The bowstring came back to brush the angle of his jaw, and the triple-bladed steel head rested above his thumb. The elk had no time to react to his presence before he loosed, and the arrow was a long arcing streak that ended just behind the shoulder of a two-year-old cow. He could hear the meaty
thwack
of impact, and the animal staggered, ran half a dozen paces, then collapsed with frothy blood pouring out of its nose. The herd scattered in genuine panic now, the more so as the dogs abandoned their driving tactics and bored in, bellies to the ground, moving like blurred streaks with teeth. Giernas laid down his weapon and ran forward himself, drawing the long Seahaven bowie from its sheath along his right calf. He bounded past the elk he’d shot; that one was clearly dying fast. The dogs had another, a yearling cow; one gripped its nose, another a hind leg. The third, largest, had the neck, but it released its hold and backed away as Giernas came up. The man dodged a flailing forelimb, got his left arm around the animal’s neck and neatly slit the hairy throat with a looping motion of his knife before leaping back.
The elk collapsed to its knees, then to its side, kicked, voided, and died. One of the dogs moved in and made as if to bite at the invitingly pale stomach; its bigger companion shouldered it away and gave a warning slash of fangs that didn’t quite connect, to remind it that the humans had precedence.
“Good boy, Perks,” Giernas said.
The dog was a wolf-mastiff hybrid six years old, huge-jawed and massive in a rangy long-limbed fashion; four parallel grooves down the right side of his muzzle and a tattered ear marked an indiscretion with a cougar.
And some of the other marks are from knives and spears, but nobody’s done it twice,
he thought.
The ranger had been training Perks since puppyhood, and the dog had walked all the way from the East Coast with the expedition. Right now he gave a canine grin, then settled in to lap at the blood pooling around the elk’s throat.
Giernas turned and waved before stabbing his knife into the ground, then wiping it on a handful of grass and carefully again on the hem of his buckskin hunting shirt before resheathing it. You had to be careful about that; if blood got under the tang it could start rusting pretty fast and then snap on you at an awkward moment. As he turned he was blinded for a moment by the sun rising over the salt-white peaks of the mountains; he flung up his hand against the light, grinning and waving a hand in a beckoning gesture.
Giernas was a big young man in his twenties, deep-chested and long-limbed. The knife-cropped mop of ash-blond hair on his head was faded with sun-streaks, his close-cut beard a lighter yellow with hints of orange; his eyes were pale gray in a high-cheeked, short-nosed face tanned to the color of oak-wood and roughened by exposure in all weathers.
Sue Chau led the three horses out from under the trees where she’d been on bear-watch. Like him she was dressed in worn, patched deerskin leggings, moccasins, and long hide shirt cinched with a broad belt that bore cartridge-box, flask of priming powder, knife, and a tomahawk thrust through a loop at the small of her back. Her hair was long and jet-black, eyes tilted and a cool blue; her father had been Eurasian, Saigon-Chinese crossed with Ozark-Scots-Irish, and her mother French-Canadian from a Massachusetts milltown.
In the crook of her left arm she carried a Westley-Richards flintlock rifle, and despite the friendly grin that answered his her eyes kept up their continual scan. There were a number of unfriendly creatures in these woods on the western slope of the Sierras. Locals sometimes; most tribes and bands were eagerly hospitable to strangers, but fear or unwitting violation of some taboo or simple human cussedness could make trouble. Wolves and cougars weren’t likely to be much of a problem unless it was midwinter and they were very hungry, but Old Ep—the big silvertip grizzlies that swarmed here in the Year 11—could be. The giant omnivores were appallingly numerous, they had little fear of man in an era of stone-tipped spears, and they’d far rather steal someone else’s kill than take the effort to hunt for themselves.
“Good-looking beasts, Pete,” Sue said, giving the dead animals an expert once-over. “They’ll dress out at a hundred, hundred and fifty pounds each, easy.”
“Ayup,” he said. “Tender, too, and they had time to fatten on this new grass.”
