To Eat the Girl
Copyright© 2025 by Heel
Chapter 3: How to Hold a Bone
The smaller cave smelled of damp stone and old smoke. It was little more than a notch in the rock, a bowl that held wind and a bitterness of moss, but it kept the worst of the storm at bay. Korr set Lura down on a bed of furs, every movement careful as if he were laying a sleeping animal that might wake and flee. Her face was flushed with fever; a slow sweat silvered her temple.
He sat back on his heels and looked at the broken limb. The thigh was a ruin of purple and slate, the skin stretched tight over a shape that did not belong there. He could see the curve of the bone where it pressed under the skin like the shadow of a riverbend. She let out a soft sound and closed her eyes.
What to do? The question was a stone in his mouth, hard and bitter. In the cave of their youth, the old men had sworn by the laws of the hunt, by ice and by knife—mend what could be mended, leave what could not. Korr had seen splints before: the crooked finger of a man who’d taken a spear to his hand, the wooden brace on a hunter’s wrist. But never a femur. The thing that held a body to its earth. He had no healer’s knowledge, only memory and will.
He reached for his spear—the haft he had kept whole when others had been shattered—and broke it into two lengths with his knee. The wood snapped with a sound like distant thunder. He set them by the broken leg and felt at once both relief and dread; they were the right length to run from hip to knee, but they could not be trusted alone.
Padding. He thought of the furs, of moss underfoot that smelled of the wet earth. He dug his hands into the pile of hides and pulled out strips of cloth—old fur liners, thin leather. He stuffed them beneath the thigh, packing gently so that the roughness would not press where bone might split the skin. Lura winced and then was still. “Steady,” he whispered, the word almost a prayer.
Traction came next in his mind—an idea half-remembered from watching a hunter free a stag’s leg from a pit. A femur, when it is angry, will shorten; the muscles clamp down and pull the ends apart or over one another. He could not set it like a potter shaping clay, but he could make the bone less wrong. He fashioned a crude loop from the water skin’s raw thong and slid it under Lura’s heel, then passed the thong over one of the haft-splints and anchored it to a rock. Gently—oh, so gently—he pulled. The muscles complained; Lura’s breath hitched, and she clutched his sleeve. He closed his eyes and kept the pull steady until, with a sick little shift like stones grinding under snow, the thigh lengthened and the curve eased. It was not perfect, but it was better.
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