Free The Hunter Returns by David Drake, Jim Kjelgaard Page B

the right moment and not afraid of the little cat anyway. He could kill it with his club if need be, but the throwing-stick was a new power, and he wished to use it as much as possible. When the bouncing wild cat was about twenty feet away, Hawk smoothly cast his spear.
    The flint-edged point snicked into the beast’s neck and came out its back. The cat reared straight up, clawing at the spear shaft, then fell on its side. For a moment its paw twitched feebly, then it was still.
    As Hawk walked slowly up to his fallen quarry, he understood why it had rushed at him in such an insane fashion. In the recent past, the cat had foolishly tackled a porcupine, and had become half-crazed from the pain of the quills. There were so many of the needle-sharp barbs in its cheeks and face that the tawny gray fur was almost hidden beneath them. The cat had evidently tried to bite the porcupine, and had succeeded only in filling its mouth and tongue with quills. Hawk looked at the little spears with respect.
    He knew the porcupines, some of which were almost as big as dire wolves. They were stupid things that knew only how to gnaw bark, and to eat grass and roots. But of all the creatures in this savage land, porcupines were the only ones equipped to survive without fighting. Any beast that attacked those bristling arrays of small spears did so to its own sorrow and frequently its own death.
    Hawk pulled his spear out of the wild cat and shouldered the carcass. It was meat, and therefore to be saved. But it had also given him an idea. A human could not carry and handle more than two or three full-sized spears, but what if, like the porcupine, he were armed with many small ones?
    When Hawk returned, Willow was turning the bird over the fire on a long spit. The puppies crowded over to frolic about him, and he pushed them aside, his nostrils twitching from the savory smell of the cooking fowl.
    Hawk tore hungrily at his portion, and looked appreciatively at the girl. Meat prepared this way was delicious, much better than that which was just hung over the fire on a green stick. Usually the outside of that was burned and the inside raw. The bird was cooked to a flaky turn all through. Hawk wiped his hands on his fur girdle, threw the bones to the puppies, and let them scramble for them. His stomach filled with hot food, Hawk sighed happily.
    “I never had such food before,” he said. “It is good.”
    Her own portion finished, Willow sat cross-legged beside the fire, weaving a basket from limber willow shoots she had gathered. Hawk watched her idly. The art of basket-making had long been known to the women of his tribe. When they gathered a store of food, they used woven baskets in which to keep it. But the baskets were never kept for very long. On a long march nobody wanted to carry extra or unnecessary weight. Only on those rare occasions when the tribe stayed somewhere for an extended period did baskets appear.
    Hawk looked up quickly, distracted by a rustling sound. But it was only the skin of the bird they had eaten. Pending some possible future use, Willow had hung it on a limb and he had heard the feathers rustling. Returning to his problem of more weapons, Hawk went to the dead cat, pulled a quill from its cheek, and looked at it.
    Although he had tried many times, he had never been able to make any practical use of the little barbs. The quills served their original owners well enough, but they were too thin and flexible even to think of tipping a hand spear with them. But he might make a small spear and see how it worked.
    Hawk emptied his pouch of flint spear heads and studied them intently. All had been fashioned for heavy spears. Attached to a shaft smaller than that for which they had been designed, they would make it unwieldy and top-heavy. Nor could they be reshaped without spoiling them. He put all the spear heads back into his pouch.
    Unmindful of the gray puppy that tagged at his heels, he rose and walked to an outcropping of