Red - Jack Ketchum [2]
The wolf is without family.
A blight upon the pack.
She stands away from him, steps forward and peers into the cave. In a few moments her eyes adjust. The cave is not deep, perhaps four times the length of her. Its walls are so narrow in front and back that she can press the palms of her hands to either side — its middle slightly wider. Its walls are high enough for her to stand in comfort though.
No humans have used this cave. No strewn debris or signs of fire. A rare thing. The cave will do.
She takes hold of the wolf’s forelegs and drags him inside. At his neck wound she kneels and begins slowly to drink him dry.
~ * ~
In a little over two hours she has created a browse-bed in back of the cave. Fresh soft boughs of pine. In another hour she has collected enough bark, fallen branches, driftwood and stones for a fire. She sparks the fire alight, feeds it bark and twigs and then the more substantial wood crossed in stacks of three.
It is time for the wolf.
She unsheathes the knife. Tomorrow she will need to hone the knife but for now it remains up to the task. She turns the wolf on his back and saws through his neck until the huge head detaches from the body. She hacks off the feet.
Slipping the knife inside his skin, pulling it slightly away from the flesh, she cuts a single line from neck to groin and makes a small circular cut around the anus. She hauls the pelt back off the shoulders — her own shoulders straining — hauls it down over the forelegs, adjusts her position to straddle the wolf and pulls the skin further over back and chest, haunches and hind legs until finally the pelt is free.
Then another cut down the middle, again from neck to groin, intersecting the cut around the anus, careful shallow cutting now so as not to burst the organs inside. She parts the ribcage and reaches into the body of the wolf with both hands and pulls his insides out in a single mass and lets them spill across the floor.
She separates the liver, heart and kidneys from the rest and sets them aside. These she will roast immediately. On another day in greater hunger or to feed her family she might have cleaned and consumed the other organs as well but there is plenty of meat for now.
She feeds the flames.
She lifts the pelt and drapes it across an outcropping of rock to dry. Her wounds are throbbing.
She sharpens a long greenwood bough and skewers liver, heart and kidneys and holds them low in the fire to sear, turns them once, then lays them across the rocks to cook more slowly.
There is still the wolf’s carcass to butcher but that can wait. Her body needs food badly. The wolf’s blood is not enough.
She gathers up the organs and throws them down the rockface to the screaming wheeling gulls outside.
~ * ~
Later, night descending, lying on her browse-bed and listening to the crackling fire and the far-off pounding of the waves she feels an uneasy sense of something she can not quite name. Perhaps it is the cave, the emptiness of it. No sounds but these reach her — the fire and the waves. No restlessness of children. No sleep-sounds from First or Second Stolen. No groaning from the Cow.
It has happened so quickly. Though life can often happen quickly in her world. But two nights ago they were eleven. First and Second Stolen, the Cow, the Girl, the Boy with his clouded eye, the Twins, Rabbit, Eartheater, the baby. All of them together in a much larger cave than this one scattered with their belongings, scavenged for and hunted over many hunts. She is alone now.
Except for the spirit of the wolf she is alone. But the wolf died well. As she herself would die. It is not his spirit which disturbs her.
And she has known aloneness before.
What then?
She hears a descending whistling trill outside. Repeated again and again.
An owl, perched somewhere, calling to