VIII
Tim Krooguh, when he rode back into camp to fetch dry bowstrings for the herd guards, found his wife, along with Nansee and several other Krooguh women who happened to be pregnant or otherwise incapacitated, congregated in the yurt of his uncle, Chief Dik. They and the bigger ones of the swams of children therein were all engaged in making the murderous wolf baits.
One woman would shave the thinnest possible slivers off one of a pile of bones; another would roll these slivers as tightly as possible without breaking or permanently bending them, always making certain that each end was sharply pointed. Another woman would deftly bind these coils of bone into place with a bit of thread-thin sinew. Then yet another woman dipped them into hot liquid fat and set them aside until they were cooled enough for the children to make each one of them the center of a hand-shaped ball of firmer fat, after which they were taken out and placed in a shaded spot to freeze.
These would be thrown out when wolves were known to be near the herds or prowling about the stockade. The wolves, of course, in their typical canine fashion, would gulp the balls of fat unmasticated, and when body heat and stomach acids had combined to melt the fat and dissolve the restraining bit of sinew, the length of sharp-pointed bone would spring out from its spiral shape, at least lacerating if not, puncturing whatever portion of that wolf’s gut it happened to be in at the time.
Chief Dik lay snoring under a mound of furs and thick blankets. He had been in severer pain than usual this morning and so had been dosed with a stronger than normal analgesic tea which gave him not only cessation of pain but sound sleep in spite of the uproar that filled the yurt.
Mindspeaking on a tight, personal beaming, Tim asked, “You and Nansee, I see here, but where is Mother? Surely she must have found a way to keep from going out to cut trees down.”
“Not this time around,” Bettylou replied, just as silently and privately. “She threw a fit and went tearing out of our yurt last night, when first your father made mention of the day’s work party and the reason for it. But when she got here, your uncle put his foot down … hard, boot, spur and all. I suppose that with all the other chiefs here, he felt that to excuse even his sister on such flimsy grounds would demean him and his authority. However he reasoned, he told her flatly that either she went out with the other sound Krooguh women or he would appoint a surrogate to thrash her until she was of a mind to obey the dictates of both her chief and the subchief who was her husband.
“So Mother went out to the forest, then?” remarked Tim. “Will wonders never cease to occur? Oh, but there will be one hellish fit in our yurt when she gets back, you can bet on it. It’s glad I am that I’m doing herd duty just now, where I’ve only wolves and other such beasts to deal with. I warn you, wife, we’ll none of us hear the end of Mother’s reverses of last night and today until she is with Wind … and, knowing her and her stubbornness, probably not even then.”
“Possibly not,” Bettylou replied to his dire forebodings. “Last night, while she was ranting here after the other chiefs had returned to their own yurts, your uncle limped over to one of the chests, I’m told, and dug through it until he found a device made of iron straps which had long ago been looted from some group of Dirtmen.
“There were several similar things in the Abode of the Righteous, and they were called by the name of ‘scolds’ bridles.’ They are of soft iron and and fitted tightly around the head and jaws by a strong man, then secured with a big lock. While one is in place, the unfortunate wearing it cannot speak, eat or easily drink, since the iron straps prevent the jaws from opening more than fractions of an inch without severe pain.
“Your uncle showed the iron bridle to your mother, explained its purpose and the fitting of it, then told her that he and others would be keeping their ears cocked, and on the very next occasion they chanced to hear her up to another of her screaming tantrums, he would be over with a couple of strong clansmen to fit the bridle to her and would see to it that she wore it until she fainted from hunger, if need be.”
“And how did my uncle’s wives react to this threat against another clanswoman?” asked Tim.
“I was told all that I have repeated by Dohrah, your uncle’s second wife,” Bettylou replied. “And she said that all in the yurt were most pleased, being of the concerted opinion that your mother has gotten away with far too much for far too long.”
Tim rode back toward the herd with a bagful of the wolf baits, a packet of dry bowstrings and a few lumps of beeswax, a bellyful of warm food and the pleasant thought that things were showing the promise of change for the better in the yurt of his birth. He filed away his uncle’s decisions and methods of exacting obedience from an insubordinate relative in his mental “when I am chief” file.
All through the daylight hours, spans of oxen and teams of straining mules dragged back to the campsite the rough-trimmed treetrunks, while the carts made trip after trip alter trip piled high with branches.
After sight and smell of the thoroughly hoof-trampled expanse of half-frozen, fecal-laced mud that one night of sheltering a large proportion of the horse herd had made of the area of the camp inside the palisade, the chiefs had made the decision to erect another palisade adjoining the existing one for the horses and another of a different configuration for the pregnant ewes, certain chosen rams and the best of the younger ewes. Only the milk goats would be kept as before in the confines of the human settlement. It would be up to the cattle to fend off the wolves themselves, any of them that got past the roving herd guards.
Throughout the next night, small fires were kept blazing all along the lines which had been traced by Chief Milo and then cleared of snow and ice. Thus, in the morning, when the still-warm ashes were scraped aside, those narrow stretches of ground were not frozen like all the rest of the topsoil for many miles in every direction, so the digging of the trenches to take the palisade limbers went far more quickly and easily than any of the folk had expected or had had any right to expect at this time of year.
Parties with carts were sent back to the wooded areas to seek out and bring back as much thorny or prickly brush as they could find, and when the palisade stakes had been erected, the ground around them thoroughly soaked and given the time to freeze, the children were set to the task of weaving the brush thickly between and around the stakes as high as they could reach easily, at which point adults took over and continued for as long as the supplies of brush held out.
“Not that the brush will stop those gray devils,” Chief Milo had remarked, and the next snow will mean that we’ll have to fetch back more brush and raise the height of it again. But at least it might serve to slow the wolves down enough to let someone put an arrow into them before they can get at the horses or the sheep.
“As for the cattle and the rest of the sheep, it might be best to drive them all closer to camp, maybe to where we had the horse herd; the herd guards will have an easier life thus, and in the event that that super-pack strikes at the cattle, we—more of us—will be able to get to the herd to help in killing the wolves or driving them off, and do it in much less time than we could now, with the herds way out there.
“Of course,” he confided to the other chiefs gathered in Dik Krooguh’s yurt, “if that pack is big enough we could easily, few as we number, lose every head of stock and have a hard fight to keep even our own lives and a few horses. It has happened before, in past years, to other nomads—Kindred and non-Kindred—and some of the smaller, more isolated Dirtman settlements, too, have been wiped out or at least ruined by one of these huge packs during a hard winter.
“Our warriors and striplings and maiden-archers who are not assigned to the herds had better start steeping in shifts, so that two-thirds of the total numbers of effectives are always available, for those big packs hunt both by day and by night when their bellies are growling, and the only things that will stop them are food, a full blizzard or death.”