Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [43]
Dag prodded the three big bundles with his toe. “Now these,” he said, “are actually my own. Bit surprised to still find them here. Two were sent down from Luthlia after I came home, and the other I picked up about three years back during a winter season I spent patrolling in the far south. This one, I figure for your papa. Go ahead and unroll it.”
Fawn picked apart the stiff, dry rawhide cords and unfolded what appeared to be an enormous wolf skin. “My word, Dag! This thing must have been as big as a horse!”
“Very nearly.”
She frowned. “You can’t tell me that was a natural beast.”
“No. Mud wolf. The very one they found me under at Wolf Ridge, I’m told. My surviving tent-brothers—you’d say brothers-in-law—skinned and tanned it for me. Never had the heart to tell them I didn’t want it. I put it in Stores thinking someone would take it off, but there it’s sat ever since.”
She wondered if this same beast had savaged his left hand. “It would make a rug for our whole parlor, back in West Blue. But it would be rather horrible, knowing how you came by it.”
“I admit I’ve no desire to look at it. Depending on how your papa feels about me by now, he might wish it hadn’t stopped gnawing on me so soon, but on the whole I think I won’t explain its history. The other two are worth a look as well.”
Fawn unfolded the second big pelt, and recoiled. Heavy black leather in a shape altogether too human was scantily covered with long, ratty gray hair; the mask of the thing, which had a manlike look, still had the fanged jaw attached.
“Another mud wolf. Different version. Fast and vicious, and they moved like shadows in the dark. That one for Reed and Rush, I think,” said Dag.
“Dag, that’s evil.” Fawn thought it through. “Good choice.”
Dag chuckled. “Give them something to wonder about, I figure.”
“It’ll give them nightmares, I should imagine!” Or was that, I hope? “Did you kill it?” And for pity’s sake, how?
Dag squinted at the mummified horror. “Probably. If not that one, plenty like it.”
Fawn refolded and bound up both old hides, and undid the third. It was thinner and more supple, and hairless. She unrolled and kept unrolling, her brows rising in astonishment, until fully nine feet of…of whatever it was lay out on the porch floor. The fine leather had a beautiful pattern, almost like snakeskin magnified, and gleamed smoothly under her hand, bronze green shading to rich red-brown. For all that the animal was as long as a horse, it seemed to have had short, stubby legs; wicked black claws still dangled from their ends. The jaws of this one, too, had been set back in place after tanning, and were frankly unbelievable, like a stretched-out bear trap made of teeth.
“What kind of malice made that? And what poor creature was it made from?”
“Not a mud-man at all. It’s an alligator—a southern swamp lizard. A real, natural animal. We think. Unless one of our ancestor-mages got really drunk. Malices do not, thank all the absent gods, emerge too often so far south of the Dead Lake, but what happens when they do get hold of these fellows is scarcely to be imagined. The southern wetlands are one of the places you want to do your patrolling in winter, because cold makes the alligators, and the alligator-men, sluggish. That one we just caught on an ordinary hunting and trapping run, though.”
“Ordinary? It looks as if it could eat a man in two bites!”
“They’re a danger along the shores of the channels. They lie in the water like logs, but they can move fast when they want. They clamp onto their prey and drag it down into the water to drown, and rip it up later, after it rots a bit.” He bent and ran his fingers along the shiny hide. “I should think your papa and Whit could both get a pair of boots out of this one, and belts and something for your mama as well.”
“Dag,” said Fawn curiously, “have you ever seen the sea?”
“Oh, yeah, couple of times. The