“When you get chunks that break thick enough to hold on one side but thin to an edge on the other,” Roland said, “lay them by. Those will be our scrapers. If we had more time we could make handles, but we don’t. Our hands will be plenty sore by bedtime.”
“How long do you think it will take to get enough scrapers?”
“Not so long,” Roland said. “Chert breaks lucky, or so I used to hear.”
While Roland dragged deadwood for a fire into a copse of mixed willows and alders by the edge of the frozen stream, Susannah inspected her way along the embankments, looking for chert. By the time she’d found a dozen large chunks, she had also located a granite boulder rising from the ground in a smooth, weather-worn curve. She thought it would make a fine anvil.
The chert did indeed break lucky, and she had thirty potential scrapers by the time Roland was bringing back his third large load of firewood. He made a little pile of kindling which Susannah shielded with her hands. By then it was sleeting, and although they were working beneath a fairly dense clump of trees, she thought it wouldn’t be long before both of them were soaked.
When the fire was lit, Roland went a few steps away, once more fell on his knees, and folded his hands.
“Praying again?” she asked, amused.
“What we learn in our childhood has a way of sticking,” he said. He closed his eyes for a few moments, then brought his clasped hands to his mouth and kissed them. The only word she heard him say was Gan. Then he opened his eyes and lifted his hands, spreading them and making a pretty gesture that looked to her like birds flying away. When he spoke again, his voice was dry and matter-of-fact: Mr. Taking-Care-of-Business. “That’s very well, then,” he said. “Let’s go to work.”
Seven
They made twine from grass, just as Mordred had done, and hung the first deer—the one already headless—by its back legs from the low branch of a willow. Roland used his knife to cut its belly open, then reached into the guts, rummaged, and removed two dripping red organs that she thought were kidneys.
“These for fever and cough,” he said, and bit into the first one as if it were an apple. Susannah made a gurking noise and turned away to consider the stream until he was finished. When he was, she turned back and watched him cut circles around the hanging legs close to where they joined the body.
“Are you any better?” she asked him uneasily.
“I will be,” he said. “Now help me take the hide off this fellow. We’ll want the first one with the hair still on it—we need to make a bowl for our slurry. Now watch.”
He worked his fingers into the place where the deer’s hide still clung to the body by the thin layer of fat and muscle beneath, then pulled. The hide tore easily to a point halfway down the deer’s midsection. “Now do your side, Susannah.”
Getting her fingers underneath was the only hard part. This time they pulled together, and when they had the hide all the way down to the dangling forelegs, it vaguely resembled a shirt. Roland used his knife to cut it off, then began to dig in the ground a little way from the roaring fire but still beneath the shelter of the trees. She helped him, relishing the way the sweat rolled down her face and body. When they had a shallow bowl-shaped depression two feet across and eighteen inches deep, Roland lined it with the hide.
All that afternoon they took turns skinning the eight other deer they had killed. It was important to do it as quickly as possible, for when the underlying layer of fat and muscle dried up, the work would become slower and harder. The gunslinger kept the fire burning high and hot, every now and then leaving her to rake ashes out onto the ground. When they had cooled enough so they would not burn holes in their bowl-liner, he pushed them into the hole they’d made. Susannah’s back and arms were aching fiercely by five o’clock, but she kept at it. Roland’s face, neck, and hands were comically smeared with ash.
“You look like a fella in a minstrel show,” she said at one point. “Rastus Coon.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody but the white folks’ fool,” she said. “Do you suppose Mordred’s out there, watching us work?” All day she’d kept an eye peeled for him.
“No,” he said, pausing to rest. He brushed his hair back from his forehead, leaving a fresh smear and now making her think of penitents on Ash Wednesday. “I think he’s gone off to make his own kill.”
“Mordred’s a-hungry,” she said. And then: “You can touch him a little, can’t you? At least enough to know if he’s here or if he’s gone.”
Roland considered this, then said simply: “I’m his father.”
Eight
By dark, they had a large heap of deerskins and a pile of skinned, headless carcasses that surely would have been black with flies in warmer weather. They ate another huge meal of sizzling venison steaks, utterly delicious, and Susannah spared another thought for Mordred, somewhere out in the dark, probably eating his own supper raw. He might have matches, but he wasn’t stupid; if they saw another fire in all this darkness, they would rush down upon it. And him. Then, bang-bang-bang, goodbye Spider-Boy. She felt a surprising amount of sympathy for him and told herself to beware of it. Certainly he would have felt none for either her or Roland, had the shoe been on the other foot.
When they were done eating, Roland wiped his greasy fingers on his shirt and said, “That tasted fine.”
“You got that right.”
“Now let’s get the brains out. Then we’ll sleep.”
“One at a time?” Susannah asked.
“Yes—so far as I know, brains only come one to a customer.”
For a moment she was too surprised at hearing Eddie’s phrase
(one to a customer)
coming from Roland’s mouth to realize he’d made a joke. Lame, yes, but a bona fide joke. Then she managed a token laugh. “Very funny, Roland. You know what I meant.”
Roland nodded. “We’ll sleep one at a time and stand a watch, yes. I think that would be best.”
Time and repetition had done its work; she’d now seen too many tumbling guts to feel squeamish about a few brains. They cracked heads, used Roland’s knife (its edge now dull) to pry open skulls, and removed the brains of their kill. These they put carefully aside, like a clutch of large gray eggs. By the time the last deer was debrained, Susannah’s fingers were so sore and swollen she could hardly bend them.
“Lie over,” Roland said. “Sleep. I’ll take the first watch.”
She didn’t argue. Given her full belly and the heat of the fire, she knew sleep would come quickly. She also knew that when she woke up tomorrow, she was going to be so stiff that even sitting up would be difficult and painful. Now, though, she didn’t care. A feeling of vast contentment filled her. Some of it was having eaten hot food, but by no means all. The greater part of her well-being stemmed from a day of hard work, no more or less than that. The sense that they were not just floating along but doing for themselves.
Jesus, she thought, I think I’m becoming a Republican in my old age.
Something else occurred to her then: how quiet it was. No sounds but the sough of the wind, the whispering sleet (now starting to abate), and the crackle of the blessed fire.
“Roland?”
He looked at her from his place by the fire, eyebrows raised.
“You’ve stopped coughing.”
He smiled and nodded. She took his smile down into sleep, but it was Eddie she dreamed of.
Nine
They stayed three days in the camp by the stream, and during that time Susannah learned more about making hide garments than she would ever have believed (and much more than she really wanted to know).
By casting a mile or so in either direction along the stream they found a couple of logs, one for each of them. While they looked, they used their makeshift pot to soak their hides in a dark soup of ash and water. They set their logs at an angle against the trunks of two willow trees (close, so they could work side by side) and used chert scrapers to dehair the hides. This took one day. When it was done, they bailed out the “pot,” turned the hide liner over and filled it up again, this time with a mixture of water and mashed brains. This “cold-weather hiding” was new to her. They put the hides in this slurry to soak overnight and, while Susannah began to make thread from strings of gristle and sinew, Roland re-sharpened his knife, then used it to whittle half a dozen bone needles. When he was done, all of his fingers were bleeding from dozens of shallow cuts. He coated them with wood-ash soak and slept with them that way, his hands looking as if they were covered with large and clumsy gray-black gloves. When he washed them off in a stream the following day, Susannah was amazed to see the cuts already well on their way to healing. She tried dabbing some of the wood-ash stuff on the persistent sore beside her mouth, but it stung horribly and she washed it away in a hurry.