"D'you have one like that?" Yana asked Sinead as she settled in the sled.
Sinead gave a snort. "No one has Clodagh's cats. They have you."
Yana agreed heartily and pulled the fur up to her face just as Sinead shouted to her lead dog, a big shaggy brindled female she had named Alice B.
There was no one else about as the dogs pulled the sled quickly down the main track of Kilcoole, though some houses showed lights. They were soon out into the forest, and Sinead urged her team to the left, down a long slope and then onto a wide expanse of white. Here and there Yana saw what looked to be the tops of square fence posts jutting up from their winter blanket and wondered if this was where the village grew its crops in the short summer season.
When she saw the leaders suddenly drop off into nothing, she just had time to take a firmer hold on the driving bow before the sled abruptly nose-dived down the steep slope.
They crashed past more of the spired vegetation she had seen on her first ride on Petaybee; then the surface became smooth again. Another one of Petaybee's many rivers? As they then traveled up a slope on the other side, she decided her notion was correct. Frozen bushes shortly gave way to trees, growing thicker as they progressed along the trail Sinead was following. The track led slightly uphill and then dipped downward again, across another clearing and into more forest, with Sinead pulling ever left, toward the slowly brightening eastern sky.
A time or two Yana's sharp eyes caught the glimmer of lights through the trees, and she smelled woodsmoke. On and on the dogs ran, barking now and then, evidently from sheer joy. Sinead would laugh and urge them on.
They had been traveling upward of an hour, in and out of forests, when Sinead called Alice B to a halt by a small shack. More of a lean-to actually, Yana thought, rising from the sled, rather pleased to find that she wasn't as stiff as usual. Nor had cold half crippled her. Was she actually becoming acclimated to this frigid planet? Probably she would become accustomed to the cold just as summer arrived, and by that time any temperature above freezing would roast her.
She helped Sinead unhook the dogs, check their feet, and set up their picket line. Then Sinead swung to her back the pack that had been Yana's cushion on the trip out. She passed a second, smaller pack to Yana. From the sled she took a long bundle, which she unwrapped to display three spears with sharp pointed metal ends and one with a wicked-looking barb and hook that Yana thought might be a harpoon, though she had never seen such an instrument before. Two bags and a large Y-shaped affair, which she could identify as a hefty slingshot, had also been packaged with the weapons.
"Ever use one of these?" Sinead asked, passing over the slingshot.
"I spent much of my childhood in domes where something like this would have been frowned on," Yana said, testing the feel of grip in her hand and the give in the slings.
Sinead gave a snort. "You handle it like you know anyhow."
Yana grinned. "One learns." She took the bag of small stones that Sinead handed over. "What's the other? Your slingshot?"
Sinead hefted the bag. "A variant-matched stones attached to long strings. You get them swinging in circles in opposite directions like this. When you've got enough momentum going, you twirl them overhead until the tension's right, then loose them to tangle the feet of whatever you want to bring down."
"I've seen that sort of thing a time or two. And where you'd least expect it."
Her pack settled, Sinead entered the lean-to and emerged with two sets of snowshoes, handing a pair to Yana. She knelt to attach hers and then they were both ready, Sinead leading the way into the dense forest, only slightly illuminated by the rising sun.
They had traveled about half an hour, Yana judged, when Sinead stopped to kneel by a heavy evergreen bush. Hauling the skirt of branches to one side, she pulled out the oddest-looking wicker contraption Yana had ever seen, with the smaller end turning back inside itself. It held two gray-furred long-eared animals of good size.
"Thank you, friends," Sinead murmured, and then with a deft twist of strong gloved hands she wrung their necks.
Yana was startled. "They weren't dead yet?" she asked, surprised more by that than by Sinead's quick dispatch of them.
Sinead shrugged. "They came to die." She hummed-though Yana was certain she caught the sounds of words, as well-while with quick movements she wound cord from an outside pocket about their hind legs and secured them to a hook protruding from her pack.
Then, continuing her odd humming, she put a handful of pellets in the oddly shaped trap and replaced it under the bush. By then Yana had figured out that the trap let the creatures in through the clever inverted neck, which, apparently, couldn't expand as an exit. Like a fish trap she had once seen, where fish could swim in, but not out.
"You don't trap them dead?" Yana asked when Sinead fell silent. She had the oddest notion that Sinead had been singing some sort of a ritual requiem.
Sinead shook her head. "No, we live-trap. It is our way. But it means I must run the trapline every three, four days, or they would also starve."
Yana shook her head, surprised. "You said it was a good time to die? Were those rabbits waiting here for you to kill them?"
"So it would appear." Then Sinead rose and started off to the left again.
They had emptied ten similar traps, and Yana now carried a share of the catch, when Sinead, holding up her hand for Yana to tread more warily, stole toward a thicket. Parting the branches so carefully that only a few grains of snow fell, she motioned for Yana to look into the small clearing. A large buff-colored reindeer stood there-on three legs, the fourth broken at the knee and hanging at an obscene angle. The deer had been cropping the bushes around it, and the snow had turned to muddy slush where it had trampled the clearing in its food circuit.
Sinead moved back, holding up one gloved hand to indicate Yana was to stay put. She slipped out of her pack, laying it quietly in the snow, and with spear in hand, she crept around the thicket. Yana watched as she disappeared into another portion of the undergrowth. Then she heard a grunt, a whirring noise, and a thunk as the spear found its target, and then an uninhibited crashing of bushes.
"Okay, Yana," Sinead called cheerily, and Yana pushed through the thicket and saw the spear sticking out of the deer's head, right between its eyes. "Grand pelt on this buck," Sinead said, running her hand down the side and back of the dead beast.
"This isn't one of your humane traps, is it?" Yana asked, looking about the clearing as she hunkered down beside the hunter.
"Not a trap, but I've seen does have their young in places like this."
"You're a mighty hunter, Nimrod," Yana went on, observing how much of the spear's metal point had entered the beast's skull. "That was some throw."
"The idea is to cause as little pain as possible. Skull's thinnest right between the eyes. Minute the point hit its brain it was dead. Which it wanted to be with a break like that," Sinead said, pointing to the broken leg. "Hadn't done it but a day or two ago, either. Bone ends not frozen through. 'Mother thing about a head kill is the skin isn't marred. C'mon. We got real work to do now."
To Yana's surprise, Sinead had her help drag the carcass from the little clearing. "Doe might need it come spring, and it don't do to leave death scent around."
They gutted the animal, a procedure Yana found somewhat less distasteful than dissections of alien creatures she had witnessed during her search-and-discover days with company expeditionary parties. Sinead demonstrated the technique with almost ritualistic care and put the offal in a sack she had obviously brought for the need. She kept out the liver.
"Lunch," she said, "but I'll just put the rest of this-which we can use-where nothing can reach it." She hung the sack high on the branch beside the carcass, which was already stiffening with cold. "We'll come back for it. Gotta finish the line."