The stag was beautiful in the light of the early morning; sure-footed and strong-flanked. Dew glistened on his muzzle as he breakfasted on ferns and grass; the clearing was so quiet that each individual chomp of his molars could be heard, and if he didn’t hurry the fuck up and get just one foot closer to her Rali was going to bite through her spear in frustration. She’d been sitting here for two of the prettiest, coldest, dampest hours of her life waiting for a crucial six inches of movement.
A bird twittered, the stag’s head jerked upright, and it carefully stepped six inches in exactly the incorrect direction.
Well, that was enough. Sometimes even if it was the wrong thing you had to do something, and that was why Rali jumped out of the tree screaming and stabbing everywhere, missing the stag by a full foot at the least and slightest. It hopped, bleated, pawed aimlessly at her – missing her head by a LOT less than a foot – and bounced backwards out of the clearing, white rump flashing, hooves flying, directly into the monster’s mouth.
The monster shut its mouth. It was a very simple operation that led to a lot of complicated changes in the stag’s anatomy.
“Show-off,” said Rali. The monster grunted apologetically through its breakfast.
She’d really wanted to get that one by herself. Yes, yes, it was a team activity, but after months of practice she’d hoped to have a chance to test herself, prove that she’d accomplished something.
Instead she accomplished a slab of venison over a fire, surrounded by a feathery and anxious blanket of squallers. At first she’d tried to shoo them back to the farm – she’d left the pen open so they could forage, and eventually someone would show up to take them in – but they never did anything but flutter away and look hurt and terrified (a squaller’s default expression, to be fair) so she’d given up and accepted that her lot in life was to be accompanied at a distance by over a dozen neurotic stinking child-beasts.
The eggs were nice, mind you.
***
Rali woke early the next morning to an unexpected sensation. Chill.
The air was cold. Her breath hung in front of her, puffy and pale. The squallers had compacted themselves into even tighter balls of feathers than usual, and frost rimed the monster’s scales across the thicket patch they called home, or at least ‘bed.’
It was snoring blissfully, so clearly this wasn’t unusual.
This was good. Rali had enjoyed the last few months, which had involved less weeding and stump-clearing and tilling than she had ever imagined to be possible, but in the back of her head she’d always been wondering what the plan was for winter. That the monster rested so casually indicated there was one, which was a tremendous relief.
After three days of waiting she lost her temper and hit its snout until its eyes opened.
“THIS is the plan?” she asked it incredulously. “Sleep through the cold?”
The monster blinked affrontedly at her.
“You’re going to sleep for three months?”
The monster indicated this was the case.
“I can’t do that.”
The monster looked mortified, half-sat-up with great purpose, then slumped over and fell asleep again.
Rali sighed, and remembered her farm, and remembered clearing the stumps.
“Well. Could be worse.”
***
The first snow came down later that day.
The first snow that stayed came down later that night.
The first white morning came right after that, and it was a real sight. But what surprised her the most wasn’t the perfect snow-tracings on every branch and twig and needle in the woods.
What surprised her the most was the sky.
Rali had spent as little time outdoors in winter as she could – as anyone sane did – and she’d ventured out only for essential chores, and she’d done them quickly and as well as she could be assed.
She’d never had this much time out here alone, and watching, and seeing the whole world turn pale grey from the heavens on down to the water-turned-ice was, well.
Maybe it wasn’t beautiful. But it was definitely something.
She could’ve looked at it for hours, and she did. And then her stomach rumbled.
Time for a hunt. She grabbed her spear, stood upright, said “hey, let’s go” to the monster, and started swearing.
***
The last berries of the season were gone, so she ate the nuts fallen from the trees.
The snowfall came and hid the nuts, so she hunted the stags, fat-packed for the lean times.
The stags hid in their secret thickets in the deep woods, and that was when the squallers started to look nice and tempting, but they were also her (slightly-foul-and-fowl-smelling) blanket and besides they were laying hens, not eating. And there wasn’t a lot of fat on them after months living in the wild.
So Rali improvised. She climbed trees and jammed her spear into holes and sometimes (just often enough to be worth it) into a sleeping treecurler atop its nut hoard. She threw very small rocks at very small birds for very small meals. She went down the frozen lakes and smashed open the ice and dangled lines made from twisted grass and bark, and once she smashed a hole open in the shallows for a drink and accidentally brained a sleeping turtle as big as her torso, which was a nice surprise and an even nicer meal.
All in all, she was doing surprisingly well when the blizzard came.
It was remarkably sudden. One moment Rali was considering the snow, trying to figure out if a hoofprint meant a stag was slumbering in the bushes ahead of her or had left days ago, the next everything had gone completely white. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, or anything else in front of her face for that matter. Then she stopped trying because her eyesockets were rapidly becoming snowballs.
Finding her way home in that was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, foot by foot, grope by grope, one foot in front of the next woops that wasn’t in front that was behind, fall after fall after getting up. But at last she stumbled into a dark space that wasn’t blindingly white and fell face-first onto the monster’s fur and slumbered like the dead.
When Rali woke up the first thing she realized was that the monster didn’t have fur. The second thing she realized was that she wasn’t in the thicket. And the third thing she realized was that the mawbear she was sleeping on top of was waking up.
***
There were no more blizzards, and even the darkest depths of the cold that came the following month were no terror under Rali’s new coat. She foraged freely far and wide, drunk on the invincibility offered by a belly endlessly full of thawed bear-meat and coddled in its slightly smelly embrace, even if it did make the squallers panic every time she came home with the hood drawn up. Maybe she shouldn’t have left the head attached. She did her best to earn back their fleeting, panicky trust with endless bribes of anything green she found in her prey’s stomachs.
Well, the bits Rali didn’t eat herself. At this point she’d have done a lot for a single burnt tuber from the west field on her farm.
Except remove stumps.
She would definitely not remove stumps.
She WOULD, however, tear open stumps with her hatchet, unearthing tiny and beautifully frail families of wood-voles, which she would devour. They were very succulent, and small enough to eat whole when roasted, particularly on a fistful of the little (and hard, and tough, but oh so smoky) monk’s-ear-fungus they bedded upon. It was in the middle of her preparing one of those miniature feasts that the monster finally bestirred itself, nostrils prickling from the smoke.
“Hey,” she said to it. “Sleeping beauty done yet?”
It wobbled itself almost to a standing position.
“Because I’ve been busy. You didn’t know I couldn’t just nap through the cold, did you?”
The monster, though possessed of an armoured and inflexible face, had expressions aplenty in subtle casts and cants of its head, eyes, and body, which Rali’s keen familiarity with it allowed her to read. For example, careful observation of the way it was deliberately avoiding eye contact with her, covering its face with its claws, and whimpering as it crept over to her on its belly allowed her to hypothesize that it was sorry.
“You’d better be.”
It grovelled a little harder.
“Okay, that’s enough.”
Birds took to flight in nearby trees, ears popping with the sheer force of the whine.
“No, it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s-” Rali’s eyes narrowed, then shot to the wood-voles simmering on the stone next to her in their fungus bed. “Wait. Are you asking for one of these?”
Hope dawned in the monster’s face, followed immediately by a snowball.
***
There was no clear victor in the great winter battle, only a cessation of hostility following mutual exhaustion of arms and also legs.
Rali maintained she won because the monster ran out of energy and stopped moving. The monster probably would’ve argued it won after Rali became immobilized for over an hour under the weight of all the snow in the thicket.
Both of them definitely admitted in the privacy of their own heads that the squallers won. By the time both of them were up and about again, the little bastards had picked the wood-voles clean.