“What do you think it is?”
“It’s… poop, isn’t it?”
“Droppings,” Aumir nodded. “Pellets. Scat.”
“So this is what I have to hunt? A... I don’t know, rabbit?”
“Correct again. Keep that up, and you’ll be leading Hunts in no time, sirrah! Although, to be exact, you don’t have to hunt any rabbit. That would be too easy, even for a greenhorn like you. You have to hunt the specific rabbit the droppings came from.”
Hunter cocked an eyebrow.
“Do you have any needles in haystacks you want me to find, while I’m at it?”
Aumir’s gold-toothed smile widened.
“Use your noggin. You’ll do fine.”
Hunter let out a sigh. It had been a week since Aumir had began trying to make a proper huntsman out of him, and he was already starting to appreciate Wroth’s endless drills back in the Sacred Training Grounds. Running laps and executing glaive forms was relatively light on brainpower. He could turn his brain off and follow Wroth’s barked orders almost on autopilot. No such luck here; what Aumir taught required constant presence of mind, not to mention lateral thinking.
Mornings were dedicated to archery training, though it wasn’t what Hunter had expected. Instead of setting up targets and focusing on accuracy and marksmanship, Aumir prioritized teaching him proper technique; how to surrender himself fully to the act of shooting. To the strange man, archery was a contemplative practice, as much meditation as motion.
“When the technique of the shooting is correct,” he’d said more times than Hunter could count, “the result is that the arrow hits the target. Focus on yourself, young osprey, not on your mark, yes?”
Out of curiosity, Hunter had paid a visit to the small martial arts library Grimm had helped him put together in his Shard. He hadn’t expected him to comply to his request. The smug bastard had come through, however—if only because he’d found it amusing.
Most of the manuals he had sent him were focused on polearms, but he could recall seeing some sections about using bows and crossbows too. His suspicion turned out to be correct: what Aumir taught bore more than a passing resemblance to the philosophy and practice of kyūjutsu, the old Japanese martial art of archery. And while the bows samurai archers used to favor were nothing like the Krommkhatani hunting recurve Aumir had given him, the overlap of the teachings in both theory and execution was notable.
The most glaring way Aumir’s teachings diverged from the Japanese martial arts manuals was mobility; from what he could tell, kyūjutsu was largely static. The huntsman’s method of archery, by contrast, was built around the Hunt.
“The only time you’ll have more than two heartbeats to shoot,” Aumir had said, “is when you’re ambushing your prey. And you can’t always count on that to be the case.”
Initially, Hunter didn’t put much faith in that holistic approach to archery. As his shooting posture, breathing, and technique improved, however, so did his accuracy. He still didn’t think he had it in him to become a master marksman, but Aumir’s approach was clearly a step in the right direction. The System seemed to agree, too; his newly acquired Archery skill had climbed to 11 in just a few days. That was nothing to scoff at, especially now that he was no longer under the effects of the Blessing of the Aspirants and its accelerated skill and ability growth.
In the afternoon, Hunter and Aumir left the makeshift shooting range they’d built near the cabin and turned their focus to another ability Hunter had recently unlocked: Wildcrafting. He’d gained access to it after reaching 20 in his Survival skill, and it was clear that Wildcrafting was, in many ways, its natural extension. Sitting somewhere between herbalism, foraging, and bushcraft, it was, as the name suggested, the craft of living off the wild.
Wildcrafting was refreshingly grounded and practical. Aumir taught Hunter how to identify the most common plants, herbs, and mushrooms native to the Weald, along with their properties and how to harvest them without damaging the local ecosystem. Hunter spent hours preparing herbal poultices and remedies from what he gathered in the woods, while the huntsman lectured and quizzed him on their uses.
Aumir also showed him how to make an antiseptic balm from pine resin and herbs. It wasn’t nearly as potent as something like Fawkes’s Trollblood Salve, but it worked well for treating minor wounds and cuts and helped blood clot.
One thing Hunter steered clear of—and Aumir agreed with his reluctance—was poisons. He’d learned to identify and harvest a wide range of toxic plants: hellebore, monkshood, henbane, hemlock, nightshade, and others, not to mention several poisonous mushrooms. In theory, he could use them to craft poisons for his arrows or weapons. Still, the huntsman warned against it until he had more survivalist experience under his belt. As things stood, he was as likely to harm himself as to handle such ingredients safely.
Another lesson Aumir insisted on, which Hunter found far less appealing, was how to properly clean, butcher, and dress his kills. Or rather, Aumir’s kills; Hunter hadn’t yet properly hunted anything himself. A huntsman, Aumir had said, should show respect for his kill, offer thanks, and waste nothing: not the meat, not the organs, not the skin, not even the bones.
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Over the course of a few days, Hunter had worked with a range of game: rabbits and hares, wild fowl, and even a deer. That last one, Aumir had turned into a three-hour workshop of shorts. He’d started by cutting around the anus, then cutting the deer open all the way to its chest, taking care not to puncture the stomach. Then he’d sawed open its chest cavity, cut the diaphragm, severed the windpipe, and pulled all of the guts out through the pelvis.
To say it hadn’t been a pleasant experience would be a gross understatement; Hunter had found it far less palatable than, say, carving up the wood-like corpse of a Bramble Blight to harvest its core. Despite all his time in Elderpyre, he remained very much a city kid. Blood and guts didn’t sit well with his stomach or his sensibilities.