The two Nantucketers set to work with a silent, easy teamwork born of twenty months shared experience in everything from running battles to crossing rivers in flood. Each unlooped a rawhide lariat, snubbed it to a saddle horn, and used it to haul the elk to the edge of the woods. A convenient black oak stood there with a branch at just the right twelve-foot height; its spring leaves were tipped with fuschia and pale rose, long gold-green pollen-laden catkins hanging down from the branches. Giernas took his own rifle from the saddle scabbard, checked the priming, and leaned it within convenient reach. Then they ran a thong between the hind legbone and tendon of each elk, threw it over the branch, and used the horses to haul the beasts upward until their heads hung at knee height. That made the messy task of breaking the kills easier; they both moved their firearms as they worked, never leaving them more than a step and a snatch away.
“I hate it when I have to butcher on the flat,” he said, drawing his skinning knife from the belt sheath rather than the bowie—for this work a five-inch slightly curved blade was best. He tested his by shaving a patch of hair from his forearm, then put his tomahawk within easy reach by flicking it into the oak tree at chest height.
The clear
thock
of steel in wood echoed across the meadow ...
for the first time ever,
he thought with an edge of wonder that never quite faded.
“The meat never drains really good if it isn’t hung up,” Sue agreed. “Always spoils faster. Borrow your hone for a second?”
She spat on the stone and scoured a finer edge onto her knife; for butchering it was better to use a soft low-carbon steel and resharpen often. They stripped to their breechclouts before they made the first long cuts from anus to neck, and they would have shed those, too, if it hadn’t been for the extreme difficulty of getting blood out of pubic hair in a soapless wash. The dogs waited, sitting panting with their tails thumping the forest floor, then falling on their portions—stomach, gut, head—with happy abandon. The major bones and the spines were chopped out with tomahawks and discarded save for a few kept to roast for the marrow; Giernas took a moment to crack the skulls so that the dogs could get at the brains, since they weren’t going to take time to tan the skins with them.
A little less than an hour later the two elk were reduced to bundles of hide wrapped around the ribs, haunches, loin, heart, tongue, sweetbreads, kidney, and liver and lashed tight with lengths of tendon. The rangers carefully rolled up the broad white stripes of sinew that lay beneath the spine; it was useful for a dozen things, from bowmaking to sewing. After that they took a moment to strip off their breechclouts and wade into the stream, scrubbing each other down with handfuls of silver sand, squatting to work their hair clean and then standing hastily. This river was so clear that it was nearly invisible where the surface was calm, but it was
cold,
running down from snowmelt and glaciers.
“All clean,” Giernas said, resting his chin on Sue’s head and hugging her back to him with thick-muscled arms; she was five-seven, which made his six-one just the right height for that. His hands roved. “And since we’ve been good doobies and worked real hard ...”
Sue laughed, stirred her rump tantalizingly against him, then broke away. “You’re that anxious to get a grizzly’s teeth in your ass at a strategic moment?” She laughed. “Movement attracts their eyes, you know.”
“Ah, Sue, we don’t have to actually lie down, it’s such a beautiful morning, wonderful time for it ...”
The young woman paused on the riverbank, hands on her hips and head cocked to one side. “Tell me something, Pete,” she said. “I’ve heard you use that line while we were holed up in a cave with a blizzard outside and no firewood—”
“Hell,” he said, his tone slightly hurt. “I said it would keep us
warm,
that time. It did, too.”
“... in tents while it was raining, on days hot enough to melt lead, and one time when we hadn’t had anything to eat but grass soup for three days ... so we’d forget about how hungry we were, you said. So tell me something ... is there any time you
don’t
think is just a peachy-keen wonderful time to fuck?”
“Hmmm.” Giernas pulled his face into a pondering frown and stroked his chin in thought. “Now that you mention it ... no.”
Sue kicked a strategically aimed splash of ice-cold water before she turned and walked back toward their clothes. Giernas yelped, swore, and waded ashore laughing, scooping up his rifle and belt from the edge of the brook. They tied on fresh breechclouts; then they pulled on their hip-high leggings, tied them to the waistband portion of their breechclouts, shrugged into the buckskin hunting shirts, a little cold and clammy from resting on dew-wet bushes, belted on their gear, loaded their horses with the meat, and set off upstream. Giernas carried his rifle now; the bow was back on the saddle, with the quiver. He used it to hunt, saving the precious cartridges and powder, but they weren’t hunting now. What he was worried about now was things trying to hunt
them;
the red-oozing bundles of elk meat were perfect bear bait.
