The Hunter Returns by David Drake, Jim Kjelgaard Page A

threatening forward step. Willow stood her ground for a moment, then turned and ran. The gray puppy raced at her heels. Furious, Hawk ran after them, club in hand.
    Willow ran across the clearing to the border of the woods. At the base of a huge, lichen-encrusted boulder, she stumbled and went to one knee. Quickly she rose, turning to face the enraged Hawk. Her eyes widened in fear, but not of the man. She was staring over his shoulder.
    Turning, Hawk saw the hunting saber-tooth between them and the safety of their fire.

HORSES AND CAMELS
    Wolf chewed determinedly at the root and berry mush which was all the tribe had to eat this morning. He tried to pretend that he didn’t notice the bitter taste. Except for the bitterness, the coarse porridge had no flavor at all.
    Elm swore that she had appeased the spirits of the plant by scraping the roots, putting them in a wicker basket, and soaking them for two days in a running stream. Finally she boiled the mass to a gelatinous solid by pouring it into a pit in the ground and dropping in stones heated by the fire.
    Wolf was confident that Elm knew what she was doing and that she had performed the rites correctly. The plant spirits would not grip the Chief Hunter’s belly with cramps and nausea, perhaps even with death, as could happen if the medicine woman made a mistake.
    But the porridge tasted terrible, simply terrible. Wolf thought that for flavor and texture—each mouthful felt as if it were made of the skin that formed on tar after it oozed from the ground—he would rather chew the willow splits from which Elm had woven the soaking baskets.
    Elm walked over and stood in front of Wolf. “Well, Chief Hunter,” the old woman said. “How do you like your breakfast?”
    Wolf dipped the index and middle fingers of his right hand into the porridge pit again and lifted another load of the glop to his mouth. “Thank you for making the food, Elm,” he said formally. There were a few dried blueberries in the porridge, but they did nothing to flavor the horrible stuff.
    “We have nothing else to eat,” Elm continued, as if it were news to the Chief Hunter. She spoke in a loud voice so that the whole tribe could hear her. “In the old days we ate bison, but it is many days since we have had any kind of meat to cook.”
    “We will have meat again soon,” Wolf said, trying to keep his temper. Under other circumstances, he would have knocked the old woman down to silence her. The Chief Hunter knew that now Elm was only saying what all the members of the tribe were thinking. If he struck her . . . well, Wolf was Chief Hunter, but there were many in the tribe. They might all turn against him at once.
    He wondered if the medicine woman had deliberately made the porridge taste worse than it needed to. Probably not. Elm was eating the horrible stuff herself, after all.
    “When will we have meat again, Chief Hunter?” the old woman demanded with her hands on her hips.
    “A moon-phase ago we had mammoth,” muttered one of the hunters. “I don’t want to go through that again.”
    Wolf licked the porridge off his fingers. He grimaced at the taste despite his attempt to keep his face calm. He knew he had to change the subject quickly or he was going to lose his position as Chief Hunter. The tribe might even cast him out, as they had done to Hawk.
    Deep in his heart, Wolf wondered if perhaps he really was the cause of the tribe’s misfortune. He performed the hunting rites with particular care each night, drawing in the ground the shape of the animal they would hunt and setting an actual part of the beast—a horn, a swatch of hide, a hoof—in the outline.
    When he had created the outline, Wolf led all the hunters in bowing to the spirit of the animal and promising honor to the spirit if it would lend the strength of its children to the tribe. Then the men danced and thrust their spears into the dusty drawing, chanting praise of the spirit of the beast while the women watched in