Chapter Eight:
There Are No Picky Eaters
in Prehistoric Times
The tent was small, dark, hot, and very smoky. Alice coughed. When her watering eyes cleared, she found herself seated by a... Well, it wasn't exactly a fire, more like a heap of glowing ashes. In the centre of the ashes was a large clay pot. The woman named Mossflower took a small wooden bowl and scooped something brown and lumpy out of the pot and handed it to Zack.
Alice suddenly realized that Mossflower had pulled off her cloak and was now sitting on it, wearing nothing more than... Nothing!
Mossflower leaned over and handed her a bowl of her own. Alice accepted it without thinking, still staring in amazement at the woman sitting comfortably cross-legged on the other side of the fire.
"Well?" asked the woman. "Little dreamer, aren't you going to eat?"
Alice was abruptly aware of the wooden bowl warming her hands. She started to protest automatically, "I can't eat this..."
Then for the perhaps first time in her life, Alice stopped short in the middle of what she was about to say. She was suddenly aware that she was very very hungry. She wanted to eat, and it occurred to her that there weren't any McDonald's restaurants around here serving french fries. This woman wasn't going to make her Macaroni and Cheese, or a peanut butter sandwich. She stared down at the brown mess in her bowl and she wanted to cry. It was everything she'd always believed she would never ever eat. It was the wrong colour and the wrong smell and it just looked yucky. But if she didn't eat this, what would she eat?
Alice looked furtively around the tent. Piled up against the wall were some dark furry shapes. One of them moved and muttered in its sleep, so she assumed these must be the other children Mossflower had mentioned. She had also said something about beds but there weren't any around that Alice could see. Just piles of furs, and nothing else that looked like anything you could eat except for this brown stuff.
Zack was eating messily with his fingers, scooping brown chunks, probably meat, into his mouth. The woman hadn't offered them any spoons, so Alice had to assume that spoons weren't something people used in prehistoric times.
"Why aren't you eating?" asked Mossflower, curiously. "Aren't you hungry?"
"I am!" wailed Alice.
"Then what's wrong? Your brother seems to like his stew well enough."
"But, I'm a..." I'm a vegetarian, was what Alice was going to say, but she realized that probably wouldn't mean anything to the woman in front of her. She didn't know that Alice had decided when she was only two years old that it was wrong to eat animals, that she was going to be a friend to all animals everywhere. She didn't know about Alice's determination to only ever be a primary consumer in the global food chain. And even if she did know, she probably couldn't do anything about it, because this was the only food there was for thousands of years yet to come.
Was this what Mommy meant when she would say, in exasperation at Alice's refusal to eat her dinner, "Being a picky eater is a luxury. You are lucky you can afford to be one!"?
There weren't any picky eaters in prehistoric times.
Alice bit her lip and very bravely scooped one of the brown lumps out of her bowl. She tried not to look at it closely as she popped it quickly into her mouth and chewed determinedly. To her surprise, it wasn't meat, but some sort of vegetable. The sauce tasted a little meaty, but further exploration revealed that most of the lumps were something not unlike potato. It still wasn't anything she'd normally eat, but it didn't taste nearly as bad as she'd expected and it felt wonderful in her stomach.
Mossflower smiled, then picked up something from the corner that looked like nothing so much as a tangled pile of ropes and began tying regularly spaced knots.
Alice and Zack ate in silence. When their bowls were empty, Mossflower refilled them.
Alice poked Zack and whispered, teasingly, "I got my seconds first!"
He stuck his chin out aggressively, "Yeah? Well, I got more than you!"
"Hey! You do not!"
Zack was starting to scream when Mossflower suddenly said, "HUSH!" Her tone was commanding. One of the sleeping children in the tent muttered something incomprehensible, before settling back into sleep.
Both children stared at her, wide-eyed.
"Brothers and sisters love each other. They do not fight!"
This was a novel concept and the children were silent for another long moment, thinking it over.
Finally Zack said, "Sorry, Liss. Do you want some of this stuff?" He handed her a dripping lump, and, in direct contradiction to his enthusiastic eating of a moment ago, he commented, "I don't like it, so you can have it."
Alice said, "I'm sorry, too. You can have all the rest of my stew, if you like."
"No, thank you," said Zack, turning his attention back to his own bowl.
Mossflower made a satisfied sound and turned back to her knotting.
When Alice finished her second bowl, she put it down on the ground and scooted over beside the woman. She still thought it was weird that Mossflower had no clothes on, but since it didn't seem to bother her, Alice wasn't going to be the one to mention it. "What's that?"
"A new net, for when we go fishing tomorrow."
"Fishing?" That sounded like fun, "Can I come?"
"You need to go to bed," said Mossflower, smiling. "It's very late, and you'll be tired tomorrow morning if you don't get your sleep."
Do all mothers sound the same, wondered Alice. That was exactly what her own mother would have said.
Later, when she was curled up under a pile of furs, the fire still glowing dimly in the centre of the hut and her eyes itching unbearably from the smoke, with a stranger's back against hers and Zack snoring quietly just on the other side of the tent, the thought that mothers were the same no matter what time period they lived in, was comforting. It helped a little with the homesick feeling.
But this was not how Alice had imagined her first ever sleep-over.