Ewan had almost finished skinning the small deer when we got back to the banked fire pit, where heat still smouldered under a covering of crusted earth. We watched him sever the head and lower legs—I was amazed by the colour and the sharpness of the curved blade he used—and wrap them in the still-steaming hide. He then lifted the entire bundle into the centre of the cloth that had covered his shoulders.
“Here,” he said, tying the corners together. “One of you take that shovel and the other the pickaxe, then go and bury this along the bank of the stream. But bring back the cloth. And mind you take it as far from here as you can carry it. Dinna think to bury it close by. Bury it deep and stamp down the ground and pile stones over it. We dinna want to be attracting scavengers, animal or otherwise. Then get back here as quick as you can.”
It took us some time to follow his instructions, and we barely spoke a word to each other, so intent were we on doing exactly as he had said. As we made our way back, we walked into the delicious aroma of cooking. Ewan had rekindled the dormant fire, and a flat iron skillet filled with fresh meat and some kind of onion was sizzling on the coals.
We ate voraciously, as though we had not fed in weeks. Those two days of running had whetted our appetites to the point of insatiability. The deer liver was perfect, coated in flour and salt and lightly fried with the succulent wild onions, and when the last fragment was devoured we sat back happily.
“How’s your bum?”
The question, addressed to both of us, was asked casually as Ewan wiped his knife carefully, removing any signs of food from its gleaming, bluish blade. We both assured him that we were much better.
“Good.” He gestured with a thumb over his shoulder to where the deer carcass lay covered with fresh ferns. “I’ll cut some of this up into bits that we can carry, and leave the rest here to smoke later. You can help me carry my mother’s share to her.”
“Does she live far from here?” Will asked.
The big outlaw shook his head. “Not far, a two-hour walk. Far enough away to be safe when anyone comes here hunting me. Laird William suspects I’m still around, so every now and then patrols come looking. But they haven’t found me yet.”
“Are you no’ afeared they’ll find your mother?” Will asked.
“She’s to the north o’ here, across the hills, on the far edge o’ William’s land. I leave signs to the south and southeast from time to time, to keep them hunting down there. Besides, she knows how to take care o’ herself.” Ewan took up his knife again and began to strop it against a much-used device that had been lying beside his foot. I looked closely at it, never having seen one quite like it before, a strip of leather, perhaps a foot long and a thumb’s length in width, that he had fastened to a heavy strip of wood. The leather had a patina of long use, its colour darkened almost to blackness by the friction of a lightly oiled blade, and I watched him test the blade’s edge with the ball of his thumb.
He had no beard. That was part of why he had frightened me so badly when I first looked at him. In a world where all men went unshaven, a beard would have done much to conceal the frightfulness of his visage, yet he had made no attempt to cover the deformity of his face by growing one. If he would wear a mask, why not a beard?
I had seen beardless men before, but very few, and my father had been the only one I knew personally. As a child, I had watched with fascination as he went to great pains, daily, to scrape his cheeks, chin, and upper lip free of hair, using a thin, short-bladed, and amazingly sharp knife that he kept for that purpose alone. It was hard work to shave a beard, I knew, a meticulous and time-consuming, seemingly pointless task, except that my father’s commitment to it had a purpose that I discovered by accident one day, listening to my mother speaking to a friend. My father, she had said, had an affliction of the skin that he could hold at bay only by shaving daily. He might perhaps miss one day, but three successive days without the blade would bring his face out in boils and scaly patches. I never did discover what this malady sprang from, but from that time onward I accepted my father’s daily regimen as necessary. Watching Ewan wield his strange bluish knife, I knew his blade was far sharper than my father’s, and that he could use it to shave quite easily. Yet there was a smoothness to his skin that showed no sign at all of being scraped.
“Ewan, why have you no beard?”
He looked at me in surprise, then laughed. “For the same reason I have no eyebrows. I can’t grow one.”
I gaped at him in astonishment, noticing for the first time that it was as he said. He had brows, the undamaged one boldly pronounced, but they were hairless.