Tracking the Edge of the Herd

"Pick up your boots, Grietje, or I cut your tallow ration and tie you to the drag-sled," Dirk van Houten barks through the sulfur fog.

His ash spear rattles against his pack frame. He stinks of stale seal grease and sour sweat, standing six paces ahead where the trail narrows between two slabs of black volcanic glass. Beyond him, thirty exhausted refugees trudge through the yellow mist, heads down against the biting cold. If Dirk froze into a solid block of salt, the sled would actually be lighter to drag.

"Tie me to the sled and the wind kills the coal in five breaths," I tell him. My throat tastes like rotten eggs and frost. "Then you can warm your frostbitten toes in an ash heap."

Dirk sneers, showing yellow stumps of teeth, but he does not step closer. Nobody touches the horn. They fear the cold more than they hate my mouth.

I shuffle forward, deliberately dragging my rawhide boots to kick a spray of loose gravel over the print in the ash.

The print is three inches deep. Twice as wide as Dirk’s foot. If the elder sees it, the camp will panic. A panicked line runs blindly into the ravines, drops the sleds, and splits apart in the dark. If the line scatters, I am left alone in the freezing fog with thirty miles of dead crater between me and the wintering caves.

I keep my left arm clamped hard over the bison horn under my sheepskin parka. The horn radiates a steady, tiny heat against my ribs. Through the carved bone quill, a thin thread of blue smoke curls into the collar of my coat. Inside rests the clan's only living spark, fed on sheep tallow, while the dry birch punk I squeezed out of Dirk minutes ago on the slope stays tucked safe in the wool lining of my coat.

"Roelof found fresh dung at the gorge mouth," Dirk mutters, turning back toward the sleds. "A small herd of frost-bison cutting north toward the high shelf. If we catch their drift before dark, we have tallow for the lanterns. Move your legs."

"I am moving them."

"Move them faster."

He stomps ahead, shouting at the women hauling the leather baggage drags. The heavy runners scrape over basalt grit with a sound like grinding teeth.

I let forty paces open between the rear sled and my boots.

It is my usual distance. Too close, and some clumsy porter trips over my heels and knocks the quill loose. Too far, and a sudden downdraft off the rim catches me without the windbreak of the sled covers.

The fissure deepens. The sulfur vents hiss from the black cracks in the stone, spitting plumes of yellow steam that freeze into pale needles before hitting the ground. The sulfur burns my eyes, but it keeps the frost from locking my knees.

My calf muscles throb with every step. My toes went numb two hours ago on the upper ridge. In this cold, hunger is not an empty belly. It is an ache inside the marrow, a slow thieving of whatever warmth the blood has left. My stomach cramps hard, empty since yesterday's ration of dried lichen and boiled sinew.

The migration rounds an elbow in the canyon wall where the basalt twists into a frozen chimney.

The wind drops here, dying behind a wall of volcanic glass. In the sudden quiet, the crunch of my boots sounds loud as snapping bone.

Then the smell hits me.

It does not smell like sulfur. It smells like hot blood.

I stop. My right hand drops to the flint knife at my belt.

Five steps ahead, half-hidden behind a boulder of dark obsidian, steam rises from the frozen gravel.

It is thick, heavy steam. Not the sulfur vapor of the fissure vents, but the rich, greasy vapor of fresh slaughter.

I creep past the edge of the boulder, keeping the horn tucked tight against my side.

A frost-bison yearling lies splayed in the scree.

The carcass is still steaming. The woolly hide has been split down the belly with one clean, savage stroke. The entrails are missing, hauled away in a single sweep. But the beast was not torn by tundra-wolves. A wolf pack leaves shredded skin, scattered guts, and chewed hair across fifty yards of rock.

This kill is neat. Terrifyingly neat.

The beast's massive neck has been snapped backward until the vertebrae splintered through the thick hide. The skull, heavy with double-ridged horns that could impale three men, was crushed like a bird’s egg by a single blunt blow from above.

No hunter in our clan could break a bison's neck with two hands, let alone crack its skull plate. Dirk uses three spears and four men just to bring down a wounded calf.

My gaze drops to the flat basalt slab beside the kill.

Resting on the stone is the animal's right hind femur.

The heavy bone has been split lengthwise. It is a clean, surgical fracture, cracked open from joint to joint to expose the thick cylinder of yellow marrow inside.

The marrow is steaming. Tiny beads of warm fat glisten on the white surface in the freezing air.

Beside the bone, on the dusty frost of the rock slab, sits a handprint.

The palm is pressed into the ash with enough weight to powder the stone underneath. The fingers are long, thick, scarred with old planar burns, ending in broad calluses that dug into the basalt like iron chisels.

The print points toward the carcass. Toward me.

My throat locks tight.

He did not butcher this beast for himself. The prime cuts—the hump meat, the tongue, the thick flank fat—have been carried away up the scree. But he left the marrow.

In the freezing wastes, marrow is life. It does not freeze solid like lean muscle. It is pure fat, dense with fuel that keeps a human engine burning when wood is gone. To crack a femur like this without shattering the bone into shards takes a master's strike, or grip strength beyond anything human.

He cracked it. He scraped the gravel clean. He set it on the slab right where my boots had to pass.

My stomach twists with a vicious jolt of hunger. My body does not care about monsters. My body cares about thirty miles of ice.

I glance back over my shoulder.

The rear sled has already disappeared around the rocky bend. The scrape of their runners is a faint, dying rustle in the sulfur fog. If Dirk catches me eating, he will take the bone and share it among the elders while lecturing me on clan duty.

I drop to one knee beside the slab.

My bare fingers touch the bone. It is still hot. Animal heat radiates into my stiff skin, so sharp it almost stings.

I pull my flint knife and scoop out a thick plug of the marrow.

I shove it into my mouth.

The fat coats my tongue, rich, oily, and intensely salty with fresh blood. It tastes of mountain moss, warm milk, and raw iron. The heat hits my chest like a swallow of hot broth. I swallow before I can think, then scrape out another wedge.

My hands shake as I shovel the fat into my mouth. Warmth rushes through my veins, pushing the dead numbness out of my fingers.

On the third bite, my knife blade clinks against something buried deep inside the marrow cavity.

I pause, wiping grease from my chin with the back of my mitten.

With the tip of the flint, I pry the object loose.

It is a shard of volcanic obsidian, no larger than my thumb. It has been flaked to a razor point on one edge, ground smooth on the other.

Carved into the glassy face is a single mark.

Two curving scratches, sharp and jagged, shaped like the slit pupils of a cat.

A faint vibration runs through the soles of my boots. High above, on the black lip of the canyon rim forty cubits over my head, loose pumice pebbles rattle down the cliff face.

I do not look up. Looking up admits I know he is there.

I scrape the last grease from the hollow bone, slip the obsidian flake into the dry lining of my coat next to the birch punk, and rise to my feet.

The marrow burns hot in my belly, heavy and alive.

The monster is not tracking the herd for meat. He is butchering the herd to leave scraps along my trail.

He is not hunting me like prey.

He is keeping his fire fed.