The Winter Hunt

My mother had a crystal ball, something she got at Crabtown before I was born. It was filled with water, and had a tiny forest of pines and a man with a big dog and an axe on his shoulder. When you turned it upside down a swirl of tiny white flakes stormed up and around, white-out, settling into a brief blizzard and then calm. No one seemed to be able to put it down before creating a whole season of turmoil in the tiny, liquid sky.

The moon on the morning Pop and I broke camp was a tiny sliver, like a fine silver blade cupped over the glimmer of it's own cold white sands. You could see the rest of the moon, faintly, like an eye in a dream. Like the little snowy world of my mother's crystal, a self-contained dreamworld floating in the sky. It was the last day of the old moon, the day before the Long Night, and the sky was black-blue, like thick ice, clear as crystal, so clear that even the colors of the sky were ghostly, barely daring to cling to the pre-dawn light. The clouds started to roll in about an hour later, a slow flood of them. Sleet was falling not long after, almost harmless but with fierce little teeth, stinging for a moment on the skin, or rolling uncomfortably down the neck. By afternoon, Pop must have known that it was going to be a bad one, because he started looking for a place to hole up and ride out the storm. I could tell from the grim expression on his face, and the silence in the woods as all the animals went to ground, that there was more to come. The wind burst and ebbed, each time with more force, whipping the fine sleet into our eyes.

We had been out for two days, and already had a half dozen turkeys in hand, cleaned and dressed for the Winter Thanksgiving the next day, the longest night of the year. Pop slung them into a low snowbank, where we could find them if we needed them, and started unpacking our camp, carefully placing the quahog shell with the smoldering punk under his pack at the foot of a large fir, out of the wind, which was gusting alarmingly. It was just starting to snow, crowds of fat flakes drifting into view, then snatched upward again together. The forest sprouted white on every hoary branch.

There had been no was no time for a purification fire on this strip, but any serious hunter carried some ashes for the ritual in her hunting gear. I always used ashes from a little boy named Apple; he was as bright and shiny and red-faced as his name, and he gave me good luck. I always made him a carved toy for the Winter Thanksgiving, or saved him an extra piece of maple candy when the sap rose in the spring.

The purification ritual was something Blind Oak had read in a book as a child, a sacred custom of an ancient Forest People far away. Hunters must kill creatures who have done them no harm, and the taking of life cannot be done without sin. Before we hunt, we must be purified by leaping through the smoke of a fire lit by those who are still innocent, who have not killed. We didn't do it because it was in a book, though. That was why we had the Sophical Council, because the Treebeards could bring ideas back from many places, but ideas are tricky things, and the words of the spirits are not like words here on the earth, and can mean something different depending on the way you turn them. The Council weighed and searched, and looked in distant places for wisdom, and they made our Law. And so it was, and we held the new law in our hearts, and it guided our way in the world. Purification was our law, that without the innocence of childhood, we could no longer accept the sacrifice of the hunted. It tied us closer, and hug the weight of consequences on our bloodshed, a weight that had been missing for too long.

From the time I could shoot a real bow, Pop and I used to go hunting together. Pop was a lousy shot, but he could track, and could tell you two or three things you could do with every mushroom or berry or waxy leaf we found on the trail. Sometimes we never caught anything, but we always came home with our bellies full anyway. I hunt with the stainless steel broadheads that Grandma Jay gave me when her eyes were too hazy for hunting. Four of them were still fused to the carbon-fiber shafts they were manufactured with, and all of them were in perfect, razor sharp, condition. Grandma Jay knew, even back then, the value of a good tool, and had kept them carefully for many, many years.

