Read Brian's Winter for Free Online

excited. Working in the firelight, he trimmed the hides to make them clean-edged and rectangular. He used one hide for lacing, cutting thin strips off the edge with his knife—the first-aid scissors were too small to help—and started lacing the others together to form a large rectangle. It took some time because he had no needle and used the point of the knife to punch a small hole through the sides of the hides and then a sharpened twig to push the lacing through. Also the laces weren’t long and he could only “sew” seven or eight inches before he had to tie it off and use a new lace and by the time he had four hides sewn together he could feel exhaustion taking him down. He crawled into his bag and slept hard and didn’t awaken until well after dawn.
    Hunger awakened with him and he knew he had to hunt before he worked more on the hides so he took the light bow and arrows and went to the foolbird area. This time luck wasn’t with him and he missed three birds before he got a shot at a rabbit that hit. He cleaned it and used the green hide for lacing and started sewing again while his stew cooked and before he knew it he was back in the shelter again, working in the light from the fire, his stomach full and his fingers flying. But this time before he fell asleep he had finished sewing the rabbit skins into a rectangle roughly two feet wide by nearly six feet long.
    “It would make a good rug,” he said, crawling into the bag to sleep at what he thought must be three or four in the morning.
    Just before sleep came he heard the wolves. It sounded like two of them, high, keening howls as they sang to each other and then a crash in the brush as they chased something—maybe a deer. He had not heard from them in almost two weeks. There had been a time when the howls would have frightened him, given him an eerie feeling, but now he smiled. They must have gotten caught in the weather if it had taken them so long to run a circuit of their range, and he supposed they would mark the edge of their territory on the way through. He would have to go up and re-mark his own—the rains would have taken the smell away—the first thing in the morning.
    Good hunting, he thought at the wolves—have a good hunt. A good hunt was everything.

Chapter FIVE
    The morning dawned cold—more ice around the edge of the lake and the geese and ducks were flying almost constantly now—and after he rekindled the fire Brian went to work at once on the rabbit skins. He folded the rectangle over on itself with the fur on the inside and sewed up the sides, leaving two holes about six inches across at the top on each side, then cut a hole large enough for his head in the fold and pulled the whole thing down over his head, sticking his arms through the holes as he did so.
    It made a perfect vest. Well, he thought, looking down at himself—maybe not perfect. It actually looked pretty tacky, with bits of dried flesh still stuck to the hides here and there and the crude lacing. But it was warm, very warm, and within moments he was sweating and realized that it was more than he needed and had to take it off.
    He set it aside and was about to get back to work on the arrows—he still had to fletch them, put feathers on the shafts—when he remembered the wolves. He trotted up to mark his boundary stump and came around a corner near the stump and stopped dead.
    Facing him was a wolf, a big male, his head covered with fresh blood. He was holding a large piece of meat with a bone in the center in his mouth and he didn’t growl or look at Brian with anything but mild curiosity. They stood that way, Brian with no weapon and nothing in his mind but peeing on a stump, and the wolf holding the meat, and then the wolf turned and trotted off to the left and was gone.
    But he had come from the right, Brian thought—somewhere to the right—and as he watched, another wolf came by from the right with another piece of meat, though slightly smaller, and trotted