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The third cartridge clicks home as you bring your Sharps up to your shoulder. The creature sets itself from the first shot only to be beset by another sword of leaden thunder. The pits and grooves of its sallow, over-taut skin tear readily from their moorings. Your shot finds the throat, ragged and dangling scraps flap and flutter from the wound, but no great flush of blood or ichor.
In its eyes shoot a light of drab, hallow gray. you watch it rend the earth with its goliath step towards Talons-on-the-Tree, some flailing lines of slobber evacuating its open mouth. The young chief tosses his nephew as far as he can without stopping and races for the corpse of the remaining dead Indian. The thing tries to scrabble in the snow to turn and chase him but a fourth shot from you dislodges a severe portion of its back left ankle.
The leg gives out in brutal fashion, the smack of its knee on the frost-limed ground raps through the night, as does the snap of its filthy beak an inch away from the young chief’s heel. Your fingers go about their duties without condescending to inherit the fear and cold coursing through the rest of your body. They fish for another piece of brass and feed your rifle’s murderous hunger as you determine a proper course.
Talons-on-the-Tree dives for his dead companion, the creature smashing its way to him as he hastens to turn the body over. Kule sits up in the snow, clumps of it falling from his head. He holds himself like someone who’s injured something serious, and his lack of movement in the face of such horror is enough to make your decision for you. You fire off another shot, this one buzzing up and into the apex of some tree. The creature fails to even turn its head, but you’ve done what you can for now. You run hard to Kule, who’s preoccupied watching his uncle unsling an axe from the corpse of the dead Brave.
Talons-on-the-Tree stands to face the creature with long knife and flint tomahawk. He is still as stone. It reaches out with its disfigured beak, thin and wormy tongue panting in anticipation. Talons-on-the-Tree stands still. It crows its craze for the grim feast to come, and slices down with jagged and irregular power.
