In the Morningside when we woke, we could see aslant our path the place Dart knew from the song of that country to be the Creeper Hills. Their sharp stones rose above the plain separated from earth by a morning band of vapour which caused them to float in the air. This was where the slicers liked to make their secret home. We all grew hushed now and Dart ceased his song. My son and his friend went forward with part of the saved carcass of last night’s hopper and laid it on the ground as the rest of us drew level. We looked at the meat sacrifice offered to the grand presence. This was the meat the slicer would be tempted forth with. The light on the rocks became sharper and all their clefts and cunning concealments were apparent to us.
Two of our party went beyond the rocks, upwind, to make a noise with spear against shield in the hope of flushing the slicer out. The two young men stood with the slaughtered remains, waving the carcass about in the grass to make its scent go further. I remained in the line, as did the five others, making a shallow trap of men, flimsy so that it might entice the slicer to emerge. The two young men by the meat were, according to a long-honoured plan, to pierce the beast beneath his armpits and then raise his body above us on their spears. I had seen it done in the past and when the slicer was so raised on a spear point it looked very much like a man.
Now, as we stood, we sang a softer song of invitation, and after a while could hear the men from the far side of the rocks making their harassing noise to nag a slicer from its nest.
At last we saw, amongst the boulders, a tawny and spotted movement and the lash of thick tail – the moving creature we had been imagining for so many hours and days was beginning to take an interest, for whatever reason, in the wider world. The men with the spear and shield drew beyond the rocks, safe from the slicer’s approach because of where they stood upwind, and grew louder, with great hoots and mockery. A crasser animal than the slicer would have been driven forward to us by them. But it took a great deal of such clamour to overcome the slicer’s preference for being aloof. Once a slicer emerges, it is willing to fill the earth with its fearsome presence, but to get it to choose the broader and more dangerous earth takes a gift for haranguing.
When the slicer came into the open, we saw it was a female, more awesome than the male we had expected. A male might fight for his lair and advantage and food, and his woman and young. A female slicer would be driven by something closer to her, the future of her womb and her pouch, of those she was still to bear. We on our side kept singing to her in a more flattering and cooing way than the men on the upwind side. She moved forward like a judge whose laws we did not know, her head swaying, her shoulders magnificent and potent. She advanced on four feet, but now and then stood back on her strong hind legs to assess the air. At such times she was a person, with the appearance of someone who walked two-legged all day. Though the wind ensured she could smell both us and last night’s meat, she wanted us to believe she took no interest in us at all. Why should she descend to recognising us or show any desire for the gross meat on our living bones? For she had a way of denying that it was a hunger for flesh that had brought her out. She sought to convince us that she had a higher purpose than appetite. And it was possible to believe that she had come forth with her heroic indifference just to show us what life should be. That it should be her. That in us was a failed and imperfect thing. And there was no doubt we were all humbled by her.
She sank to four feet again and advanced on us, then rose to full height once more before instantly letting herself flop, this time as if she intended to sleep. I did not trust the easy way she rolled on the earth, and I hoped the young men remembered from the songs the warning that the slicer could go from yawning to a terrible furore and speed in only a shudder of the eye.
And her other gift to us was that when she moved again and clearly knew we were there, she pretended to be unsure as to whether we were phantoms. She began to run now, pawing herself forward with tumultuous muscles in her spotted fur while pretending to be interested in a different horizon than the one we were now tied to.
So she arrived at a little claypan, where she bent down on her four mighty legs to drink some icy water pooling at the base of a rock, before rising to her hind legs and throwing off pretence as she eyed us with a sudden frankness which declared that she meant to have us. When she hurtled towards us, I wondered if the songs we had sung were adequate to have set up my son and his comrade for this splendid destroyer’s attack. I saw my son calmly step a few strides aside from the path of the beast, and heard the gruff, manly sound as he and his companion beat their narrow shields with spear shafts as if each wanted to be the one to draw the slicer to him. Both of them were brave to show themselves without hunching, to demonstrate to the creature that we ourselves were beasts of honour. We were the only animal that sang at such length, but there was weakness as well as sinew behind the songs. If a young man showed a being who he was and lived, then no one lesser could question his worth. As for me, I let forth a cry of pride, exultation and terror as she entered within spear throw, and the two of them crouched.
It was then that the creature’s path changed and my brave Son Unnameable was chosen by her. I saw with dread that my son’s task was to allow the being to prove its power to us yet again. As for my son, he stood and allowed the creature to vault and descend on him from the sky. There was just the narrow stick spear and its point and his leg planted back to answer the broad attack of the animal and its purpose. According to our desires, the desire of the people, the meeting about to occur was meant to lead to the expiration of the slicer and the gush of the beast’s heart blood. This was supposed to be followed by the emergence of the young man on the verges of the Lake as a surviving hunter, grinning and shouting, sometimes with a venerated claw slash across his upper body!
In this case, though, my son’s spear point was not correctly aligned for the slicer. The shaft snapped, its point broke off and the beast landed upon my son before I could move, and took to devouring him in her mouth while slicing at his throat with her monstrous thumbs. I heard my son’s brief terror uttered from within, his blindness as his face and eyes and nostrils were torn away, and the great wheeze of breath as his life gushed forth from his clawed-open neck. It happened with such awful quickness. My son’s companion tried to sink a spear deep into the slicer’s flank but the spear did not accurately puncture the creature’s heart, and she continued with her whole being clenched on my poor, dangling son’s face.
We all moved in recklessly then as the slicer released my son’s head from its mouth and reared on its paws to display its own bloody face. It seemed that we killed it many times over. As frantic as I was, overcome with the vision of my son’s bloody, meaty stump of head, I took account of where its forearm met its trunk and drove my own long spear exactly there and up into its soul. The creature looked up briefly, releasing her jaws as if to take a breath and a second of contemplation. Then she fell, one of her great slicing thumbs still in my Son Unnameable’s throat. Having seen for the last time the meeting of the earth and sky, the slicer sank dead on top of my son, having taught us her legendary lesson.
The men helped me retrieve my son from under the great beast. He still had life in him, and I promised him impossible acts of cure. The other men now told me that he was dead. One of them had brought a pouch of ochre in case of a hunting death, and I wrapped my son’s head gently in a sack of netting, of the sort his sister would become adept at making. Then the men lit a fire and sang the death songs for my son, songs ending in a growl to frighten his confused soul away from us for the sake of its own peace and embrace of its death. I had by then taken the time to wash his mutilated face and body, which we anointed to the waist with ochre. One of the men felled a small tree with his axe of flint, and we marked it with our knives, incising on it the symbols of his mother’s god for him to seek. After that we buried him with the shield and spear with great reverence, again constantly consoling him and urging him back to the Heroes’ world he’d come from by way of Girly’s womb. I was gratified that, whatever hard designs the heavens and earth had for me, I did not have to present him to my wife, who would have lamented his devoured face.