The doe stood and craned her neck over her shoulder, alerted by the slightest sounds that did not belong in the forest clearing. Her nostrils flared as she searched for the scent of danger on the warm autumn breeze, refusing to abandon her fawn, its mottled back still wet from its birth. She stood motionless over her newborn baby, her ears pricked, defenceless but defiant.
Nothing.
She licked the birth fluid from her baby and ate the fawn’s placenta.
Upwind, and thirty feet up a spruce tree, the hunter, Jon, held his breath, watching, waiting, squinting down the sight of his cocked crossbow, past the vulture feathers of the flight and the stubby bolt resting in its groove.
The doe stood, alert.
Jon squeezed the trigger. Before the doe could react, the shaft pierced her ribs behind her shoulder and lodged in her lung. She collapsed on top of her fawn. A moment later, the doe struggled to regain her feet. Blood and mucus dribbled from her mouth. She swayed, fell, and, in silence, lost her fight for life.
Jon climbed down the tree while the doe’s legs still thrashed in her final death throes. He halted a short distance from her, wary of being struck by a hoof, waiting until her last twitchings died and the deer lay still. Moments later, an older man with long grey hair and a matted beard approached, dressed like the archer, Jon, in a camouflage jacket and pants.
“Good shot,” the older man, Karl, grunted, and produced a length of river grapevine. He tied the vine around the deer’s hind legs, threw the loose end over a branch, and hauled. When the carcass cleared the ground, Jon drew a long knife from inside his jacket, slit the doe’s throat, and stood back while the blood flowed over the carpet of spruce needles at his feet. He drew the bolt from the deer’s side, wiped it, and slipped it back into his quiver.
“I’ll dress it,” Jon said and slit open the belly. He reached inside and pulled out the warm guts. The prized heart, liver, and kidneys he slipped into a bloody pouch. The fawn struggled unsteadily to her feet, tottering on spindly legs, and gazed at her mother’s carcass. Before the fawn could move, the younger hunter grabbed it by the neck and slit its throat. He wrapped his woven grass belt around the fawn’s hind legs and hauled the carcass over the branch beside her mother to finish bleeding.
With both carcasses bled and dressed, Jon and Karl slung them from a pole, shouldered their burden between them, and began the journey home. Toward dusk, they reached their cave beneath a rock overhang near the edge of the pine, spruce, and hemlock forest, their acknowledged ancestral hunting ground.
Their small clan had occupied this cave for generations. According to legend, in ancient times, an ancestor—perhaps even the same person who painted SHIT HAPPENS on the cave wall—hauled the rigid blue box with the letters COLEMAN on the front, along with a large mattress and a sofa, up the hillside to the cave. None doubted that those few artifacts dated from before the time of the great plagues and the fires, some said as many as five centuries ago.
Since then, generations of their clan lived, bred, and perished mostly without contact with other humans. Years ago, Karl and Jon raided a camp, captured Noma, a woman of breeding age, and took her from her people. By common consent, Noma belonged to Karl, who had fought a bloody battle and killed another man for her. Though she was his, Noma serviced both men as was her duty. She had bred well in the years that followed. Of her eight surviving children, Noma’s three older daughters had bled and reached the age to breed.
The oldest of her children, Ayah, was now twenty. She had been bred since her first bleeding, eight years ago, but had not produced a child by either man or her brothers. Her likely fate seemed to remain barren and contribute nothing to the clan's survival. She was spared death as long as she cooked, looked after the youngest children, and provided Karl, Jon, and her brothers with sport and pleasure.
Whether Karl or the younger Jon sired Ayah, the four boys who came a year apart after Ayah, or the three youngest girls, none knew, cared, or questioned. Only those infants born without defects did they keep; the others they killed, and the small clan ate their flesh according to ancient rites. That way, their bodies and spirits might live forever in those who consumed them.
Ridi, Jon, and Karl’s mother, along with Noma and the younger children, greeted the returning men with excitement, eager to hear their tale of the hunt. The four boys would be back soon: hunting was for the men. Chet would be the first to join them in November. Until then, the four trapped and fished, while the girls plucked berries and leafy sorrel wherever they could find them.
Tonight, they would fill their bellies with the sacred flesh of the deer roasted over the fire pit, just as their ancestors had done since the old days. Then, with the feast over, the men would breed with the women according to custom, passing on to the yet unborn the magic of the deer.
Karl and Jon removed and carefully folded the revered, threadbare camouflage outfits handed down through the generations and placed the garments in the blue box. These garments they wore only to mark the most sacred of occasions: for the deer hunt, to celebrate the arrival of a child born without defects, a girl’s first bleeding, a son’s first coupling, and final rites.
Before they set out for the hunt, Ridi built a fire and took from the blue box their communal treasure: a magnifying glass. She lit the scrim and kindling with a shaft of sunlight focused through the glass. Together, those old enough to know the words spoken to invoke good luck and ensure the deer hunt's success recited them around the flames. Then, in vigils through the day and night while the men were away, the two older women kept the fire alight to prevent evil from preying upon them in the dark.
