‘I am almost there,’ he thought. ‘The sweat does not matter.’
The sun was dropping low over the mountains as he approached the last quarter-mile, and he was now regretting that he had chosen to bring his new long-barrelled musket, and his two Emburley pistols. Kaelin had planned to do a little hunting with Finbarr and the boys, but now all he wanted was a chair by a warm hearth, and to be relieved of the weight of his guns and his pack. He shivered with pleasure at the thought of the heat from Finbarr’s fire.
The boys, Feargol and Basson, would be delighted to see him. The youngsters loved his stories – stories he had first heard from the giant Jaim Grymauch when he was their age; tales of Connavar the King, and Bane, who had fought in the great arenas of Stone. Basson, the elder at ten, would sit at Kaelin’s feet, his eyes wide, his attention rapt. Feargol, a six-year-old with an unruly mop of red hair, would interrupt the tales constantly, asking the oddest questions. ‘Did Bane wear a hat?’ he asked one day, just as Kaelin was telling the boys the story of a gladiatorial contest between Bane and a Stone warrior.
‘Not while he was fighting before the crowd,’ said Kaelin, patiently. ‘So Bane drew his sword and stepped out before the emperor, a powerful man named—’
‘What kind of a hat did he wear when he wasn’t fighting?’ asked Feargol.
‘Will you be quiet?’ snapped Basson, a slim young lad, who had inherited his mother’s fair skin and blond hair. ‘Who cares if he had a hat?’
‘I like hats,’ said Feargol.
‘He had a woollen hat,’ said Kaelin, ‘just like yours, with ear protectors. When it was cold he would let them down and tie them below his chin. In the summer he would lift the ear flaps up and tie them at the top of the hat.’
‘What colour was it?’ asked Feargol. ‘Was it white like mine?’
‘Yes, it was white.’
Feargol was delighted. Scrambling up from the floor he ran back into the bedroom and returned wearing his white hat. Then he sat quietly as Kaelin finished the story.
The memory lifted Kaelin’s mood as he saw the cabin. He pictured the fire and the friendly reception, the boys running out to greet him. Kaelin paused in his climb. There was no smoke coming from the stone chimney. This was odd, for there was enough firewood to last the winter. He and Finbarr had spent weeks hauling and sawing logs, chopping rounds and stacking the fuel by the north wall.
As he came closer to the cabin he saw that the timbers of the west wall had caved in, and part of the roof had fallen. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he sa.w something red flicker in a nearby tree. Squinting against the fierce cold wind, and the flurrying snow, Kaelin focused on the tree. Finbarr’s older son, Basson, dressed in a thin red nightshirt, was clinging to the upper branches. Kicking off his snowshoes Kaelin scrambled up the last part of the slope, his weariness forgotten. Even as he came to the tree he knew that the boy was dead.
The ten-year-old had frozen to death. There was ice in his blond hair, and his skin was blue. Great gouges had been torn from the trunk of the tree below him. Kaelin recognized the marks as the talons of a grizzly. They reached up almost nine feet.
Moving to the shattered wall of the cabin he saw the timbers had been smashed open. There were talon grooves in the shattered wood and blood upon the snow around the ruined door. Shrugging off his pack he pulled off his gloves. There would be no point trying to load the musket. The firing mechanism would be frozen solid. Opening his heavy sheepskin coat he pulled one of his long-barrelled Emburley pistols from its leather sheath and cocked it. He did not go into the cabin, but examined the bloodstained ground. There were bear tracks and a deep channel where something had been dragged towards the trees – something leaking gore.