Dies the Fire (11 page)

Damn!
he thought; the other snowshoe jinked left at just the wrong moment.

Astrid muttered something under her breath as she recovered the arrow. Then she checked it—you had to keep broadheads sharp—and smiled at him in congratulations.

“Better luck next time,” he called to her.

He trotted to his kill and finished the hare off with a sharp blow of the rabbit stick; the animal was a young male, a little under two pounds, with the relatively small ears and big feet of its breed. He was crouched by the side of the trail getting ready for the gutting and skinning when the stretcher came into sight.

Eric Larsson was on one end, and his sister on the other. They both exclaimed in delight at the sight of the rabbit; even their father looked up from where he walked beside his wife and smiled.

“And
that's
why they call it a rabbit stick,” Havel said, grinning and waving. “Take a rest, everyone, it's time to change off anyway.”

He'd stripped off his sheepskin coat and rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt; it was chilly, but getting blood out of the fleece was impossible. There was a little hone in a pocket on the outside of his belt sheath; the steel went
scritch-scritch-scritch
over it as he put a finer edge on the
puukko
and began breaking the game.

Astrid drifted off ahead; she could shoot rabbits easily enough now, and was certainly willing to eat her share, but she didn't like to watch the butchering. Eric followed, probably to tease her—someone was going to have to tell the kid to lay off it, but Havel remembered what
his
brothers had been like and doubted it would happen anytime soon. The problem there would come when Eric got some food and rest and felt full enough of beans to try pushing at the older man, and hopefully this whole lot would be off Michael Havel's hands by then.

Ken stayed beside the stretcher as he always did at stops, holding Mary Larsson's hand; he and his wife talked in low tones, usually of inconsequential things back in Portland, as if this was just a frustrating interruption in their ordinary lives.

Which means Mr. Larsson knows his wife better than I thought,
Havel told himself.
Which will teach me to try and sum someone up on short acquaintance.

Biltis the orange cat also jumped up on the stretcher, burrowing down to curl up beside the injured woman in what Astrid insisted was affection and Havel thought was a search for somewhere warm and dry in this detested snowy wilderness. She made a pretty good heater-cat, though.

He grinned at the thought; the cat would come out for its share of the offal, right enough; it would even purr and rub against his ankles. Cats and dogs and horses were more honest than people—they really did like you when you did things for them, instead of faking it.

Signe Larsson came up; she leaned his survival pack against a tree—she carried it, when she wasn't on stretcher duty, freeing him up to forage—and squatted on her hams with her arms around her knees, watching him skin and butcher the little animal. She didn't flinch at the smell or sight of game being butchered anymore, either.

He'd roll the meat, heart, kidneys and liver in the hide, and they'd stew everything when they made camp—he still had a few packets of dried vegetables, and the invaluable titanium pot. You got more of the food value that way than roasting, particularly from the marrow, and it made one small rabbit go a lot further among six. Plus Mary Larsson found liquids easier to keep down. The antibiotics gave her a mild case of nausea on top of the pain of her leg; he was worried about the bone, although the pills were keeping fever away.

“
Who
calls it a rabbit stick?” Signe said after a moment, nodding towards the tool he'd used to kill the hare.

“The Anishinabe,” he said, his hands moving with skilled precision. “Which means
‘the
People,' surprise surprise—the particular bunch around where we lived are called Ojibwa, which means ‘Puckered Up.' My grandmother's people; on Mom's side, that is. I used to go stay with Grannie Lauder and her relatives sometimes; she lived pretty close to our place.”

“Oh,” she said. “That's how you learned all this . . . woodcraft?”

She looked around at the savage wilderness and shivered a bit. “You really seem at home here. It's beautiful, but . . . hostile, not like Larsdalen—our summer farm—or even the ranch in Montana. As if all this”—she waved a hand at the great steep snow-topped slopes all around them—“hated us, and wanted us to die.”

