Robert Adams - A Woman of the Horseclans

Djahn just grinned. “That is a promise, I hope. In that case, wife, you had better take your bed rug and coverings, plus all of your clothes—winter and summer—for horses will sprout horns and oxen will climb trees before you hear me recant what was only truth.

Squatting, her face working. she began to roll her bed for easy carrying, but when she made to include the bearskin, he roughly jerked it from her grasp.

“Give it back, damn you!” she shouted hotly. “It’s mine, mine! ”

His reply was cold, “You seem to forget—conveniently misremember, as is your wont—just who killed that bear and then skinned it out, woman, By custom as well as by the law of the Horseclans, I can give this prize to whomever I wish, It is not automatically yours simply because you chose to lay claim to it, as you have claimed or made shift to claim everything of beauty or of value that ever has come into this yurt.”

“But … but …” she stuttered, too angry for a moment to talk properly. “But me it was who cured that skin, me it was who stitched up the tears of fang and claw, the holes made by the arrows, It has been long and hard, it has taken me months of daily work on it. You can’t just rob me of it now!”

He just shrugged, saying. “You cannot be robbed of something you never really owned, Lainuh. And as for the vast amounts of work you claim to have put into the curing and repair of this bearskin, I am certain that our son and his new wife here will thank you in winters yet to come, for I have decided to give it to them.”

Lainuh did not return that night. The four women and Djahn Staiklee ate the stew and the fried bread, then sat for a long while around the dungfire, nibbling on hard cheese and chunks of dried fruit and sipping tea, while Djahn spun tales of hunting and of his youth on the arid southern plains, where more than a few of the bands of nomads still were neither Kindred-born nor even allied with the Horseclans by marriage.

All the while he talked, in the near-darkness Staiklee’s big, capable hands were busy. First, he fitted a new string to his powerful hornbow, then rubbed every inch of that string well with a lump of beeswax. That done, he unstrung the bow and thoroughly dressed it with sheepsfoot jelly before wiping off the excess and returning it to its weatherproof case of wood, felt and oiled leather.

Then it was the turn of the arrows. He lit a small fat lamp and dumped out the contents of both quivers, checked each shaft for straightness, tightness of head and horn nock, then subjected the feather flights to a painstaking scrutiny, before replacing them in precise order in the two quivers—one, the larger, for hunting arrows, the other for war arrows.

Having found a couple of places on his saber edge that happened to be less keen than he thought proper, Staiklee took that weapon and a stone and began to carefully hone the blade.

Looking directly at Bettylou. he remarked, “The bruin that once wore that skin I gifted you and Tim, well, he wasn’t the first of his breed I came up against, you know.

“Now down Tehksuhs way, we hunt more with packs of dogs than with prairiecats. Of course, the most of our dogs are each as big as or bigger than a full-grown prairiecat, some of them as big as lions, to tell the truth: but they have to be, because the bears up here are just puny little critters compared to the bears we hunt in Tehksuhs. Why, the flayed hide off a Tehksuhs bear would cover the whole top of this yurt and hang partway down the sides.

“And the hides on Tehksuhs bears is so thick and tough you can blunt down the edges of a whole beltful of skinning knives a-trying to skin one of the critters, even if you was able to kill him afore he killed you, that is.

“I recollect an old boar bear that my daddy sent me out to kill when I was about fourteen, fifteen winters. Well, that was a bad-luck hunt from start to finish for me, but a damned good day for the bear.”

He paused for a moment to rub a fresh application of sheep fat and spittle into the grain of the hone stone, then went on with his tale, “Anyhow, two days out, my horse turned up lame, and I hadn’t brought but the one, so I had to throw my saddle on Brootuhs, the biggest of my tooth-hounds.”

“Your pardon. Honored Father,” Nansee interjected, “but what is a tooth-hound?”

Djahn nodded, smiling, and answered, “I keep forgetting, you Horseclanners don’t hunt with dogs. Well, honey, there are three kinds of hounds that go to make up a pack of hunting dogs. The ‘nose-dogs’ are the ones that find and follow the scent trail of whatever critter it is you’re hunting. The ‘leg-dogs’ or ‘runners’ (as some folks call them) don’t have much of a nose, but they’ve got keen eyesight to spot the critter, the speed and stamina to run him to earth and enough ferocity to hold him in place until the tooth-hounds get there.

“ ‘Tooth -hounds’ are bigger, heavier and meaner than the other two kinds of dogs. Their job is to bring the critter to bay and, if necessary. to go in and kill him, rather than let him get away before the hunter gets there.”

“But they truly are big enough to saddle and ride?” asked Dikees widow, Ahlmah.

“Of course they are … down Tehksuhs way.” replied Djahn Staiklee emphatically.

Bettylou truly liked this man so she kept her own doubts to herself. The Abode of the Righteous had kept many canines—both hounds of several varieties and herding dogs—but she had never seen one, even the biggest of these, that stood much over knee height at its shoulders.

“Anyhow,” Staiklee went on, “Brootuhs didn’t care too much for the saddle and he was downright upset about the bridle and bit, but I gentled him down some before we’d been many more days on that bruin’s trail. And we were many a day on that trail, too. Why, I doubt not that me and all the dogs would have plumb starved to death, if I hadn’t been able to kill a couple of middling-size rattlers every day.”

This last was just too much for Bettylou to take in continued silence. “Father, please tell me how a couple of rattlesnakes a day could feed you and your entire pack of dogs.”

Again, he smiled. “It’s all just a matter of size, Behtiloo. All critters seem to get bigger or stronger or smarter down Tehksuhs way; even plants do, too. You’ve seen these scrubby little smidgens of cactuses on the plains hereabouts? Well, in Tehksuhs, they gets tall as twenty lances end to end would be, that tall and as thick through the middle as Chief Dik’s wagon is long, too. And …”

“Your pardon, Father,” Bettylou interrupted again, “but we were talking of two snakes big enough to provide enough meat to feed you and all your dogs for a whole day.”

“Yes,” he agreed in a dead-serious tone of voice, “they get every bit that big down in Tehksuhs, honey. Big enough to coil all the way around the outside of this yurt and grab their tails in their mouths, was they of a mind to do such a thing. More than a foot thick in the body Tehksuhs rattlers get, some of them nearer to two feet. That’s a powerful lot of meat.”

“It certainly is.” Bettylou agreed, then asked, “But you give the impression that these plains are very dry, near deserts, so what creatures are there of a size to sustain such huge serpents in such a wasteland?”

Djahn Staiklee regarded her shrewdly for a long moment, then he mindspoke quickly and personally, “Child, you are far more intelligent than you seem outwardly. Tim has more of a prize than I think he realizes yet in you. But let be, here, tonight. This is a long-drawn-out mocking tale I spin; don’t question it too closely. I mean but to bring a little merriment into this yurt which has seen so many years with little or none.”