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Snap. The arrow's flight had the sweet inevitability to it, as always when you were going to hit the mark. It struck the buffalo high on the right shoulder and slanted down, vanishing completely within the body cavity. The beast stiffened and raised its tail, started to gather itself for a leap forward and collapsed.
"Kiy-ee-kiy!"
The shout rose from three-score throats as the hunting party signaled their agile ponies up to a gallop, and the alarm ran through the herd like a wave across water-the ambling progress suddenly turning to milling chaos, and then to headlong flight. The sound of its passage changed from a grumble to a roar to a thunder like the hammer of a god striking ten times a second, as twenty thousand tons of weight pounded the hard prairie soil through three hundred thousand hooves. Dust spurted upward, and suddenly he was riding through a mist of it, with great hairy rolling-eyed shapes looming up out of nowhere.
One came close; it had the pink slash on its hump, and he ignored it. Now he was deeper into the rearward fringe of the herd, with the black-brown shaggy humps plunging up and down on either side of him. A head jerked sideways, and the black curved horn missed his foot by inches; his arrow was already on the way, and cracked into the beast's spine. It fell, and another rammed into it from behind and went cartwheeling.
"Kiy-ee-kiy!" Rudi screamed exultantly himself; twitched an arrow out of the quiver and shot again When the recall sounded he coughed dust out of his lungs and spat brown. A swill of water from his canteen came out almost as soil-stained; he could feel the dust gritting between his back teeth. He coughed again, rinsed his mouth once more, then took a long lukewarm swig. The hunt had been brief-he'd spent the same amount of time stalking a single deer in the Cascade forests many a time. And none of the humans had been hurt badly, though Frightens Bears was flushed and embarrassed because Red Leaf had had to pull him out of a tight spot, and his friends were giving him new names-Craps His Pants and Tatonka's Trampoline were popular. The herd had swung well away eastward, and it was slowing as the pursuit ended and the smell of blood fell away.
There were smells aplenty around the Sioux hunting camp with its wagons and bustling scores, and plenty of work left to do. Nothing in either was unduly strange to someone who'd been born among farming folk who also hunted for the pot; Rudi had helped butcher livestock and dress game all his life, and so had his friends.
"Except the scale of the thing," Rudi muttered to himself, as he turned his exhausted pony over to a youth.
The great bodies were scattered back over miles, until they dwindled to black dots against the flower-flecked tawny-green grassland. Horse-drawn sleds of salvaged sheet metal with upturned fronts like toboggans were already at work, dragging the carcasses back. Rudi walked over and joined in as a team of men heaved a thousand-pound body onto one of them, then moved on to the next as a woman led the horses away, leaning into their collars; after he had his breath back it was enjoyable enough work except for the flies. Soon his whole body gleamed with sweat in the hot sun as he labored stripped to his breechclout.
At the camp the bodies were ski
The first few bison to be broken up were surrounded by rings of hopeful camp-dogs, but there was enough offal to spare that they soon wandered off in a daze of bloated ecstasy. Garbh had quickly established herself as alpha-female and got the best bits; he saw her lying on her back not far from where Edain was working, feet splayed in the air and belly rounded, tongue lolling over her fangs as she made faint moaning sounds.
"Eight hundred and twenty-two!" Red Leaf called, as he walked through-the most senior hunters didn't have to do anything more. "Good work! Plenty of pemmican for winter, plenty of hides for tipis and harness and clothes!"
Call it two hundred tons of meat when they're dressed out, and much else of use besides, Rudi thought. Now, that is a good day's work!
The scores of the individual hunters were chalked up on a board hung on one of the wagons. Rudi's had been very respectable-seven- but Red Leaf had gotten fifteen, and his son Three Bears twelve. Edain, listed as Swift Arrow, had scored nine, the highest of all of the newcomers; he'd been using his longbow, possible on horseback when you were shooting directly to the left.
You know, I'd like nothing better than to pass a summer with these folk, Rudi thought. It's a pity that we'll be moving on soon.
The butchering teams worked steadily at their messy, bloody task, stopping only now and then to sharpen tools on whetstones and drink water carried around by youngsters. The area stank and attracted hordes of flies, but everyone was in good humor; there was a lot of teasing between the men and women, some of it as bawdy as anything Mackenzies did, though most of that was in Lakota. The entrails were turned inside out and scraped, put aside for a dozen uses; horns were carefully stacked, to be turned into everything from drinking vessels to strips on the bellies of bows; the valuable sinew that ran down beside the spine was bundled up. Most of the tongues went into barrels, to be salted down as delicacies for months to come.
Others gave the hides a first scraping and then scattered salt on the flesh side and stacked them high in bundles on wagons. The crack. .. crack… of axes on bone sounded as the skulls were split for the brains that would be used to tan the leather. Bones and hooves would make glue, or handles for tools; from what Red Leaf had told him, there was a use for everything, right down to cured stomach linings making good canteens. Of course, that didn't mean that every part of every beast was used, but most were.
The meat itself was sliced into long narrow paper-thin strips; those were dumped into tubs and pulled over to the racks. Others had cut back long shallow trenches in the turf and lit fires in them, low and smoky with sage; over those were erected the knock-down drying racks of wire mesh. The meat was rubbed with salt and powdered herbs and laid carefully in long rows, in the first stage of preservation.
Still other fires were lit for cooking. A number of young calves had been killed inadvertently-mostly knocked down by the near stampede. Those were split open and butterflied and set to grilling over the coals, with a cook using a long-handled brush to slather sauce on them from a keg. Tongue and hump meat went on beside them, and young girls carried around skewers of grilled tongue and kidney and liver. Rudi paused for a moment to take one; the rich taste of the organ meat spurted over his tongue, just short of burning-hot, incomparable when taken fresh in the field like this.
"That's the hunter's share," the girl said. "Seven tatonka! And on your first hunt, too."
"Tasty!" Rudi said, gri
She did, then looked at him. Her eyes went a little wider as she took in the scars; the distinctive puckered arrow-marks on his shoulder and lower back, the long white marks of blades on his arms and legs and along the left side of his jaw. It was a remarkable collection for a man his age, and one who wasn't crippled by it either. If you knew anything about the matter, which nearly everyone in a Sioux camp did, it implied that the people who'd given him the scars were mostly worse off-fatally worse.