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There is no real choice to be made, you are for the hunt, and the hunt is for you. Whatever is in the mystified air holds you voice fast, and you are unable to shout out to Talons-on-the-Tree. Fortunately for you, the young chief has stopped his pursuit of the creature to wonder in the silence.
You’re able to approach from a wide circle, so as not to startle him or his tomahawk. He looks at you with face drawn in desolation. He was there, as you recall, when these omens birthed your expedition. Their ugly conclusion lain fresh in your memory.
You unclasp Kule’s arms from around your neck and offer the Indian child to his uncle. Talons-on-the-Tree takes him and drapes him like a garland around his own shoulders. Without speech it is difficult to make yourself understood, but you do so. You make him feel the heart-heat ebbing from Kule’s cheek and wrist, the boy’s twitching eyelids already nodding off. He understands. He looks back toward P’oilkat and jerks his head, but you shake yours from side to side, just the once.
His look of indecision is supplanted slowly but surely by his concern for his nephew. Your eyes linger on each other. He says nothing, but his eyes change their gleaming. He raises a hand to you as he backs away. You answer him with a hand of your own and he breaks off into a jog back to the white pyre of P’oilkat. Now it is you alone, with your fissured back, its seraphine pain, and the creature in the dark.
Tracking it is no struggle, a cavernous drift parts the snow where it was forced to drag its dead, hobbled leg. You make your way almost leisurely through the severe silence and to the stream that you and the group of Braves followed up into the mountain to P’oilkat.
There it sits, back to you, head upraised bewailing some winter song through cracked and bloody beak. Of course despite the motions of the creature’s strange prayers there is no sound to hear. You tap your way through your ammunition. The five bullets loaded into your revolver are the very last. Your Sharps has a goodly amount, almost twenty five. Your makeshift cross is through a belt loop opposite your holster, but you have yet to reanoint it with Lamb’s Blood. Your stock too old, dilute, and crass to carry any semblance of effectiveness.
Needs must, you will trust your safety to the Lord, as well as your rifle and agility. You make no sound when you approach, though you traipse almost braggartly to a position on the corner of a tree. Wasting such advantage is not in your nature, and so you take aim of the thing in its vulnerability. You will kill this creature. The words of its True Ending already fill your mouth, they must be spoken, they must be heard, you will deliver them. You aim down your sight at the thing’s seated back, and fire.
Please Roll 1d100 to wound the creature.
>Roll 1d100, first three rolls will be counted.
