They had emptied ten similar traps, and Yana now carried a share of the catch, when Sinead, holding up her hand for Yana to tread more warily, stole toward a thicket. Parting the branches so carefully that only a few grains of snow fell, she motioned for Yana to look into the small clearing. A large buff-colored reindeer stood there-on three legs, the fourth broken at the knee and hanging at an obscene angle. The deer had been cropping the bushes around it, and the snow had turned to muddy slush where it had trampled the clearing in its food circuit.
Sinead moved back, holding up one gloved hand to indicate Yana was to stay put. She slipped out of her pack, laying it quietly in the snow, and with spear in hand, she crept around the thicket. Yana watched as she disappeared into another portion of the undergrowth. Then she heard a grunt, a whirring noise, and a thunk as the spear found its target, and then an uninhibited crashing of bushes.
“Okay, Yana,” Sinead called cheerily, and Yana pushed through the thicket and saw the spear sticking out of the deer’s head, right between its eyes. “Grand pelt on this buck,” Sinead said, running her hand down the side and back of the dead beast.
“This isn’t one of your humane traps, is it?” Yana asked, looking about the clearing as she hunkered down beside the hunter.
“Not a trap, but I’ve seen does have their young in places like this.”
“You’re a mighty hunter, Nimrod,” Yana went on, observing how much of the spear’s metal point had entered the beast’s skull. “That was some throw.”
“The idea is to cause as little pain as possible. Skull’s thinnest right between the eyes. Minute the point hit its brain it was dead. Which it wanted to be with a break like that,” Sinead said, pointing to the broken leg. “Hadn’t done it but a day or two ago, either. Bone ends not frozen through. ‘Mother thing about a head kill is the skin isn’t marred. C’mon. We got real work to do now.”
To Yana’s surprise, Sinead had her help drag the carcass from the little clearing. “Doe might need it come spring, and it don’t do to leave death scent around.”
They gutted the animal, a procedure Yana found somewhat less distasteful than dissections of alien creatures she had witnessed during her search-and-discover days with company expeditionary parties. Sinead demonstrated the technique with almost ritualistic care and put the offal in a sack she had obviously brought for the need. She kept out the liver.
“Lunch,” she said, “but I’ll just put the rest of this-which we can use-where nothing can reach it.” She hung the sack high on the branch beside the carcass, which was already stiffening with cold. “We’ll come back for it. Gotta finish the line.”
Then Sinead beckoned Yana to follow her as she took up her trapline again. They had acquired several more animals, two already dead in the live traps, when Sinead decided it was time to eat. She built a little fire and, with sharpened twigs, skewered slices of the liver.
The cooking smelled as good as the eating tasted. Yana licked her fingers, shoving them into her parka to dry them on her shirt when she had finished eating. Sinead heated a pan of water and made some tea, which they took turns drinking.
“So,” Yana said. “So far these all seem to be fairly standard critters, the kind that would have occurred in the northernmost parts of Earth back in the old days. I had kind of hoped for something a little more unusual.”
Sinead looked across at her, a slight smile on her face. “Day’s early.”
“Do you ever catch those freshwater seals?” The shock of Sinead’s reaction to that casual question made Yana try a hasty apology. “What’d I say wrong? You’re the one asked me had I seen them.”
“You see a seal, dama, and you be respectful.” And there was no question of the menace in Sinead’s manner.
Yana held her hands up in surrender and laughed shakily. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to put both feet in my mouth. Are seals special?”