Panicked caribou were being pushed from behind and pitching over onto the beasts already below. Loon chose one beast teetering on the brink and threw his spear as hard as he could. It was a very close throw, but downward, so he had to adjust accordingly, and he did: the spear slammed deep into the beast right behind its ribs, and Loon shouted to see it. Quickly all the men cast their spears into the mass of struggling beasts, and the women and children threw rocks at them, and the big beasts thrashed and bled and screamed, the air filled with the smell of their blood and shit and piss. The human screams were as loud as the caribou.
In a matter of twenty or two score heartbeats they had about twenty dead caribou lying at their feet, which was as much as they could deal with at once, or more. It was a bizarre and awful sight, shocking and exciting. Everyone was cast into a kind of blood lust; their mouths ran and their faces were red and pop-eyed. Some of the boys and girls were sent racing to the chute’s eastern end, to drive away any beasts that might run into the trap. Thorn went with them to help them construct a block.
Loon limped up to the top of the little hill overlooking their trap, and saw columns of smoke in the distance, rising from the distant fires of other packs of people. They were all out there doing the same thing. The smoke from every fire was black with burned caribou fat.
Some of them started a fire from their embers, and the kids were sent out to find old caribou dung to add to the fire, as the steppe had so little wood. The rest of them set to breaking down the animals. But before they began, Schist led Loon and Nevermind and Ibex in the performing of the caribou sacrifice, and Thorn tagged along. Never take the first of anything was their constant rule, and so here they took the westernmost body and eviscerated it, then placed a big stone up inside the ribcage, and together carried it down to a deep spot downstream in the nearby river. There they threw the caribou in, chanting the thank you chant, and Thorn threw in some painted stones after the body, asking the caribou to return the following year, and thanking them for this year’s gift of themselves. Then they went back to the kill site and the hard work of breaking the animals apart.
Everyone worked for as long as there was light, and ended up with blood all over them; but all the while there was a fire roaring that allowed them to cook favorite bits of the beasts, and burn the parts they could not use, which were admittedly few; but it helped fuel the fire. And disposing of these parts helped to keep scavengers from descending too hard on them in the night. Even after night fell completely, not long before midnight, they continued by firelight.
First they skinned the beasts, chopping out the useful ligaments and tendons as they went, and eating as they worked, getting into a bit of a frenzy, working without clothes on to avoid all the blood, so that the women looked like they were at their coming-out dances, the men from their hunting initiations, all of them streaked with grease and blood, and euphoric with the sudden ingestion of all the fat and muscle of the beasts. They bathed downstream in the narrow but deep river that ran next to the hill they were working on, immersing themselves briefly in the snowmelt water, knowing that with their bonfire they would be able to warm back up, and would stay warm as they kept on butchering. They set a big night watch to guard the meat, and were faced with so much of it that they deboned the legs so they would have less weight to carry when they left. It was a long hard day and night of work. And the next day and night would be much the same.
Schist and Ibex howled when they came back from making the river gift to the caribou, and Thorn grinned to hear it. Loon saw suddenly that Thorn liked the pack’s ceremonies that did not require his leadership; this was something Loon had not realized before. Loon put that away to think about, and went back to chopping through hip joints, sitting down as he worked to give his bad leg a break, and trying to be careful as he got more tired. He made each cut like it was a test in a trial, or a contest at a festival, judged by something stricter even than Thorn: which was to say pain. For it would be all too easy, with everything so slippery with blood, and every muscle getting tired, to cut oneself on a turned blade; it often happened on this first night of the slaughter. On a journey of twentytwenty days, that treacherous last step. It was easy on this long night to feel how that could happen.
But no one was hungry anymore, indeed they were all stuffed, and the fire was sizzling and cracking and airily roaring, and between the remaining work, the feasting, the dancing, and, for some, the quick slipping off into the night for a spurt, the entire pack was laughing and singing. Groups went down to the stream to strip off and plunge in screaming, rubbing off the blood and guts, splashing each other, and when clean, hiking gingerly back up to the fire to face it and get warmed up again. It always happened this way; they were at this day of the year again, around full moon of the seventh month; the long winter and the hungry spring were over, and they had reached the time when they were fully fed again, and would be eating well for several months to come. There wasn’t another day in the year as giddy as this day, as full of relief. They had made it through another spring.
Loon danced by the bonfire, staying off his bad leg. He fronted the fire and caught its heat, then spun away to laugh at the night, which was very chill, except in the bubble of their fire. But you never feel as warm as when some part of you is still cold.
Sometimes the fire burst with fat exploding. Loon watched all their women, all wearing nothing but skirts, or waist wraps and necklaces, and even knowing every body there, muscle by muscle, move by move, still it was something to see them in the firelight, moving high on the fat in their tummies, swinging around their flat summer breasts, their bodies each known to him curve by curve by curve. His eye was always caught most by whatever seemed at first to make their bodies somehow wrong, but which over time eventually made them right, or made them them, each to her own self. Then too there were the ones who had no flaws or oddities, Sage, Chamois, Thunder, each perfectly proportioned in each her own way.
He danced or sat down from time to time to give the bad leg a break, and wiggled his toes and drummed with the boys for a good long time. Who knew how long these times were, when you were lost in moments that you hoped would go on forever. Although of course the moon always told. Loon drummed away watching Sage dance, and she looked so good his spurt antlered in his wrap, and he stood up and danced with it thwopping side to side, a little pole of pulsing pleasure leading him toward Sage as she danced, her breasts nowhere near as big as they would be in the fall, but even so, their curve and bounce on her ribs as she danced, her arms in the air to left and right of her, her butt dipping and spinning, two big round muscles like the rumps of mountain sheep, known so well to him, their layer of fat hardly there in this month, just pure muscle and the promise of fat, maybe the best look of all; such a long-legged girl, so rangy, so graceful and smooth. Oh yes, Loon would have been very happy to stumble off with Sage into the night, go down by the stream where the chuckle of the water would sing them along and cover their noise as their kissing and rubbing took them away into the realm of helpless cries indulged. It had happened the year before, and this indeed was the thought that was causing his spurt to stand all athrob.
But tonight Sage was not making eye contact with anyone, and was clearly intent to stay in her dance. This was perhaps a response to Hawk as much as to Loon, indeed every man there had a happy eye for Sage, and she by dancing with none of them danced with all of them, which was nice, and appreciated. And no doubt it was the same for the other women, Likes Mash and Chamois and Ducky and Bluejay and Thunder, each of them the favorite perhaps of different men, and Sage by no means the only beauty of the pack’s women, but just one of the sisters. Oh yes their pack had such sisters. One had to be fierce to defend such women from the otters of this world; and yet at the same moment one had that worry, one could recall that all the other packs were similarly blessed, and so one could rest easier. It was a world of beautiful women, and the whole world ran for them. A twenty of packs would soon meet for the eight eight festival, and all the men and women would mingle, everyone in their finest clothes, and there would be fires and dances like this one; there many young men and women, and boys and girls too, would find each other for the first time, members of the proper clans for each other or not, and they would stick together afterward, and the packs of the steppe and the highlands and the canyons to the south would mix and become more related yet again. There were packs from the frozen north who stole each other’s women, it was said at the festivals, but among the packs who lived south of the caribou steppe, from the great salt sea in the west, to the great salt sea in the south, to as far to the east as anyone had been, they were all interrelated, so there was very little thievery of that kind.