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It’s here the young chief drops, his body completely limp, edging just under the triumphant hook of the thing’s beak. He rolls his body over, bringing the knife in his left hand to bear, and drives it whole through the creature’s tongue, gravity’s great hand helping to jerk the creature’s neck smashing down into the earth. Its weight compromised by forward momentum, the thing’s whole body stumbles, crashing down in a mess of pallid limbs.
Tongue gripped by his long knife, Talons-on-the-Tree raises the tomahawk and with a yip hacks down on the wriggling organ, again, and a third time. Each successive chop wrings an unholy scream from the creature, but it fails to regain its footing fast enough Its tongue lies still and snake-like on the snow before it courses upward with a terrible vengeance, but the Indian is moving, already on his own feet and over to the creature’s other side.
Talons-on-the-Tree weaves inside the creature’s front two legs, precluding any easy course of attack, and begins chopping a deep groove in the channel that joins the thing’s back right leg with its hip. The creature tries to maneuver, desperate for distance between them, it walks back, stretches its taloned legs away in different directions, and tries to fit its bloody beak through its front legs to defend itself. Whatever it does, the young chief keeps pace, hacking, and hacking, and hacking, strands of sinew snapping apart in audible, wretched echoes.
You reach Kule, the boy watches his uncle dance beneath the creature, his breath steady, but slowing as the rest of the world fails to intrude on his attention. You snap your fingers in front of his face and he starts, his mouth opens but you don’t wait for him to speak, you can see the twist and bulge under his skin at the ankle, the swollen coursing of broken bones. You turn around and place his arms around your shoulders. He gets the hint, and clings to you as you lift up with him in tow.
You bespell your rifle with killing force once more and let loose against the creature, both it and the young chief around thirty feet away from you and Kule. You score a shot clean through its jaw. It still does not bleed, but this one, it reacts to, trying to make its croaking wails, stifled and bent through its now shredded tongue. It turns and tries to move to you, but Talons-on-the-Tree is still underneath, and he sinks his knife to the hilt in the furrows he’s made in the thing’s muscle.
