Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling

you when you did things for them, instead of faking it.
    Signe Larsson came up; she leaned his survival pack against a tree—she carried it, when she wasn’t on stretcher duty, freeing him up to forage—and squatted on her hams with her arms around her knees, watching him skin and butcher the little animal. She didn’t flinch at the smell or sight of game being butchered anymore, either.
    He’d roll the meat, heart, kidneys and liver in the hide, and they’d stew everything when they made camp—he still had a few packets of dried vegetables, and the invaluable titanium pot. You got more of the food value that way than roasting, particularly from the marrow, and it made one small rabbit go a lot further among six. Plus Mary Larsson found liquids easier to keep down. The antibiotics gave her a mild case of nausea on top of the pain of her leg; he was worried about the bone, although the pills were keeping fever away.
    â€œ Who calls it a rabbit stick?” Signe said after a moment, nodding towards the tool he’d used to kill the hare.
    â€œThe Anishinabe,” he said, his hands moving with skilled precision. “Which means ‘the People,’ surprise surprise—the particular bunch around where we lived are called Ojibwa, which means ‘Puckered Up.’ My grandmother’s people; on Mom’s side, that is. I used to go stay with Grannie Lauder and her relatives sometimes; she lived pretty close to our place.”
    â€œOh,” she said. “That’s how you learned all this . . . woodcraft?”
    She looked around at the savage wilderness and shivered a bit. “You really seem at home here. It’s beautiful, but . . . hostile, not like Larsdalen—our summer farm—or even the ranch in Montana. As if all this”—she waved a hand at the great steep snow-topped slopes all around them—“hated us, and wanted us to die.”
    â€œThese mountains aren’t really hostile,” Havel said. “They’re like any wilderness, just indifferent, and . . . oh, sort of unforgiving of mistakes. If you know what you’re doing, you could live here even in winter.”
    â€œWell, maybe you could, Mike,” she said with a grin. “What would you need?”
    â€œA nice tight cabin and a year’s supply of grub, ideally,” he said, chuckling in turn.
    She mimed picking up the rabbit stick and hitting him over the head.
    He went on: “Minimum? Well, with a rabbit stick and a knife you can survive in the bush most times of the year; and with a knife you can make a rabbit stick and whatever else you need, like a fire drill. You can even hunt deer with the knife; stand over a little green-branch fire so the smoke kills your scent, then stalk ’em slow—freeze every time they look around, then take a slow step while they’re not paying attention, until you get within arm’s reach.”
    â€œThat’s fascinating!” she said, her blue eyes going wide. “Of course, the Native Americans did live here.”
    The big blue eyes looked good that way, but . . . He gave a slight mental wince.
    I’m too fucking honest for my own good, he told himself wryly. Also I’m effectively in charge here, damnit, which means I can’t play fast and loose. Not to mention her parents are watching . . .
    â€œEven the Nez Perce starved here when times were bad,” he said. “Nobody lived in these mountains if they hadn’t been pushed out of somewhere better. I hope you don’t believe any of that mystic crap about Indians and the landscape.”
    â€œOh, of course not,” she replied, obviously lying, and equally obviously wanting to correct him to Native American .
    â€œIndians have to learn this stuff just like us palefaces,” he went on. “It’s not genetic. But some of Grandma’s relatives were hunters and trappers, real woods-men, and I used to hang around