by Philip Smith
“Oh, whatever,” Paige said, eyes rolling. “You know you’d love to spend all day, every day with just Mother.”
“Well, you’re not wrong!” he said with a grin. “Now, we’d better get that buck so we can get back before the Burgess’s meet and decide their chief is too tardy to keep around!”
They shook themselves free of the myriad of colored leaves, the first the season had to offer. Paige stooped and tucked her trousers back into the top of her moccasin, tying the leather laces tight. She snatched up all the arrows that had fallen out of her belt quiver, taking the time to nock one to her bow. Then, quiet as a mouse, she jogged into the trees.
Because the leaves were still mostly on the trees, it wasn’t hard to find the blood trail down into a deep gully. Paige darted around the mossy trunks and boulders as she descended into the hollow. Her father kept up easily behind her.
The forest she’d grown up calling home, commonly referred to as “the Wild,” was beautiful this time of year. From the time the sun rose in the west every morning till the two moons danced in the sky together at night, the forest was alive with the chatter of all manner of creatures. Paige loved taking walks in cool, early autumn with both her father and mother. The crisp air she would breathe in every dawn would fill her lungs with a sense of vigor that no other season could match.
“Here!” her father called, touching blood on a rock at the bottom of the gully. “He can’t be far now.”
Paige ran up beside him and looked at the trail. It wound around the bottom of the ravine and over a small rise. They jogged to the top of the incline and looked down into a gully filled with fallen leaves, remnants of green poking up from patches in the earth where the blades of sweet grass seemed to be begging for one more day of spring.
The buck lay on one such patch of grass, heaving for air. Paige felt a pang of guilt. She enjoyed hunting, even if most in the village would have considered it a chore. But there was nothing sporting about a wounded animal.
“Finish him quick, darling,” her father said softly, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “End his suffering.”
Paige nodded and knelt down beside the wounded buck. It didn’t even try to rise. She drew her knife from its sheath on her belt and covered the deer’s eyes with her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
A quick movement and a moment later, the buck’s eyes closed for good. Paige laid his majestic head down in the damp, dewy grass where he had spent his final moments. She started to brush away a tear before it could escape her eye, but her father caught her hand.
“Let it fall,” her father encouraged. “There is no shame.”
His eyes were filled with love and kindness, and though she felt some sorrow in her heart, she couldn’t help but notice a warmth spread inside her chest.
“I should have been a better shot,” she said mournfully. “I don’t feel bad about taking his life. Just in making him suffer.”
“And that, my brave, little Alwasu,” her father said, using her elvish name, “is the difference between the hunter and the butcher.”
Paige nodded as her papa placed his gloved hand reassuringly on her face, his palm warm against her cold cheek. She cleared her throat, put a hand on the deer and whispered a prayer to the Creator. She thanked Him for the success of the hunt and asked His blessings on the life they could now sustain, thanks to life sacrificed. She grabbed one antler while her father grabbed the other, and together they pulled the deer over to a tree at the far end of the gully.
“Let’s get the nasty part over with,” her papa said, dropping his pack on the ground and unclasping the leather buckles to open the top flap. He removed several different-sized knives from the pack and placed them on the ground, tossing Paige a small hand shovel and a length of rope. She secured the latter around the buck’s neck while her father began laying out large pieces of linen cheesecloth.
Paige had done this enough times to know what was expected of her. While her father strung up the kill using the tree as a gallows, she took the shovel off a few paces and dug a forearm-deep hole in the earth. As soon as she had a sizeable hole dug, her father came over with a linen bag which now contained all the inner parts of the deer. Paige wrinkled her nose at the smell but helped her father bury them without complaint.
“Well, that was painless,” Papa said, grinning as he wiped his blade off on his doublet.
“Mother’s going to murder you if you get any more bloodstains on your shirts,” Paige scolded.
Her father shrugged. “Being the chief means I can negotiate a trade deal with the weavers in the Kinnebrek for a new shipment of linen, right?” He winked.
Paige rolled her eyes. Papa didn’t have time for such nonsense, even if he had been serious. Luckily for Paige, though, demand on the chief’s time had lessened as the harvest drew to a close, so they got to spend more moments in the woods than they normally did.
The princess took out her knife and began helping her father skin their prize, peeling the hide off the carcass, moving her blade with deft strokes. Her fingertips slid between the animal’s fat and the smooth, pearly membrane of his hide. She spread her fingers and loosened the shaggy coat, inch by inch, until it lay in a pile on the forest floor.
With both of them working, it didn’t take long to get the hide off, folded, and wrapped in a piece of linen. Paige’s father wasted no time getting the backstrap cut from along the spine, then reaching inside the ribcage and pulling the tenderloins out by hand.
“We’ll give the rest to the market, I think,” he said, tossing the second tenderloin to Paige, who began wrapping them in cloth. “But I’m afraid I love your mother’s backstrap and butterfly steaks too much to let these go!”