The fir we sheltered under looked old enough to hold back the worst of the snow, but young enough not to break under the weight. When it was clear that the snow was getting harder, we stowed our hunting gear under the tree and gathered all the dead branches we could find in the gathering darkness. It was too cold to string our hammocks at a safe height, unless we wanted to end up like apples twisting in an early frost. We stayed under the tree. An old house or stone tower might have given us better cover, but they were tricky in the snow, often concealing dangerous drops and sharp edges. The hardest part was the first few hours, when there was not enough snow to use for protection, and the cold air stabbed hard at any open skin. The wind was angry as the fuzz of darkness oozed down from the sky and swallowed the world, us with it.

The snow was heavy, and with no fire and not shelter, we could only move in slow circles, packing down the snow into hard ice beneath us. The trees provided some protection, but the lash of the wind was harsh, backed with flying ice and bitter cold. We each took up one of the snowshoes and began the slow labor of packing the loose snow away from the trunk, building up walls toward the drooping branches overhead. We had one pair of snowshoes between us - the snow almost never lasted very long these days, but Pop insisted that we bring a pair anyway, just in case. Soon it was too dark to see the branches, although the after hitting my head a few times I knew where they were. The night was spent slogging, packing snow, struggling with the unseen drifts in the darkness to keep warm, moving and resting, not to sweat in the freezing wind.

Gradually we built up the icy walls, packed tight with double-handed blows from the snowshoes, and the wind didn't hit us directly, but stumbled through the branches above, tripped, and spilled its flakes to sift down onto our heads. Long before dawn I was shaking with exhaustion, and wanted a fire so we could rest. I recovered the carefully wrapped quahog shell, with a heart of smoldering punk within, and Pop carefully built an impressive pyramid of dry branches, cones and needles, The punk surged into angry orange in the bitter wind, as I tried again and again to light a fire. Needles caught, flared, and immediately scattered into sparks in that wind, that wind that was sucking the life out of us, and would finish us in a few hours without fire. Pop tried, I tried again, and then the rotted wood slipped from my numb fingers into the snow and died with a terminal hiss.

I didn't even have the energy left to curse. Without fire, we could not rest, just push onward until we dropped from exhaustion. I turned to look out under the branches into the spitting winds, the winds that would suck the life from my body, that would bury me in powdery snow, crust my lips and eyes with frost here on the shortest, darkest day of the year. Would they find us in the spring, or would we be among those that were lost forever, slipping away in the midnight of the year, in the moonless dark, drifting into the starry void below?

At some point I realized that there was a person standing in the snow, just visible through the float-and-race of the driving snow. a young man, bare chested, long white hair blowing in the wind. He reached out his broad hand to me, smiling warmly, fingertips just outside the tent of fir needles overhead, and I reached back with my pale hand. My fingers were not entirely numb, yet, and the wind set fire to my skin up to my wrist, gnawing hungrily. The branches burned like hot needles as I pushed through them.

From behind me, where Pop still knelt by the fire, there came a sharp crack, a hiss and an unnatural, muted roar, followed by a blaze of light as if a raging star had burst from the earth. I turned, and immediately shielded my eyes from the brutal incandescence pouring from the end of Pop's arm, stretched as far from his body as possible, and into the pile of carefully stacked branches. Flames were already crackling in the soggy limbs, warm orange fire mixing with the white light of the star, spattered across the underside of the rain fly. It was such a comfortable, safe scene, so far from this world of ice and darkness, that I stared dumbly, uncomprehending at my father.

Pop grinned up at me, "What? You didn't think I was going to let you freeze to death, did you?"

--

We took turns sleeping, shuffling out through the blinding snow for more dead or fallen branches to feed the fire, and waiting for the winter's anger to subside. I looked for the young man's tracks when I went out to get firewood, but the drifts had covered everything, if he had left any. My snowshoes were enchanted carpets, letting me float over the deep drifts like a heavy ghost.

By afternoon, the snow had stopped, but the wind was still sharp, whipping icy powder through the trees, rattling as it tumbled down over the rain fly we had strung up as high as possible, to guide the smoke up the trunk of the tree, and keep the snow that it melted from snuffing out the flames. We didn't have the strength to make the trip back to the winter camp by nightfall. We would spend the night by the fire, and miss the Winter Festival.

