S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

Lord Emiliano, he thought. Got a sound to it.

S ssst!" Michael Havel hissed, and held his left hand up with the fist clenched.

Footfalls stopped behind him as he peered into the brush and half-melted snow along the Centennial Trail, in the cold shadow of the tall red cedars.

Just being on it was a relief; all he knew of this particular stretch of country was maps and compass headings, and it was an enormous mental load off his shoulders to be able to follow a marked trail-even if it was still wet with slush, and muddy. As a fringe benefit of being here between the end of cross-country skiing season and the beginning of hiking, the animals weren't all that wary, since they didn't expect humans along.

He'd trimmed and smoothed a yard-long stick from a branch; it was as thick as Astrid Larsson's wrist, and nicely heavy. He let it fall from where he'd been carrying it under his armpit; the end smacked into his palm with a pleasant firmness. The snowshoe hare made a break for it as he moved, streaking up the slope and jinking back and forth as it went; he whipped the stick forward and it flew in a pinwheeling blur.

"Yes!" he said.

The throw had the sweet, almost surprising feel you always got when you were going to hit. The rabbit stick hit the hare somewhere in the body, and it went over in a thrashing tangle of limbs and a shrill squeal. He started forward, but Astrid's voice checked him: "There's another one!"

The second terrified-rodent streak was much farther up the slope; he waited as the girl brought the bow up, drawing in a smooth flexing of arms and shoulders as it rose.

The string snapped against her bracer, and the arrow flashed out in a long beautifully shallow curve; he followed it with an avid hope born of days of hard work and short rations.

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."