The Hunter Returns (13 page)
Read The Hunter Returns Online
Authors: David Drake,Jim Kjelgaard
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #Prehistory, #Action & Adventure, #Survival Stories, #General
Club swinging, Hawk sprang to meet him. He sidestepped the wolf’s vicious lunge, and struck with his club. It smashed solidly down on the wolf’s head, but still the monster came on. Hawk struck again and again, beating the wolf with bone-crushing blows. Finally the wolf lay still.
For a moment the dog worried the wolf, then stood quietly while Hawk knelt beside him. He ran his hands over the dog, and brought them away sticky with blood. Certainly the dog had been hurt, but he did not seem to be crippled and could move freely. A wild thing, and powerful, the dog could survive anything except a crippling wound. Hawk considered.
He did not want to leave any evidence of a fight along their escape route. There would certainly be blood stains at the base of the tree and they would not be easy to erase. However, now that they had meat, they should certainly take advantage of it, even though they could not build a fire. With his knife Hawk hacked off both hind quarters from the wolf and had Willow pull them up into the tree by the vine. Safe in their retreat, the humans ate raw meat, while at the base of the tree the dog satisfied his hunger on the remains of the wolf.
The next morning, packing such meat as they could carry, they went on. As they left, Hawk looked back at the tree. Vultures were already circling it; they would soon devour whatever was left of the wolf. But that would not be enough to throw the pursuing hunters off. Only a man or a saber-tooth could kill a dire wolf, and there would be no evidence of tigers around the tree. Should the hunters come this far, they would have all the proof they needed that Hawk and Willow had fled this way.
On the second day, after spending another night in a tree, they completed their great circle and came back to their former camp.
The ashes of their fire were a cold, damp mass, and already green grass was laying a fresh new carpet over the trampled, bare earth. A herd of antelope, grazing in the meadow, danced away. At this evidence that grass-eating creatures had come back to the clearing, Hawk grunted in satisfaction. They had found no game except mammoths elsewhere, but apparently some animals which had moved out of the rest of the country had come back here. He and Willow had done well to return.
But there was still something lacking. Hawk had proved that he could defend their camp against any animal that dared attack it. They were not dealing with animals now, but with men, and should the enemy hunters come they would do so craftily. They would surround the camp, and strike from all sides. Even though Hawk might kill two or three with his superior weapons, he could not destroy them all. If a determined group of humans attacked the camp, they could take it and kill its defenders. He paced nervously back and forth.
There were many places to which he might take Willow, but moving had not proved a happy experience. Food they must have, and as long as they stayed here he could get food. Furthermore, if they moved again they would probably run into other hunters, and just as likely they would be hostile. They would stay here, then, and try to strengthen their defenses. But first came the more immediate needs of fire, food and weapons.
Hawk rebuilt the fire, gathered wood, and with the dog at his side ranged into familiar hunting country. The dog found a track which Hawk identified as that of a deer, and he took a stand where he thought the deer would pass. After a short interval he saw it coming and killed it with the first dart.
Now they had meat, and he could attend to the next most important matter. On their ill-fated venture to the river he had lost half his darts, and must make more at once. Hawk busied himself chipping flint heads, and fashioning dart shafts. On the other side of the fire, while she waited for meat to cook, Willow was contentedly weaving another basket.
Hawk worked on his darts until night, then lay down to sleep. With morning he finished them and went out to hunt again. Certainly there was more game than there had been. Apparently animals needed only a few days of security to make them bold again; creatures which had formerly fled to hide from him were no longer so wary. Hawk considered the significance of that. While the dog ranged into the forest he squatted on a stone, waiting, trying to bring some orderly arrangement out of this new thing he had learned.
Hitherto he had hunted all parts of the country which he could easily reach, which meant all the country within striking distance of the fire, indiscriminately. He had been guided only by the game itself, and had hunted where he thought he would find the most.
Perhaps it would be wise to do things differently, to divide his hunting range into sections and leave one alone while he hunted another intensively. When game grew too scarce wherever he was hunting, he could go into one of the other sections. That way he might assure a constant supply of meat.
After a while the dog came back and sat down at the base of the rock. He had failed to find any game, and let Hawk know it by whining. Hawk leaped from his rock and went on.