Now, as night descended, with the deer butchered and washed, and while the men and children looked on, Ridi added dry wood to the fire. They waited impatiently for the flames to die down to embers shimmering with an even heat, signalling the fire’s readiness to receive the offering of meat. When Ridi deemed the time was right, each clan member circled the fire pit seven times and chanted the words to ensure that they might receive the magic of the deer into their bodies. Then Karl gave the signal, and they hunkered down to feast on the venison until they could eat no more.
They relaxed and listened, open-mouthed, as Karl told tales of the old days in the great places where their ancestors had dwelt before the fires consumed their homes and the plagues reduced their numbers to a handful. They had heard the tales many times before, but kept their silence.
Ayah, the four boys and the three girls sat around the fire, giggling in anticipation and pointing as Karl, exercising his right as the older male, took Noma to the sacred mattress in the cave. Ridi took the youngest girl, Ray, by the hand and led her to the mattress to receive instruction in her life’s singular purpose: the women’s obligation to ensure the survival of the clan. The boys and the two older girls already knew: the boys, having received their initiation with Ayah each in turn, and the two older girls by Karl and Jon as soon as they had bled for the first time. The older of the two, Sal, had a swollen belly, a good omen.
Later that night, after the males had taken their turn with Ayah and her sisters, Ayah woke to the sound of a bear snuffling outside their cave. She shook Jon awake. He rose and hauled the uneaten deer meat higher in the tree that stood near the entrance, out of the bear’s reach. By the light of the flames from a log thrown on the last embers, Ayah saw the black bear dimly outlined against the dark of the night. Jon threw a burning brand at it, and they watched from a safe distance as it skulked away.
“When the last of the venison has putrefied and is inedible,” Jon said, “We will leave it out as bait and shoot the bear.”
Ayah nodded and returned to her place near the rear of the cave to sleep with the others.
As the first fingers of dawn appeared in the east, a scream awoke them.
Jon turned to Karl, already stirring. “Noma’s gone.”
Karl and Ayah leapt to their feet and dashed from the cave to see Noma hobbling toward them, screaming hysterically.
“What happened?” Karl shouted when they were halfway to Noma.
“Diamondback bit me,” she yelled.
Noma pointed to two pinprick puncture marks on her bare buttock. Karl understood at once: stepping on a snake in the dark when going for a squat, they call the woman’s death, and before it comes, as it almost always did, she will suffer great pain. If the venom did not kill her quickly, the flesh around the wound would rot, and the death would be slow and agonizing.
They carried her back to the cave entrance. Karl and Jon debated their options in low voices, listening to Noma’s laboured breathing and whimpering while she writhed on the ground nearby. If Noma died, as the men agreed was inevitable, and with Ridi past breeding age, the other girls would be of even greater value in keeping the clan alive. The two men regard the girls with appraising eyes, and Ayah with scorn. In turn, the girls reacted to the men’s scrutiny with indifference, acknowledging their mother’s immediate fate.
Jon said, “Sal will be useless for a year while she feeds. That leaves only Teen, unless Ray bleeds soon.”
“She can’t be far away,” Karl said. “But if she turns out like Ayah, that only leaves Sal and Teen. Stupid woman. Why couldn’t she have looked?”
Jon lowered his voice. “We can’t eat Noma after a snakebite.”
Karl nodded. “You’re right. The venom could kill Ray, and maybe Teen. It will certainly make us all sick. We can’t risk it.”
He disappeared into the cave and returned with his long-bladed hunting knife. Like the deer before her, Noma struggled to her feet and held out her arms in supplication. Her scream gurgled and died in her throat as the blade sliced through the gristle of her windpipe, and blood from her severed arteries spurted onto the dirt.
Ayah vomited, as she had done often this past two months, ever since her bleeding had stopped.
The men hung Noma’s body from the tree by her ankles to bleed.
That night, they cut Noma down, laid her body a short distance from the cave entrance and waited for the bear. In the early morning hours, it appeared, sniffing warily around Noma’s carcass before dragging it away to devour.
Karl and Jon watched and waited. Shortly before dawn, once the bear had devoured most of Noma’s body, Karl killed it with a single bolt from his crossbow.
The men skinned the bear, scraped off the fat and pegged the pelt out to stretch and dry. Karl and Jon butchered the carcass while Ridi built and lit the sacred fire. When they deemed the fire ready, Jon and Karl once more donned the camouflage jacket and pants, and as night fell, they ate the bear’s roasted flesh.
When they finished feasting, Noma dwelt in them, body and spirit.
Michael Joll is the author of three broadcast radio plays, three collections of published short stories, and four published novels. A Gentlemen’s Agreement is his fifth novel, due out in the spring of 2026. He has had stories published in several anthologies. Born in England in 1945, he spent much of his childhood in India and Pakistan before returning to England at the age of 9 to attend school. In his working life, he has worn many hats, experiences he weaves into his novels and short stories. He rarely writes speculative fiction, preferring to ground his stories in realism, often based on true stories. The Clan is one of his rare ventures into that realm. Most of his stories and his personal experiences, adapted to protect the innocent and guilty alike, but primarily to prevent civil suits, bring to life the old saw, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” He is a multiple award-winning short story author and has lived in the Greater Toronto Area for over fifty years after immigrating from England with his wife. Although he has long been officially old, his wife is stalled at 29 until further notice.
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