The chieftain carved up the flanks into shanks and hams, each wrapped in the clean cloth and placed in his pack. With most of the meat carved, Paige’s papa dropped the carcass from the tree and dragged it over by the filled-in waste pile. He took the head from the beast to bring with the hide to the tanner in the village. Stepping back from the remainder of the skeleton, he said one more prayer to the Creator as he began slipping his pack on.
“That will make a fine meal for a few of our forest folk,” he said. He wiped his last knife clean on his shirt, despite Paige’s scolding look.
She unstrung her bow and slipped it into a special loop on her quiver belt. She adjusted the belt to sling the whole lot over her shoulder, grabbed the buck’s head from her father and carried it back up the gully by the antler. Her father trekked behind her, hefting the heavy pack effortlessly along with him.
The walk back to their village was an easy stroll, all things considered. One of the benefits of being this deep into the Wild was the plentiful game within an hour’s hike from their house in Kapernaum.
“You pick out what you’re wearing to the feast tomorrow?” Papa asked, falling into step with her.
“I think mother made Olivian and me dresses. She’s just been trying to keep them a surprise.”
“That sounds like her. What gave it away?”
“The smile.”
“Ah, yes. Gets her every time.”
“You think maybe it’s an elf thing? It’s like she has so much excitement when she’s planning a surprise, it leaks all over her face when she tries to hide it. Which makes it even worse!”
“You’ve no idea. I knew we were going to have you three weeks before she told me!”
“Ha! Sounds about right. I still will never understand how you ended up getting so lucky on that one,” Paige teased.
Her father’s expression was amused. “It’s a long story.” He chuckled softly. Paige leaned over and pushed against him playfully, knocking him slightly off balance. She knew all about their beautiful woodland wedding they’d had in the mists of the Wild, their arrival in Kapernaum, and the stories of how they helped build it into the village it was today. But the one story she had yet to hear was how her father and her mother met. It was a story every person in
the village had tried to pry out of them at some point, considering that it was unheard of for a human to marry an elf. But Papa always winked and said, “It’s a long story,” and left it at that.
Paige tucked away a strand of hair and felt the noticeable taper of her ear. She hadn’t given it much thought when she was younger, but the older she got, the more curious she became about that untold story. By the time she’d been born, everyone in Kapernaum had just gotten used to the fact that their chieftain was married to an elf. Apparently it had caused quite a stir at first, not only in Kapernaum, but in the villages in the surrounding forest as well. An elf hadn’t been seen in the Wild for nearly two hundred years, according to the elderly citizens. News of one not only appearing but marrying a human had spread through the mountains faster than a lightning-strike forest fire.
“Try and act surprised for her sake, okay?” her father encouraged, moving along with the conversation. “I know she’s worked hard on both those dresses for the last two weeks.”
“Oh, I will. Don’t worry,” Paige assured as they came out of the forest and onto a well-worn path heading southeast.
The jagged pathway lay covered in a mosaic of fallen leaves. They plodded downhill with the trail as they moved into an area of the forest that became thinner with larger trees spaced farther apart from one another. Birds called as they darted in and out of the canopy, their chipper songs tempered only by the muffled stillness of the forest around them until they heard the faint sound of steel ringing when, somewhere around the next bend in the road, a hammer struck an anvil. She smelled the woodsmoke of a hundred fires going. Her heart warmed as they rounded the last turn of the pathway.
“Smells like the baker hasn’t been wasting his morning.” Papa grinned, inhaling deeply as he quickened their pace.
Kapernaum’s market bustled ahead. It was an area of tents and smaller shelters set up underneath the village for commerce and bartering among themselves and any neighboring traders that happened to be traveling through. Bright colored canvases and hand-painted signs swayed in the whispering breeze. The smell of baking breads and fresh candies wafted over Paige in the sharp early autumn air. She inhaled deeply, memorizing every note of sweetness.
Above the makeshift tent city, the village’s two-hundred or so buildings sat nestled in the high canopy overhead--a small city of treehouses, platforms and rope bridges that the locals referred to as “Up Top.” Most of the buildings encircled the living tree’s trunk, not unlike a mud wasps’ nest on a blade of grass. The siding and roof shingles were almost entirely cut from cedar, due to its rot resistance and natural red-toned beauty.
Initially, the Alatarians had chosen the area for the very presence of the giant, red-wooded Elder Trees; their fifteen- to twenty-foot wide trunks and monstrous branches provided both ample protection from the elements as well as a solid base to construct their platforms and dwellings. The trees were said to have been as old as Eirensgarth itself, having stood the test of time from the last two ages into this, the third age, strong and unmoving as time itself seemed to be in the Wild.
No matter how many times she walked the village, Paige still marveled at its beauty and unique charm that none of the surrounding villages had. It was the Wild’s best kept secret from the outside world, her Papa always said, and Paige was glad of it.
“Alaire!”
