She should have known this would happen.<br/><br/>When Ingrid came to live with them and study her people, she'd been physically ill the first time they portioned up an already quartered reindeer, the animal dead hours before and not even butchered before her eyes.  The same thing happened the first time Ingrid helped Asta slice the trachea out of a still warm carcass and yet again when her brother put his rifle near a reindeer's head and shot it before Asta came in and slit the great arteries and veins in its neck to help it bleed out.  Each time Ingrid had been ill, been unable to even watch, but she persevered.  Tales of how meat came to her already cut up and packaged in foam and plastic wrap fascinated Asta and she understood that people who lived in the big cities, who didn't live with the land but rather on it, had no experience with butchering animals.  It didn't make them soft, any more than Asta was soft for not knowing how to handle herself alone on a flight.  It just was.<br/><br/>It was obvious Alejandro felt upset that he couldn't finish it.  Asta's heart beat faster for him, for the compassion and bravery in trying to do something he had no experience with and with the way he'd fought off the beast.  No mountain of a man like Aerin, a more sensitive and gentle and softer one, he still showed all the qualities of a man but in a way she'd never seen before and it fascinated her.  Delighted her too.  Asta pressed the spear into his now empty hand, her own resting briefly on his upper arm before squeezing it, then she bent to pick up the knife from the ground.<br/><br/>Peering at the beast, she watched the rise and fall of its chest, noting where its belly curved in under the ribs, where the great flat bone of its front legs acted like a shield, then oriented the knife in her hand just so.  As it breathed out Asta made three quick steps towards it and fell to her knees.  It was just starting to raise its head when she positioned the tip of the knife on its skin, blade parallel to the curved ribs she'd observed, then she bore down with all her weight while using her open palm to stroke the handle as hard as she could, grunting with the effort.<br/><br/>It was hard, very hard, to drive the blade through the muscle of the ribs, and had she hesitated or used any but all of her force it would have failed.  The blade slid through with a crunching noise and the animal jerked but that only served to draw it back and forth, nearly cutting a lung in two and razoring the heart past the point where it would do anything but spasm.  Asta held on, bearing down as the animal briefly struggled, her ass up in the air and showing her bottom beneath the short dress as she pushed up on her tiptoes for the most leverage.  A few seconds that felt like minutes and the animal grunted once more and finally fell still, dead.<br/><br/>Asta fell back onto her heels and panted, then stood up with one foot on the pig's chest and pulled the knife free with both hands, blood splashing out across her bare legs and over her new pretty shoes.  Ignoring it, the stink of it and the stink of the animal, she pushed its jaw back with the sole of her foot and bent once more to saw into its neck, opening the animal up to bleed out.  A pool of dark red, almost black blood, began to spread and Asta stepped back from it.<br/><br/>"Alejandro," she said and motioned him over.  "Alejandro," she said again, putting the knife down on a rock and took one of its back feet, trying to pull it to where a root of the tree bulged above the ground, wanting to put the rump of the pig on it to allow gravity to help it bleed out.  Asta tugged, hard, but was making little progress without Alejandro's help.