Stone Spring (5 page)

Now Shaper, exhausted, hungry, stared into the fragment of flame. He fingered the bits of curved tooth in his bag. ‘I was thinking about our totems,’ he said. ‘Here are the three of us, named for the bare bones of the world, ice and stone and moon - and Mammoth Talker, named for a beast nobody living has seen. Have our totems abandoned us?’

Ice Dreamer shifted, trying to find a less uncomfortable position. ‘Whether they have or not, it is up to us to behave as if it is not so.’

He nodded gravely. ‘Maybe you should be the priest.’

That made her laugh.

Moon Reacher pushed her way into the shelter. ‘Oh, it’s cosy. Not very warm yet. Why are you laughing?’

‘Because we’re alive.’ Dreamer could smell the blood. ‘You caught something.’

With a flourish, Reacher produced a jackrabbit from behind her back and held it up by the ears. The snare still dangled from its leg, and Reacher had broken its neck.

Dreamer leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. ‘You are a great hunter. Come on, let’s get this cooking.’

The three of them worked together. Dreamer quickly detached the animal’s head and sleeved off its skin. Dreamer and Shaper butchered the jackrabbit quickly, and Reacher used her own small obsidian blade to cut the meat fillets finely, so they would cook faster on the small fire.

When the meat was sizzling on a hot stone, Mammoth Talker pushed into the shelter. He let the cold wind in, and they all had to huddle around the fire to make room. ‘I found no prey,’ he growled. ‘But I did find this.’ He dragged in a bundle of wood, dried, old.

They eagerly piled it on the fire. Bark curled, the wood crackled, and smoke began to billow. For the first time that day Dreamer began to feel warm.

‘You can have some of my jackrabbit,’ Reacher said brightly. She handed Talker a leg.

He gnawed it, crunching the delicate bones. ‘And I saw Cowards. Many of them.’

The mood in the shelter immediately turned cold again. Dreamer asked, ‘Are we safe here until morning?’

‘Yes. But listen to me. The Cowards have killed bison. They drove them into a valley . . . You should see it. Many animals. More bison than Cowards, I think.’

‘What have Cowards and their bison to do with us?’

‘Don’t you see? There is more meat than they can eat, even if every man, woman and child gorges until the meat rots. More than they can carry away. Meat for us. All we have to do is take it.’

‘But it’s the Cowards’ kill,’ Shaper said. ‘They hunted these beasts. We will be scavenging, like the dogs of the prairie.’

Dreamer could see that Talker, the proud hunter, hadn’t allowed himself to think that way. ‘You should applaud me. Not peck at me with these questions, peck, peck, peck. I will sleep outside this hovel.’ He grabbed a handful of Reacher’s jackrabbit fillets, more than his share, and pushed his way out of the shelter.

‘Don’t be a—’ Fool. Dreamer bit back the word before she could say it; it would do far more harm than good.

Talker left a skin flapping loose. Stone Shaper crawled over to shut out the cold.

6

Mammoth Talker woke them all not long after the dawn.

If he had been uncomfortable in the night, huddled alone in the cold protected only by his cloak, he said nothing of it. But Dreamer thought he looked paler, his eyes that bit darker. Even his great strength was not infinite, and he was a fool to waste it on displays of temper.

He pointed with his spear. ‘The kill site is that way. South. Not far. We will leave our stuff here.’

Moon Reacher wasn’t happy. She was a child who in her eight years had seen almost everything taken from her, her whole family destroyed by the glacial flood, and now she had a habit of clinging to what was left.

Dreamer squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t worry, Reacher. We will be fine, our stuff will be safe here.’

Stone Shaper objected too. ‘I will take the medicine bag, and the fire, even so.’

‘By the Wolf’s teeth - fine, fine, just make sure you bring your blades.’ Mammoth Talker hefted his spear. ‘Everybody had a drink and a piss and a shit? Anybody got anything else to say? Then let’s go.’

So they walked south. As soon as they were away from the lee of the rock bluff the wind from the icebound north bit at their backs. The country seemed lifeless, with only dead grass and scrub at their feet. Once Dreamer saw a cloud of dust on the horizon, far to the east. A crowd of large animals - bison, perhaps, or horses, or deer.