Presently bear scent came very strongly to his nostrils and Hawk remembered that, very close to this place, the great cave bear had its home. He circled to go around the cave, then changed his mind and swung closer to it. He had remembered something else. Although in recent years his tribe had traveled mostly in open country, following game herds, it had at times taken shelter in caves when attacked.
That might be his answer, too. If he could get possession of the bear’s cave, and the hunters came, he would not have to meet them on all sides. They could reach him only from the cave’s entrance, and would have to come singly. Hawk crept cautiously down until he could see the cave.
As quietly as he had approached, he slipped away and returned to his fire. He thrust a knotty club into the fire until it blazed, and held it high.
“Come with me,” he told Willow. “We are going to drive the great cave bear from its home.”
DOGS
A vulture flapped slowly into the air as Wolf’s tribe approached. The big bird did not seem particularly frightened. It had no important business to perform on this stretch of plain any longer, so it left as the human staggered in its general direction.
Kar walked at the end of the line of march. Wolf was in the front, but the Chief Hunter could not really be said to be leading the tribe anymore. Wolf was simply walking forward. The tribe had not had any real direction since it left the camp where so many of its members were trampled into bloody muck by the bison herd.
The vulture had no reason to fear them, the Chief Fire-Maker thought dismally. In the shape the humans were now, they would have been hard put to drive the bird off if it had not wanted to go.
Well, the tribe was a little better off than that, but they were not doing well. Only three of the eleven survivors were adult males. Most of the hunters who had not been killed in the attack on the other tribe’s encampment had at least received wounds. Normally the men of the tribe were best able to run and jump to safety when a fresh disaster threatened. Because of the stiffening injuries, many of the hunters were caught by the horns and hooves of the bison while women and children had managed to escape.
Wolf’s tribe now consisted of four women, two juvenile boys, two girls—and Bearpaw, in addition to Wolf and Kar himself. Bearpaw had the only spear. They carried only a few tools instead of bundles of their belongings. Virtually all the tribe’s possessions had been lost in the bison stampede, and the folk were too weak for burdens anyway.
It seemed a lifetime ago that the tribe had abandoned Willow in accordance with long tradition, because her injured leg prevented her from keeping up with healthy people. Now, because of hunger, fatigue, and injuries, scarcely any of the survivors were in better condition than Willow had been when they left her.
The tribe had exiled Hawk at the same time, also because of tradition. Kar wondered if tradition was going to kill them all.
It had stopped raining just before dawn. The sun blazed down with all its fury, sucking water from the sopping soil and vegetation. Walking felt like a bath in springs heated by the fires of the earth. Despite the drenching heat, the Chief Fire-Maker was wracked with occasional bouts of shivering as his tortured body protested at the abuse it had received.
Wolf halted and raised his hand with a flash of his old leadership as Chief Hunter. Kar rose to his full height, peering over the grass heads. He saw nothing, but perhaps Wolf’s keener eyesight had spotted game that the tribe could kill even in its present condition.
“Food!” cried Grassblade from just behind the two hunters at the front of the line. She trotted forward jerkily. Everyone else—even Wolf himself—lunged into the swiftest motion they could manage in their present condition. Kar found himself running like a leaf blown by the wind. His head wobbled from side to side. Tears of exhaustion dribbled from the corners of his eyes.
The others were already bent over the source of the excitement when the Chief Fire-Maker reached them. It was a horse, or at least the barren remains of a horse. Tigers had killed the beast so long ago that the corpse scarcely stank any more. After the saber-toothed cats gorged their fill for two or three days, they had abandoned the kill.
Saber-tooths’ jaws were not well adapted to picking bones, so quite a lot of meat must have remained on the carcass. The jackals and vultures had taken over then. The scavengers pecked and nibbled. The vultures used their long beaks and featherless necks to reach deep into the body cavity, plucking out hard-to-reach scraps. The jackals gnawed at the stiffening tendons and dragged the skeleton apart in their determined efforts to clean every bit of the edible material.
When the humans arrived, the horse had been reduced to scattered bones and a swatch of horsehide lying hair-side down at the site of the kill. Flies buzzed at the tribe’s approach, but even the insects seemed to have stayed in the area out of habit instead of hoping for sustenance. No wonder the vulture had lifted high in the air and disappeared rather than perch nearby in case the humans left.
Three of the women slashed at the hide with hand-axes, worrying it into bits that would fit in their mouths. Cracked and dust-caked though it was, the raw leather could provide the protein that starving bodies demanded. Some of the half-grown children tried to snatch bits from the women. Others pounded at the horsehide with ill-chipped stones of their own.
