Until Then

The hiss of snow hitting the roof and the creaking of timbers kept Elk awake most of the night. A doe skin his brother had proudly prepared the week before kept them plenty warm, trapping the heat of other hides as howling gusts rushed down the mountain.

Under the wind traveled a crunching near the southernmost wall, passing just behind Elk’s head. The others were too asleep to notice.

Business had been slow since autumn, and the hogs more expensive to feed. Another deer would aid the wait for spring.

He slipped out of bed, a simple task since he lie at the end, and patted down the hides in his spot to keep a draft from forming in the gap. Low flickers from the weakening hearth lit the room enough for him to find his bow – his final gift from the old trapper before she vanished a few seasons prior – and tie on a coat. The hooks on his boots proved trickier.

Anticipation quickened his heart as the crunching, slow and mindful, continued along the walls. Too many footfalls and too far apart to be a single stag, they showed no sign of veering from the house. Depending on the depth of their stride and the height of the drifts that had built up past sundown, one of them might trip a snare he’d set in early winter.

The arrows rattled in his quiver as he fastened it around his waist. In one night, they might score enough food to keep them full through the following month.

He had to move quickly, though. If one of them got caught in a snare, the others would bolt faster than he could safely follow them in the storm. The old trapper had warned him times enough to mind the fickle moods of a blizzard.

Rope hinges creaked in the biting air as he pushed open the door. That or the sound of him shutting it behind him alerted the deer, now well on the other side of the house.

With the full cabin between them and the wind slamming through the trees across the way, their footfalls eluded him for a moment. But there was no mistaking the thud of a body falling and thrashing in the snow.

Right where he had left the snare.

Elk hopped down from the steps and waded through shin-deep drifts around the corner as the others hurried away. Strangely, he had heard no telltale whine from the trapped deer as it struggled. In fact, neither the tracks he followed nor the sound of the escapees rushing behind the hog pen were all that deer-like.

The snow where they had been stepping carefully looked plowed through, too roughly for anything with long, thin legs. And rather than leaping and dashing, the creatures fleeing his pursuit moved much slower - about his rate, judging by the sound.

A groan carried on the wind from whatever had fallen behind the house. Elk couldn’t place the animal. His best guess was that it was a family of wild hogs that had wandered down instead of deer, and in that case, it was probably better he didn’t meet the rest of them.

Snowflakes fell smaller and sparser as he rounded the back. The thrashing and guttural huffing continued, weaker, as the hog rolled about with one leg twisted beneath it.

Moonlight behind the clouds and the bright blue cast of the snow made for its own lamp, but deep shadows remained unreadable. As he got closer, the thing fighting to escape the snare began to look less like a hog and more like a small bear. Hunched over the way it was, it was hard to get a good look at its limbs.

When Elk’s shadow blanketed the creature, it lifted its head before lurching back.

And it spoke.

It was too quiet for Elk to catch any of the words, and he wondered at first if he might have caught a spirit. He’d heard plenty of tales about them, but none of them involved a spirit struggling with something as simple as rope. It was metal they feared.

Something gleamed near the creature’s twisted back leg. Elk followed the shine of it and found a small saw working at the snare.

His focus darted back to the creature’s face. This time, he understood what it was he was looking at.

Not a deer, not a hog, not a bear.

Suddenly, the tracks he had followed made sense. This must have been a group of desperate hunters, too possessed with need for the quarry they’d been stalking to worry about courtesy.

But it was strange. In this weather, most folk would have stopped at a place like this to beg shelter and maybe a meal. Seasoned hunters wouldn’t have ventured out so late in a snowstorm, anyway.

Maybe they’d gotten lost as soon as the weather turned. That happened.

Elk lowered a hand to help the hunter rise when the snare gave way.

They let loose an odd chuckle, as bitter in tone as Elk used to hear from his mother. “You were smarter than we,” they said, taking his hand and gripping it tight. “But you can’t stop it.”

A weightless, spinning feeling, like slipping on a patch of ice, sank into his core. He couldn’t make any sense of the hunter’s words, but the second they met his ears, world seemed changed.

It was the same feeling he had gotten coming home to find blood all over the floor.

The hand grasping his own tightened and wrenched, bending back his wrist and pulling him lower. While Elk struggled, the hunter drew a deep breath and called to their companions hiding behind the hog pen.

It was only one or two words they bellowed, but Elk didn’t understand them. Through the ringing in his ears, it sounded something like the language the old trapper sometimes mumbled in when she had damaged a hide.

He reached for the quiver at the same time as the hunter. The hunter, unburdened by the confusion and shock buzzing through Elk’s entire body, got first hold of an arrow.

It slipped from the quiver with a light clack, rattling the others and making them harder to grab with fingers numb from the cold. In one breath, the hunter plunged the point of the head into Elk’s hand.

Around the corner, a rush of footsteps climbed the front steps, and the door slammed open. It crashed against the front wall with a crack loud enough to shed mounds of snow from the roof.

The cold weight of it stung through the collar of Elk’s coat. The hunter cursed and rolled away, the arrow still tight in their fist.

Elk swung with all his might and missed. The blade sank into the wall inches from the bandit’s shoulder.

Rattled, the bandit stumbled aside before shoving him against the wall and pressing an elbow to his chest. She shouted in the dialect prevalent among trappers who worked the Eastern half of the mountains, heavily influenced by Isulfrite.

He understood only two of the words she pushed through her teeth: “Big fool.”

She used her other elbow to jab him between the eyes and again in the nose.

Elk’s eyes burned and watered as his head knocked against the solid wood of the wall. A flash of lights snapped behind his eyelids. His face felt full beneath the skin, the familiar sting and ache that hit him like a wave in the lake.

He hadn’t felt this way in years.

Some trembling anger gripped him by the neck and kept him standing.

Another of the bandits rushed forth to take over, splattered in a deep red that shined in the light of the open door.

No coherent thought ran through Elk’s mind as the bandits continued to beat him. He was aware only of the blurred sights and dampened sounds and the feeling of the bandit with the spear moving away.

A spark lit in his arms when the weight of her lifted. He slammed his arm free and reached for the axe beside him as they fought to subdue him again.

He wrenched out the axe in a shower of splinters and came at them again, rage raw in his throat. The one with the mace, he clipped on the shoulder, near the blood-stained collar.

The mace slashed blindly at the air in panic as its wielder lost confidence and a favorite swear of the Old Trapper’s burst from his lips. Whether he had taken any damage, it was hard to say.

Elk breathed hard from his mouth. A cold feeling spread in his knee as he prepared to take another swing. He didn’t realize anything was wrong until he tried to take a step forward and a strange, heavy force locked his knee in place.

He looked down as the ache began. The first bandit had the point of her spear wedged just above his knee.

The force wouldn’t let him move. The pain wouldn’t let him move.