Book of Brutality

Chapter 1

The woods hid many secrets under the dark of the boughs. One such secret surrendered itself, a man clad in the skin of a deer stepped out of the woods with a clutch of ropes holding rabbits in one hand and a bow in the other. He walked a path of hardened dirt up to a mud daubed hut in the shade of a bluff, over which rose the Castletown of Caligo. And above it all was the sky, ashen gray like every day, with the threat of rain as constant as the breath he breathed.

Léon was a hunter. A simple man. He lived outside the city, but close enough to stay attached to some of its people. His was not the way of fired hearths or plated glass. The great cathedral offered him no peace or solace at all. So he did not live in its shadow. He chose the shade of nature to conceal him. It was the way of life of his forefathers whom he could not return to. A life of traditions that would soon die out with him.

He held his small colony of rabbits like a lantern at his side, to keep the dirt off of them. They were already dead and pierced, bloodied by his arrow, but the dirt did not need to worsen the job of flaying. He set them up on a hook beside his hut over packed dirt with a red tint, hardened by the blood of spilled beasts from years of butchery. He set up his bow on a notch in the wood and took out a knife.

The blade was clean and sharp. The handle was finely wrought bone, carved with the scrimshaw images of a hunt. A man stood with the same blade in hand facing a beast like a bear with wide, round eyes which stood above him, inverted onto the opposite wall. Held in a reverse grip, it was the depiction of a beast making a plaintive gesture to an enraged, murderous man. This, too, was of Léon's tradition. An heirloom and his only piece of wrought iron.

His stomach growled. It was a painless reminder, a regular occurrence. He hunted until he hungered, then worked to make the meat taste better. He picked a rabbit from the clutch and spread its body out on top of a flat stone. The weak, little thing never heard him or saw him. It blended in with the fallen detritus of the forest just enough to hide from the wild dogs and other beasts, but it could not hide from him. Not it nor any of its warren kin.

He started with the neck and made a shallow incision. Just through the skin. The skin had to come off first. The skin could be used for so many things. The fur was liked by the villagers, and they liked it clean. No stains or awful marks. The softness of a rabbit's fur was enjoyable compared to the rough, leathery garb the peasants of Caligo had to wear. Fur was special. It brought them closer to nature which they rose walls to defend themselves against.

He peeled the fur off carefully. Only one cut to split it, from neck to groin, and he disrobed the rabbit like he was removing a jacket. The fur around the head was too hard to remove, and too little to use - but he would use it. There was always a use. All creatures were made to serve man with their bodies. Nothing was made to be wasted. That was the tradition Léon preserved for his people. Their lives, though lost, could not be wasted either.

Next came the quartering. He cut off the head and saved it for later. Then he bisected it through the muscle and opened the body cavity. Each organ had a purpose, divined since creation, to offer life even in death. His stomach growled again. He sighed. There was an order to things that he knew and practiced many times. But just one bite out of order wouldn't hurt. He plucked out the heart like a cherry and popped it in his mouth. It was tough and chewy. It satisfied his desire to feel some resistance between his teeth for a time. It was slightly cold. This was the first rabbit he caught. It had time to bleed and chill in the morning air of the hunt.

He set the rest of the organs aside. The intestines could be boiled and roped together into a leathery string. The stomach could be cleaned out and made into a small cover for an open vessel, like a bottle, and would inflate as the temperature rose where the moisture tried to escape. The liver was food, once prepared correctly. As were the lungs. Its many pieces unfolded before him, each one with a purpose for him which the rabbit would have never considered.