It was uncomfortable camping, and hard to sleep, once the sharp edges of exhaustion were dulled. The fire had melted and remelted the snow into a sheet of ice and soggy ashes, and the drip of melting snow from the fir branches stretched long, frozen stalactites all around us, dripping or freezing, as the wind blew. It was almost a relief to struggle up out of the bowl we had created under the tree, and out into the open drifts of the woods. Without the snowfall, it would have been unmercifully dark, and even with the whiteness all around it was impossible to see anything clearly, the storm had drawn a fat blanket of clouds across the stars. I knew that there was nothing more dangerous than a stick in the eye or a snowshoe hare to be out in the deep drifts, so I used my light as little as possible. I enjoy moving in the darkness, stretching my senses to pulling as much of the world as possible, rebuilding it all in my head, in minute detail. And tonight was the Solstice, the Long Night.  It was a time of darkness, the dark of the moon, the dark of the year, and I felt it was not my place to spit my puny light onto such a canvass.

I could hear the Grey Brothers calling to their Queen, perhaps calling her back from her hiding place, perhaps mourning the emptiness of this long journey through the shadow, I think because she was the only one who understood them. They were orphans in the darkness like us, banded together in the forests, unbowed, unfettered, and unmourned, except by their Mistress, Queen of Madness and the Dark, Empress of Tides, with her cold light that bears no life, but bathes the Earth in dreams, stuttered epiphanies, turns the forest inot a land of spirits. Her light is the distant glimmer in the eyes of the Grey Brothers, for they think and speak in tones of moonlight, and their teeth shine with her silver brilliance.

As the night drew on, the clouds separated, struggled, and then fled, leaving the forest open to the glittering glory of the moonless stars, and I was dumbfounded by their mighty hordes. On this longest night of the year, just this one, turned away from the blinding roar of the sun, it is possible to lean over the edge of the world and listen to the outside, turned away from the high whistling roar of the breath of the sun, and hear the whisper and hiss of distant serpents swimming through the void, their burning scales the stuff of life itself, their lunging fires damped by impenetrable oceans of nothingness. A colloquy of dragons, sputtering droplets of fire scattered in a bottomless cloud stretching down, down, everywhere, behind everything. On this one evening, to step beyond life measured out in the burning days of our star, and slip into the swirl of the others, and their slow promenade in that greater night, cradle and crucible and tomb at once.

The stars shone out all their colors and the Silver River was bright, undulating across the heavens. The air was still, cold, and as clear as a deep lake of icy water. I have always loved the stars and the night sky, and it was more beautiful that night, perhaps more than any night before or since. Maybe that is why I didn't notice the lupine sounds were no longer distant, and were closing quickly. Perhaps it was the long night, or the scare in the storm, but when I noticed the baying and howling approaching through the forest, for some reason I was filled with the absurd conviction that they were coming for me, to sweep me up into the night forever, to run motherless and hungry in the darkness, and I turned and lurched back toward our campsite as fast as I could.

An interesting thing about snowshoes is that, while they are marvelous for gliding over the deep snow, they become clumsy very quickly if one is too rushed or too confused to pay attention. And so my snowshoes became tangled and tumbled me to the snow or into branches and brambles, driving me into a frenzy as the howls and baying approached. I could sense a rush of small creatures in the dark, birds crashing blindly through the branches, a fox struggled in the heavy snow, a snowshoe hare raced past, and I went down again with my face in the snow and stayed, for there was no place to run. The first shaggy beast flew by, paws landing painfully across my legs, but I stayed stock still. The second passed, green tongues of flame trailing from its mouth, and ripped the fox open in a spray of blood and hair, and then there were dozens, kicking up arcs of powdery snow as they passed.

