but it will do. I shake snow from the branches and then haul it back to the cave.
I stand the tree up near the fire. Ehd narrows his eyes and looks at it closely, but when he reaches out to touch it, I push his hand away.
“No, Ehd. You aren’t burning this one.”
He huffs out his nose and reaches for the tree again.
“No!” I grab his hand and pull it away from the tree. Ehd ducks his head, looking contrite and slightly frightened. I stand on my toes to press the end of my cold nose to his warm one. He relaxes, glances at the tree again, and then goes back to skinning rabbits.
I stand back and take a better look at it. It’s small, leaning a bit to one side, and a few of the branches broke off when I pulled it through the cave opening, but it still serves its purpose. In fact, it looks like the same tree Charlie Brown had during the Peanuts Christmas Special.
“If I had a blue blanket to wrap around the base, we could create a Christmas miracle!” I laugh and grab one of the extra furs at the back of the cave to wrap around the tree’s base. I stand back and stare at it for a moment, but no miracle occurs.
Ehd comes up to me and looks at the tree and then at me and then at the tree again. He closes one eye and tilts his head. He lets out a soft grunt before ignoring the tree completely and wrapping his arms around my waist.
I give his hands a squeeze before moving away and looking back at the tree. As I turn, it falls over, and Ehd grunts at it.
“If you would just help me with this, it would be a lot easier.”
Ehd doesn’t help. In fact, from the look on his face, he believes I have completely lost my mind. I eventually manage to get the small tree to stand up by removing the wood base and using rocks instead.
“Now, we need to decorate it!”
I look around the cave, but I really have no idea what to put on the tree as decorations. I head back outside, hoping to find some inspiration. Ehd follows close behind. He doesn’t like it when I go outside by myself, so we stick close to the cave.
I collect a few cones and some acorn caps, hoping to find some use for them. I feel silly adding pinecones to a pine tree for decoration, but it works, and Ehd doesn’t try to take them away from me. I also pick up a handful of polished stones, and we head back inside.
Now for the hard part.
In the back of the cave, I crouch in front of a mostly cleaned deer carcass and pull strands of tendon from the bones. Back at the base of the tree, I pull at the strands of tendon, separating them into long strings. Using the sliver of bone, I attempt to poke little holes in the acorn caps, but they just end up breaking. I go through about forty of them, only managing to get a proper hole in two before I give up.
“What else would be good to string on the tree? I could probably make better holes in bark, but how pretty is that? Berries would look the nicest, but we’ve eaten all we’ve gathered.”
“Maybe shells will work.”
When we head to the lake for water, I go to the water’s edge and break through the ice to collect the shells of the tiny freshwater clams. When we return to the cave, I have much better luck stringing them though a lot of them still break.
“My kingdom for a bottle of Elmer’s!” I laugh at my joke, and Ehd tilts his head to one side, looking at me quizzically. “I’m not crazy. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
Ehd huffs and goes back to the fire.
With the tree as good as it’s going to get, I go to the back of the cave and collect my Christmas gift to Ehd. I had wrapped it in a piece of fur and tied it together with sinew the day before. I place it carefully at the base of the tree.
“Now we’re all set!”
Ehd looks over with narrowed eyes, tired of my noises.
“Why can’t you seem to communicate with me?” I close one eye and stare at Ehd with the other for a moment. “You can make sounds. You’ve got a grasp on the whole name thing. You aren’t stupid; I know that. But no sign language? No pictures? Why?”
I remember from various health classes that there is a language center in the left hemisphere of the brain. I wonder if Ehd suffered some head injury that caused damage to it.
“Come here, Ehd.”
Ehd reacts to his name and shifts closer to me. I run my hand over the long hair on the left side of his head. He makes a low growling sound as he smiles and closes his eyes. He leans his head against my shoulder, and I feel his warm breath on my neck as he runs his nose over my skin.
I don’t feel any bumps or divots in his skull.
“Maybe you were just born like this. Does that even make you Homo sapiens? You aren’t a Neanderthal; I know that. Your head isn’t that kind of shape, and your body looks like any other boy I’ve ever seen. Not that I really ever saw any other boys. Not like I’ve seen you.”