Chapter 47: What Would Come for the Meat
The plan was two days old and had been argued into a good shape and Tala broke it in one question on the morning of the hunt.
She had walked the ground with Kharun three times. She had agreed the animal, agreed the season, agreed the cut bank below the second bend where the ground funnelled and a turned animal would have a drop on its left and soft mud on its right. She had not raised a single objection in two days.
Then, at first light on the forty-ninth day, standing on the landing with everything already moving, she said, "What comes for the meat?"
Kharun stopped.
Fourteen hundred kilograms of open carcass, in the heat, at the bottom of a cut bank, for two days.
Every scavenger inside eight kilometres would have it within an hour of the first cut. That was expected and it was manageable, because scavengers are a nuisance and can be driven off by people who outnumber them. But the smell would carry a great deal further than eight kilometres, and there was a `Talrakh` with a range that overlapped theirs who had been seen at ninety metres eleven days ago and had passed at sixty without turning her head, and she was not a nuisance.
And you cannot butcher fourteen hundred kilograms while also defending it.
Leon watched Kharun take about four seconds to accept that the ground he had chosen three times was wrong.
They moved the whole plan to the shallow bar below the landing, forty minutes’ walk from the terrace instead of three hours, which was worse in every way except the one that mattered. Poorer funnel. Softer ground. A longer drive with more chance of losing the animal.
But close enough to put thirty people around a carcass at short notice, and close enough that everything cut could go up to the racks the same afternoon instead of the next morning.
"Move it," Kharun said, and the whole thing changed direction.
***
By the middle of the morning Leon was four hundred metres back with the hauling party, and had been told twice.
He had not argued about it. He was a hundred and ninety-six centimetres of unearned muscle who had never thrown anything at a living creature, and the hunt involved twenty people doing precise things in a precise order in the presence of a two-and-a-half-tonne animal, and the correct place for a man with his qualifications was standing next to a pile of cordage with his mouth shut.
So he stood next to a pile of cordage with his mouth shut and watched what he could see, which was not much, and heard the rest.
The herd was eleven animals on the flat below the bar, doing what they had been doing for a week, which was stripping the bank vegetation down to the stems. The chosen one was an old female at the back with a foreleg that swung wide on every third step, which Fel Longline had spotted four days ago and had been watching since.
The separation took an hour and it worked.
They did not charge anything. Six people moved along the far side at a walk, into the wind, until the herd began to drift; two more closed a gap that the animals had been using; and the old female, who was slow and who was at the back, was slower to drift than the rest and found herself with forty metres of open ground between her and the others without ever having been chased.
Then the herd turned.
Nobody had made it turn. The wind had not shifted. The people on the far side had not moved. One of the animals near the front of the group put its head up, made a sound Leon had heard twice before and had written down as a contact call, and the whole eleven came around a hundred and eighty degrees in about three seconds and went back the way they had come.
Straight over the ground the closing party was standing on.
Leon heard it before he understood it. Four hundred metres away it arrived as a change in the pitch of the ground, and then as shouting, and then as a specific voice shouting one name twice.
He was moving before anybody told him to and Ket had him by the arm within four steps and did not let go.
That was correct and Leon knew it was correct and he stood there with a man half his weight holding him still and hated every part of it.
Pel had been on the inside of the closing pair.
He got out of the line of the herd. He got almost all the way out of it. The animal that reached him was not the biggest and was not aiming at him and did not know he was there; it was a two-tonne creature moving at speed on a soft bank with ten others around it, and its hind foot came down where his lower leg was and rolled.
Not a graze. Nayra used the word for the noise it made, and then, in front of everybody, said: "Both bones. He keeps the leg or he does not."
Both bones, below the knee, and the skin had gone at the front, and by the time Leon got there Tala had already got a strap above it and Bren had his hands where they needed to be and nobody was panicking and everybody was moving very fast.
Aru arrived on his crutches nine minutes later, from four hundred metres, and had to be physically stopped from getting closer.
They carried Pel back to the terrace on a hide before anything else happened, four people, at a pace that Nayra had specified before they left that morning, because she had specified it before they left that morning.
***
An hour after Pel went down the hill on a hide, the hunt continued.
That was the part Leon had not prepared for, and it was the part that told him most about where he was.
Nobody discussed it. Nobody proposed stopping. "Four go back with him," Kharun said. "The rest close up."
The remaining fifteen carried on with a plan that had one fewer pair in the closing group, and the reason was arithmetic, and everybody on that bar had done the arithmetic weeks ago: seven days of food, a run that was eight days late, and one old female with a bad foreleg standing in the open forty metres from her herd.
Leon had thought, in some unexamined place, that a hunt was a thing you abandoned when somebody was hurt.
A hunt is a harvest. You do not abandon a harvest.
***
It took four hours and there is no version of it that is impressive.
They did not bring the animal down. Nothing brings an animal that size down. What they did was open it — two long wounds, low and behind the ribs, made with spears at very short range by people who then got out of the way immediately — and then follow it while it bled.
It went into the shallows in the first ten minutes, which is what a wounded animal does, and after that the whole thing was a matter of staying with it, keeping it from getting back to the herd, and waiting.
It did not roar. It made a sound about every forty seconds that was almost exactly the contact call, and it made it for three hours, and nothing answered.
Leon stood on the bar with the hauling ropes and listened to that for three hours.
Nobody near him looked as though they were enjoying it either. Two of the younger ones were crying by the second hour and were not told to stop. Fel Longline stood at the water’s edge the whole time and did not sit down once.
When it was finally over he waded out to the carcass ahead of everybody, put his hand flat on the flank, and said four words that Leon did not catch and did not ask anybody to repeat.
It died in the water.
Not deep. Chest-deep at the shoulder, on the soft bottom eleven metres out from the bar, in the one place that everybody had spent the morning trying to keep it away from.
The head and the forequarters were on the mud. The hindquarters, which is where the useful mass is on an animal shaped like that, were in the river.
Leon stood on the bar in the late afternoon and did the estimate because it was the only thing he was good for.
Perhaps four hundred kilograms of it was submerged. In water that was moving slowly, at twenty-eight degrees, an hour’s walk downstream of a reach where a nine-metre `Urukar` had held the same three bends since before anybody standing on this bar was born.
They had until dark, and they had thirty people, and they had a rope.
Kharun looked at the water for a long moment and then began giving instructions, and "You two. There. Face down the river." Tala did not give them anything else to do. "You do not help. You watch and you shout."
It was the first time Leon had seen anybody assigned to a job that consisted entirely of being the alarm.