Winter
Beelo took a deep breath. As he exhaled, he carefully released the string of his bow and sent and arrow sailing across the meadow. From Beelo’s point of view, it looked less like he shot the arrow at the lapina and more like the arrow was drawn to the furry creature. The arrow flew across the snow, destined for a spot near the base of the skull. Beelo didn’t have to watch to know the arrow would find its target. Yet he didn’t take his eyes off of the animal. He waited and almost hoped the lapina would bolt at the last second. The precision with which a Téchni arrow was fired made it almost unfair. There was no way for it to know, but the creature was already dead as it stood there and chewed on a piece of bark.
Just as Beelo knew it would, the arrow pierced the back of the neck, just under the skull. The multi-bladed arrowhead severed the spinal cord lodged into the windpipe before stopping. There was almost no sound. The lapina’s head jerked forward with the transfer of energy from arrow to animal and then it’s front legs buckled. The powerful rear legs held the rump in the air for a few seconds before they too failed and the rear end of the animal fell sideways into the snow.
Beelo continued to watch from where he hid, crouched behind a winterberry bush and braced against the trunk of an evergreen tree. He counted to twenty. In the middle of winter, there were animals who would see prey fall and take advantage of the easy meal. Beelo’s arrows were perfect for hunting lapina, but next to useless against one of the huge mountain lions or the rare but dangerous sylvan wolf.
Beelo stood and began to make his way across the snow to claim his furry prize. His boots were strapped into snowshoes made from woven willow branches and held in place with strips of waterproof leather and brass buckles. With the snowshoes on, Beelo trod on the top of the piled snow, not unlike the lapina he hunted. Without the snowshoes, he would find himself buried to his chest in snow.
When he reached the body, Beelo crouched once again, set the bottom end of his bow into the snow, and began to extract the arrow from the animal’s neck. He pushed the arrowhead the rest of the way through the trachea, then unscrewed the tip from the shaft. With the broad-head removed, Beelo was able to pull the shaft backwards and free from the wound. He used snow to wash the blood from both pieces, reassembled the arrow, and slipped it into the quiver behind his right shoulder.
Beelo reached behind him with his left hand and found the handle of his hunting knife. The knife sat in a sheath attached to the lower end of his quiver. The blade was held in place with friction and came free of its resting place with proper force. He handed the blade to his right hand and went to work. The carcass was field dressed in very little time. Beelo’s expert hands and the razor-sharp blade meant minimal damage to the hide and no taint to the meat or edible organs caused by an accidental puncture to one of the lapina’s stomachs.
Beelo dug a hole in the snow and pushed the offal into it. He used snow to wash the inside of the carcass, pushing the bloody snow into the hole and covering it with with clean snow. He then packed more clean snow inside the body cavity along with the liver, kidneys, and heart. He used a long rawhide thong to tie the carcass closed. He gripped the remaining length of the rawhide and began to tow the lapina’s body back to the hiding spot by the evergreen tree.
Next to the tree and the behind the winterberry bush, Beelo had left a small sled made from a doma leaf that had been shellacked and braced with a framework of willow branches. He laid the sled on top of the body, then rolled the whole thing over so the smooth surface of the leaf would ride across the snow. The effort of dressing and towing the carcass to the sled was considerable. The dressed weight of the average lapina was almost that of an adult Téchni. Beelo was sweating under his coat.
Beelo stood for a moment, propped against the tree, and opened his coat a little. The wind ripped through his coat and blew the warm air out from around Beelo’s body. While it was much too cold outside to worry about catching the notice of a slink, Beelo’s special coat masked his smell as much as it did his body heat. The big cats and wolves didn’t have heat-sight but they relied relied heavily on scent and sound to find prey in the forest.
Beelo fastened closed his coat and looked at the horizon. There was no moon tonight and the sun would be set in an hour. It would take at least that long to get home. To make matters worse, it was the middle of winter, which meant the sun would set and stay down instead of coming back for another period of daylight. Beelo needed to hurry if he didn’t want to do that last stretch of his hike in complete darkness.
The valley in which the Téchni lived was south-east of a massive mountain they called Maternas, the great mother. The mountain’s position between the valley and the horizon put it in the path of the sun as it headed toward the western horizon. On the equinox of spring and fall, the sun would pass behind the middle of the mountain with about fifteen to twenty minutes of near darkness until it reappeared. It would then set for the night an hour and a half later. In height of summer, the sun would just barely dip behind Maternas’ peak and tinge the sky with an orange hue as it did. In the dead of winter, the sun would set behind Maternas’ eastern slope and would not be seen again until morning, except for the faintest glimmer of twilight which the Téchni called “mother’s goodnight kiss.”
Beelo placed his quiver and bow in the sled, next to the body of the lapina. He draped the rawhide strap over his right shoulder and began to pull the sled across the snow, away from the meadow and toward the deep forest where evergreens gave way to willow and doma.