The fourth woman was Magnolia. She had not been right in the head since her baby starved to death at her breast. Now she kept at one corner of the horsehide and chewed at it. Magnolia held her digging tool, a deer’s cast antler ground to a single sharp tine. Whenever another member of the tribe came too close to her, Magnolia growled deep in her throat and jabbed with the antler.
The two grown men smashed the horse’s big leg bones to get at the tasty, nutritious marrow within. Bearpaw slammed the end of a thighbone against a rock, bellowing with his concentration. Bone splinters flew in all directions.
The Chief Hunter proceeded with more deliberation. Wolf had set the shaft of the other thigh across a head-sized lump of quartz. He struck the bone expertly with his club. The thigh chipped but did not break open. Wolf rotated the shaft a quarter-turn and hit it again. This time the bone tube shattered. Most of the thigh remained in the Chief Hunter’s hands, but the knob flew straight at Kar, who managed to catch it.
Wolf snarled and started to rise, like a wolf whose kill has been snatched by a jackal. He lifted his club. Kar bleated in surprise and stumbled back, still clutching the chunk of bone. The Chief Hunter hunched to lunge after the old man. Then the madness of hunger left Wolf’s eyes and he sat down. “No,” he said heavily. “There is enough for both of us, Kar. You should eat also.”
The Chief Fire-Maker sucked at the salty, incredibly delicious marrow. He did not recall ever before having eaten something that tasted so good. There were other bones besides, too sturdy for the jackals to break apart, and filled with the same wonderful nourishment.
Soon Kar would have enough energy to gather wood and build a fire which would protect the tribe during the night. But first he would suck his belly full of marrow and luxuriate in the feeling that he was not starving to death—for the moment.
Kar smiled in contentment, listening to the pop and crackle of the campfire. Those warm sounds comforted the humans even more than did the flickering light which brightened the sky’s last glow. The constant rain of the previous moon-phase had washed the air clean of dust, so that the scents of earth and growing vegetation were strong and pure.
Because the humans had fallen so far, the scraps of horse carrion provided a feast beyond imagining. The folk of Wolf’s tribe were still hungry, but they were a tribe again. Mothers and children had ignored one another for the past several days in a rivalry of starvation. Now they resumed mutual grooming. People combed through one another’s hair with fingers and bits of bone, straightening tangles and cracking lice between their teeth and fingernails. Magnolia sat apart from the rest, but even she seemed to have relaxed slightly.
Bearpaw sucked thoughtfully at a rib bone cracked lengthwise. Wolf chipped at a hand-axe, trying to convert it into a spearpoint. The flint axe was flawed by a grayish streak of shale, but it was the best stone available for the purpose just now.
Kar knew the Chief Hunter was no spear-maker. Wolf’s big, calloused hands were strong, but they lacked the delicacy necessary to pressure-flake flint into a well-shaped weapon. The important thing was that Wolf was
trying
to improve the tribe’s condition instead of grimly stumbling from disaster to disaster the way he had done for so long.
Stumbling was all the tribe had done since they cast Hawk out of their community. Kar’s lips pursed in concern as he settled another branch carefully on the fire. Throwing wood only scattered the coals. A properly made fire burned clean and bright. It did not shower sparks that threatened the hair of the folk the fire was intended to protect.
Perhaps the tribe’s luck had turned. Perhaps matters now would improve to where they had been before Hawk’s exile—or even better, to the way they had been when Kar was a child and bison were easy to hunt!
They heard the pack clucking and growling among themselves before they saw the beasts. They were plundering dogs, not true dogs, but similar enough in appearance. There were six of them, and they were ambling through the grass in the last twilight.
One of the women wailed in frustration and misery. Bearpaw blinked in surprise. He gathered his spear as the Chief Fire-Maker added more wood to the fire. Wolf drew his club from beneath his waist thong and jumped to his feet.
Wolf snarled. The leader of the plundering dogs snarled back at him. The pack spread out. The animals crouched with their powerful chests close to the ground.
The plundering dogs had short, tawny fur. Their necks and chests were thick-muscled, but their hindquarters were relatively weak. The beasts were not able to run fast enough to capture game of their own—but they didn’t need to. Their huge, bone-crushing jaws enabled them to break up the skeletons that even the much larger dire wolves left at their kill sites.
