Last the bull came into sight, all-white, rangy-massive, better than a thousand pounds of irritation with rage and steam pouring off his flanks and head, and a set of horns like forward-pointing scimitars. In front of him Garbh looked like a puppy, but she bounced around making a din with little threatening rushes, her tongue over her long fangs like a taunting scarlet banner. Then he lowered his head and his tail went up and he pawed divots of dark soil out of the ground; Artos grinned as Garbh replied with the play-gesture of her tribe, rump up and forequarters down.
The charge was like thunder and would have smashed any fence to flinders or any man, dog or wolf to bloody rags, but Garbh made a last-second leap, twisting in midair to avoid the rake of horns that spanned five feet from tip to tip. She landed nimbly and streaked after the rest of the herd. The bull twisted in his turn with an agility astonishing in an animal so large, and chased her. . which meant he was running in the direction his charges had been going. They thought the bull was running away from the wolves too, and decided that discretion was the better part of valor for heifers and youngsters. In an instant heads were down, tails were up, and fifty-eight sets of hooves were churning. Which in turn meant the bull was disinclined to stop, lest his cows get out of sight. Garbh promptly dropped back around him.
I’ve met war-chiefs with less sense of tactics than that dog, Artos thought with a wide grin; he felt a familiar bubbling excitement. This is one of the things the Gods made men for, as they did wolf and lion.
The pounding of hooves grew into a rumble that shivered up the trunk of the beech and into his legs and backside, and bits of vegetation shot ten feet high as the herd smashed its way through all obstacles. It was a very good thing to be well above them. Closer, closer. .
He threw the weight of arm and shoulder and gut against the stave, drew past the angle of his jaw and shot. The string twanged, and an instant later he could distinctly hear the wet meaty thwack as the point struck his target, slanting down from the base of the neck to sink feathers-deep in the body cavity. The big two-year male took three steps and crashed bodily into the trunk of the beech, making Artos lurch and also making him grateful for the safety rope. The animal recoiled backward and collapsed with blood pouring out of nose and mouth. Another shot, and a smaller yearling went down bawling with an arrow lodged in its shoulder-joint and the leg paralyzed. Then they were directly beneath him and he drove one more shaft into a spine at point-blank range, aiming between the shoulder blades to get the heart and lungs even if he didn’t cut the nerve-cord.
Matti and the others were shooting as well, and whooping. After that, the survivors were past and spooked even more by the cries of pain and the smell of blood, showing no sign of stopping for miles as they thundered through the water of the creek in a wave of spray and splashing. He slung his quiver over his back again, dropped down lightly and bent his bow three more times, considered close-range mercy shots; you didn’t leave an animal in hurt and fear longer than needful, but there was no need to risk taking the point of a horn in your belly or crotch in a last thrashing. The others were attending to the same task; when the beasts were still and throats had been cut, he and Edain each touched a finger to the blood, tapped it between their brows and passed a palm over the dead eyes and their own before they faced west with their hands raised.
Edain recited: “Thank you for your gift of life, brothers, sisters, and know it will not be wasted. Speak well of us to the Guardians of the Western Gate, and go in peace to the bright clover-meads of the Summerlands where no ill comes and all hurts are healed, to be reborn through the Cauldron of Her who is Mother-of-All.”
Artos finished the rite:
“Lord Cernunnos, Horned Master of the Beasts, witness that we take of Your bounty from need, not wantonness, knowing that to us also the Hour of the Hunter comes at last. For Earth must be fed, and we but borrow our bodies from Her for a little while.”
Mathilda crossed herself and murmured a prayer to St. Hubert, patron of hunters; the Norrheimers invoked Ullr, the veithi-As, the God of the hunt and the bow.
Then they set to work, retrieving their arrows and hauling up the twelve carcasses by cords threaded through the hocks between bone and tendon and thrown over convenient branches. It was brute-force work to get the heavy bodies in place, and nearly as much to hoist them up the necessary eight or ten feet, but they were all strong and five pairs of hands on one rope did the job quickly enough. There was no need to break and butcher; there would be help enough from camp for that with tools that included bone saws, but the meat would keep much better if it was thoroughly drained at once. They did do a rough gralloching of one young heifer, for the liver and kidneys and heart-incomparably best when grilled fresh right from the beast, with only a sprinkle of salt.
“That’s the hunter’s right,” Artos said, laughing, stripped to his kilt and with blood to his elbows, tossing the organs onto a bed of broadleaf plantain.
“By olden custom,” Bjarni agreed.
Asgerd kindled a small hot fire while they finished the work and washed in the creek, and whittled green sticks. That also gave them plenty of offal for Garbh. She waited anxiously with her nose following the business, but she was far too well-mannered a dog to feed on the kills until given leave.
Crouching with a string of smoking chunks of liver and kidney and heart on his stick, Artos bit into a flavorsome morsel and chewed blissfully, and started in on a second skewer. Then he caught Edain’s eye and used his own gaze as a pointer. The younger Mackenzie nodded slightly, gulped, wiped his hands and rose, strolling away with Garbh at heel as if to obey a call of nature.
Artos swallowed a mouthful and called mildly: “Come and join the feast, friend, and introduce yourself. We’re all the Mother’s children and should share Her bounty.”
A clump of blackberry canes not far away shook violently, and there was a choked-off cry and a low growling. Garbh came out, with her huge jaws clamped on the wrist of a stranger, pulling him along by walking backward-and perfectly capable of taking off the joint in one bite, as the captive seemed to realize. Edain followed with an arrow on his string.
“Nobbut the one, Chief,” he said casually. “He hid well, but not as well as Garbh and I looked.”
“Thought so,” Bjarni said, taking another pinch of gray sea salt from his pouch and sprinkling it on his meat. “Not much of a catch, hey? Not as much meat on his bones as these cattle!”
Asgerd gave a violent start of surprise when the intruder was revealed, and made a nearly successful attempt to disguise it by coughing as if she’d swallowed some meat juice wrongly. Mathilda waved her skewer through the air to cool it and looked the man up and down.
Artos considered their captive as well. He was young, his beard just a patchy orange-yellow fuzz, straggled dirt-and-sweat-crusted yellow hair falling to his shoulders, blue eyes wide with fear. He was about five-eight and lean but not too hungry-scrawny, his skin marked with a number of thick scars but no open sores or scrofula or scabies. His pants were patches of hide on a foundation of pre-Change denim, and his feet were bare and tough and calloused, but he had a pair of the crudest moccasins Artos had ever seen tucked into his belt, mere bags of skin fastened with hide laces. His upper body bore a sleeveless vest of small animal skins, rabbit and squirrel predominating, badly cured with piss and brains, from the smell.
The belt around his waist was braided from thongs of raw cowhide, fitted to a salvaged buckle, and bore a knife and a hatchet; a necklace of teeth adorned his chest, human and wolf or dog and punctuated by two boar’s-tusks. Edain returned his arrow to his quiver, slung his strung bow and drew his dirk. Touching the point of the ten-inch blade to the skin behind the man’s ear, he used his other hand to toss the weapons at his belt to the ground before Artos; they were pre-Change salvage too, but well cared for, sharp and shining with grease. The bowman ignored the crude buckler made from some sort of metal pot lid with a handle, which looked as if it had been hammered into a convex shape with a rock. Then he stepped back and picked up a bundle of spears, handing them to his chief.