“Put down the leg,” Lydia said softly. “Lay it down in front of you and back away.”
He did as she said and looked to see if the bear was advancing. So far, it remained where it was, but it roared now, a shattering, nerve-chilling sound that seemed to fill the forest. It clawed at the air again with its right paw. The left, obviously trying to join in, made a tiny movement.
“Don’t make eye contact with it,” Lydia warned. She was already backing toward the trees behind them, her eyes lowered. Thorn hastily complied.
“Back away,” she repeated and Thorn, eyes down, slowly took a pace backward. Then another.
“Don’t let it know you’re afraid,” Lydia told him.
“I think it’s already guessed,” he said through gritted teeth. The bear dropped to all fours again and began to shuffle forward, eyes fixed on the carcass of the dead deer.
“Do bears eat deer?” Thorn asked. The bear looked up and snarled, curling its lips back from those massive yellow teeth.
“I think this bear will eat anything it can catch,” she told him as they continued to back away from the monster. Thorn looked ruefully at the ground beside the deer’s carcass, where he had laid his bear spear down. Not that a piece of sharpened stick would stop this brute, he thought.
“There’s a tree root behind you,” Lydia warned him. If he fell, the bear might rush to take him. He felt carefully with his foot as he continued to step back, finding the root and stepping over it.
“Thanks,” he said breathlessly.
The bear reached the deer carcass and pushed tentatively at it with its right front paw. It lowered its head and licked at the drying blood that smeared the spot where Thorn had severed the deer’s leg. Then it raked the separated limb toward itself. Holding the leg awkwardly between its crippled left paw and the uninjured right one, the bear took a huge chunk of meat from the leg with its massive teeth. It sat beside the deer, holding the joint across its body, and took another huge bite. It snarled appreciatively, its attention now focused on the thirty kilograms of fresh meat in front of it, the intruding two-legged creatures forgotten.
Lydia and Thorn continued to back away, listening to the crunching and growling as the bear demolished the leg, then started on the rest of the deer.
“Curse it,” said Lydia. “I can’t keep losing deer this way.”
Thorn looked at her bleakly. “We’ve got a bigger problem than that,” he said. “After today, it’s going to associate us with fresh meat.”
chapter sixteen
Stig and Ingvar had the second watch that night, from midnight to three in the morning. They patrolled along the inside of the barricade, peering out at the beach before them. The moon had set hours ago and now the bay was lit only by stars. But they were brilliant and there was plenty of light.
They’d considered patrolling separately but decided to stick together. Thorn and Lydia had told the group about the bear and the mysterious observer, so they knew it was important to keep a sharp eye on their surroundings. Ingvar was armed with his long voulge—the spear-axe-pike combination that had become his standard weapon. Stig had his ax thrust through a metal ring on his belt and carried one of the long bear spears. He looked at it doubtfully.
“From the way Lydia described the bear, it’ll take more than a pointy stick to see it off,” he remarked.
Ingvar smiled. “That’s a pointy stick with a crosspiece,” he said. “That makes all the difference. You’ll be glad of it if the bear tries to climb over the barricade.”
Stig was about to caution his big friend not to say such things. Putting ideas like that into words often seemed to make them come true, he thought. But at that moment, they heard a violent crashing and snarling from the southern end of the fence.
“Come on!” said Stig and the two of them broke into a run, heading for the source of the noise.
There was a massive form against the fence, gripping it with one forepaw and trying to clamber up onto it. But as it did so, it came into painful contact with the dozens of sharpened ends of branches and saplings that protruded outward. And the tangle of light saplings and brush gave it no useful purchase, collapsing under its weight as it tried to climb over. The fence shook and vibrated along twenty meters of its length as the bear struggled with it.
“Loki’s beard, that’s big!” said Ingvar. He had a sudden flash of understanding how normal-size people felt when they saw him.
Stig dashed forward, the wooden spear in both hands raised to shoulder height. He lunged at the bear, putting all the weight of his body behind the stroke. The point caught the bear in the shoulder. It didn’t penetrate the bear’s thick fur, but it jabbed painfully and the bear roared in pain and anger. It swatted at the spear with its right paw and spun it out of Stig’s grip. The force of the blow numbed his hands. He paled. This was a serious opponent, he thought. He retrieved the spear and began a rapid series of darting jabs at the bear’s head and neck, aiming for the eyes and the soft flesh around the mouth.
“Get a torch from the fire!” he shouted at Ingvar. Ingvar had cut at the bear with an overhand blow of the voulge. The razor-sharp blade drew blood along the bear’s upper arm, but unfortunately it was on the already-damaged left side. As the blade bit into its flesh, the bear swung around and batted the shaft of the voulge, knocking it out of Ingvar’s hands. He stepped back, then nodded to Stig and took off at a run for the fireplace, grateful for the viewing spectacles Hal had made for him months ago.
Even so, in the uneven starlight, he stumbled several times and once fell full length on the cold sand. It had been warm earlier in the day, under the sun, he recalled. Strange how it had lost its heat so quickly.
