Chapter 26: Smoke on the Hunt

By the time the smithy was done, buds were swelling on the scorched maples of the dell, and the sap had stopped running. The dwarves had dug a short tunnel south from the High Adit, then a chamber with ten feet of rock between it and the open air of the cliff face. With a scaffold along the cliff counterbalanced across the gate tower, they’d used Yorvig’s drill to drive air shafts into the chamber. With masonry in the new chamber, they constructed a small but superior smelter, a forge, and a spacious meat-smoking closet like the ones in many a family stonehold back in Deep Cut. Ventilation shafts were cut to provide for each of these necessary functions. Yorvig sacrificed the pelts on which he’d slept all winter for new simple slippers, as their boots were falling apart.

No longer would they need to smelt ore, forge tools, and smoke meat in the danger of the open dell. But meat was in short supply. Only a few strictly rationed pounds remained, and the river was still high from the spring meltwater rushing down the mountainsides. When it rained, it was still snow on the ridge-crests. The vernal spring roared down the boulders of the upper dell, swelling the tailings pond and carrying away some of the embankment.

They had four barrels of weak sap beer left, and yet another few of the birch and maple syrup. It gave them short bursts of energy, but not enough. They needed meat. Yorvig had woken up one morning to find his body bruised in many places, though he did not remember the blows. What’s more, he noticed bruises on the others as well, as if they had all been in some kind of brawl. These worried Yorvig more than the ürsi who had not made themselves known since the destruction in the birch grove. Their own bodies were weakening.

Yorvig spent the morning working in the smithy. The draw from the vents with the power of bellows made the work far easier. They had smelted the last of their hematite ore, creating two thick billets of iron. Now, Yorvig was collecting and working the scraps that remained. He had already fashioned a narrow spike, and he was beating out some other scraps into sheets. Even as he did so, his mind wandered, planning. They had checked the pit trap, and even after all the spring rains, it still stank. They could build another, but it could be destroyed just as easily, wasting their valuable energy.

They needed a more active method of hunting. They needed crossbows. That was why they had smelted the last of their hematite into billets. Human bows had done great injury to the dwarves during their flight from the Kingdom of Laith. In response, the dwarves had learned to forge compact steel crossbows, much easier for dwarven frames to manage than the tall bows of the humans.

After Yorvig had beaten out the scraps, he heated them again in the blazing coals and worked the bellows. His walking stick leaned against the stone wall. He had chiseled out a setting in the top of the root bulb, and there he affixed the spike, securing it with a shim and some pine tar. Next, he encased the root bulb, using hammer to wrap the iron around the bulb and its projecting beak. Next came the chisel to press the iron into the grooves and deformities of the root, reheating the metal as needed, careful to spare the root within. He wrapped a few inches of the neck below the bulb in iron as well, filed the seams, reheated, and quenched it in spring water. The last touches were affixing a butt-plate at the base of the handle and rasping away any rough edges that remained. The iron at the end of the beak he filed to a sharp point.

At last, he hefted the stick-weapon. It most resembled a deformed and elongated version of the war hammers that the guards of Deep Cut wielded, with their flat heads and spiked backs, except this amalgamation had a spike at the top, the sharpened beak, the bulbous club, and a longer handle. It was something between spear and hammer, but it did not just serve the purpose of combat. It was a walking hammer. Over the months his leg had knit together, leaving a puckered scar, but never had the intermittent sense of weakness departed. He could not fully trust the leg. Now, at least, his support doubled as a vicious weapon. The craftsmanship was only adequate, but he was no master smith and he had only scraps of leftover iron from the making of the billets. Mayhap in days to come he could improve upon it. For now, it would serve.

The walking-hammer was a mere warm-up. Yorvig hoped it would steady his hands. His hands felt weaker than they ought. The hunger pangs had gone away, but the weakness was coming. The two billets of iron should provide for two crossbows, but then that was it. Whether they would find more hematite in the claim was another problem for a later time. He hoped so. Extracting ore from limonite took more energy than they had to spare.

