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elsewhere.
A month after Lambert's visit, the Mongol hunt went off very well, I thought. Over forty knights
accepted my invitation, including the Banki brothers, which Janina, Yawalda, and Natalia appreciated.
And Friar Roman had come from Okoitz to observe.
With all of my people and Sir Miesko's, with men, women, and older children going at it, we had over
seven hundred people beating the bushes, backed up by the knights in case of trouble.
Starting out almost a hundred yards apart in the morning, they were shoulder to shoulder at sunset, and
the valley was full of animals. Bison and wolves and bears. There were so many that during the night I
had to give orders that no one was allowed out of the building. Not that anybody much cared. They were
all too busy playing in the bathroom.
The showers were the biggest hit of all, with people standing under them back to back and belly to belly
and using up hot water by the ton. The kitchen stoves were going full blast and nonstop, but they were
still hardpressed to keep the water warm.
I suppose it's harder to get enthused about a flush toilet, but they caused considerable wonderment. One
knight complained that he washed his small clothes in one of the low sinks, pressed the little lever and
they disappeared!
Natalia had counted the animals as they ran over the drawbridge and through the gate, and toward the
end she had a different person counting each species.
We had over four thousand deer, eleven hundred wild boar, four hundred bison, six hundred wolves, two
hundred elk (or moose, as the Americans call them), one hundred forty bears, plus lynx, wildcats, wood
grouse, heathcocks, rabbits and other small game. And eight of the biggest cows Natalia had ever seen.
People couldn't believe her when she read the list, but after all, these were all the animals living on forty
square miles of rich land. They believed her in the morning when the killing began. The knights
rampaged for two days, exhausting themselves physically before their bloodlust was sated. The
commoners had to scurry to drag in all the bodies, and gut and skin them.
Tadaos the bowman begged permission to join in the slaughter, and I told him that he could bag a few,
but I didn't want to spoil the nobles' fun. He strung his bow in an instant and fired off four arrows in as
many seconds. Each came to rest in the head of an animal: three bucks and a wild boar. Every one of
them was more than two hundred yards away. His shooting was still as good as it had been last fall.
Then he unstrung his bow, and with a look of contentment on his face, recovered his arrows before he
went back to help out with the skinning and gutting.
I had reserved all of the hides for myself, since we needed leather for a lot of things, and we exhausted
all of my salt just salting down the skins. I had to buy three more tons out of Cieszyn before it was all
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over.
Five of our huge beer barrels were pressed into service holding salted meat. For a few weeks, we were
back to having only water to drink, until more barrels were made.
The sauna/smokehouse was a nine-yard stone dome, and was packed almost solid.
The beehive coke oven had just been completed, and hadn't yet been used for coal. It was the same size
as the sauna, since they had used the same centering on both. It too was used as a smokehouse, and the
woodcutters were hardpressed to find enough hickory to keep both fires smoldering.
In the Middle Ages, the most highly prized meat was not the muscle tissue but the internal organs.
Everyone gorged themselves on liver and hearts and kidneys.
The kitchens turned out head cheese by the ton and I resolved that next year we'd have some sausage-
making machinery. This year, there just wasn't time.
But to me, the most interesting things were the aurochs. There were eight of them, a bull, four cows, and
three calves. These were huge wild cattle that are extinct in the twentieth century. The last of the species
was killed in Poland in the sixteenth.
They were black with a white stripe down the back, from head to tail, and they were huge. While I was
sitting on Anna, who was bigger than the average warhorse, the bull could raise his head and his eyes
were higher than my own.
"He's mine!" Sir Vladimir shouted, lowered his lance and would have charged if I hadn't stopped him.
"Remember the rules," I told him. "At least one-sixth of the males must be kept for breeding, and he's
the only one. Anyway, I'm going to domesticate him. Think of the meat on that animal! There must be
three tons of it!"
"You'll never domesticate that beast, Sir Conrad."
"I can try."
With a lot of work and one serious injury, we managed to herd the aurochs into another valley, then cut
down a few strategically placed trees at the entrance to barricade them in. Eventually, we had a good-
sized herd of them, but I get ahead of myself.
Six dozen bucks were saved to provide fresh meat for us through the winter and there were no
complaints when I had the female half of our catch released along with the young and a sixth of the
males. We had more fresh meat than anybody had ever seen before.
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Friar Roman had come from Okoitz, where he had been studying clothmaking, at the behest of his abbot.
At supper, he presented me with a beautifully illuminated manuscript of the deed to my property. It was
as colorful as a church altar and radiant with gold foil.
"It's wonderful!" I said. "But where did you get all the paints and gold leaf?"
"Oh, I have quite a painting box now. It was given to me by a wealthy widow as a pious act for the
Church. Actually, my vow of poverty has made me much better off than I was. Soon, my vow of
obedience is going to give me command of a cloth factory at Cracow. I think perhaps I shouldn't discuss
my vow of chastity, but Okoitz is a marvelous place."
It was agreed by all that we would do the hunt again next year, and people were courteous enough not to
remind me that I wasn't going to be here next year.
Sir Miesko said that next time we should sweep his lands as well, and Count Lambert was seriously
thinking of staging a Mongol hunt covering his entire territory.
"Think of it," he said. "We might rid all my lands of wolves and bears! Do you realize how many of my
people they kill every year? It must be dozens! And the food we'd gather!"
Someone pointed out that the beaters would have to be in the field for weeks. How would they be fed
and housed? How could they keep the wolves from sneaking out of the ring in the dark?
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