who fell ill was quickly lost. She had been dismayed to find herself pregnant.
And then had come the night of the flood. It had been Horse Driver’s fault, Driver who insisted he had seen caribou in the shadow of a grimy glacier that scoured down from an eroded mountain. He had led them to the shore of a chill lake at the glacier’s foot, and left the women and children to make camp while the men hunted shadows. Nobody had wanted to be there. They believed that glaciers were the claws of the Sky Wolf, who had smashed the good earth, making it dark and cold and wiping the land clean of game. Driver would not listen.
Well, the Sky Wolf had stirred in his sleep that night. A great piece of his glacier-claw broke away, and a wave of slushy water washed over their poor camp. Only four had survived, or five if you counted the child in Dreamer’s belly: Dreamer herself, Mammoth Talker, orphaned Moon Reacher, and poor Stone Shaper, who the hunters had thought was too weak to go with them, and who had found the dead priest’s medicine bag.
Now Shaper, exhausted, hungry, stared into the fragment of flame. He fingered the bits of curved tooth in his bag. ‘I was thinking about our totems,’ he said. ‘Here are the three of us, named for the bare bones of the world, ice and stone and moon – and Mammoth Talker, named for a beast nobody living has seen. Have our totems abandoned us?’
Ice Dreamer shifted, trying to find a less uncomfortable position. ‘Whether they have or not, it is up to us to behave as if it is not so.’
He nodded gravely. ‘Maybe you should be the priest.’
That made her laugh.
Moon Reacher pushed her way into the shelter. ‘Oh, it’s cosy. Not very warm yet. Why are you laughing?’
‘Because we’re alive.’ Dreamer could smell the blood. ‘You caught something.’
With a flourish, Reacher produced a jackrabbit from behind her back and held it up by the ears. The snare still dangled from its leg, and Reacher had broken its neck.
Dreamer leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. ‘You are a great hunter. Come on, let’s get this cooking.’
The three of them worked together. Dreamer quickly detached the animal’s head and sleeved off its skin. Dreamer and Shaper butchered the jackrabbit quickly, and Reacher used her own small obsidian blade to cut the meat fillets finely, so they would cook faster on the small fire.
When the meat was sizzling on a hot stone, Mammoth Talker pushed into the shelter. He let the cold wind in, and they all had to huddle around the fire to make room. ‘I found no prey,’ he growled. ‘But I did find this.’ He dragged in a bundle of wood, dried, old.
They eagerly piled it on the fire. Bark curled, the wood crackled, and smoke began to billow. For the first time that day Dreamer began to feel warm.
‘You can have some of my jackrabbit,’ Reacher said brightly. She handed Talker a leg.
He gnawed it, crunching the delicate bones. ‘And I saw Cowards. Many of them.’
The mood in the shelter immediately turned cold again. Dreamer asked, ‘Are we safe here until morning?’
‘Yes. But listen to me. The Cowards have killed bison. They drove them into a valley… You should see it. Many animals. More bison than Cowards, I think.’
‘What have Cowards and their bison to do with us?’
‘Don’t you see? There is more meat than they can eat, even if every man, woman and child gorges until the meat rots. More than they can carry away. Meat for us. All we have to do is take it.’
‘But it’s the Cowards’ kill,’ Shaper said. ‘They hunted these beasts. We will be scavenging, like the dogs of the prairie.’
Dreamer could see that Talker, the proud hunter, hadn’t allowed himself to think that way. ‘You should applaud me. Not peck at me with these questions, peck, peck, peck. I will sleep outside this hovel.’ He grabbed a handful of Reacher’s jackrabbit fillets, more than his share, and pushed his way out of the shelter.
‘Don’t be a-’ Fool. Dreamer bit back the word before she could say it; it would do far more harm than good.
Talker left a skin flapping loose. Stone Shaper crawled over to shut out the cold.
6
Mammoth Talker woke them all not long after the dawn.
If he had been uncomfortable in the night, huddled alone in the cold protected only by his cloak, he said nothing of it. But Dreamer thought he looked paler, his eyes that bit darker. Even his great strength was not infinite, and he was a fool to waste it on displays of temper.
He pointed with his spear. ‘The kill site is that way. South. Not far. We will leave our stuff here.’
Moon Reacher wasn’t happy. She was a child who in her eight years had seen almost everything taken from her, her whole family destroyed by the glacial flood, and now she had a habit of clinging to what was left.
Dreamer squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t worry, Reacher. We will be fine, our stuff will be safe here.’
Stone Shaper objected too. ‘I will take the medicine bag, and the fire, even so.’
‘By the Wolf’s teeth – fine, fine, just make sure you bring your blades.’ Mammoth Talker hefted his spear. ‘Everybody had a drink and a piss and a shit? Anybody got anything else to say? Then let’s go.’ So they walked south. As soon as they were away from the lee of the rock bluff the wind from the icebound north bit at their backs. The country seemed lifeless, with only dead grass and scrub at their feet. Once Dreamer saw a cloud of dust on the horizon, far to the east. A crowd of large animals – bison, perhaps, or horses, or deer.
Talker was right that it wasn’t far to the Cowards’ kill site. The morning was not much advanced by the time they saw threads of smoke rising, and Dreamer began to hear noises: a general lowing, deep screams of pain, high-pitched human calls.
Confidently Talker led them towards a bluff of layered, eroded rock. It was clear he had done his scouting well. They climbed, and on the feature’s flat top they lay down on their fronts. This was awkward for Dreamer, who tried to favour her belly. They inched forward until they could see.
From here the land sloped downward gently to a valley incised sharply into the ground and littered with shattered rocks. People clustered in knots around fires that burned on both sides of the valley.
The valley itself was dry, as far as Dreamer could see. But it was not empty. The narrowest part of the valley, she was astonished to see, was full of squirming animals.
They were bison, no doubt about that, many of them, heaped up on each other. The living tried to stand on the backs of the dead below, wriggling and tossing their heads. Blood splashed everywhere, and there was a lingering stench of ordure, mixing in the morning air with the smoke from the fires. The air was full of heart-rending bellowing.
She could see where the herd had been driven into the trap. On one side of the valley the dusty ground was churned up by the hooves of stampeding animals, who had evidently crashed through a concealing screen of brush and tumbled down the steep valley wall.
And the hunters worked, Cowards with their strange spiky hair and dense tattoos. As Dreamer watched, a carcass was hauled out of the pit and dragged to a fire, where it was efficiently butchered, the skin slit and dragged away, the limbs detached, the guts spilled, haunches cut off the carcass and hung on racks or thrown straight on the fires. This was going on all around the valley, and the ground was marked by the remains of butchered carcasses, bloody masses that looked as if the animals had been dropped from a height and splashed open.
Some of the Cowards danced for fun around the terrified, furious animals, jabbing with spears, mocking, keeping well back from hooves and horns. There was plenty of meat; there was no need for everybody to work.
Talker murmured, ‘It was like this before dark. It must have been going on all night. Look at them prodding the wretched animals with their stupid little spears. Look how they sprawl on the ground, asleep in the middle of the day.’
Dreamer made a rough count. ‘I see a dozen fires. There must be a hundred hunters here – hunters and their women and children.’
‘The Cowards always hunt in packs,’ Talker said dismissively. ‘Like dogs. They like to stampede their prey. They set fires and holler and chase.’