The hammer rang within the stone.

“So how do we go about this?” Hobblefoot asked. “I’m no hunter.”

Yorvig wasn’t a hunter either. None of them were. Yorvig ignored the veiled complaint and the look of disdain on Hobblefoot’s face. Sledgefist wore the same expression though he kept his mouth shut, maybe because he didn’t feel like supporting Hobblefoot.

Did they just want to mine until they fell over dead of starvation? Or expect others to take care of them? Yorvig had just about had it. He was no longer strong enough for tolerance. At least Shineboot’s face remained flat.

Worse, they were looking to him for some kind of plan, and like them, he wasn’t a hunter. It was an effort to keep his voice steady and even.

“We need to go up higher on the ridge, away from the river. We’ll head south, all of us. Shineboot and Sledgefist will carry the crossbows.”

“Are you sure you can manage it?” Sledgefist asked, glancing at Yorvig’s leg.

Yorvig ignored the comment. This was not a matter of choice.

“I remember there was a wide valley a few miles downriver. We come to that, and we descend and move toward the river. That way, we don’t leave a scent trail up or downstream. The wind has been from the southwest now for days, and that should aid us. We find cover, and we wait for something to move up and down the game trails along the river.”

“That’s an awful lot of effort just to move downstream.”

“The beasts smell as well as we do,” Yorvig said. “I’m certain of that. And we hunt as we go. Quietly.”

Hobblefoot wasn't wrong. It was an awful lot of effort. But they were out of food, and the river was still high. Though buds had burst on the birches and maples along the river, the streams and rills flowing down the ridges still ran heavy from spring rains and the melts from the higher elevations. The white snowline had slowly crept up the mountains, still seen in patches along the highest promontories and ridges, even as spring advanced in force along the river. Dwarves were a hardy folk, but they needed food to work. Otherwise, their strength would fade, and every day it would be harder to go in search of sustenance.

Carrying only their weapons, empty packs, and any tools they might need for butchering, the four dwarves headed up the steeply rising ridgeline. It was difficult to climb their way up out of the dell; the sides of the mountain were sheer to the west and narrowed dangerously around the vernal stream at the north end. But they picked their way east and north, sometimes using the trees to pull themselves forward and up. It was difficult for Yorvig, but he used his walking hammer to good effect, even hooking branches and rocks above to pull himself onward.

By afternoon, they had crossed over the eastern arm of the dell and halfway up the mountain slopes. Here, there were more game trails running along the sides of the mountain, though they must have been made by hardy beasts. Yorvig was surprised, as he hadn't thought beasts would wander so far up. The mountainsides were a jumble of conifers mixed with some hardwoods, all broken up by projecting rock and open patches of scree. Folds of the ridges hid dense thickets of rhododendron and open groves of old pines, their bases sheltered from the winds. In some of those deep shadows, beds of snow or ice remained untouched by the sun or warmer spring breezes.

Yorvig was trying to calculate their progress and compare it to the memory of his trip upriver the previous year when Shineboot flinched and stopped. Yorvig looked up and saw it too. Halfway up a pine tree clung a massive black beast. It stared at the four dwarves as if curious at their coming. It was nearly the size of all four of them put together.

“What is that?” Sledgefist whispered, crouching.

Yorvig didn’t answer. He had no clue what it was. The beast seemed to grow bored staring at them and began licking at the tree trunk grasped in its heavy clawed paws.

“What’s it doing?” Shineboot asked.

“Looks like it’s eating something?”

“I’d rather we were eating it,” Hobblefoot said. “We might not know its name, but I’m sure it cooks well.”

Shineboot hefted his crossbow. Sledgefist carried the other. They were made from stout tillers of cedar affixed with prods of iron with iron stirrups at the fore, strung with thick twisted sinew from the dead pig. The bolts were fletched and pointed with iron. They knew the crossbows fired true, as they had tested them. They also knew that, unpracticed as they were, they could not hope to hit the beast from such a distance.