“These mountains aren't really hostile,” Havel said. “They're like any wilderness, just indifferent, and . . . oh, sort of unforgiving of mistakes. If you know what you're doing, you could live here even in winter.”

“Well, maybe
you
could, Mike,” she said with a grin. “What would you need?”

“A nice tight cabin and a year's supply of grub, ideally,” he said, chuckling in turn.

She mimed picking up the rabbit stick and hitting him over the head.

He went on: “Minimum? Well, with a rabbit stick and a knife you can survive in the bush most times of the year; and with a knife you can make a rabbit stick and whatever else you need, like a fire drill. You can even hunt deer with the knife; stand over a little green-branch fire so the smoke kills your scent, then stalk 'em slow—freeze every time they look around, then take a slow step while they're not paying attention, until you get within arm's reach.”

“That's fascinating!” she said, her blue eyes going wide. “Of course, the Native Americans
did
live here.”

The big blue eyes looked good that way, but . . . He gave a slight mental wince.

I'm too fucking honest for my own good,
he told himself wryly.
Also I'm effectively in charge here, damnit, which means I can't play fast and loose. Not to mention her parents are watching . . .

“Even the Nez Perce starved here when times were bad,” he said. “Nobody lived in these mountains if they hadn't been pushed out of somewhere better. I hope you don't believe any of that mystic crap about Indians and the landscape.”

“Oh, of course not,” she replied, obviously lying, and equally obviously wanting to correct him to
Native American
.

“Indians have to learn this stuff just like us palefaces,” he went on. “It's not genetic. But some of Grandma's relatives
were
hunters and trappers, real woods-men, and I used to hang around them. Learned a lot from my own dad too, of course. Though I figure the Ojibwa part is why I'm so chatty and talkative. It's perverse for a Finn.”

He scrubbed down his hands and forearms with some of the snow lying in the shade of a whortleberry bush, trying not to think about hot showers and soap. She passed him his coat again, and winced a bit doing it, pulling her hands back protectively and curling the fingers as he took the garment.

“Damn, let me look at that.”

He took her hand in his and opened it. The palms looked worse than they were, because the strings of skin from the burst blisters had turned black. Havel drew his
puukko
again, tested the edge by shaving a patch of hair from his forearm, then began to neatly trim the stubs of dead skin; that should help a little, and reduce the chafing. There hadn't been time for her to really grow any calluses yet.

“I told you to put more of the salve on them,” he scolded. “You're pushing it too hard. When something starts bleeding, say so and someone will spell you on the stretcher.”

“I'm doing less than Eric is, Mike,” she said.

“You're also forty pounds lighter than Eric, and most of that's on his shoulders and arms,” Havel said bluntly. “I thought you had more between your ears than he does, though. You've got nothing to prove.”
And you're certainly not the cream-puff airhead I thought you were,
he thought.
Massively ignorant, but not stupid.

She learned quickly, rarely had to be told how to do something twice, and didn't stand around waiting to be found work.

“Eric may be bigger, but I'm a lot younger than Dad—I don't like the way he looks,” she went on, leaning a little closer and lowering her voice. “Mike, he goes
gray
sometimes when he's been on the stretcher for twenty minutes, especially on the steep parts. The doctor's warned him about his heart. What will we do if he . . . gets sick . . . out here? Carrying him
and
Mom—”

There she's got me,
he thought, looking over at the elder Larsson.

The flesh had melted away from him, but it didn't make him look healthy, just sort of sagging, and his color was as bad as Signe thought. Cold and the brutal work and lack of proper sleep or enough food was grinding him down, and he wasn't a young man or in good shape.

And this isn't the way to
get
into shape at his age. Much more of this and I wouldn't bet on him coming through. But I can't take him off carrying the stretcher for at least some of the time. There's too much else to do and I'm the one who knows how to do it.

“By the way, Mike,” Signe said, obviously pushing the worry aside with an effort of will. “There's something you should consider about ‘mystical crap,' as you put it.”

