The Reindeer People by Megan Lindholm Page A

panting voice sounded in the night behind him. His eyes sought and found the struggling figure that had ventured up the pingo to find him.
    'I'm here,' he called back softly to Lasse. The boy made his careful way across the broken crest of the frost heave. Heckram found himself studying the boy as coldly as he would study one of his yearling calves. His short legs were already acquiring the typical bow of the herdfolk. When he finished growing, his head might reach as high as the point of Heckram's shoulder. But he would never fill out to be a sturdy, thick-shouldered herder like his father and mother had been. His body had known too much privation, too soon. Had he been a calf, Heckram would not have considered him worth gelding into a harke, let alone using as a stud. With a snort of self-mockery, he shook such images from his mind, and once more saw Lasse as Lasse. As reluctant as he was to have his solitude broken, at least it was Lasse who had come to do it. The boy seemed to sense his mood, for he was silent as he approached. Lasse was nearly ten years younger than he but Heckram never treated him as a boy. Lasse, like Heckram, had become a man before his time. If anything, Lasse and his grandmother lived in circumstances even more straitened than Heckram's. But Lasse never complained. Perhaps because he had never known that life could be any different.
    'See them?' Heckram asked softly, and Lasse nodded. Both sets of dark eyes were fastened on the distant smear that was the wild herd. Vast it was, and yet still but a splinter of the thousands that moved from tundra to forest to tundra in their annual migration. And before the plague, the herd had been even larger. He knew Lasse found that image hard to comprehend. But Heckram remembered. In his boyhood, the wild herd had flowed before them like a river making its own bed. Brown and heaving it had surged across the tundra, leaving a swath of grazed earth in its wake. It always ranged ahead of the domesticated herd, but followed the same migration path. It was closer to the forested foothills but it had settled for the night.
    'How many shall we take this winter?' Lasse asked boldly, as if it depended only on skill and determination, and not luck.
    'Ah, perhaps a hundred,' Heckram blithely estimated. 'Eighty vaja for me, and twenty sarva for you.'
    They both laughed short, quiet laughs at the bitter jest. 'As many as we can, my friend, and it will never be enough,' Heckram amended.
    Lasse grunted in soft agreement.
    'I've been thinking,' Heckram began.
    'Not much else one could do up here,' the boy commented.
    'About our hunting,' Heckram went on firmly. 'What if we were to shoot the vaja as she grazes, and then try to lasso the calf? The calf would tend to stay by its mother, not understanding what had happened to her. And it would give us meat this winter.'
    They were both silent, thinking. A live animal weighed about three hundred pounds. A good portion of that would be guts, but that was not wasted. Heart and liver, bowels for the dogs, intestines and blood for sausages, bones and sinews for tools. Still.
    'Tough meat,' Lasse qualified. 'And a calf with no antlers is not as easy to lasso. And it has less of a chance of surviving the winter without its mother's protection.'
    'True,' Heckram agreed. 'But in a case where we couldn't get close enough for a good throw, it might at least be a chance for meat and a new animal.'
    'But the calf would be too young to bear that spring and would not fare well without its dam. If we take the vaja, even if the calf doesn't follow, we have an animal that will bear again in the spring. Whereas we may shoot the vaja, and find we have made all that effort for a male calf.'
    'Better than no calf at all,' Heckram rumbled.
    'Or only an antler to show for it,' Lasse suggested wryly, and they both laughed companionably. It had been last winter. Lasse had stalked a vaja and her calf. He had thrown his lasso well and true, and the bone runner