There was movement in the camp as people rolled out of their tents, calling to one another, asking what was happening. Kloof galloped back and forth, barking. There was a rising note of alarm in her bark.
“It’s the bear!” Ingvar shouted. “It’s trying to climb the palisade!”
He grabbed two large burning brands from the fire and turned to retrace his steps. He had a quick glimpse of Hal turning back to his tent and reappearing with his crossbow and quiver. Then he was running back the way he had come, picking his way with a little more care this time, the burning torches in his hands spewing out showers of red-hot sparks behind him as he ran.
The bear was still roaring its frustration at Stig as the first mate jabbed and stabbed his spear at it, never leaving it in place long enough for the creature to smash it with that mighty forepaw. Ingvar saw it manage to clamber up almost to the top of the barricade, where it towered high above Stig in the night, seeming to blot out the starlight. In another second, he thought, it would come tumbling over inside the barricade.
And then all hell would break loose.
Acting instinctively, Ingvar drew back his right arm and hurled one of the flaming torches at the monster’s head. The torch struck it on the shoulders, and the flames, subdued momentarily as the torch spun end over end through the air, sprang to violent life once more.
The bear recoiled, crashing over backward from its precarious perch on the barricade and hitting the sand with a mighty, earth-shaking thud.
Its fur had caught fire in several places and it beat at the flames, its howls of anguish rising higher as it shambled away from the barricade, down the beach and toward the southernmost of the piles of firewood. The torch Ingvar had thrown fell to the ground within the tangle of saplings and brushwood. Ingvar reached into the barricade with his voulge, hooking the burning brand out onto the sand before it could set the fence ablaze.
“That’d be all we need,” he muttered.
He was conscious of someone arriving beside him at a run. He looked around and saw Hal, lowering his crossbow to cock the string and setting a bolt into the loading groove.
“That won’t stop the bear,” he said, but Hal gestured to the lump of pitch-soaked r
ags on the head of the bolt.
“Light it up,” Hal ordered.
Ingvar, understanding his intention, used the remaining torch to light the oil-soaked rags. The flame flickered for a moment, then flared into bright life as the oil caught.
Hal raised the crossbow, sighted quickly and released. The flaming bolt became a tiny red coal as it streaked across the intervening space toward the beacon fire where the bear had run. Then, when it hit, the flame came alive again. For a moment, they could see the yellow tongue of light among the pitch-soaked firewood.
Then the pitch and the tinder caught in a WHOOMPH of flame, throwing the dark form of the bear into stark relief.
Frightened by the sudden explosion of fire close beside it, the monster threw back its head and snarled in terror. Then it dropped to all fours and lumbered away, back toward the forest from which it had come, never pausing, never looking back.
Hal let go a huge sigh of pent-up breath as he watched it go.
“We can’t go on like this,” he said. “We’re going to have to do something about that cursed bear.”
chapter seventeen
For the next few days, it seemed that the problem with the bear had been solved, for they saw no further sign of it.
Perhaps, Hal thought, the shock of having the beacon explode into flames a few meters away had convinced it that the two-legged creatures were best avoided. Thorn maintained his directive that nobody, other than Lydia, should venture into the forest alone. Various groups went out from time to time, bringing in firewood and, under Edvin’s direction, searching for edible plants and wild vegetables. After hearing of the twins’ encounter with the rattling snake, they took great care not to reach under any fallen trees, rocks or piles of deadfalls.
Lydia resumed her solo hunting expeditions and finally returned to the camp with a medium-size deer.
“I actually saw plenty,” she told Hal. “But there’s no sense in killing more than we can eat, and the meat would only spoil if we left it.”
Hal rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “We could always salt it or smoke it,” he said, but Lydia dismissed the idea.
“Why smoke meat when we can find plenty of it fresh?” she asked. “As I said, the forest is full of game.”
“We’re going to have to start doing it sometime,” Hal told her. “We’ll need to lay in a supply of dried or smoked meat for when we head home.”
It was the first time he had made any mention of a return journey, and although Lydia had known deep down that one day they would have to leave, having the concept mentioned brought it into sharp focus. She hadn’t thought much about it in the preceding few days.
“When will we be doing that?” she asked. She didn’t ask the other question that sprang to mind—how will we do that? They’d been driven hundreds, probably thousands of kilometers off course by the huge storm that had engulfed them. She wouldn’t have a clue how to head for home.
“Not for a while,” Hal told her. “It’s still winter and I don’t want to try crossing the Endless Ocean while there’s a chance of hitting winter storms.”
“But when you do—or rather when we do—how will you know which way to go?”
Lydia was a total adept when it came to finding her way through a forest—or any other form of landscape if it came to it. But her inherent sense of direction failed her on the ocean. To her, it was a trackless, watery waste. And it tended to hurl bucketfuls of cold water on you if you didn’t stay constantly alert.