Talker was right that it wasn’t far to the Cowards’ kill site. The morning was not much advanced by the time they saw threads of smoke rising, and Dreamer began to hear noises: a general lowing, deep screams of pain, high-pitched human calls.

Confidently Talker led them towards a bluff of layered, eroded rock. It was clear he had done his scouting well. They climbed, and on the feature’s flat top they lay down on their fronts. This was awkward for Dreamer, who tried to favour her belly. They inched forward until they could see.

From here the land sloped downward gently to a valley incised sharply into the ground and littered with shattered rocks. People clustered in knots around fires that burned on both sides of the valley.

The valley itself was dry, as far as Dreamer could see. But it was not empty. The narrowest part of the valley, she was astonished to see, was full of squirming animals.

They were bison, no doubt about that, many of them, heaped up on each other. The living tried to stand on the backs of the dead below, wriggling and tossing their heads. Blood splashed everywhere, and there was a lingering stench of ordure, mixing in the morning air with the smoke from the fires. The air was full of heart-rending bellowing.

She could see where the herd had been driven into the trap. On one side of the valley the dusty ground was churned up by the hooves of stampeding animals, who had evidently crashed through a concealing screen of brush and tumbled down the steep valley wall.

And the hunters worked, Cowards with their strange spiky hair and dense tattoos. As Dreamer watched, a carcass was hauled out of the pit and dragged to a fire, where it was efficiently butchered, the skin slit and dragged away, the limbs detached, the guts spilled, haunches cut off the carcass and hung on racks or thrown straight on the fires. This was going on all around the valley, and the ground was marked by the remains of butchered carcasses, bloody masses that looked as if the animals had been dropped from a height and splashed open.

Some of the Cowards danced for fun around the terrified, furious animals, jabbing with spears, mocking, keeping well back from hooves and horns. There was plenty of meat; there was no need for everybody to work.

Talker murmured, ‘It was like this before dark. It must have been going on all night. Look at them prodding the wretched animals with their stupid little spears. Look how they sprawl on the ground, asleep in the middle of the day.’

Dreamer made a rough count. ‘I see a dozen fires. There must be a hundred hunters here - hunters and their women and children.’

‘The Cowards always hunt in packs,’ Talker said dismissively. ‘Like dogs. They like to stampede their prey. They set fires and holler and chase.’

Shaper said, ‘But some run in front, directing the beasts to the trap they want them to fall into. We call them Cowards. It must take courage to run ahead of a stampede.’

Talker dismissed this. ‘It takes courage to face the animal whose life you will take for the sake of your own. To look it in the eye, to see its spirit vanish. Not like this. And look how wastefully they are butchering the beasts. Taking only the best fillets.’

‘They can afford to,’ Dreamer murmured. ‘Anyhow, Talker, what’s your plan?’

‘There’s plenty of meat down there. We could haul away a dozen prime bulls and they wouldn’t know the difference.’

‘No matter how much they have they won’t share with us.’

‘They won’t know anything about it,’ Talker said. ‘Not if they don’t see us.’

Shaper said, ‘We could wait for night, and then sneak up.’

Talker said, ‘Have you ever tried butchery in the dark? No. We will go in while there is still light. I’m a hunter. I can sneak up on a deer. I can certainly get close enough to those animals, with the noise and the stink of them, without disturbing the dreams of fat, lazy Cowards.’ He pointed. ‘See that part of the valley, away from the circle of fires? If we head that way we will be concealed by the slope of the land, and can get to the herd where nobody is working.’

‘It’s a risk,’ Dreamer said. ‘If we’re seen—’

‘If we’re seen we run,’ said Talker with supreme confidence. ‘Those Cowards with their bellies full of meat will never catch us. And then we’ll wait for another chance.’

It looked terribly dangerous to Dreamer, who had been on hunts herself, and knew how to read a landscape. ‘Let’s wait and see if a better chance offers itself.’

‘If we wait we’ll be discovered. I told you, I scouted this out, I know what I’m doing. You people do nothing but argue, argue. Now we act.’ He got on his haunches, preparing to move. ‘Follow me. Step where I step. Don’t kick a pebble, don’t break wind - don’t make a sound.’ He glared at them until they all nodded, even wide-eyed Reacher.

Talker moved out of the shelter of the bluff. In the open he kept low, running in a crouch.

Dreamer’s heavy belly made it difficult for her to copy him, but she did her best, and, padding in his footprints in the dust, stayed as silent as he was.