Paige turned to see a tall man with broad shoulders stride towards them, heavy fur boots thudding against the ground like the hooves of a draft horse plowing the field. The man’s bald head glistened in the sun, but his thick beard was almost long enough to tuck into his belt. He wore a coat made of sheepskin with the sleeves ripped off to reveal his bulging biceps, rippled and riddled with zoomorphic tattoos. A wide, upturned collar barely covered his large, cherry-red ears from the frosty morning. His linen trousers were carelessly tucked into his thick, black fur-lined boots. An elegant bow nearly twice as long as Paige’s own was strung and slung over his barrel chest, a quiver of oak arrows dangling by his side. He smiled warmly at Paige’s papa, bright blue eyes sparkling under dark, thick eyebrows.
“Gerik, the mighty Rabbit Slayer returns! It’s good to see you, old friend! I don’t recall gazing on that beautiful beard of yours in this village for at least a week!” Papa extended both arms in an embrace. Gerik grasped her papa by the shoulders and smacked his arm good-naturedly, a large, toothy grin poking out from his unkempt facial hair.
“You old fox, how have you been!?” The men touched their foreheads together, one hand grasping the back of the other’s neck in the traditional embrace of the Alatarian warriors. Paige smiled. Gerik was one of her father’s oldest friends and as close to an uncle as Paige had ever known. He was a hunter by trade, specializing in trapping the Longbottom Hares that roamed the depths of the Wild and the mountains beyond it. Papa always teased Uncle Gerik for being “the Bane of Bunnies,” but hunting a thirty-two pound hare that could outrun a horse was no small feat.
“I’ve been fortunate, you ol’ rapscallion!” Papa responded, dropping his pack to the ground and opening the top flap to show off their morning kill. “This was Paige’s first kill this season.”
“Only her first?” the giant hunter said, feigning surprise and scrunching up his wild eyebrows at Paige. “Losing your touch?”
“This coming from the man I outshot fair and square at our last hunt together,” she said, jutting her chin out in similar mockery. “If I remember correctly, I’m the one who downed that Longbottom in Culver’s gulley last spring, not you!”
“Oh, you’re living in the past, kid!” Uncle Gerik poked the bridge of Paige’s small, slightly upturned nose she’d inherited from her father. She crossed her wide blue eyes to humor him, then laughed and swung a playful upper cut at his long bearded jaw. He caught her fist in one of his massive hands, powerful tattooed fingers curling around like an iron cage. He pulled her in and spun her around into a bear hug.
“It is good to see you, Alwasu.”
“It’s good to see you too, Uncle Gerik!” Paige grinned and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. He spun her round, affectionately patting her rosy, frost-nipped cheek.
“Ah, Alaire, how are you keeping the young lads away from the fine filly you’ve raised?”
“Ha! More like an ornery bobcat, I’d say!” Papa teased, earning him an eye-roll from his youngest daughter.
“Aye, hunts like one too, it would seem!”
“Speaking of, where are your hares, Gerik? Haven’t lost your touch, have you?”
Uncle Gerik frowned, a hundred crinkles etched into his bald forehead. “Not a lick of luck all week, mate.”
“No! Truly?”
“Not even a trail.” Gerik spat. “I went up and down the eastern forest and couldn’t find anything. Ran into old Hob. You remember ol’ Hob, don’t you? That beefy guy with the stained beard, always smelled like sour cheese? Anyways, he told me he hasn’t seen any Longys in nearly two weeks. Said three weeks ago they were all over the place, and then they vanished!”
“That doesn't sound normal, does it? You think they all migrated?”
“It isn’t. They’re hibernators—they should be out fattening up for at least two more full moons before catching a long nap over the winter months!”
Papa stroked his scruffy chin thoughtfully. “Only thing I can think of is if those miners from the northeast had strayed into the Wild for hunting again. They usually honor the treaty, but if meat is getting scarce in the Ohlmars, they may be wandering down from the mountains now.”
“I haven’t seen a miner in nearly five years, myself. I didn’t even know they still ran mines anymore,” Gerik said, poking into Papa’s rucksack.
“Neither have I,” Papa remarked. “I wonder how that town fared after the last two blizzards. I can’t even remember what they called that village, can you?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.” Gerik shrugged. “All I know is something’s got my Longys spooked and that’s bad for business.”
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“Ger, I’m sorry,” Papa said. “Swing by and eat with us tonight?”
“Is Elennas cooking that backstrap of hers?” Gerik asked.
“Best in town!”
“If she lets me back in the house, I’ll be there,” the hunter said with a polite bow, unexpected from a man wearing such ignoble garb.
“We’ll see you at sunset, then.” Papa smiled, returning the slight bow. “Till then, old friend!”
“Till then!” Gerik said, heading for the center of the market, waving over his shoulder. Paige and her father waved back, then Papa hefted the pack once more.
“Right,” he said. “Where were we?”
They made their way through the hum of the crowd to their favorite butcher’s tent.
“No, no, I said it was three Cops for the rib rack, nine for the hams!” a fat butcher wheezed at a disgruntled old woman.