Hal smiled. He was weaving fine beech saplings together to make a new tiller attachment for the ship. The old one was fraying badly, he’d noticed.
“The stars,” he told her. He gestured toward the sky above them. “I don’t recognize a lot of the ones we see now, but I can still spot some of my old friends in the northern sky. They’ll lead us home.”
He sounded confident and that reassured her. She knew he was a master navigator. Even Thorn, with all his years of experience, deferred to Hal’s knowledge of the sky and wind and sea, and his instinct for sensing currents that could take the ship off course. She’d noticed that Hal had been quiet since they had reached this strange land and she had feared that the storm had driven the confidence out of him.
“It’s another reason to wait until winter is over,” he added. “In summer, the stars move south, so I’ll be able to see my familiar signposts a lot easier.”
“Move south?” she asked. “How do stars move south?”
He shrugged. “I suppose they decide they want a warmer climate,” he said. Then he added seriously, “We don’t know why they do it. We just know that they do. In the meantime, keep bringing in fresh meat.”
She nodded. She had heard and seen several of the big oggle birds over the past few days. But she had become a little obsessive over bringing down a deer and had ignored them. It might be time to take a few of them for Edvin’s cook fire, she thought. The last one had proven to be delicious.
She nodded toward the dressed deer carcass lying at her feet. “I’ll take this up to Edvin,” she said. “We can have venison tonight.”
Hal grinned. “That’ll make a difference from salt pork,” he said, and turned back to his tiller attachment.
She made her way through the campsite, replying to the greetings from the other members of the crew, who were engaged in building a more permanent form of accommodation for their extended stay. They had cut saplings to form a hut-shaped framework and were now covering it with canvas at the sides, and interwoven pine branches on the roof. It looked snug and waterproof. Stig, as first mate, was the de facto foreman of the crew and in charge of the building of their shelter, although the overall design had been laid out by Hal. Lydia had been amazed by the speed at which the hut was taking shape, until Hal had revealed that the hut was almost identical to the one they had all built on the first day of their brotherband course, and they were drawing on that experience.
One corner of the hut had been screened off—to form a small private room for her, she knew. She smiled to herself. She enjoyed the way her brothers took extra trouble to make her comfortable and preserve her privacy. It made her feel special and well regarded. Thorn saw her crossing the sand and laid down the hammer he was using to nail several cross-ties into place. Even working left-handed, she thought, he was still capable of driving nails neatly into place, with a minimum of hammer strokes and without the sort of off-angle blows that would bend the nails out of shape.
“No sign of our giant hairy friend?” Thorn asked as he came over to walk beside her.
Lydia smiled. “Not until you came up and started talking to me.”
“You’re getting altogether too smart with your words,” he told her, then continued in a serious tone. “But no sign of the bear?”
She shook her head. “We may have finally scared him off.”
He looked at her sidelong. “Do you really think that?”
She paused, considering her reply. “No. I think he’ll be back eventually. We’re going to have to figure out what to do about him.”
Thorn nodded. “Don’t know what that’ll be. None of our weapons really seem to bother him.”
“I suppose I could put four or five darts into him,” she said thoughtfully. “That’d kill him eventually. But it’d be a slow, unpleasant death and I really don’t want to do that.”
Thorn had noticed this trait in her. She was a hunter, and a highly efficient one. Yet she took no joy in killing and tried to make her kills quick and clean. The idea of leaving a bear with half a dozen wounds cutting him up inside, and bleeding him slowly to death, was against all her instincts. He admired her for it.
“Still,” he said, “it may come to that.” She nodded briefly, knowing he was right. He changed the subject.
“How about our other friend?” he asked. “Any sign of him?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I checked seve
ral times but there was no sign that anyone was out there with me.”
He scratched his beard. “Maybe they’ve watched you long enough to know you’re simply hunting for game,” he said. “And that you’re no threat to them.”
“That could be it,” she agreed.
They were close to the cook fire now, and Edvin looked up, smiling as he saw her burden. “Venison!” he said happily. “I take it you didn’t have to give this one to a bear?”
He stepped forward and took the deer from her. She passed him a parcel of the liver and tongue, wrapped in a section of the animal’s skin.
“And some delicious offal!” he added. He knew that some people declined to eat these parts of an animal, but to him they were a true delicacy.
“Do you need a hand jointing that deer?” Thorn asked.
Edvin nodded. “I’d appreciate that.”
Thorn drew his saxe and got to work, removing the haunches first, then the fore shoulders. While he set them aside, Lydia cut the rumps off. Then Thorn went to work with his saxe again, cutting the rib cage into racks of chops. In a short time, the deer was reduced from one carcass to a selection of cookable pieces.
As they worked, Lydia told Thorn of her conversation with Hal.
“Hal’s talking about heading back to Skandia,” she said.
Thorn nodded, a satisfied look on his face. “Good. I hoped he’d start thinking that way. I was a little worried that he was feeling lost—figuratively as well as literally. That storm could have sapped his confidence badly.”