Chapter 10: Winter Meat

The first frost came early, white and silent.

By then the lion king had broken every rule Jory had given him.

He had stopped scratching the post on the second day.

He had stopped sleeping anywhere but the Hollow on the third.

On the fifth morning he carried a whole young boar across the plain on his shoulders and laid it on the bed.

"Rule three," Jory said.

"It is a different bed."

"It's the same bed."

"It is our bed," said Lucan, with great calm, and went out again for water.

Jory stood looking at the boar for a full minute.

He'd been about to argue.

Somewhere around the word our he forgot what the argument was.

The smokehouse went up that week.

It was a small hut of green poles and hides over a trench, with a fire pit at the low end and racks above.

The pride built it in two days.

Fifty lions who had never seen a smokehouse now argued over it loudly.

Jory stood in the middle with his sleeves rolled and told them where the poles went.

"The smoke has to be cool," he said. "Slow. Green wood and no flame, or it cooks the outside and rots the middle."

"It will rot?" Sabra asked.

"It'll go bad in a week unless you do it right," Jory said. "Done right, it keeps through winter."

"Through winter," Sabra repeated.

"All winter."

She looked at the racks, loaded with sliced venison and boar, and her hunter's face did something complicated.

"We lose four cubs in a bad winter," she said quietly. "Most years."

Jory kept his eyes on the poles.

"Not this year," he said.

Bix spent the days under everyone's feet.

He had a tunic of rabbit fur now and a stick he called his spear.

He followed Kiri and her brother around the camp in a gang of three.

He still bit, but less.

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