To Eat the Girl
Copyright© 2025 by Heel
Chapter 4: The Two Sticks
The days grew longer after the storm broke. The wind still sang through the passes, but the sun climbed higher, softening the ice on the rocks. From the cave mouth, Korr could see the line of the valley stretching wide and empty—a white graveyard of the hunt that had failed.
Inside, the fire still burned. Lura sat close to it, her splinted leg stretched straight, the fur bindings now dry and dark from smoke. The swelling had gone down, but the limb beneath was thin and strange, the muscles withered from stillness. Her foot—small, fragile, as if half the size it had been—hung limp, unable to bear weight. When she tried once to stand, the pain had sent her reeling into his arms, her breath sharp as a knife.
“I will walk,” she said that day, her eyes bright and feverless now. “I must.”
Korr looked at her for a long while. He had heard those words before—from warriors who never stood again. But Lura’s voice was different: not pride, but defiance. She meant to fight her own body as if it were another beast to bring down.
That night, he sat by the fire and thought of how.
He remembered watching an old bear once, limping after a wound—a beast too stubborn to die. It had leaned on its forelegs, dragging its weight forward, swinging its body side to side to keep balance. A man could do the same, if the arms were strong enough.
In the morning, he went out and found birch trees, thin and straight, their bark pale as bone. He cut two poles shoulder-high, stripped them clean, and shaved their ends smooth with a flake of flint. When he pressed them under his arms and leaned forward, the poles took his weight. It worked—awkwardly, but enough.
He returned to the cave and set to shaping them properly.
At the top of each stick, he bound a crosspiece of wood with sinew and hide, padding it with scraps of fur so it would not bite into flesh. The crosspiece sat just beneath the armpit; when he pressed down, the weight of his body flowed through the poles to the ground. Below, he carved small notches for her hands to grip.
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