Susannah didn't bother trying to reload from the little pile of bullets lying beside her on a square of buckskin but took one of the 'Riza plates instead, her hand automatically finding die dull gripping-place.
""Riza!" she screamed, and flung it. It flew across the dry grass, elevating slightly as it did, giving off that weird moaning sound. It struck the racing buck at mid-neck. Droplets of blood flew in a garland around its head, black against the white sky. A butcher's cleaver could not have done a neater job. For a moment the buck ran on, heedless and headless, blood jetting from the stump of its neck as its racing heart gave up its last half a dozen beats. Then it crashed to its splayed forelegs less than ten yards in front of her hide, staining the dry yellow grass a bright red.
The previous night's long misery was forgotten. The numbness had departed her hands and her feet. There was no grief in her now, no sense of loss, no fear. For the moment Susannah was exactly the woman that ka had made her. The mixed smell of gunpowder and blood from the downed buck was bitter; it was also the world's sweetest perfume.
Standing up straight on her stumps, Susannah spread her arms, Roland's pistol clenched in her right hand, and made a Y against the sky. Then she screamed. There were no words in it, nor could there have been. Our greatest moments of triumph are always inarticulate.
FOUR
Roland had insisted that they eat a huge breakfast, and her protests that cold corned beef tasted like so much lumpy mush cut zero ice with him. By two that afternoon according to his fancy-schmancy pocket-watch-right around the time the steady cold rain fattened into an icy drizzle, in other words-she was glad. She had never done a harder day of physical labor, and the day wasn't finished. Roland was by her all the while, matching her in spite of his worsening cough. She had time (during their brief but crazily delicious noon meal of seared deersteaks)
to consider how strange he was, how remarkable. After all this time and all these adventures, she had still not seen the bottom of him. Not even close. She had seen him laughing and crying, killing and dancing, she'd seen him sleeping and on the squat behind a screen of bushes with his pants down and his ass hung over what he called the Log of Ease. She'd never slept with him as a woman does with a man, but she thought she'd seen him in every other circumstance, and... no. Still no bottom.
"That cough's sounding more and more like pneumonia to me," Susannah remarked, not long after the rain had started.
They were then in the part of the day's activities Roland called aven-car: carrying the kill and preparing to make it into something else.
"Never let it worry you," Roland said. "I have what I need here to cure it."
"Say true?" she asked doubtfully.
"Yar. And these, which I never lost." He reached into his pocket and showed her a handful of aspirin tablets. She thought the expression on his face was one of real reverence, and why not? It might be that he owed his life to what he called astin.
Astin and cheflet.
They loaded their kill into the back of Ho Fat's Luxury Taxi and dragged it down to the stream. It took three trips in all.
After they'd stacked the carcasses, Roland carefully placed the head of the yearling buck atop the pile, where it looked at them from its glazed eyes.
"What you want that for?" Susannah asked, with a trace of Detta in her voice.
"We're going to need all die brains we can get," Roland said, and coughed dryly into his curled fist again. "It's a dirty way to do the job, but it's quick, and it works."
FIVE
When they had their kill piled beside the icy stream ("At least we don't have the flies to worry about," Roland said), the gunslinger began gathering deadwood. Susannah looked forward to the fire, but her terrible need of the previous night had departed. She had been working hard, and for the time being, at least, was warm enough to suit her. She tried to remember the depth of her despair, how the cold had crept into her bones, turning them to glass, and couldn't do it. Because the body had a way of forgetting the worst things, she supposed, and without the body's cooperation, all the brain had were memories like faded snapshots.
Before beginning his wood-gathering chore, Roland inspected the bank of the icy stream and dug out a piece of rock.
He handed it to her, and Susannah rubbed a thumb over its milky, water-smoothed surface. "Quartz?" she asked, but she didn't think it was. Not quite.
"I don't know that word, Susannah. We call it chert. It makes tools that are primitive but plenty useful: axe-heads, knives, skewers, scrapers. It's scrapers we'll want. Also at least one hand-hammer."
"I know what we're going to scrape, but what are we going to hammer?"
"I'll show you, but first will you join me here for a moment?"
Roland got down on his knees and took her cold hand in one of his. Together they faced the deer's head.