Chapter Six

Sparrow ran to the left of the mammoth rather than between the double row of huge footprints. Otherwise he would have to break stride to avoid skidding on broad splotches of the beast's dung. The trail was now so fresh that the pine-scented droppings steamed on a thin bed of snow.

Sparrow and the mammoth were both pacers who matched their strides to the long haul. Krita ran like a deer. She loped and bounded over obstacles, wasting energy that the others conserved by never changing the length or rhythm of their steps. . . .

But the hunters were in sight of the mammoth, now, and Krita was closing the gap while the smith was still a hundred meters behind her.

"Not—" Sparrow shouted as his right heel struck the ground.

"—yet," he boomed out at the completion of the next stride.

"Wait!"

Krita would do as her own whim directed. Sparrow shortened his pace by a centimeter, quickened his legs' scissoring by a few heartbeats, and began to draw minusculely nearer to his companion and their prey.

They had no business hunting a mammoth at all, just the two of them. Sparrow and Krita had been checking their trapline when they struck the trail of the beast. It was a lone bull who had passed by so recently that the edges of his footprints in the fresh snow still showed flakes whose individuality had not melted into a blur.

"Come on!" Krita had cried.

She unfastened her cloak and slung it onto the snow as she sprinted off in the unexpected direction. If the smith had not followed, she would have gone on alone.

Sparrow had stripped to the waist as he ran. He still sweated. The air was cold and dry. The tiny snowflakes of the evening before had ceased to fall before midnight, while the temperature continued to drop.

Sparrow would have taken off his fur leggings as well, but that would require him to break stride; and he would not break stride.

The mammoth's ivory tusks gleamed in intervals of sunlight through the pine boughs. As Krita drew nearer, she slanted her course slightly to the right. She was parallel to the beast's haunches and closer than the length of her spear.

Krita still wore her doeskin chemise. Though she was a small woman with a taut, trim body, her breasts were too heavy for her to run comfortably with them unrestrained. She had twisted her belt so that the sheath of her broad-bladed knife waggled like a tail.

Sparrow's quickened stride forced him to suck in deeper breaths. Needles of ice danced in his lungs.

The mammoth paced onward. Its legs moved deceptively slowly, but each step carried the beast another three meters across pine straw and snow. Either the animal was unaware that it was being pursued, or it was too certain of its own black-haired, mountainous strength to pay attention to mere humans.

Krita drew level with the mammoth's right shoulder. She poised the spear above her head.

"Wait!"

Krita stabbed, using the full strength of her upper body. Her left boot anchored the thrust. It slipped on pine needles iced into a mat and kicked the other leg out from under her as well.

Instead of plunging through the forward lobe of her quarry's lung and into the heart, Krita's spear ripped a long gouge across the mammoth's ribs.

The mammoth flared its small ears and pivoted like a dancer. Its trunk lifted. The beast shrieked outrage and fury as Krita tried to roll to her feet.

Sparrow hurled his own long-bladed spear from ten meters away. It sank to the shaft in the roll of fat and gristle on top of the mammoth's head.

"Ho! Mammoth!" Sparrow shouted as he waved his arms.

The beast's eyes glittered beneath its deep brow ridges. Ignoring Krita, as Sparrow intended it to do, the mammoth strode forward with the inexorable power of an avalanche.

Sparrow turned; and, turning, fell. He didn't feel the impact of the frozen ground because of the molten pain in his lungs.

The mammoth paced forward, right rear and left front legs together. Sunlight flared as Krita swung her heavy knife.

Left rear and right front—

The mammoth staggered and slid down on its left haunch. Sparrow stared up at the ribbed red dome of its palate.

The mammoth trumpeted in raging fury. It tried to turn. Krita, moving behind the huge animal with the grace of an ermine pouncing, cut the beast's other hamstring as well.

Sparrow rose. His spear wobbled high in the air. Its point was in the spongy bone of the mammoth's skull—useless to the hunter and harmless to his prey.

Krita backed away from the beast she had crippled. She set both palms against the trunk of a pine tree and leaned against her arms with her head bowed. Her black hair, loosened by the run, covered her face like a veil of mourning.

With the major tendons to its heels cut, the mammoth was unable to lift its hind legs. It was anchored where it stood as surely as if it had frozen in ice.

Sparrow walked around the beast, just beyond the circle its trunk could lash in desperate attempts to reach him. The mammoth lifted its right foreleg: once, twice . . . and settled again into the pose in which it now knew it would die.

Sparrow met the animal's black, glittering eyes. He blinked before the mammoth did. Sparrow walked the rest of the way to his goal. His vision was beginning to settle, and the air felt cold on his bare, trembling skin.

"I was wrong," Krita said. "I'm sorry."

She did not raise her head. Her chest heaved with the violence of her breaths. Her right shoulder and forearm were scraped where she had struck the frozen ground.

Sparrow found the woman's spear a few paces away in the snow. The tip was dappled with blood. He hefted the weapon, then stepped close to the mammoth from the rear. The gash above its heel was drawn back in a bloody smile by the white, severed ends of the hamstring tendon.

The beast slapped its ears twice, but it did not turn its head.

Sparrow set the point behind the mammoth's shoulder with a craftsman's precision, then drove it home. The steel passed between the ribs with only a faint grating sound, but the mammoth's hide and muscles were thick and its fat was a sucking blanket to clog the stroke.

Sparrow bellowed: with his effort, and in an access of pity. The steel slid in. A meter of the ash shaft followed it. There was a great sigh as the mammoth's settling weight drove the air out of its lungs.

Krita touched his shoulder from behind. "We'd better get back," she said. "Before we freeze."

"Yes," Sparrow agreed without turning.

Krita stepped in front of the smith and kissed him fiercely. "Back to the lodge," she said. "And to bed."