Wild Gourmet: Chapter 12

Brand reached across his body to pull out one of his extra daggers with his off-hand. He needed to keep his main weapon ready to go, to use as a deterrent that kept the bear at bay. Springing back through an exceptionally thick part of the growth, he used the split second he bought to pick a target and fling the knife with all his might.

It flipped end-over-end through the air, embedding in the bear’s shoulder up to the hilt. It wasn’t the kind of throw he could have pulled off without a weapon skill, which meant his weapon skill was actually OK with this type of use. It was good news of the type that just might mean he was going to get to live.

Shoulders won’t cut it. I’ll have to hit something more vital.

Calling his shots was going to be an order of a magnitude harder than just flinging knives, but Brand did his best anyway, looking for a soft target and heaving the knife at it with everything he had. It was too much. He missed the bear completely, and the knife shattered as the flat of the blade slammed against a tree.

“One last chance.” Brand weaved further into the stand of trees, hoping that Shemi had the sense to have gotten away from the fighting. “Gotta make this count.”

The monster found an opening and charged towards him. Brand let it. He bet everything on the next throw, full of the knowledge that if he didn’t hit something important he’d likely be dead in the next five minutes anyway.

The dagger throw this time was better. It helped that the bear was moving straight towards him, but the real change came from how he threw it, opting for an underhand spear-style throw that would let the blade point forward through its entire flight. He held his breath for a moment as it cut through the air, then nearly cheered as it embedded itself in the ursine’s eye.

The Ursine roared and reared up on its hind legs, enraged. Brand moved forward as it clawed at the dagger, darting under its big arms and burying his sword in its side. It wasn’t a fatal blow, he could tell. But it was a real wound cutting through real important muscles. It would almost have to slow the monster down.

The monster regained its sanity a moment later and started the hunt anew, leaving the dagger in place as it focused entirely on the hunter in front of it. It slashed and bit, but Brand now had the upper hand. The two daggers that had hit had done their work, as had the deep slash in its side. The ursine was fighting hurt, now, and the decrease in its speed was noticeable. Brand moved closer than he would have dared before, slashing and stabbing.

He hit more often than not, and though each new wound enraged the bear further, that was more a feature than a flaw in his plan. The bear lost all sight of the forest around it, bashing into trees and getting hung up on the underbrush. It finally slashed out at him and got its arm momentarily caught in the crook of a split tree trunk. Brand went to work, stabbing it deeply in several points on its side. He didn’t know where the bear’s heart was exactly, but he figured if he stabbed it enough times where it should be he’d eventually hit it.

It was the fifth strike in that sequence that finally worked. The monster turned its one good eye on him, still full of fire and rage, and then slowly bucked. Its legs gave out underneath it as it went limp, still held in place by its paw and the thick tree trunks that trapped it.

“That was…” Shemi stumbled out of her hiding place as soon as she was sure the bear was dead. “That was something. Thank you. I…”

“Sit down.” Brand guided her a bit away from the dead monster and sat her down, back against a tree. “You look terrible.”

“I ran from it for… I don’t know. Hours.” She shuddered. “If it wasn’t for the trees I’d be dead.”

Brand wasn’t feeling great, himself. Now that the fight was over, he saw just how many close calls he had taken in the last desperate struggle. His body sported cuts, some shallow but a few deep enough to almost be dangerous to him. They’d close up, he felt, but he was losing a good amount of blood in the meantime.

“It’s safe now.” He hoped that was true. “Just rest. We’ll… we’ll take a nap.”

Shemi nodded, weakly, then closed her eyes. Brand watched for the minute or so it took her breathing to calm, then closed his own eyes. It was a day off at last, he thought. His own eyes grew heavy as he finally laid idle in the sun. He finally let himself drift off as the last of his wounds closed.

When Brand woke up, it was to the smell of broiling meat. Burning meat, really, though he found he wasn’t in any mood to complain about that. Shemi was sitting by a small fire, broiling a long strip of meat on the pan from Brand’s pack.

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“Sorry about stealing this. I was starving and I don’t think I can walk all the way home without some food in my stomach. I used up all the energy from your stew yesterday running away from the monster.” Shemi smiled apologetically. “I am making enough for two, though.”

“It’s fine. Thank you.” Brand rubbed his face to try and get rid of some of the sleep that he felt sticking to his brain. “I could use the food too.”

“It’s not going to be good.”

“Any food is good when you are hungry.”

When the Ursine meat was burned thoroughly enough to count as cooked, Shemi cut it in half with her axe and handed a slab to Brand. He took his knife and trimmed off a bite-sized chunk, thankful that his new stats were enough to keep his skin from burning as he handled his share of the meal.

The meat was tough and strong-flavored, almost to the point of being inedible. It hardly mattered. Brand chewed the bite thoroughly then cut another, putting away two meals worth of energy by the time the huge chunk of meat was gone.

“Not good. Like I said. Right?”

“Honestly?” Brand laughed a little. “It was an abomination before the gods of cooking. But there wasn’t anything you could do. Food like this needs a certain kind of attention to be good, and you just don’t have the supplies out here to do it, even if you knew what you were doing.”

“Which I don’t.”

“Which you don’t. But it’s OK.” Brand patted his stomach. “Being full is better than being hungry. I’ll take it. I just wish we could get this monster back to town. There’s so much meat on it that it could feed us for days. Maybe weeks, if we could get some sort of smoking rack built fast enough.”