He could smell smoke though it had yet to start billowing from the torched cabins.

These cabins were our doom. We should not have learned to build them.

He tore through a chest-high thicket of flint-thorn brambles, shredding his worn buckskins and the skin beneath, now seeing the world through a red haze as his eye-lids caught the blood that splashed from his forearms. After ten paces of cracking and tearing he was through the thick stand that Six-Song had declared impassable by any creature but a mad bear. For that reason it had been placed at the back of the camp, and Father would be making his stand with his back to it.

The sound of slaughter—not battle—rose terribly above the racket caused by his headlong charge. When he broke through the thicket he came out behind a knot of struggling men. Around which a dozen Pushing River braves scrambled: splitting the heads of women, slitting the throats of the elders, grabbing the babies and children by their feet and dashing their brains out against the boughs of the beech trees that had shaded the camp in summer.

Kill them!

Even as the thought of attempting to save a child by dashing through the battle tugged at his will to fight he gained resolve from the sight before him. There was Father, scalped, with one leg horribly broken, two bodies at his feet. He wrestled a large warrior for the spear that had run him through the guts even as a smaller warrior stabbed him repeatedly in the back with a long steel knife. He thought to say nothing, to yell nothing, but only to scream his fury as he swung the great blade horizontally overhead, never slacking pace, “Father!”

With that deep bellow the small warrior’s head flew from his shoulders. Hush spun even as he ran, repeating the same cut, which cleaved the spearman’s head in half, the top half flying like a cast stone through the air.

He bellowed, “Father!” and a warrior fell in two pieces, sheared at the waist.

Something dragged him furiously back into the past…Hush had killed two Pushing River men once in a gully above the Shellfish-water, had shot three dead from a tree stand below the Pushing River, had murdered one fool, who was line-fishing by their main camp—had even run down and released the one boy. On another occasion he had murdered a Spanish black robe who was extolling the virtues of his slain god-on-the-cross. He had slain innumerable animals on the hunt. This, however, was his first battle. He lost all perspective, all notion of where his men might be, as his sight narrowed and his heart pounded in his ears.

“Father!”

Something ripped open his cheek and he smashed a warrior’s face into pulp with one punch of SoulDrinker’s cross-piece.

He bellowed, “Father!” and slashed for the sky—through the Pushing River chief’s groin, splitting the man with a rising backhand cleave from pelvis to right shoulder.

He charged through the separating halves of the gushing and still screaming corpse with a tremendous roar, “Father!” and slashed down to his outside. He was thrilled to see a leg cleaved above the knee and spurting blood sideways as the falling body pulled the thigh up. An arch of spurting blood blinded him as he ran through it.

He saw a large brave before him mounted on his eldest sister as she lay on her back, legs spread, her feet having been smashed to pulp with a war club. He screamed, “Father!” and thrust SoulDrinker down through the man’s arching back, and through his sister, Rabbit—Yes, Rabbit had been her name—pinning her momentarily to the ground. A tear wet his eye when he ripped the blade from them and she yelped.

Goodbye Rabbit.

He rose out of his crouch and took a tomahawk in the chest over his heart. The blade cut him, and his high rib cracked as the haft of the weapon tumbled over his shoulder. He bellowed, “Father!” and felt a searing pain in his chest as he leaped forward with a savage downward stroke that cleaved the man from shoulder to hip.

Something raked his shoulder blades and he instinctively ducked and ripped a lateral backhand which sent SoulDrinker shearing through the empty belly of a warrior holding a curved Whiteman’s knife. The belly sounded like a torn sack half full of water as the man fell in two silently.

Two big ones before you, meet them.

Grandfather?

He began lunging forward from his long squat to meet the two large warriors that came toward him, one with Father’s head in his left hand. But a great forceful weight slammed into his back. He began to pitch forward, but his foot caught on something and his knee buckled. So the warrior that had leaped on his back tumbled over him. He screamed, “Father!” and pinned the boy’s face to the frozen blood-slick earth with the point of SouldDrinker, conscious that the now lifeless eyes of Father’s head regarded him with the expectation of revenge.

Leap upon them!