Still, he did his best to push through. Under Aumir’s guidance, he’d made even more progress with Wildcrafting in a few short days as he had with Archery; it now stood at a very satisfying 13.
He’d also been putting his Mystic’s Eye to frequent use, examining anything and everything that caught his attention: trees, herbs, animals, insects, fungi. It was a remarkably effective way to learn more about his surroundings, and he suspected the extra information was helping him level Wildcrafting faster. Using Hallara’s owl pendant as a lens kept the usual nasty side effects to a minimum. Despite the near-constant use, however, the skill had only gained a couple of ranks. His working theory was that the subjects of his examinations were too mundane to truly challenge it.
All in all, it had been a productive, if somewhat taxing few days. Hunter had been looking forward to a change of pace and had expected Aumir to send him on his first proper hunt sooner. What he hadn’t expected, though, was for his designated prey to be a single, oddly specific rabbit.
How many rabbits were in the surrounding woods? Dozens? Hundreds? Hunter had no idea. The only lead he had was a tiny pellet of dry droppings. It was beyong ridiculous. What was he supposed to do with that?
Aumir had told him to use his noggin, and if he had learned anything about the outlandish huntsman, it was that he loved a puzzle. It was probably his way of teaching, laying out the pieces and making Hunter figure it out for himself rather than handing him the answer.
He briefly considered having Fyodor sniff the droppings in hopes of picking up the rabbit’s scent, then dismissed the idea. The direwolf was no bloodhound; besides, the big oaf would probably think Hunter was handing him a snack. It was bad enough that his entire hunt hinged on a piece of poop. The mutt gobbling it up would just be the icing on the cake.
“Is there a time limit or something?” he asked Aumir.
The huntsman gave it a moment’s thought, then nodded.
“Two days,” Aumir said. “I was thinking of heading off to run a few errands. Should be back by then. If you haven’t tracked down your prey by that point, you probably won’t at all—so we might as well call it two days.”
“Starting when?”
“Starting right now.”
The huntsman packed his things and was gone within the hour. He made sure Klothi was confortably stashed in the inner pocket of his greatcloak, gave Fyodor a friendly scratch behind the ears, offered Hunter a parting nod, and set off southwest-bound.
Figuring it was as good a place to start as any, Hunter clutched the owl pendant around his neck and began cycling his Essence.
Droppings of Leporidae wealdiensis, a common crepuscular herbivore native to the Weald. The rabbit’s diet consists primarily of grasses, roots, bark, and fungi. Skittish and quick-footed, it favors dense underbrush and forms shallow nests rather than deep burrows.
These droppings are relatively fresh, likely left within the past day. Signs of recent grazing activity may be nearby. Primary predators include foxes, wolves, birds of prey, and wildcats. Tracking recommended during dawn or dusk, when the animal is most active.
A faint coppery aftertaste clung to the back of Hunter’s tongue, like the tang of old pennies, and he felt his sinuses tingle. A subtle reminder that, his new lens notwithstanding, knowledge still didn’t come free.
He was satisfied with the result, if not exactly blown away. The Mystic Eye had confirmed what he already suspected. Unfortunately, ‘dense underbrush’ wasn’t much of a lead. Out here, anything beyond twenty feet from the cabin qualified, and the woods stretched for miles in every direction. At least now he had a rough timeframe and a few behavioral cues to work with.
Pendant still warm against his chest, he sat down on a mossy rock and closed his eyes for a moment. He’d have to be methodical about this: pick a direction, search for signs, and work outward from there. Guesswork would get him nowhere. He needed a plan. Slowly, he began to piece together a mental map of the resources at his disposal.
During the last tenday, Fyodor had put a decently-sized dent in the local rabbit population. It wasn’t like Hunter could just send him out to catch his prey for him, but there had to be a way to put the direwolf to good use.
Then there were the ravens, his eyes in the sky. They could cover wide areas in a short amount of time, far more efficiently than he ever could on foot. He could use them to get a better sense of the lay of the land: trails, watering holes, signs of grazing, patches of churned earth or cropped vegetation, that kind of thing.
That was as good a start to his hunt as he could hope for, save for one tiny detail: catching just any old rabbit wouldn’t do. He needed a very specific one, and he still didn’t have the foggiest idea how he was supposed to identify it, let alone track it.
For a brief moment, he considered the possibility that Aumir was just pulling his foot. How could anyone know which specific rabbit the droppings belonged to? Was that part of the lesson, maybe?
That was a possibility, he supposed, though he still wasn’t ready to accept he was being pranked and call it a day.
What was the play here?
What was the strange huntsman expecting him to do, expecting him to learn?
Then it hit him—the solution to his problem. It was so sudden and obvious he nearly groaned. He wanted to kick himself for not thinking of it earlier.
Hunter stepped back into the cabin and made his way to the corner where his bigger-on-the-inside pack lay. He unfastened the buckles, dug past his bedroll, and pulled free his folded tarp and the heavy sack filled with monster cores and other grisly reagents he’d collected over the past few weeks.
Outside, he found a level patch of ground near the treeline, cleared away some debris, and laid the tarp flat. Sensing that he was about to do something interesting, Biggs and Wedge left their perch in the upper branches of a nearby tree, fluttered down in a rush of black feathers, and landed beside him.
“You better wish this works,” he told them. “It’s going to save you—and more importantly, me—a ton of time and effort.”
The two ravens offered no answer; they just tilted their heads in curious unison.
Hunter knelt, opened the sack, and got to work.
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