The Late Summer Hunt

The day following her 17th birthday, Elena Zaytseva departs with her dog team for a late summer hunt. She'd gone on plenty of hunts before, both with others and on her own. This was bound to be as routine as all of those had been, right?

“Easy. Easy!” Elena called out in Russian to her dog team, slowing the sled down, “Whoa!”

Her foot was on the brake now, the team coming to a halt in front of her. She hopped down off the back of the sled, trudging through the late-summer’s mud, pausing next to her lead dog to pat his head as she leaned down, reading the tracks. She grinned. Seems they’d stumbled upon a musk deer, and a pretty big one from how deep the imprints were.

Heading back to her sled, Elena removed the old hunting rifle that had been in her family for generations off of the equally old sled. Neither was the fanciest of tools, the rifle treated composite and metal without any of the finicky electronics of the cheaper modern models and the sled equally as plain, titanium alloy and a kevlar basket. But they were cheap and they were sturdy, and that’s all her family needed. Yet, in the basket, sat a drone of her own making, too. Her family may have only needed the rifle and sled to hunt, but Elena found the more antiquated methods lackluster without some modern tech to go along with it. Trudging back through the mud, she called out to her lead dog as she passed, “Line out!”

She didn’t know how far the deer was exactly, and she couldn’t have the dogs getting tangled if she needed to get back to them and head back out so she tossed out the order to get them straightened up taut. Satisfied with the line, she followed the trail of prints up the nearby ridge, pressing down low to the ground as she approached the lip. Pulling out her datapad, she called her drone forward from the sled, raising it silently over the top of the hill and grinning as she saw what it was filming on her screen. There, not fifty meters out, was the familiar silhouette of the musk deer she was tracking. Setting the datapad down next to her, she slowly raised her rifle up and over the ridge, propping it carefully as she snuck up to expose her head.

Spotting the deer visually now, she reached up to the bolt on her weapon with her left hand, slowly cycling it, quietly as possible. Leaning her cheek against the stock of her rifle, she pulled the weapon up to her shoulder and braced it, scope pulling towards her left eye as her finger found its way back to the grip of the old rifle, index finger resting just off the trigger. Running through her breathing, she rested her sights on the target and…

Chau-Chau! ClickBANG!

The shot went wide, sending the musk deer scampering off and Elena cursing under her breath. It was only as she was scrambling to cycle her bolt to fire again that she heard the growl behind her and realized it wasn’t her dogs that had been barking. Swinging her rifle around, she pulled on the trigger towards the leaping wolf. A beat. Nothing fired. And the beast was on her.

Crying out in pain as the wolf clawed and bit at her, she flailed her rifle at it uselessly, the weapon to clumsy to make a club out of from her current position. Dropping it, she began trying to grapple with the beast, eyes squeezed shut, but found its attack joined by another, and a third. Seeing little else to do, she let out one more cry, this one forming into words, “HIKE! HIKE!”

It seemed an eternity passed by the time her dogs reacted, but it was mere seconds later when the lead dog, still latched to the sled, set upon the first wolf of the trio, biting at the scrawny beast’s neck, and mere seconds more that the team managed to intimidate the hungry beasts off of Elena and scampering back off into the woods. Letting out a weak “Whoa…” Elena called the dogs to a stop, keeping them from chasing after the creatures that had attacked her.

Grabbing her rifle and datapad, Elena managed to drag herself up into the sled’s basket, settling back into it. Trying to blink her eyes open, she found only her right willing to do so and cursed under her breath. Taking a ragged breath, she tapped at the ‘recall’ button on her drone’s controls, sending it back to her uncle’s house, smearing her blood over the screen as she did. Dropping the datapad as she saw the press register despite the lack of direct contact, she let out the best “Hike!” she could manage and closed her eyes again, trusting her dogs to follow the drone back home.