He gathered his legs and leaped—silently, for nothing else would come from his throat but air—like a giant frog, hearing a popping in his chest as he dove to meet their charge. He managed a savage cross-cut that sent him rolling sideways into the rightmost man as SoulDrinker sheared off the left arm of the head-bearer. He had the satisfaction of seeing Father’s head fall free of the dismembered hand even as he scrambled to his feet.

As he gained a knee arrows whistled over head, crying babies died against tree boughs, a child screamed in agony, a woman—old Weasel—whimpered a curse as her throat was cut…

Hush cut the enemy warrior’s right arm off at the elbow.

The man fell flat on his face as his stump gushed over Hush’s moccasins—then he saw him there, a warrior among warriors: an old one-eyed Whiteman with face hair like bloody crab grass, a steel breastplate, but one broken tooth in his grinning mouth, and Hush’s best man, Groove, choking out his life on the wide curved steel knife in the massive, gore-dripping, white left hand.

This is the one, the ‘peerless enemy’ Father spoke of, the one who would come to rub us out.

He could hear some struggling men, a falling woman, a dying girl asking frantically where her eyes were, and the caw of a great crow. The man turned on him with measured malice, a great wooden shield—many-layered, hide-covered, feathered with four arrows and spiked with a great dagger—strapped to his right arm.

He is left handed. What would Father say?

Circle away from the shield, your blade being longer than his.

A cabin roof crackled as a great, heated “woosh” of air engulfed it somewhere beyond the edge of Life.

The man turned toward Hush and spit a glob of green lung puss into the snow and spoke in ragged English, “So you the weaned one, are ya boy?”

Chopping feet—one comes.

A scream in the Longhouse tongue split his right ear and he let go a back hand cut toward the charging warrior he could not see in the gathering smoke and snow that drove from that quarter. The plucked and painted head—ornately adorned scalp lock fluttering in the wet, sooty flurry—flew into the air, the still open mouth now forever silent. But the body kept coming. The gushing stump crashed into his belly, nearly driving the wind from him as he fell to his back.

The tramp of the heavy Whiteman’s booted feet came crunching toward him. He did not think, but acted, somersaulting back over his rear end and slashing upward and outward with a close forehand, sensing that extension against this foe would be his doom. As the towering man rushed in and parried SoulDrinker with his long knife, Hush saw pretty little Fox being pinned to a towering beech by a spear through her neck as she held her dead baby, even as Falcon Tail, with two arrows in his belly, sunk an arrow into the back of Fox’s killer.

Then lightning coursed through his mind’s eye, blinding him to the world for an instant as the big bear of a man removed Hush’s top left teeth—from molar to canine—with the edge of his wooden shield.

Hush stepped back with a backhand that sent SoulDrinker glancing harmlessly from the steel-covered torso of the enemy. The man roared some oath and sent a vicious sheering cut toward Hush’s neck. Hush ducked deep, letting himself fall beneath the big man who was crowding him—something Father had always warned against. He felt the blood spew from the side of his mouth and felt a tooth blown loose by his exhalation as he put everything into a cross cut that would finish the fight one way or the other.

The man’s rank breath was washing over his face as his alien war cry spewed green snot across Hush’s brow and his shield came ripping around to stave in the crouching warrior’s head. Hush, last of the Sons of Fierce Woman, was to die here, today, beneath these booted feet…

“No!” came his gurgling cry.

SoulDrinker bit first and bit last. The great blade first cleaved through the massive left thigh of the pivoting Whiteman. It sang with a twanging—even thirsty—voice as it tore through the inside tendons above the knee. It than sang a high-pitched song as it broke loose, cut air, and sheared through the bony right knee. The reeking Whiteman and his mouth-wrecking shield fell like fresh dropped bear dung before the crouching warrior.

The camp was silent but for the roar and crackle of the flames and the caw of the gathering crows.

There was only the sound of fire and the silence of the dead.

Hush rose above the sprawled and heaped bodies of family, friends and foes. The cabins now roared with flames and crows cawed from above. But no sound of suffering or struggle came to his ears.

Hush caught the bearings of the footfalls back up the ridge down which he had just charged mere moments—and an ever-changed world—ago. He ran back through the thorns, hacking a path with SoulDrinker as the slight footfalls hurried up the hillside ahead of him in the gathering snowstorm.

Save this one of your cousins at least.