They came to a kind of tributary, just as dry as the main valley. They crept into this, and then scrambled to lie flat behind a worn boulder that hid them from the kill site. The smell of blood and ordure was strong here, and the noise of the animals was a continual lowing wail. With great care Talker levered himself up until he could see around the boulder. He dropped back, grinning. ‘Get your blades ready. We are only paces from the animals, but we must be a hundred paces from the Cowards and their nearest fire.’

Dreamer frowned. ‘Really, as far as that?’ She tried to remember the land as she had seen it from the bluff.

‘Don’t argue with me,’ he snapped. ‘I will go first.’ He dug into his wrap and produced a cutting tool, a block of flint with a single sharp edge. He held this in his right hand, and hefted his spear in the left. ‘I will take as much meat as I can. Then I will come back here, and we will decide what to do next.’

‘I’m not sure—’

‘Woman! Do you want to eat? Then do as I say.’ And with that, silent as a cloud, he crept around the rock and was gone.

‘We are closer than a hundred paces to the Cowards,’ Shaper whispered, quietly enough that Reacher couldn’t hear. ‘I am no hunter but I have a good sense of place.’

Dreamer didn’t reply.

For an unmeasured time they huddled behind the rock. Dreamer strained, trying to hear Talker’s butchery, or his returning footsteps - or the tread of a Coward band. The hunger and the strain began to make her feel light-headed, and she felt the tension winding up inside her, coiling her guts.

It was too long. She had to see.

She got up to a squat and slowly, carefully, lifted her head above the lip of the stone. She winced at every blade of dead grass that rustled under her legs.

Reacher and the priest-boy watched her wide-eyed.

There was Talker. Beyond him she saw the bison struggling in their heap, dead or dying. Talker had walked just a few paces down the valley slope and cut open a dead animal. Its innards were spilled, a haunch of liver lay on the ground beside him, and there was blood around Talker’s mouth. He hadn’t been able to resist taking the rich delicacy immediately, the traditional prize of the successful hunter. Too long, Talker, you are taking too long, she thought desperately.

She shifted a little so she could see further along the length of the valley - and there was the nearest fire of the Cowards. She was shocked; it could be no more than fifty paces away. In his courage or stupidity Talker had indeed lied, and was taking a much greater risk than he had admitted—

Movement. She saw them clearly, two, three, four, five - four men, one woman - sneaking through broken ground at the lip of the valley. Even on this freezing day they went naked. They wore their hair stiffened with dust into spikes, and painful-looking jagged tattoos had been incised into their cheeks. They bore no spears or knives, but they each hefted rocks, as you would use to drive a dog away.

They knew Talker was there. They thought he was a scavenging dog or coyote. And meanwhile Talker dug his hand deep in the innards of the dead bison. Perhaps he was looking for the gall bladder; she knew he relished that morsel. He had not heard the Cowards, who were nearly on him.

She stood up. She yelled, ‘Talker! Cowards!’

Without waiting to see what happened, she ducked back down. ‘They know we are here. Go!’

Stone Shaper did not hesitate. He didn’t even pick up his medicine bundle. He ran back the way they had come, keeping to cover, heading for the stone bluff where they had hidden.

But Moon Reacher clung to Dreamer’s arm. ‘I won’t leave you.’

Dreamer could hear the jabber of the Cowards, only paces away. ‘Come, then.’ And she ran, clutching her heavy belly, the child hanging onto her arm.

She risked one glance back. She saw Talker standing - not running - facing the Cowards. ‘I am Mammoth Talker,’ he yelled. ‘Mammoth Talker! Remember me!’ And he hurled his heavy spear with his fluted blade straight at the lead Coward. The spear, heavy enough to bring down a charging bison, smashed into the Coward’s chest, and heart and lungs were torn out of his back before he was pinned to the ground.

The Cowards hesitated; they were armed only with rocks. But now Talker had only his stone meat-cutting blade. In a heartbeat they were on him.

Dreamer turned and ran harder. Maybe even now they might make it, if she could get them to a bit of cover where they might hide out—

It felt as if a huge fist grabbed her heels, pulling them out from under her. She went down hard, face first, her nose slamming into the dirt. Tasting blood, she looked down to see rope wrapped around her legs, a throwing rope weighted with stones.