His brows went up and she continued by putting her hand out, fingers cocked like a pistol and making a
fffffumph
between lips and teeth, uncannily like the way his gun had sounded when he tried to fire it.

Have to admit, you've got a point,
he thought, and was about to say it aloud when he heard Eric's voice, cracking with excitement: “A deer! She got a deer, and it's running away!”

Havel was on his feet and running forward in an instant, scooping up the rabbit stick and tumbling Signe on her backside with a squawk; she was up and following him half a heartbeat later, though.

He passed Eric, but the twins were right on his heels as he flashed into the clearing; their legs were long and their hightops were better running gear than his solid mountain boots. Astrid was a hundred yards ahead, sprinting fast with the bow pumping back and forth in her left hand; and the blood trail was clear enough for anyone to follow—bright gouts and splashes of it on snow and mud and last year's dry grass sticking through both. He pushed himself harder, knowing all too well how the tap could turn off suddenly on a trail like that, unless—

He went through a belt of lodgepole pines, like seventy-foot candlesticks; the ground beneath them was fairly clear, and the wounded animal was following the trail; that wasn't too surprising, since it was on level ground and would make for maximum speed. Massive tree boles flashed by him, and then they were out into bright sunlight with mountain ridges rippling away to the west and south like endless green-white waves on a frozen sea. Thin mountain air burned cold in his chest; Astrid's hair was like a white-silk banner as he pulled past her. Then the trail jinked a little higher.

Good!
he thought exultantly.
Make him work at it!

The blood trail wasn't dying off; getting thicker, if anything. Then he saw the animal in a patch of sunlight not far ahead.

That's no by-God deer,
he thought.

It was an elk; a three-year bull still carrying his rack, a six-pointer, and he knew it must be badly wounded—a healthy elk could do thirty-five miles an hour in a sprint, and twenty all day long. As Havel neared it staggered, gave a gasping, bugling grunt of pain, and began to collapse by the rear. Blood poured out of its nose and mouth; the forelegs gave way, and it lay down and groaned, jerked, and went still with its thick tongue hanging out of its mouth.

Astrid and the twins were only a few seconds behind him. “Stand back!” he said sharply, controlling his breathing.

As if to back up his words the beast gave a final galvanic kick; it was a little thin with winter, but sill magnificent—glossy reddish brown on most of its body, with a shaggy gray mane on its thick neck and a yellowish patch on the rump around the small white tail. He could just see the fletching of the two-foot arrow against its rib cage behind the left shoulder; Astrid must have been lucky. The blade of the broadhead had struck with the edges up and down, slipping between two ribs and going through right into the lungs, probably cutting a big artery or nicking the heart too. The arrow could never have punched through the outer ribs if it had struck horizontally, not from a twenty-five pound draw.

Even so, that was a light bow and a short shaft to bring down something this size; bull elk were the size of a medium-sized horse. This one wasn't quite full-grown, but it would dress out at four hundred pounds or more of steaks, roasts, chops, ribs and organ meat, enough to feed six people for a month. The main problem would be carrying it; in this weather it would keep a long time once he'd drained it properly and dressed it out.

Astrid was dancing from one foot to another and crowing with glee: “He stepped right onto the trail! He was only twenty feet away! Go me! Go me! I got him, I got him! ”

“That you did, kid,” Havel said. “That makes up for a hell of a lot of lost rabbits!”

Signe hugged her sister and danced her in a circle. Even her brother gave an admiring whistle.

“I take it back, Legolamb,” he said. “I'm gonna say ‘sorry' with every mouthful.”

Havel nodded agreement and moved in to make sure of the elk with his knife; on the one hand there was no point in letting it suffer, but on the other he didn't want a hoof through his skull or six inches of pointed antler in his crotch either.

“Sorry, brother, but we needed it,”
he said, in an almost noiseless whisper—he never spoke that aloud, not wanting to be thought gooey or New-Agey—and passed his hand over the beast's eyes and then his own.