The Storm-Toad Hunt
Winter 1
(Bjorn Bjarnesson and Erik Hardhead)
Some time during the winter...
Bjorn Bjarnesson and Erik Hardhead come back with several sledges. One is longer than most Norsem*n are tall, made all of bone. Bjorn pulls it himself, for it carries their original quarry: the carcass of a Storm-Toad, about the size of a horse.
The other sledges are smaller and made of wood- very fresh-looking wood. Some of the poles look like branches with the bark still on, except that they're as straight and neat as if turned on a lathe. Erik pulls the largest of these, which is normal enough. The others are a strange, grim sight, being dragged or pushed across the ground by the little walking skeletons of a pack of the strangely birdlike predators found in this land. Those who know Bjorn will recognize his tricks with bone being in play.
Upon the sleds the corpses of many sizeable lizards are piled high. In repose, they look a bit like logs, with their rough scales, save only that they have stubby arms and legs and taper in ways that no log would. The lizards have flexible tails and long jaws. Some are larger than a man; others smaller. It is hard to count them, since their sizes vary so much, but there must be more than two dozen, probably more than three.
There are a few other things piled on the sledges and propped in place by the lizard carcasses- containers of this and that, and a few large, hastily hollowed-out vessels of wood containing blood drained from the lizards. More disturbingly, there are some humanoid bodies, long since heavily decayed. They probably weren't human. Probably.
The whole load smells... pretty ripe, though all among the Norse have smelled worse.
...
The little train of sledges comes to a stop about half a mile from the edge of the land cleared in the first summer, well over a mile north of the old camp, and about halfway between the Erik and Bjorn's houses. The large, curiously striped rock serves as a natural landmark and part of the boundary between their plots.
When the sledges reach the agreed-upon place, Bjorn lets his little skeletons collapse into loose piles of bones with a sigh of relief. Both men, walking wearily, stride a goodly distance away to where others await them- they made slow going with the sledges, so others got here ahead of them easily enough.
As they made slow going with the sledges, by the time they arrive, several people are already waiting there for them. Along with a number of idly (or not so idly) curious spectators, there's Erik's wife Svanfrid, who was thoughtful enough to carry out a good-sized keg full of water. The two men are very thirsty, so this is met with cries of appreciation. Erik's mother Unna is out here too, with a couple of skins containing her latest experiment. Someone, she insists, has to at least try to make proper ale out of what crops and forage are available in this new land. The result is... dissatisfying, but no worse than most of what's been done along those lines so far. There isn't much, but it's a change of pace from the water.
Erik Hardhead glances to Bjorn. But Bjorn's stomach lets out a mighty rumble, and he waves to Erik to tell everyone about what happened himself. While Bjorn scrubs most of the dirt off his hands and tucks into a meal of hard bread and salt fish brought out to him by his mother Bridget, Erik tells the story.
...
"So you all know me and my cousin Bjorn are neighbors. I decided to go with him, hunting these Storm-Toads I've heard about. Killing the toad turned out to be no great trouble, seeing as it was already caught in a snare, so to speak..."
He smiles wryly, and gestures to the stacks of lizard corpses.
"But what snared the toad, that was quite a different problem. Those were strange beasts, things no shaft or blade would bite upon, that I doubt a man could even approach! But we killed them anyway, as you see, all thirty and seven of them."
"We started out going north to the big frog-pond you've heard tales of. Very little happened on the way to the pond. The Void-Eagle passed in the sky high over us, but it saw us not, or it cared not. I've never tried tossing a spear half a mile straight up, so we left the thing alone." Erik shrugs. "We got to the pond, and there were no Storm-Toads there. But Bjorn smelled something like toad to the west, so we went that way, to what I think must have been the swamp Ivor Lindholm and Njall Ulfson discovered. They talked about magic logs in the swamp- now we know." Again, he points at the stacks of lizard corpses."
"We saw a storm-toad, locked in midair, as if frozen! Quite a surprise. Bjorn looked things over, to judge all the angles, and you know me, I'm well enough content with that, but even I got impatient! I threw a clot of mud past the toad. It froze too, and we knew we were dealing with whatever strange thing Ivor talked about. We even recognized the logs floating all around, just as Ivor told it."
"Then one of the logs blinked." Erik's smile is evil and toothy, now. "Right there, in the heart of the place of frozen time- which it seems is their doing. Their way of snaring things for the hunt, perhaps. And their best defense too, for the pack of the things stopped my spear-cast the same as they'd stopped the toad. Not wanting to be frozen ourselves, and seeing that a whole great pack of the things was coming for us, we backed up a bit, to stay out of their reach. They're not slow in the water, but easy enough to outrun on land, I think. Still, running away wasn't what we had in mind."
"Bjorn called up his little skeletons to nip at their flanks, and plied his arrows, and I hit them with javelins from this way and that. But it was no good- spear, shaft, bone, all freeze. What they see, the stop the time for, so long as it's close enough. Their eyes darted this way and that, every way at once, stopping everything we threw at them, like a knot of men holding a shield-wall all round themselves. Even when I brought a spear hurtling down from above like a thunderbolt, they caught it." He snaps his fingers.
"But that was when we spied a weakness! For as they moved into the grass, the grass beneath their bellies was moving, even as the grass away from them did not. As I reckon it, they cannot freeze what is right around them and still move, so they don't try. And so Bjorn Bjarnesson buried bones, broken bits beneath, sowing them in the ground ahead of the beasts... and then he reaped his bloody harvest! As they walked over the bone-traps, he stabbed them from below with spikes of death, slaying one and all!"
"So that's the trick to killing these things. Get them to walk over something and hit them from below. Clever of him, I say. A good trick."
Erik pauses.
"So that's all the part that was really interesting. We brought the carcasses out on sledges, as you see, and Bjorn used his bone-tricks to rake part of the mire. We found the bodies, you see. Me, I'm wondering how good the eating is on these lizards. Bjorn favors the name Kyrreðola, 'Still Lizards.' Me, I'd have called the things 'Danger Logs,' but he's the one who killed them."
