In the morning, the day began with the butchery of Gall’s deer. It was a big beast, a handsome male. Gall had already removed its antlers. The women took the lead in the butchery, picking up tools from a shared heap as they needed them. But Gall looked faintly disgusted when some of the men of Etxelur joined in - and even more so when Shade picked up a stone blade. Ana knew that in Gall’s culture the women did such work, with the hunter sitting around and lapping up the praise for his kill. Maybe Shade was curious about learning a new skill. Or maybe he was just trying to irritate his brother.
The animal’s head was removed first, and this was the job of the priest, who used an ancient, lustrous flint tool from his charm bag. He apologised to the deer, closing its lifeless eyes and kissing the lids. Then he cut through the animal’s cheek and briskly removed its tongue, severing it at the root; this juicy treat would be his reward.
Then came the skinning. The women made cuts around the hooves and along the inside of the legs; the torso was sliced from throat to crotch. Then the animal was turned over and the skin peeled back, the men hauling, the women crawling around with their blades to chop away sinews and clinging tissue. The skin came away almost intact, and was folded and set aside.
The animal was cut open with heavy blades, and its stomach wall and ribs pulled back. The lungs were torn out and discarded, the guts spilled to the ground. The liver was dug out of the pile of offal and handed to Gall, the hunter, as his prize; he bit into it raw. Then the butchers moved around the carcass, working steadily. The legs were removed and broken at the joints, the ribs put aside, meat sliced from the body. As the animal disintegrated neat piles grew up around it, of meat fillets, big bones to be sucked clean of their marrow, sinews and useful bits of smaller bones, heaps of gut to be chopped up and mixed with blood, salted, fried. Some of the more bitter internal organs would be thrown into the waste pit, which had been placed close to the forest’s edge to lure pigs. Only a few scattered fragments were thrown aside, chopped vertebrae, bone fragments.
Before the butchery was finished, Ana went to work with her sister on the skin. They scraped it clean of the last of the blood and fat and sinews, using tools of small stone blades stuck into a bit of bone with resin. It was fine, careful work; you had to get rid of all the waste while not cutting the skin. After they were done here, the skin would be rinsed in the river water and then soaked in the urine pit for a couple of days, after which the hide would be taken out, washed, and put through a process of stretching, rubbing, folding, soaking, until it was quite soft. Meanwhile there were the deer’s sinews to work on. These would be scraped with even finer tools. Back at the coast they would be washed in sea water, hung up to dry, and split into fine threads. These would be made soft by working over with scrapers, as Ana preferred, or working through your teeth, as others chose.
In this way virtually none of the deer was wasted, and a proper price paid for taking its life.
Glancing up, wiping a bloody hand across her forehead, Ana saw that four young buzzards were circling overhead, their round wings and tail easily visible. When the people had gone and the birds and worms were done with their feeding, nothing would be left of the deer but a few fragments of bone and broken flint. And perhaps when the river shifted its course again, even those traces would be washed out to sea, leaving the land as clean as if humans had never come here at all.
This was what was best about life, she thought, a little wistfully. Useful labour hard enough to make your muscles ache and your skin glow with sweat. People building their lives together through one small task after another, while respecting the world and the endless gifts the mother gods provided for them.
It was while she was in this pleasant, dreamy, late-morning mood that the party from the snailhead camp approached.