“Perks, guard,” Giernas said, as they set out, rifles in the crooks of their left arms and leading-reins in their right.
The wolf-dog was pleasantly full and plainly regarded it as time to do the sensible thing and curl up in the sun to doze, but he didn’t need telling twice. A heavy sigh, and the gray shape slipped into the underbrush, moving ahead and to the flanks. The younger pair of dogs followed their sire obediently; Giernas was the alpha of their pack, but Perks ran a close second.
Seen that often enough,
Giernas thought—a punishing nip on the nose, or a brief wrestle that ended with an uppity youngster on his or her back, throat caught in a warning grip.
With Perks around we’ve got
discipline,
by God.
The camp was half an hour’s brisk walk away, in a meadow much like the one they’d found the elk in. They hadn’t bothered to set up a tent last night, no need when they had good fires and sleeping bags lined with wolverine fur. He scrambled up a rise a half mile away and pulled out his binoculars. The others had the equipment packed and on the horses, all but one of the fires extinguished and buried, their rubbish likewise. Dogs milled around, woofing in excitement at the preparations for a journey into new country.
“Everyone looks ready, except for ...”
“Eddie. Bet he’s waiting up for us?” Sue said.
“Do bears shit in the woods?” Giernas said, looping the reins up over Kicker’s saddle.
In his opinion horses were idiots every one, even by grazing-beast standards, but if you kept at them long enough they could learn. The horse rolled an eye at him, then kept moving stolidly up their own back-trail. The others, as was the nature of the tribe, followed the leader.
The humans split up, moving soundlessly into the shadows of the trees, flitting from one trunk to the next. Nothing ... but after a moment Giernas caught a familiar sight; Perks frozen still as a statue, with his nose pointing to a big sugar pine. He moved behind the one at his back and poked the muzzle of his rifle around it.
“Peek, I see you,” he called out. Playing ambush kept you on your toes. So far he was one five-gallon barrel of beer up on points, and when they got back to Nantucket he intended to collect. “Hi, Eddie. You’re dead.”
“It’s a draw!” a man’s voice said from behind the tree, aggrieved.
“No it isn’t,” Sue replied ... from behind him.
Eddie Vergeraxsson stepped around the pine, shaking his head and glaring at Perks. “Not fair, when you two’ve got a werewolf working for you,” he said.
Not entirely in jest—the slender hazel-eyed man with the queue of brown hair was a Zarthani chiefs son from Alba, brought over to Nantucket as a hostage/pupil after the Alban War. He’d been a citizen of the Republic for years, but that didn’t mean he thought entirely like an Islander born. He’d spent his teens in the Republic, and decided he liked being a ranger more than being heir to the
rahax
of a Sun People tribe in what a later age would have called Kent.
“Hi, Sue,” he went on. “Hey, couple of elk, eka? I’ll get it on the packhorses.”
Not entirely a bad thing that he still thinks a little like a charioteer down deep,
Giernas thought. Eddie had a bad case of what some of the older generation on Nantucket called the Spanish Toothache, particularly during his frequent quarrels with Jaditwara, but there wouldn’t be any trouble over Sue.
As far as he’s concerned, I’m his chieftain and she’s my woman and that’s it.
Another woman ran over to him as they walked into the clearing and threw herself into his arms. He grinned, clasped her to him with his left arm, and swung her around until she squealed with glee and her blue-black braids flung out like banners. Spring Indigo was a full foot shorter than his six-one, her skin a bronze-brown-amber color, with a roundly pretty snub-nosed slant-eyed face. She was halfway to stocky ...
but I have absolutely no complaints about that figure, nosireee.
Plenty to grab in all the right places, with the suppleness natural to a nomad in her seventeenth year.
Smart, too.
She’d learned English fast, and was picking up her letters quickly.
“Husband!” she said.
Her mouth lingered on his, tasting of acorn bread and berries. Her people didn’t do lip-kissing, but she’d decided it was a good idea, during their long trek from the tall-grass prairies near where Independence, Missouri, would never be. She went on:
“You are the rising stars in the sky of my night! I am the moon to your sun! You are the greatest hunter in the world!”