“Hobblefoot moves forward with the spear, a crossbow to either side,” Yorvig said. He would come behind with his walking hammer. The beast stopped to watch them as they moved. At first, it just stared. Then, as if they had crossed a line they couldn’t see, it scampered further up the tree to just below the upper branches. It stared down at them in silence. They reached the base of the tree. The beast clung about fifty feet above.

“Hobblefoot, be ready in case it drops.”

Hobblefoot spread his feet for purchase and raised his spear above his head. It was a well-pared cedar haft with an iron-forged head he'd made himself, two wing-lugs at the base.

“I think it was eating those insects.” Shineboot pointed to a swarm of what may have been large ants on the side of the tree where they had first seen the bear. A small meal for a big beast, if it were so.

“Alright,” Yorvig said, looking at Sledgefist and Shineboot. “When you’re ready.”

Shineboot and Sledgfist looked at each other. They had yet to shoot at something living, and they seemed nervous.

“You first,” Sledgefist said. Shineboot sighed, raised the butt of the tiller to his shoulder, and pointed it upward at the rump of the bear.

“Try to hit its chest,” Yorvig said. Ruptured intestines could foul the meat. “But not the sternum.”

Shineboot squinted over at Yorvig.

“Right. Like I’m going to pick and choose,” he muttered. A few moments later, he released the catch and the iron prods sprang. The bolt glanced off a branch twenty feet up and flew wide. The beast twisted around to the far side of the tree trunk. Shineboot cursed and lowered the crossbow, putting his foot in the stirrup and drawing back the string.

“Your turn,” Yorvig said to Sledgefist. His brother grunted and walked to the other side of the tree, stepping back a few yards.

“I’ll need to aim at its back from here. I’ll try for behind the shoulder.”

A few moments later, he pulled the catch.

“Oh!” Sledgefist said. The beast lurched and scrabbled around the tree trunk, climbing even higher and groaning, hiding among the thick topmost branches.

“Did you hit it?” Yorvig couldn’t see.

“I think I got its neck.”

As if in answer, drops of frothy blood landed on the pine needles at their feet.

“Shineboot, can you hit it again?”

Shineboot had loaded another bolt.

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s bleeding pretty heavily,” said Hobblefoot, stepping a few feet back out of the way of the falling drops of blood.

Even from so high, Yorvig could hear huffing gurgles and groans.

“I think we wait,” Sledgefist said.

They had to wait a long time as blood ran down the tree trunk and dropped to congeal among the brown pine needles below. At last, the beast seemed to lose its grip on the trunk. It scraped and grasped at the bark, holding for a little longer with claws. Then its arms went rigid and it fell, breaking thin branches as it plummeted to the ground and landed with a thud.

Hobblefoot prodded it with the end of the spear, but it didn't move, nor did its sides rise with breath. The gurgling had ended. The fur around its neck was matted and red. They all stared at the beast. Yorvig felt pity and triumph mixed. They would eat again, and judging by the size of the beast, they would have hundreds of pounds of meat.

“Should I start a fire?” Sledgefist asked.

“No, we quarter it and carry it back to the claim on a pole. We can be there by dark and put it into the smoker.”

“I could fill my belly with its liver and kidneys raw and now,” Hobblefoot said.

“We all could, but we’ll quarter it and carry it back.”

They argued no further. Using their knives together, they opened up the beast’s hide, gutted and quartered it. It had long fangs and claws, which they also took, as well as its sinews. They would even take the bones. They could boil them or crack them and suck the marrow. The bolt they found entirely embedded within the beast's neck.

They had hung the quarters of meat on a pine pole for transport and filled and tied off the pelt full of organs and bones and other savings when Hobblefoot raised his head and sniffed at the air. Yorvig looked at him and tried to taste the air as well, but his nose was full of the smell of blood and offal.

“What is it?” he asked, fearing the worst.

“Smoke,” Hobblefoot said, frowning.