Read Brian's Winter for Free Online Page B

hide loose, cutting it off the front legs and up the neck to the back of the head.
    The doe’s eyes bothered him at first. They were large and brown and open and seemed to be watching him as he turned and cut and pulled, and he apologized for what had happened to her, what he was doing to her.
    It did not ease his discomfort but he hoped the spirit of the deer knew what he was feeling and he promised that none of what was there would be wasted.
    And what a lot of it there was—more than he’d seen since he crashed. The hide—much tougher and thicker than the rabbit skins—was big enough to nearly make another vest and he laid it near the side of his shelter to dry while he worked at the meat.
    The wolves had fed until they were gorged and must have then taken what they could carry back to their den, but he was amazed at how much meat there was left. He started cutting it off in strips, lean red meat, which he laid on a flat rock. Just off one shoulder there was more meat than he’d ever seen together in one place outside a supermarket. A good six or seven pounds, with no bone in it, and then the other shoulder and then on top going up the neck and when he was finally done—just at dark—he figured he had twenty-five or thirty pounds of meat.
    He made a huge stew, boiling close to six pounds of meat sitting by the fire in his rabbit-skin vest as the evening chill came down. Then he ate, and ate and ate, and when he was done there was still meat and broth left. He dozed, slept and awakened in the middle of the night and ate some more, drank some more of the broth, and there was
still
some left.
    He awakened in the morning with a stomach still bulging full and grease on his lips and something close to joy in his heart.
    He was not done with the body of the doe. The head bothered him—the way her eyes seemed to see things—and he separated it from the neck bones and took it up and set it in the fork of a tree well off the ground and looking out over the lake. He wasn’t sure why but it seemed the right thing to do and he thanked her again for her meat before turning back to work.
    The freezes at night had done away with the flies so they didn’t bother the meat and he spread the pieces out to give them air and by the middle of the afternoon he could see they were drying into a kind of jerky in the sun. But before that he went to work on the bones. There was still a lot of meat on them and he chopped them up with the hatchet and kept a pot boiling all day to boil the meat and marrow from them. When it was finally done—again, in late afternoon—he was surprised to see the liquid in the pot become semihard, like Jell-O, and turn into a thick mass full of bits of cooked meat.
    This he ate for the evening meal—or about half of it—spooning it in thick glops, and when he was at last back in his shelter, the meat stored safely in the rear and the pot set aside from the fire for the night (still half full) he felt like the richest man on the earth.
    It was very hard to concentrate on working. Everything in him wanted to sleep now—he’d never been so full and the shelter was warm and snug and all he really wanted to do was close his eyes and sleep and end the day.
    But he could not forget the bear attack, or the rain and cold, and he knew that the good weather and his luck wouldn’t last and he had really no time to waste.
    He took the arrows out and rummaged around in the survival pack for his feather stash. He had found early on that foolbird feathers from the wing and tail worked the best for arrows and he had saved every wing and tail feather from every foolbird that he had shot and he took them out now.
    These arrows were different. They were heavier and he worried that the width of the point would catch the air and counteract the feathers in some way. The solution, he felt, was to make the feathers longer.
    He selected only two feathers for each arrow but left them a full six inches long and shaved a flat side