Chapter 70: THE PRINTS
He had not slept.
Nothing had kept him awake. His body had not asked for sleep.
He had sat against the tree until the wind turned and stopped carrying the smell off the boar. Then he had sat until first grey.
The boy in livery had slept against his bedroll. The small Hearthcat had not. It had been at Aiden’s boot when the wind turned. It was at Aiden’s boot when first grey came up over the lower marches.
The senior was already up.
"You go to the trail at first bell. The apprentice with you. You log what was done with the body. You do not engage whatever did it."
"Sir."
"You will not see it. Whatever took the boar walked off before the blood went cold. You will see the work it did. Log the work."
He looked west, at nothing Aiden could see.
"Then come back. Camp moves at first bell tomorrow. We are not staying out here past the rotation."
Aiden looked at him.
The senior’s face gave him nothing. He did not explain why the second rotation had been cut before it started. He had not explained the first morning either.
But the senior had been writing in the small book under his coat again. That book did not leave the coat, and it was not the rotation’s log. Whatever was moving camp west was on that page, not on the one Aiden’s report went to.
Aiden did not ask.
He went.
He could see the trail from forty paces back. He could see the second growth broken where the boar had come out, the stems snapped off at knee height.
He could see the earth turned up in a long scrape where it had gone down, and the hollow at the end of the scrape that its weight had pressed into the ground. He could see the plate lying in the hollow, and the brighter grey of dawn light coming off it.
The body was not all there.
The boar had been the size of a calf and the weight of two men. The rib cage stood open and empty, the bone picked down. Blood had run out under the plate and gone black in the burnt earth all round it. Flies were on it already, thick, working the wet parts at the edges of the opening.
The smell that had come to him on the wind all night came off it now without any wind at all. What was left inside would not have filled a barrow.
He stood at the edge of the trail with the boy beside him.
He read.
The plate had been worked at along the joints. Not broken. Worked.
Something with teeth small enough to fit between the segments had pulled meat out from under the plate without lifting it. Pulled it out clean, down to the bone, and left the bone in place.
The eater had had time. This was not fast eating.
The body had been opened along the line where Aiden’s blade had gone in, the cut pulled wide, the gut dragged out through it and eaten off the trail.
Whatever ate the body had used the opening he had made and never cut one of its own. It had eaten what it could reach through the gap and along the loosened joint. The plate was still on the trail. Nothing had tried to lift it. It could not get through plate. It had needed a man to open the animal first.
Dew was beading on the underside of the plate, the side that had never been out in weather before.
He crouched at the edge of the trail where the blood had run out and softened the burn earth.
The prints came up clean, and they said it had not eaten alone.
The big print was a canid’s, front paw the size of his hand, four pads forward. The claw marks ahead of the pads pressed deeper than the pads. It had carried its weight onto the toes at every step.
Something had gone up this trail dragging a load. He looked back at the boar and found where the load had come from: the hindquarter was gone off the bone on the far side, cut clean at the joint by teeth, and it was not anywhere on the trail.
He laid two fingers beside the pad mark without touching it, and measured it twice. Marsh’s rule for anything a man would later have to defend.
The second measure matched the first.
Small prints ran beside the big ones, in the space between its front and hind paws, where young ones walked in under the belly. A mother and her young, then.
He counted three sets of the small prints.
Three different shapes. Different sizes. Different gaits. Not the same age.
Or one litter, and the mother had kept them apart because two of them would not have lived beside the third.
The boy was writing. He wrote a long time. Aiden did not read what he wrote.
The tracks came off the trail at the curve and went up through the second growth, thinning as they went.
They thinned because the ground went hard under the second growth, and whatever made them had picked that path for exactly that reason. He could follow them anyway.
They went up onto the upper slope, then east along it, toward the third ridge and the lightning tree.
He stood up.
He had barely lifted his head when he caught the movement on the ridge to the southeast.
He did not turn. He moved his eyes only.
Two men were walking the ridge beyond the burn floor, coats the colour of new burn ground. They moved at the pace of men carrying paper, not tools.
They had short staves and short knives at the belt. They had a satchel between them, slung from one to the other. They were not on Aiden’s trail. They were up on the ridge path, which the rotation was not permitted to walk.
The lead man stopped at the curve of the ridge.
He looked down. Not at Aiden. At the trail.
He held there long enough for Aiden to count to four. He did not lean out for a better angle. He did not call the second man up to look. He already knew what was on the trail.
Then the man looked east, at the lightning tree on the third ridge. He wrote something on a small slate in his free hand, turned to the second man, and they kept walking.
The senior’s hawk crossed above the ridge a half-minute later.
The Vane men did not look at it.
The hawk crossed once and went west and did not come back.
The senior had been told. The hawk had told him.
Aiden did not say anything to the boy.
The boy did not say anything to him.
The Vane men were not going in the rotation book. They were going on the page that did not leave the senior’s coat.
He went back to the prints. They said the same thing they had said the first time.
They walked back to camp.
The senior took the report.
"Body partially consumed. Plate worked through joints, not lifted. Body opened at the knife’s line and eaten from inside the opening along the meat. Tracks on the trail: one large canid print, three smaller of different shapes. Tracks east upslope."
The senior wrote it.
He wrote east. He did not write the third ridge.
"Two Vane charter men on the southeast ridge at the same hour."
"Logged," the senior said. "Not in this book."
"Sir."
"Camp moves west at first bell tomorrow. The rotation’s last day. You will not be on this line again. The line will be on another man’s slate."
He closed the book.
"Eat. Sleep."
Aiden went back to the tree he had spent the night against.
He did not eat. He took the blade out. The boar’s blood had dried on it a day ago and gone brown. He had not cleaned it yet. He cleaned it now.
Miasma came down onto his knee, which put her directly under the hand holding the blade.
He moved his hand. She moved with it. He put it back, and she was there first.
"It’s my knee," he said.
She did not agree. He worked over the top of her, and when the blade was clean she was asleep on it.
Three pup prints. The mother. The tracks going east. The lightning tree on the third ridge, and a house with paper on it. Two Vane charter men on the ridge above the trail with a slate. The senior with a page that does not leave his coat.
Everyone on this ground today read the same prints. Nobody wrote what made them.
The senior won’t, because a name in the rotation book is a name anyone can pull. The Vane men won’t put it on a slate either. A den on ground their house holds paper on is worth more unwritten. I won’t, because I’m the one who opened the boar for it.
A name on a page is a job somebody has to do. The man who wrote it is the man they hand it to.
He finished the blade and put it in his boot.
The boy looked at him then.
"The senior made me log it twice," the boy said. "Same thing, two days apart. He didn’t have me name it either time. Nine years he’s been walking this ground, and there’s no name for it in any book he’s turned in."
"And if you saw it."
The boy thought about that.
"He told me," the boy said, "that if I saw it, I was to put my notebook in my coat, walk back to camp, and not look at it twice."
"And you’d know what to do with the notebook."
"He’d take it. He’d burn the page. He’d write it again without the part that got it burned. He said a page like that finds the man who logged it."
Aiden nodded once.
He did not have a name for what was on the third ridge.
At first bell they put the fire out with earth, rolled the bedrolls, and went west down the road. The senior’s hawk flew ahead of the rotation team the whole way. The trail went onto another man’s slate.
Out past the burn line, on the upper slope, something started moving east.