Inigo: A Short Story

It was dry, hot, incandescent. The August heat had eaten away at the water supply all summer, and now they had none. The past couple years had been a drought, thought Inigo, if this doesn't end soon, we will be forced to move. Inigo was the chieftain of the most successful Indian tribe of his time, they were good hunters and gatherers, but they had no 'magic men' or shamans. They neither knew how to heal a wound or to do a rain dance. The people, Inigo knew, would soon start dying if this kept up longer. All of the farmers crops had been dying, none of them producing edible things. The animals were bone skinny and never yielded enough meat for even one. All of the rivers and streams had gone dry, only useful for dry dirt. There wasn't enough water to sustain anything for more than a month, and the only water hole not dry was under control of a powerful, triple alliance between three small tribes.

None of them came back with magic skills,(some hadn't come back at all, yet) and just last month they had sent one more to ask for help. The sun was always shining down upon them and beating with the fire of the roaring inferno inside, hammered upon the small tepees and people. Recently the people of Inigo's tribe had taken to hiding in chilled caves, where the drip drop drip drop... Of the water brought hope to the thirsty people. But even the arctic freezing of the hard stone couldn't keep them safe from the incalescence outside, and every day their numbers