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just make sure you bring your blades.’ Mammoth Talker hefted his spear. ‘Everybody had a drink and a piss and a shit? Anybody got anything else to say? Then let’s go.’

    So they walked south. As soon as they were away from the lee of the rock bluff the wind from the icebound north bit at their backs. The country seemed lifeless, with only dead grass and scrub at their feet. Once Dreamer saw a cloud of dust on the horizon, far to the east. A crowd of large animals - bison, perhaps, or horses, or deer.
    Talker was right that it wasn’t far to the Cowards’ kill site. The morning was not much advanced by the time they saw threads of smoke rising, and Dreamer began to hear noises: a general lowing, deep screams of pain, high-pitched human calls.
    Confidently Talker led them towards a bluff of layered, eroded rock. It was clear he had done his scouting well. They climbed, and on the feature’s flat top they lay down on their fronts. This was awkward for Dreamer, who tried to favour her belly. They inched forward until they could see.
    From here the land sloped downward gently to a valley incised sharply into the ground and littered with shattered rocks. People clustered in knots around fires that burned on both sides of the valley.
    The valley itself was dry, as far as Dreamer could see. But it was not empty. The narrowest part of the valley, she was astonished to see, was full of squirming animals.
    They were bison, no doubt about that, many of them, heaped up on each other. The living tried to stand on the backs of the dead below, wriggling and tossing their heads. Blood splashed everywhere, and there was a lingering stench of ordure, mixing in the morning air with the smoke from the fires. The air was full of heart-rending bellowing.
    She could see where the herd had been driven into the trap. On one side of the valley the dusty ground was churned up by the hooves of stampeding animals, who had evidently crashed through a concealing screen of brush and tumbled down the steep valley wall.
    And the hunters worked, Cowards with their strange spiky hair and dense tattoos. As Dreamer watched, a carcass was hauled out of the pit and dragged to a fire, where it was efficiently butchered, the skin slit and dragged away, the limbs detached, the guts spilled, haunches cut off the carcass and hung on racks or thrown straight on the fires. This was going on all around the valley, and the ground was marked by the remains of butchered carcasses, bloody masses that looked as if the animals had been dropped from a height and splashed open.
    Some of the Cowards danced for fun around the terrified, furious animals, jabbing with spears, mocking, keeping well back from hooves and horns. There was plenty of meat; there was no need for everybody to work.
    Talker murmured, ‘It was like this before dark. It must have been going on all night. Look at them prodding the wretched animals with their stupid little spears. Look how they sprawl on the ground, asleep in the middle of the day.’
    Dreamer made a rough count. ‘I see a dozen fires. There must be a hundred hunters here - hunters and their women and children.’
    ‘The Cowards always hunt in packs,’ Talker said dismissively. ‘Like dogs. They like to stampede their prey. They set fires and holler and chase.’
    Shaper said, ‘But some run in front, directing the beasts to the trap they want them to fall into. We call them Cowards. It must take courage to run ahead of a stampede.’
    Talker dismissed this. ‘It takes courage to face the animal whose life you will take for the sake of your own. To look it in the eye, to see its spirit vanish. Not like this. And look how wastefully they are butchering the beasts. Taking only the best fillets.’
    ‘They can afford to,’ Dreamer murmured. ‘Anyhow, Talker, what’s your plan?’
    ‘There’s plenty of meat down there. We could haul away a dozen prime bulls and they wouldn’t know the difference.’
    ‘No matter how much they