Under normal circumstances, plundering dogs were not a danger to tribes of human hunters. The beasts were not quick enough to attack a properly armed tribe; and anyway, the bones and hides that attracted the dogs were waste beneath the concern of humans to protect.
Here, though, the remains of the long-dead horse provided the tribe’s first hope of survival in days. Kar’s face scrunched up in frustration like that which had driven the woman to tears. They couldn’t leave this food!
But the Chief Fire-Maker knew they had to leave. The pack would begin snarling over scattered bones and the portions of horsehide at the edge of the firelight. Then they would move closer. As Kar used up the fuel piled within easy reach, the fire would die back to coals—and the humans would face a repetition of the disaster which had occurred the night they slept close to the bogged mammoth.
This time the disaster would be worse and probably final. The plundering dogs were less dangerous enemies than the dire wolves had been, but for all practical purposes the tribe was without weapons. Jaws that could smash a bison thigh bone would rend human flesh with ease. If the tribe had a sufficiency of weapons, a volley of spears would kill or maim most of the small pack before the animals could close.
One thrown spear would only infuriate the remaining dogs, even if it killed; and the tribe’s sole spear was too valuable to throw.
Wolf’s face bore a beastlike expression of its own as he glared at the plundering dogs. All the folk of the tribe were on their feet, clutching anything that could be used as a weapon if the pack rushed them. The tribe’s arsenal was pitifully slight. The women hefted hand-axes, digging tools, and clubs, while the half-grown children hunched with stones and jagged bone splinters in their hands.
The Chief Hunter had his club. Bearpaw held his spear ready. He edged sideways to face a big male dog creeping closer from the edge of the pack’s arc. Kar sighed and dragged out a branch with which he had fed the fire some minutes before. The upper half of the wood blazed brightly, but there was still a comfortable unburned length by which the Chief Fire-Maker could hold his weapon.
The torch
looked
like a dangerous threat. Kar knew well that if a dog had the courage to leap at him despite the torch, the beast would bring down its prey and suffer only minor burns in the process.
The plundering dogs snarled and slunk closer. The sky was still light enough to show the animals as shapes in the grass instead of merely cruel, glinting eyes. Kar glanced at Wolf. In a moment, it was going to be too late for the tribe to attempt to flee—as they
must
do.
The Chief Hunter must have felt the same thing, because he suddenly sagged. “We will leave the rest of the horse to them,” he said loudly. “There’s nothing left anyway.”
Wolf began to back away, staying between the advancing pack and the folk for whom he was responsible. Kar waved his torch furiously and backed also. A big bitch with black markings jumped to her feet. She circled, snarling, to avoid the light and sparks of the torch.
The campfire was now between the Chief Fire-Maker and Wolf. Bearpaw was near the Chief Hunter, facing outward to prevent the pack from closing in from that side. The women and children obeyed Wolf’s order with relief, although they knew that the remaining scraps of carrion were still more meat than they had had for days until they stumbled onto the horse.
One of the boys darted ahead of the tight group. The swift movement drew the attention of the dog which Kar’s torch had driven wide. The boy’s weapon was a sliver of the horse’s foreleg, broken into a dangerous point when one of the tribe searched it for marrow. The bitch may have been more interested in the bone than the youth holding it. Whatever the reason, she rushed in with her huge jaws open.
Kar shouted and hurled his torch at the big dog. He knew as soon as the wood left his hand that he had made a mistake. He was now unarmed, and the campfire separated both the other adult males from the immediate threat.
The burning branch slammed into the bitch’s shoulder, rocking her onto her side with its weight. Her fur ignited in pale, stinking flames. The boy threw up one hand to protect his face and stabbed with the other. The plundering dog rolled to her feet and slammed powerful jaws closed on the boy’s hand and weapon together. There was a black, singed patch on the animal’s hide, but the short fur could not sustain a fire by itself.
The boy screamed as the dog started to drag him away. A woman ran from the tight throng of humans with her hand-axe raised high to rescue her son. The whole pack of plundering dogs moved toward the prey with the speed and grace of water tumbling over a cliff. The leader snapped at Kar. The Chief Fire-Maker shrieked and jumped away, barely avoiding jaws that reeked of carrion and death. Two more of the dogs grasped the mother by the opposite ankle and arm before she could even strike the bitch which held her boy.
