The pig was soon cooking over a number of small and relatively smokeless fires. Two Hawks ate hungrily and felt the strength flow back into him. The meat was strong and rank and only half- cooked, but he had no trouble wolfing it down. Ilmika Thorrsstein, however, seemed to have a delicate stomach. She refused the large chunk offered her. She smiled when she rejected it, but when she turned her face away and thought herself unseen, she could not repress a grimace of disgust. Then, as she watched the others eat, she seemed to have a change of mind—or of appetite. She took a small book from her bag and leafed through it. Two Hawks, looking over her shoulder, saw what appeared to be a calendar. It was not marked with Arabic numerals, however, but with numerals derived from the Greek alphabet. There were several that resembled runic symbols.
She asked Dzikohses a question. He came over and pointed at the second square in a row of seven figures. So, Two Hawks thought, they had a seven-day week. Ilmika smiled at this and said something to Dzikohses. He handed her the same piece he had offered before, and this time she ate.
Two Hawks could only deduce from this that pork was tabu for her except on certain days of the week.
“Curioser and curioser,” he muttered.
O’Brien said, “What?” but Two Hawks did not answer. To try to explain the whole business would only confuse and perhaps frighten O’Brien. The sergeant looked too happy at the moment for Two Hawks to upset him further. Poor O’Brien, unused to such long hard hikes and so little food, had been ready to keel over. Now he was even humming.
O’Brien patted his stomach, belched, and said, “Man, I feel great! If only I could get a week’s sleep now, I’d be a new man; I could lick my weight in Kilkenny cats.”
Several days later, they were still climbing along the lower parts of the mountains. Occasionally, they went higher to traverse a pass which would lead them down again. And then they were suddenly faced with a situation in which they had to use their firearms, noise or no noise. They had come down a mountain into a valley about six miles wide and twelve long. Part of the valley was wooded; the rest was a grassy plain and a marsh. Duck honks came from the marsh; a fox chased a hare not twenty feet in front of them. A big brown bear stood at the top of a small hill and watched them for a while before it turned and went back down the other side of the hill. The party crossed a band of trees splitting the valley in half and began to go across the wide plain. At that moment, they heard a loud bellow to their right. They whirled, their guns ready, and saw the great bull trotting towards them.
O’Brien, standing by Two Hawks, said, “Jesus, what a monster!”
The bull stood at least seven feet high at the shoulder; it was a glossy dark brown and had horns with a spread of at least ten feet.
“An aurochs!” Two Hawks said. He gripped his gun with the eery feeling that it was the only solid thing in the universe. He was not so frightened by the enormousness of the beast itself, since there was enough firepower in the group to knock down even this huge creature. What frightened him was that he felt as if he had been thrust back into the dawn of mankind. This was the kind of creature that early man had faced. Then he reassured himself that this was also a creature that man had wiped off the earth. Moreover, it, or something like it, was not so ancient after all. It had survived, though not in so great a form, up to and during World War I in the forests of Germany and Poland.
The aurochs bellowed and trotted towards them. Several times, it halted, threw up its head, and sniffed the air. Its black eyes gleamed in the sunlight, but whether it was premeditated murder or curiosity that shone there was not yet apparent. Fifty yards behind him, several cows thrust their lesser horned heads from behind bushes. Each of these looked large enough to take care of herself quite well, but they may have been hanging back to guard their calves. Two Hawks did not see any young and doubted that this was calving season. It did not matter whether or not the bull was protecting calves. His territory was being challenged, and he was intent on making sure that they intruded no longer.
Dzikohses said something to the men, then stepped out from them and shouted. The bull slowed down, stopped, and glared about him. Dzikohses shouted again. The aurochs wheeled and raced away and Two Hawks breathed easier. Then, as if driven by whim or as if he had caught a new scent which steered him around to face them again, he stopped and wheeled. The great head lowered; a huge hoof pawed the ground. Another vast bellow, and the bull was charging toward them. The ground trembled under the impact of hooves bearing a thousand pounds or more.
Dzikohses shouted more orders. His men spread out so that they could shoot at an angle at the aurochs and hit him in the body. The aurochs was not confused by this maneuver; he had evidently chosen the two Americans and Ilmika as his target. They had been standing in the center of the group and when the others went to left and right, they had stayed in the same spot as when they first saw the bull.
Two Hawks glanced at O’Brien and Ilmika and saw that they were not about to break and run. Ilmika was holding her revolver, its barrel resting on her left arm for steadiness. O’Brien did not have a weapon, but he had taken position just to the right of Two Hawks. He was poised to run.
“I’ll go one way; you go the other,” he said. “Maybe it won’t know which one to take after.”
By then the two muzzle-loaders and the rifles were firing. Ka’hnya loosed an arrow; it plunged into the right side of the beast just behind its shoulder. This did not stop it or even make it stagger. Though it shook at the impact of bullets and arrow, it kept on with unchecked speed. Ilmika began firing with no apparent effect. If her .40 caliber bullets struck the bull, they were hitting the thick bar of bone between the horns or glancing off the massive and tough neck muscles. Two Hawks told her to quit wasting her ammunition, but she did not even glance at him. Coolly, she kept on firing.
Then another arrow plunged into the bull, this time, whether by accident or design, into his right leg. He fell to one side and skidded on the grass, his inertia making him slide right up to Two Hawks’ feet. Two Hawks looked down at the great head and the enormous black eye glaring at him. The long eyelashes reminded him of a girl he had known in Syracuse—later he wondered why that irrelevant thought occurred to him in such a dangerous situation. Then he stepped up to put a bullet from the .32 through the eye. The other men closed in and shot into the body. It shuddered under the impact; by now blood was spurting from at least a dozen wounds. Nevertheless, so driving was its vitality, it started to rise again. Despite the crippling arrow in its leg, it managed to get on to all four legs.
Two Hawks placed the muzzle of his automatic only an inch from the eye—he had to raise the barrel upwards—and fired. The eye exploded and left an empty socket. In the midst of a roar, the auroch collapsed. He tried again to get up, then fell back on his side, gave a feeble bellow, and died.
Only then did Two Hawks start shaking. He thought he was going to get sick but the urge to upchuck died away and he was not forced to disgrace himself.
Dzikohses made sure that the bull was dead by cutting its throat. He arose with bloody knife and forgot about the bull for the time being. He looked all around the valley, worried that the sounds of the guns might bring unwelcome company. Two Hawks wanted to ask him whom he might expect to find in this remote place but decided against it. He not only was not sure that he would be understood; he thought it might be to his advantage if their captors thought they could speak freely in his presence. Actually, they were not too self-deluded. He comprehended only about one- sixteenth of what they said. But he was learning.