The Middle Brother Finds His Range

The plainstrider folded like laundry. Bullseye Cudsong watched it drop into the grass of Red Cloud Mesa, counted the feathers that would not stay on the bird, and did not waste the meat. In Mulgore you take what you need. The rest is a conversation with the Earth Mother that hunters are supposed to keep short.

He had been on the mesa for less time than it takes Grandmother Ohsa to finish a verse of the old grazing song. Grull Hawkwind, the chief’s son, had looked him over the way men look over a fence post they have not yet trusted with cattle, and sent him out for seven plainstrider feathers and seven pieces of meat. The camp’s stores were low. The tribe does not feed itself on promises.

Bullseye walked until the tents of Camp Narache were a smudge behind him. He keeps a pocket full of smooth round pebbles for old times’ sake, and the chronicler notes that his aim has not gotten worse since the afternoon he sat Haymaker down in the grass with one of them. The plainstriders were less impressed by family history than by the arrow that followed, which is fair of them.

Somewhere on that slope the strength of the plains settled into him, and a pillar of gold light stood up out of the grass. Level two. Another rung on a ladder that never ends, though this one smelled of feather and dust and the long open country he likes better than anything with a roof.

He carried the bundle back to Grull and was thanked in the economical Camp Narache way: you show much promise. Then the camp did what camps always do the moment a stranger proves useful. It handed him more work.

There was a hunt that continues, because hunts do, and prairie wolves do not write themselves off the list. There was a humble task from Chief Hawkwind himself, who wants someone to look in on his mother at the well southeast of camp — the kind of errand that sounds like nothing and ends with a speech. And there was a note.

The Etched Note was the one that mattered. It pointed him to Lanka Farshot, the hunter trainer of Camp Narache, who teaches the tribe how to fire a weapon that keeps the herd alive and how to know a beast before it knows you. Lanka spoke of bloodlines and elders and a road that will one day leave Mulgore for unfamiliar lands. Bullseye listened the way he watches a hawk: without blinking, without interrupting. Track Beasts settled into his hands like a language he had already been speaking under his breath.

He spent a little copper on the trades that turn a kill into a living — herbs for the bag, a knife for the hide — because a hunter who wastes nothing is only doing what his mother already taught him on the farm below Bloodhoof Village. Fourteen minutes. Forty-two copper earned, forty spent. The arithmetic of a first day that knows it is a first day.

He logged out in Mulgore with The Hunt Continues still open, the Chief’s humble task unanswered, and the open thread he has carried since before Camp Narache: a companion that walks beside him by choice. He will know it when it stares back.

The prairie wolves on the mesa have no idea what is coming. Neither, the chronicler suspects, does Bullseye — and that is the honest beginning of every hunt worth singing about.