Rudi nodded, and there was a murmur of agreement from the others. The Sioux dismounted and gathered in a murmuring circle around a small fire of sweetgrass; Red Leaf was waving it with an eagle-wing fan. Rudi made the Invoking sign, raised his bow above his head and murmured his own hunter's prayer:
"Forgive us, brothers, and speak well of us to the Guardians; thank you for your gift of life. It won't be wasted. Horned Lord, witness that we take from Your bounty in need, not wantonness. Guide the spirits of those we slay home to the fields of the Land of Summer, where no evil comes, until they are reborn through the Cauldron of Her who is mother to us all. This we ask, knowing that the Hour of the Hunter shall come for us too at the appointed time, for we borrow our bodies from Earth for only a little space, and Earth must be fed."
Then they moved out, bows in hand and hunting lances in the scabbards behind their right elbow; the weapons had seven-foot shafts and a vicious head like a double-edged butcher's tool. Rudi was riding one of Red Leaf's trained buffalo ponies, though Epona and the rest were with the remount herd. The animal was smallish for someone his height, but it had a deep muscular barrel and a bright intelligent eye, and it had done this for five or six seasons. They rode south down the long slope, across the front of the great mass of bison and down its western flank with a thousand-yard wide space on their left, until they were behind the herd and the Choosers rejoined them.
Those were Red Leaf's most experienced hunters, and each of them took a selection of the first-timers under his care; other men worked alone, or in family groups, and there were seventy bows in all. The itancan himself kept his son and his new relatives with him, as well as Frightens Bears and a few others. The older hunters were steady and intent, their faces grave; Rudi took a deep breath and focused, pulling up strength from Earth below and down from Sky above.
They fanned out and walked their horses forward. The noise of the herd grew steadily as they approached it, the grunting of mothers to calves the loudest sound. Rudi blinked as he realized that the deep rumbling beneath it was tens of thousands of ruminant stomachs, then grinned in delight for an instant. That would be a wonder to tell his grandchildren!
"When you get within twenty yards, they start moving away," Red Leaf said.
The chief's recurve came up and he drew smoothly to the ear. The four-edged triangular head slid back through the cutout of the bow until it rested just above his left knuckle. The buffalo ahead of him was a two-year-old male, big and turned dark brown but without the muscled hairy massiveness of the great herd bulls. It sped up a little as his horse approached, giving a look over its shoulder and then moving up to a trot that looked clumsy and lumbering but started to draw away from the hunter.
"So shoot… now!"
The snap of the string against his bracer and the wet solid thunk of the arrowhead merged with each other. Beneath that Rudi could hear the crack of a rib parting under the impact of the steel. The arrow vanished to its fletching against the beast's flank, and a bawl of astonished agony cut across the lowing and stomach-grumble of the great herd. The young bull galloped then, blood fanning from its nose and mouth as it groaned; a thousand yards later it stumbled and went down as its left foreleg collapsed under it.
Rudi came to himself with a start as the other bows snapped, distracted by the primal dance of life and death. A yearling threw its head up at the smell of blood not ten yards away; he clamped his legs on the barrel of his horse, judged the moment…
Snap. The arrow's flight had the sweet inevitability to it, as always when you were going to hit the mark. It struck the buffalo high on the right shoulder and slanted down, vanishing completely within the body cavity. The beast stiffened and raised its tail, started to gather itself for a leap forward and collapsed.
"Kiy-ee-kiy!"
The shout rose from three-score throats as the hunting party signaled their agile ponies up to a gallop, and the alarm ran through the herd like a wave across water-the ambling progress suddenly turning to milling chaos, and then to headlong flight. The sound of its passage changed from a grumble to a roar to a thunder like the hammer of a god striking ten times a second, as twenty thousand tons of weight pounded the hard prairie soil through three hundred thousand hooves. Dust spurted upward, and suddenly he was riding through a mist of it, with great hairy rolling-eyed shapes looming up out of nowhere.
One came close; it had the pink slash on its hump, and he ignored it. Now he was deeper into the rearward fringe of the herd, with the black-brown shaggy humps plunging up and down on either side of him. A head jerked sideways, and the black curved horn missed his foot by inches; his arrow was already on the way, and cracked into the beast's spine. It fell, and another rammed into it from behind and went cartwheeling.
"Kiy-ee-kiy!" Rudi screamed exultantly himself; twitched an arrow out of the quiver and shot again When the recall sounded he coughed dust out of his lungs and spat brown. A swill of water from his canteen came out almost as soil-stained; he could feel the dust gritting between his back teeth. He coughed again, rinsed his mouth once more, then took a long lukewarm swig. The hunt had been brief-he'd spent the same amount of time stalking a single deer in the Cascade forests many a time. And none of the humans had been hurt badly, though Frightens Bears was flushed and embarrassed because Red Leaf had had to pull him out of a tight spot, and his friends were giving him new names-Craps His Pants and Tatonka's Trampoline were popular. The herd had swung well away eastward, and it was slowing as the pursuit ended and the smell of blood fell away.
There were smells aplenty around the Sioux hunting camp with its wagons and bustling scores, and plenty of work left to do. Nothing in either was unduly strange to someone who'd been born among farming folk who also hunted for the pot; Rudi had helped butcher livestock and dress game all his life, and so had his friends.
"Except the scale of the thing," Rudi muttered to himself, as he turned his exhausted pony over to a youth.
The great bodies were scattered back over miles, until they dwindled to black dots against the flower-flecked tawny-green grassland. Horse-drawn sleds of salvaged sheet metal with upturned fronts like toboggans were already at work, dragging the carcasses back. Rudi walked over and joined in as a team of men heaved a thousand-pound body onto one of them, then moved on to the next as a woman led the horses away, leaning into their collars; after he had his breath back it was enjoyable enough work except for the flies. Soon his whole body gleamed with sweat in the hot sun as he labored stripped to his breechclout.
At the camp the bodies were skinned by the women-that seemed to be considered female work among the Lakota, their curved knives flashing with unerring skill-but help in turning the bison from one side to another was appreciated. Then they were hoisted up by the hind legs with hook and rope and chain on tripods of stout wooden poles or metal rods, aided by pulleys at the top. The gutting and cleaning went swiftly with over a hundred hands at work with knife and hatchet, cleaver and bone-saw, but there were over eight hundred of the big beasts.
The first few bison to be broken up were surrounded by rings of hopeful camp-dogs, but there was enough offal to spare that they soon wandered off in a daze of bloated ecstasy. Garbh had quickly established herself as alpha-female and got the best bits; he saw her lying on her back not far from where Edain was working, feet splayed in the air and belly rounded, tongue lolling over her fangs as she made faint moaning sounds.