He turned the horns into tools the same morning, because having them sit there doing nothing offended some new practical instinct that had no patience for wasted resources.
He worked the first horn against the sharpest rock he had near the river, grinding it down at the tip the way he had learned to work the stones, angling it and drawing it back and checking the edge with his thumb. The bone material was denser than he expected, harder than the stones in some ways, and it took longer. His right arm worked. His left assisted where it could and complained about it. An hour of grinding produced a tip that would go through something if he put enough behind it. He bound it to a new shaft with fresh vine, tighter than his earlier work, and set it beside the cave entrance.
The second horn became a dagger. Shorter, heavier at the base, bound to a grip of doubled vine that gave his hand something to close around. He drew it across his thumb and watched the thin red line appear.
Good enough.
He set both down and looked at them and felt nothing like satisfaction because satisfaction required a full stomach and his stomach was currently a hole with opinions. The hunger from this morning had not diminished with the cooking and the eating. It had quieted briefly and then returned with the confidence of something that knew it was going to win eventually.
He needed more meat.
He took the bone spear, the stone dagger on his hip, the horn dagger in his right hand, and walked into the forest.
He pushed his radius further than he had gone before. Past the clearing where he had killed the rabbit, past the burrow system he had wasted time watching, further east where the trees thinned slightly and the ground changed from root-covered to something flatter and darker, soil that held moisture and grew things differently. He moved fast. Not carefully, not with the deliberate quiet of his earlier hunting attempts. Fast, because something in his legs wanted to move and the hunger had burned away whatever patience he had previously operated with.
He ate as he walked. Berries from bushes he passed without slowing, grabbed and put in his mouth without looking, identified by texture and the absence of the wrong taste. It was not enough. It was nothing. It was the nutritional equivalent of spitting into a fire.
He smelled the creature before he saw it.
This registered as strange for approximately half a second before he accepted it and moved toward the smell, which was animal and warm and large. He came through a section of dense undergrowth into a wider space between the trees and stopped.
It was tall. Taller than him, significantly, with a body mass that suggested the forest had simply decided regular deer were not making enough of a statement. It had the architecture of a reindeer, the broad chest, the long legs, the antlers branching wide above a head that was currently down, grazing. The antlers alone were wider across than he was. Its coat was a dark grey that made it look like part of the forest had decided to stand up and eat something.
He did not think.
He pulled the bone spear back and threw it with everything his right arm had.
It hit the creature's neck and bounced off.
Literally bounced. Struck the hide and deflected away and landed in the grass like he had thrown a stick at a wall. The creature's head came up. It looked at him with the large calm eye of something that was not accustomed to being threatened and had not yet decided whether this qualified.
Then it turned and ran.
Something happened in his legs.
It was not a decision. It was not him choosing to run after a creature twice his size that his spear had literally bounced off. It was his legs deciding and his body following and his mind arriving late to a situation already in progress. His first stride covered more ground than his strides usually covered. His second stride covered more than that. By the fourth stride he was moving at a speed that the analytical part of his brain, the part still generating observations from somewhere behind his eyes, filed as not right, not human, not what legs do.
He was catching it.
The reindeer was running at full capacity through its own forest and he was catching it, closing the distance in a straight line and then the trees intervened and the straight line ended and he went with the forest instead of fighting it, left around a trunk that appeared suddenly, right between two roots that would have caught a foot at the wrong angle, a jump over a fallen branch that he cleared by more than he needed to and landed already running.
The jump felt like something clicking into place.
He jumped again. Not over an obstacle, just jumped, drove both feet into the ground and went up and forward and covered a distance that should not have been possible and came down running without breaking stride. The creature was ahead of him, crashing through undergrowth, its size working against it in the dense sections where the trees closed in.
He came out of the trees behind it into a narrow open section and left the ground entirely.
The jump was too high. He knew this on the way up and could not do anything about it on the way down. He came down on the creature's back with both feet and grabbed the thick fur at its neck with his right hand to stop himself from bouncing off entirely, the horn dagger in his left, and he drove it into the neck with everything his left arm had, shoulder screaming at the demand, and felt the tip go through.
The creature did not stop.
It crashed forward into the trees and he went with it, holding the dagger grip with both hands now, left arm a continuous white hot conversation, his body dragged through the forest at the speed of a panicked animal that outweighed him by several hundred kilograms. Grass and earth and roots hit his legs and body from below. Branches came at his face and he dropped his head against the creature's neck and took them across his back and shoulders.
He pulled the dagger.
Not out. Through. He pulled it toward himself with everything both arms had, right hand over left, the wound opening wider as the creature's momentum worked against it. The dark blood came fast and heavy and the creature's front legs started going wrong, losing the coordination of something operating with full function, and then it crashed.
Not a controlled fall. A collapse, one side and then the other, weight hitting the forest floor in stages, and his grip slipped on the blood slicked horn and he left the creature's back and hit a tree trunk with his shoulder, the left one, and the pain was a full reset, a white nothing that lasted two seconds and then came back as something specific and total.
He was on the ground.
He could hear the creature ahead of him, still moving, crashing through undergrowth, wounded but not finished, its sounds getting slightly further away and then less further and then the same distance for too long.
He got up.
Not because he felt like getting up. He got up the way something that is not fully human gets up, without consulting comfort or pain, just vertical because vertical was the direction of what came next. His left arm hung. His right hand found the stone dagger at his hip.
He ran.
He found it thirty meters further into the forest, down on its front knees, head low, the dark blood running from its neck into the earth in a steady pour. It heard him coming and tried to rise and couldn't complete it, the front legs not answering properly.
He came in from the right side.
He drove the stone dagger into the neck twice, three times, fast and without ceremony, feeling each impact travel up his right arm, and the creature's resistance became less with each one and then became nothing.
He stood over it breathing.
His left arm was a disaster. His back had opinions. His face had taken at least two branches during the drag and his right hand was so covered in blood that the dagger grip was invisible inside his fist.
The forest was quiet except for his breathing, which was loud and ragged and not slowing down as fast as it should have been.
He stood there and looked at what he had killed.
It was enormous. It was genuinely, physically enormous, and he had run it down and killed it with a piece of horn and a rock tied to a stick, one-handed, dragged through the forest behind it like a piece of equipment it was trying to discard, and he had gotten up and finished it.
His hands were shaking.
Not like the shaking after the rabbit meat. This was adrenaline, the ordinary biological kind, his body dumping its emergency reserves now that the emergency was concluded and leaving him with the tab. His legs felt suddenly like they belonged to someone else. He put his right hand on the creature's flank to steady himself.
The hunger was still there.
Underneath the adrenaline and the pain and the shaking, the hunger was still there, patient and absolute, waiting for the other things to finish so it could have his full attention again.
He looked at the creature.
He looked at the forest around him, the trees standing the way they always stood, grey and ancient and entirely unmoved by what had just happened in the space between them.
He put the stone dagger back on his hip.
He grabbed the creature's hind leg with his right hand and started pulling.