Once they were gone, I snatched my hunting knife and floundered a few meters to crouch behind an old brick chimney, rising straight from the ground like a broken tree. Then came the riders, first the thud of hooves, and nightmare horses shot from among the dark trees, fanged, scaled, or with curved horns, hooves or clawed talons tearing into the roiled snow. But the horror of the steeds was nothing compared to the fantastic mix of riders, fat frog-eyed hunters, snake headed or fox jawed, lizard skinned or bristly or naked grey monstrosities, one who even seemed made up entirely of sucking, lamprey-like mouths. The one thing common to them all was the hunger in their eyes, a thirst driving them forward across the carcasses of the dead creatures slain by the hounds. And then they were gone, the baying and cries fading as quickly as they came.

I was still shaking with fear when the final figure emerged from the darkness, as silent as the others had been raucous. Emerged is perhaps not right, for he moved like an eel in oily water, bending the night around him rather than moving through it, only visible against the pale snow. I could feel the weight of his presence before I saw him, pressing like a great black thumb on my heart, the darkness moved and there was a shadow like a man, huge, muscled, kneeling to sniff at the bloody earth, torn through the snow by the churning of the riders. His head rose into elaborate antlers, an intricate boquet of blades and points. He swiveled toward me, I looked into those eyes, and they looked into me.

I know I tried to stab him, aiming for the soft abdomen to avoid the bones of his deep chest. I should have at least marked him before he finished me, but I don't think I did. The hand that locked my arm in a relentless grip and twisted me down was a thing of stone, cold and inexorable. His other hand reached for me, and paused in front of my face, two blunt fingers extended, dripping with soggy, bloody mud. They scratched a quick pattern across my forehead, and I was dropped like a clot of earth into the snow. By the time I arose, stinging blood in my eyes, there was no one, and nothing but the trampled snow. I scooped up a clean handful, scrubbed my face, and headed back to camp as the sky spun slowly toward white.

On the way home, I didn't tell Pop what had happened. The snow was already melting. Winter storms can be fierce, but they don't last the way they did before the Hot Age, when the forest could be dressed in white for nearly half a year. I almost did tell him, when we stopped to rest, and he was telling me a story about how he and Mother had met, working in the Crabtown Archives, long tunnels filled with shelf after shelf of trays of fish oil, each with rows of carefully preserved metal rings, screws, tubes, attachments, everything that the Crabtowners had ever found or used, so they could make an exact copy in the metal workshop for repairs or new projects. Mother and Pop scuttled through the narrow tunnels to fetch this piece or that, and would spend the long empty hours building intricate automata of wire and bits they had hammered out in their own classes. There was one short-tempered professor who repeatedly changed the long lists of items he wanted for his work, returning and re-requesting dozens of items in a single day, and keeping them in the catalog room for hours. Mom and Pop finally started palming pieces of their own projects, dipping them quickly in oil when out of sight, and solemnly delivering them to be copied as the pieces he had requested. Pop's description of the expressions on the man's face set us both into fits of laughter.

We were sitting in the snow, faces streaming with tears of laughter, and his face was lined, stiff, like he had been holding it on tight for too long. I could see the drops channeled down those creases. "You know Pop, back there... last night..."

"Yeah?", he was wiping his face with the back of his hand, peeling and raw from the cold.

"I, uh..." I could feel the gaze of that Huntsman, burrowing inside my chest like a ball of thorns, scraping slowly downward. I wanted to tell him, but Pop saw things differently than I did. For him, there were always steps to be taken, preparations to be made, a logical sequence, a start and a goal and a path.

"Um, I... What was that fire-thing you had, anyway?"

Pop was collecting the things we had taken out for lunch, and stood up with a big smile, shouldering his pack with a breathy grunt. I stood up with him.

"That? Magnesium flare. Not made for fires, you know, but I keep a few around for emergencies. Interesting thing about magnesium..."

We were back home by nightfall, and Grandma Jay hugged me so tight she lifted me right up off the ground, and the People gathered around and Blind Oak and Apple came and I told him he was my good luck charm, and his little red face lit up like new star, and we sat together and told them what had happened to us. Most of it.