A time or two Yana’s sharp eyes caught the glimmer of lights through the trees, and she smelled woodsmoke. On and on the dogs ran, barking now and then, evidently from sheer joy. Sinead would laugh and urge them on.
They had been traveling upward of an hour, in and out of forests, when Sinead called Alice B to a halt by a small shack. More of a lean-to actually, Yana thought, rising from the sled, rather pleased to find that she wasn’t as stiff as usual. Nor had cold half crippled her. Was she actually becoming acclimated to this frigid planet? Probably she would become accustomed to the cold just as summer arrived, and by that time any temperature above freezing would roast her.
She helped Sinead unhook the dogs, check their feet, and set up their picket line. Then Sinead swung to her back the pack that had been Yana’s cushion on the trip out. She passed a second, smaller pack to Yana. From the sled she took a long bundle, which she unwrapped to display three spears with sharp pointed metal ends and one with a wicked-looking barb and hook that Yana thought might be a harpoon, though she had never seen such an instrument before. Two bags and a large Y-shaped affair, which she could identify as a hefty slingshot, had also been packaged with the weapons.
“Ever use one of these?” Sinead asked, passing over the slingshot.
“I spent much of my childhood in domes where something like this would have been frowned on,” Yana said, testing the feel of grip in her hand and the give in the slings.
Sinead gave a snort. “You handle it like you know anyhow.”
Yana grinned. “One learns.” She took the bag of small stones that Sinead handed over. “What’s the other? Your slingshot?”
Sinead hefted the bag. “A variant-matched stones attached to long strings. You get them swinging in circles in opposite directions like this. When you’ve got enough momentum going, you twirl them overhead until the tension’s right, then loose them to tangle the feet of whatever you want to bring down.”
“I’ve seen that sort of thing a time or two. And where you’d least expect it.”
Her pack settled, Sinead entered the lean-to and emerged with two sets of snowshoes, handing a pair to Yana. She knelt to attach hers and then they were both ready, Sinead leading the way into the dense forest, only slightly illuminated by the rising sun.
They had traveled about half an hour, Yana judged, when Sinead stopped to kneel by a heavy evergreen bush. Hauling the skirt of branches to one side, she pulled out the oddest-looking wicker contraption Yana had ever seen, with the smaller end turning back inside itself. It held two gray-furred long-eared animals of good size.
“Thank you, friends,” Sinead murmured, and then with a deft twist of strong gloved hands she wrung their necks.
Yana was startled. “They weren’t dead yet?” she asked, surprised more by that than by Sinead’s quick dispatch of them.
Sinead shrugged. “They came to die.” She hummed-though Yana was certain she caught the sounds of words, as well-while with quick movements she wound cord from an outside pocket about their hind legs and secured them to a hook protruding from her pack.
Then, continuing her odd humming, she put a handful of pellets in the oddly shaped trap and replaced it under the bush. By then Yana had figured out that the trap let the creatures in through the clever inverted neck, which, apparently, couldn’t expand as an exit. Like a fish trap she had once seen, where fish could swim in, but not out.
“You don’t trap them dead?” Yana asked when Sinead fell silent. She had the oddest notion that Sinead had been singing some sort of a ritual requiem.
Sinead shook her head. “No, we live-trap. It is our way. But it means I must run the trapline every three, four days, or they would also starve.”
Yana shook her head, surprised. “You said it was a good time to die? Were those rabbits waiting here for you to kill them?”
“So it would appear.” Then Sinead rose and started off to the left again.