Uneasy Relations by Aaron Elkins Page A

— was another such outcrop. If he could manage to pull himself up onto that and then stand up on it — not a happy thought, but he could do it — he’d be home free; he could reach the top from there and pull himself up. The problem was getting to the outcropping in the first place. He could shinny the two feet from where he was to the base of the tree and get up on
this
outcropping. From there, given his height, he’d easily be able to reach up another eight feet.
    Which left seven to be accounted for. Taking extreme care not to look down again, he hitched himself along the trunk an inch at a time, then leaned forward to test the clay near the outcropping to see if it was soft enough to dig footholds in, yet firm enough to hold his weight. Firm enough was definitely not the problem. The stuff was more like breccia than clay: a conglomerate of little pieces of rock in a coarse matrix that seemed to be some kind of hard sandstone. When he dug at it with his fingers — holding grimly on to a root with his other hand and wrapping his legs around the trunk as tightly as they would go — all he did was tear a fingernail. And now for the first time he noticed that he’d torn a couple of other nails on the way down, and scraped his knuckles as well. He’d hurt his back too, he realized, although it didn’t feel like anything serious — just an abrasion or two and maybe a strained muscle, and a little bruising; nothing too bad . . . he hoped.
    But that was something to worry about later. For now, he had to get back up, and the thing to do was obvious. If there was nothing that would serve as hand- and footholds, he would have to carve out his own. Fortunately for him, the tools were right there. The roots of the Aleppo, in their unremitting search for sustenance, had split and fractured the rock, leaving a couple of football-sized chunks lodged in their coils. Tugging the smaller chunk out (no easy task for Gideon, considering his nervous-making perch) he found that it would indeed do the job; by repeatedly pounding its broken edge against the sandstone, he was able to dig out a small cavity.
    But it was far too heavy to be a useful tool, a good twelve or fifteen pounds; it took two hands to keep it going for more than a short time, and he most definitely didn’t have two free hands. He was worried about his endurance too. What he needed was a smaller rock, but a quick probing of the outcrop showed that there was nothing that would do. The one other chunk that he could pull out was about the same size as the first one. All right, then, using both of them, he’d make his own. He’d spent a good many hours one summer teaching himself the craft of prehistoric stone-knapping, and although the art of fine-edge pressure-flaking had been beyond him (he’d spent more time applying Band-Aids than turning out arrowheads), he’d done pretty well with the less complex skills involved in percussion-flaking, which, at its most basic level, consisted of using a hammer stone to chip away at the edges of a core stone or “blank” to create a crude hand ax or chopper.
    In simpler terms, you banged one rock against another until something gave.
    It helped, of course, if the banger was harder than the bangee, and if the bangee was made of flint, or obsidian, or something else that would fracture along regular, predictable planes, but these were luxuries he didn’t have. What he had were two pieces of limestone. Setting the smaller one on the trunk between his thighs, with its cleanest edge up and at a slight angle (if you struck the edge straight on, you’d just crumble it away), he delivered his first careful blow with the other one, his aim being not merely to break the rock in two, but with a series of well-placed blows to produce a finer implement, sharp-edged and shaped to the hand.
    The first blow produced nothing; only a sharp little
clack
. He tried again. This time the hammer stone glanced off the core and drove painfully