The mountain deer’s antlers spanned up to twelve feet, its dark pelt striped with ash and blood.
It charged, eyes black and glassy, hooves and dewclaws biting into the earth.
Idan’s sheep scattered, their bells jangling in panicked chords.
He, however, stepped forward, a broad shadow against the drizzle of rain and flickering light, and met the charge with a twitch to his lips.
A spear sang from his hands, in a clean arc, burying itself beneath the beast’s shoulder. Even so, the animal slammed into Idan, but his heft and will held.
Muscle and sinew clenched as he whispered an ancient Sacran prayer of sacrifice and drove the weapon home.
The practiced shove of wrist and hip that made the giant deer fold over.
It died with a roar, followed by a short, ragged exhale, as it fell with a heavy thud.
Idan stood over the carcass, chest heaving, hands blood-stained. The spear came free with a wet suck.
The shepherd-warrior cleaned its blade on grass, heaved the beast’s body into position, and dragged it up the mountain with its antlers.
He moved toward the thin smear of smoke marking his hut.
His apprentice, Lago, slept in a straw pallet by the barn’s far wall.
His face was loose and young, hair wild and mouth open in the soft, unguarded peace of sleep.
Idan threw the carcass onto the ground in front of the shack, the thud sparking the outdoor fire in front of it into a bright flare.
He set a cleaver to the beast’s flank with the steady movements of a man who’d stripped leather many times before.
He worked in silence, the only sounds the knife’s steel clang and the wind’s constant complaint through the trees.
The pelt came off in one piece, and he flayed and sliced off all the fat.
Wrapping the entrails in the skin, he strode towards the ocean beyond.
He made his way to a small beach where he threw the off-cuts to the gulls and washed the hide clean, rubbing it down with sea salt.
He returned to his hut, where he hung the beast’s pelage to dry on a wooden frame outside the barn, nailing it fast with crude iron spikes.
The hide shuddered in the wind as the skies above caught the last of the dusk light.
Then he worked on its flesh, carving it up, butchering it with skill.
He salted three legs and the remainder of the flank, wrapped them in parchment, and took them to the cool house by the stream.
Where he placed them under rocks that bled with ice from a fjord deep below the earth.
He returned to the fire to roast his dinner.
Steam and fat hissing into the flames, the scent filling the air.
When Lago woke, he first spotted the skin, draped across a frame of stilted wood, shaking in a wind that wanted to take it.
Then his eyes fell on the carcass, and his eyes dilated.
‘Caught a big’un,Khan?’
I did. You’ll take back what’s left of the leg tonight, a shoulder, and your favorite tendermeats for your family,Idan grunted into Lago’s mind.
