"Eight hundred and twenty-two!" Red Leaf called, as he walked through-the most senior hunters didn't have to do anything more. "Good work! Plenty of pemmican for winter, plenty of hides for tipis and harness and clothes!"
Call it two hundred tons of meat when they're dressed out, and much else of use besides, Rudi thought. Now, that is a good day's work!
The scores of the individual hunters were chalked up on a board hung on one of the wagons. Rudi's had been very respectable-seven- but Red Leaf had gotten fifteen, and his son Three Bears twelve. Edain, listed as Swift Arrow, had scored nine, the highest of all of the newcomers; he'd been using his longbow, possible on horseback when you were shooting directly to the left.
You know, I'd like nothing better than to pass a summer with these folk, Rudi thought. It's a pity that we'll be moving on soon.
The butchering teams worked steadily at their messy, bloody task, stopping only now and then to sharpen tools on whetstones and drink water carried around by youngsters. The area stank and attracted hordes of flies, but everyone was in good humor; there was a lot of teasing between the men and women, some of it as bawdy as anything Mackenzies did, though most of that was in Lakota. The entrails were turned inside out and scraped, put aside for a dozen uses; horns were carefully stacked, to be turned into everything from drinking vessels to strips on the bellies of bows; the valuable sinew that ran down beside the spine was bundled up. Most of the tongues went into barrels, to be salted down as delicacies for months to come.
Others gave the hides a first scraping and then scattered salt on the flesh side and stacked them high in bundles on wagons. The crack. .. crack… of axes on bone sounded as the skulls were split for the brains that would be used to tan the leather. Bones and hooves would make glue, or handles for tools; from what Red Leaf had told him, there was a use for everything, right down to cured stomach linings making good canteens. Of course, that didn't mean that every part of every beast was used, but most were.
The meat itself was sliced into long narrow paper-thin strips; those were dumped into tubs and pulled over to the racks. Others had cut back long shallow trenches in the turf and lit fires in them, low and smoky with sage; over those were erected the knock-down drying racks of wire mesh. The meat was rubbed with salt and powdered herbs and laid carefully in long rows, in the first stage of preservation.
Still other fires were lit for cooking. A number of young calves had been killed inadvertently-mostly knocked down by the near stampede. Those were split open and butterflied and set to grilling over the coals, with a cook using a long-handled brush to slather sauce on them from a keg. Tongue and hump meat went on beside them, and young girls carried around skewers of grilled tongue and kidney and liver. Rudi paused for a moment to take one; the rich taste of the organ meat spurted over his tongue, just short of burning-hot, incomparable when taken fresh in the field like this.
"That's the hunter's share," the girl said. "Seven tatonka! And on your first hunt, too."
"Tasty!" Rudi said, grinning at her; she was about the age of his sister Maud, twelve or so. "And done just right. Have a bite."
She did, then looked at him. Her eyes went a little wider as she took in the scars; the distinctive puckered arrow-marks on his shoulder and lower back, the long white marks of blades on his arms and legs and along the left side of his jaw. It was a remarkable collection for a man his age, and one who wasn't crippled by it either. If you knew anything about the matter, which nearly everyone in a Sioux camp did, it implied that the people who'd given him the scars were mostly worse off-fatally worse.
"You must be a great fighter!"
He took the skewer back and bit off a lump of kidney, chewing with a solemn, considering look, and said:
"Well, I'd be lying if I said no." Then he grinned and winked at her. "But I prefer hunting to fighting, and also dancing and wine and song and talking to pretty girls."
She laughed, flushing to the roots of her ash-blond hair, and dashed away. Rudi tallied on to a rope and helped hoist up another carcass, heaving with half a dozen others as the pulley clattered. Butchering hundreds of tons of buffalo took a lot longer than hunting them. By the time the late-summer sunset came Rudi could feel the tiredness down in his bones, the way you did at the end of the wheat-harvest back home. And the brief shower under nozzles attached to a wagon bearing a water-tank was inexpressibly welcome.
The night-camp was well away from the butchering site, though relays of guards would be posted throughout the hours of darkness around the racks; he could hear the song of the coyotes already, and fainter with distance the deeper, fiercer sound of the lobo packs signaling to one another. The smell might bring bear or lion as well, which was a good reason to get a little distance before you slept. The water and fuel carts were there, but nobody needed a tent tonight.
"That was… interesting," Odard said, as they settled down around Red Leaf's campfire. "It's certainly not like shooting cows, which I thought it might be. Not in the least!"
Airag tasted better after you'd been drinking it for a week or so, Rudi found. It had a dry flavor beneath the first snail-squeezing impression, and it went down pleasantly with plates of hump steak and slices of juicy buffalo tongue. He took a swallow, upending the leather bottle with the bulk of it supported on his right elbow in the local style, and managing to avoid spilling any over his chin. Then he passed it on to Ingolf.
Mathilda sighed. "I'm having a great time. Things are less… complicated here than they are back home."
Fred Thurston nodded, but Virginia Kane thumped him on the shoulder.
Now, they are getting on well indeed.
"No, it ain't," she said. "You're just seeing part of it, and with an outsider's eyes, too."
Rudi sighed agreement, despite Mathilda's glare; still, even if it was disappointing, it was better to shatter the illusion.
"Matti, if someone were a guest at Castle Todenangst, they might think that your life was nothing but balls and hunts and hawking and tournaments and listening to the minstrels."
"This isn't like that," she replied. "This is working life. And even the festivals at home, you're always looking out for some plot or intrigue or conspiracy or something."
Red Leaf was on the other side of the fire from them. He could still hear, and he chuckled:
"Nah, this is more of a working vacation; more interesting than sitting on your horse looking up a cow's ass, at least. And we've got our politics and problems, same as anyone else-and not just the Cutters. You folks haven't been around long enough to get a handle on them, is all. Plus, you're seeing the best time of year. Hunkered down in a blizzard, things can get sorta stressful, nothing but the same faces for weeks on end. I think that's why the old Lakota had a lot of those rules that look silly when you hear about 'em-not looking at your mother-in-law, and that sort of thing."
Rudi finished up the last spoonful of beans and roasted buffalo sirloin tips. He'd put away a lot of it, and felt an impulse to curl up on a warm rock for a week or two.
It's a good thing I'm not prone to constipation, he thought. This diet would bring it on, sure and it would.
Ingolf poured himself a cup of chicory from the tin pot that rested across two stones in the firepit; he could drink it past sundown and not stay awake, which he claimed was the result of overdosing on the stuff in his career as a paid soldier and salvager. Mary was leaning against his shoulder, blinking into the embers of the fire with drowsy contentment while Ritva plucked out a little wandering tune on Odard's lute.
The man from Wisconsin spoke, his voice a deep rumble:
"Yah, I've been to a lot of places from Oregon to the East Coast and back, and I've yet to find one where life is simple. You might think some plow-pusher's is, but you get close enough to see the details and it's got just as much going on beneath the surface as a Bossman's court. Mind you, there are Bossmen and then there are Bossmen. Des Moines-"