It turned out that cutting up those dead spirds was a challenge. In death, they became rigid as if the rigor mortis had set in at the moment they were killed. The hide was thick and elastic, the body unyielding as iron, making piercing it practically impossible.
I decided to temporarily ignore the two with damaged heads, one with pierced back and the still living crippled one. Instead, I approached the one that I had cut in two by throwing the poleaxe.
---
Well, most certainly I had two pieces of a spird in front of me. Bad news was, it was torn up instead of cleanly cut through.
As I looked at a crappy example of the longitudinal section of the specimen, I was totally at loss. While the spinning poleaxe had smashed up a lot of finer structures and tissues, I could still make out that it was completely alien anatomy.
Most eye-catching was the absence of the skeleton. No endoskeleton inside, no exoskeleton outside. Instead, it had rigid spikes and flakes forming a complex support structure through the layers of connective tissues. The rest was a semitransparent solidified mass interlaced with vessels, tubes and other unidentifiable organs.
Only the head had some sort of skull, which was very thick and heavy. Unfortunately half of it was caved in, making impossible to reconstruct the finer details . The skull also had a tubular structure protruding from behind along the back, before disappearing into the center of the body. It seemed, that I had hit that tube when I got my first kill.
I was unable to learn anything else from the mangled body pieces, so I decided to make use of it to try to learn to dismantle the carcasses.
---
I was mostly interested in the hide, as I still wanted some pants and boots. Not to mention that a few belts and a sack would be a great addition to my equipment.
Annoyingly, the ice layer on the fur made any attempts of getting the whole pelt almost hopeless. If I tried to remove it forcibly, the fur was pulled out, leaving bald spots on the hide. Deciding to use it as a rawhide, I started to rip out the ice and pull the fur out together with it.
Soon, I had a half of a spird’s body free of ice and fur. Next came the skinning.
At least I had a wide cut to start the process from. I had to use the spear tip of the poleaxe to wedge between the hide and the body, before slowly tearing the hide off.
It was a slow process, and the hide was fairly thick, reaching almost five centimeters in thickness. I had trouble estimating the total weight of such hide, but I was thankful for my strength and endless stamina. Otherwise, skinning such a huge creature in such cold would have been plain impossible.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
It took a lot of effort to cut the hide off at the legs, but I finally managed to use my power in the poleaxe to make the sharpened parts as keen as an obsidian edge, and that helped to cut the hide much better.
After some time, I was finally a proud owner of a fur-free hide from the bigger half of the bisected spird. It was a huge piece, over three meters long and almost one and half meters wide. But it was still thick enough to kill people with just its weight.
---
Leaving the hide, I tried to gather up some smaller body parts. I had heard that in extreme conditions the bones are used to supplement firewood. Usually bones do not burn themselves, but I had no way of knowing if the components in spird bodies were the same.
I gathered small amounts of spicules, semitransparent body tissue, amberlike matter from under the skin and some fur to try to start the fire. Considering the extreme cold, I doubted that striking sparks from the stones would be of any help.
Instead, I used the poleaxe to cut some available materials into planks and carved straight groove onto each. Then, by using a long spicule I found in the body, I imitated a primitive firemaking method called “fire plough”. It entailed “ploughing” the grooved boards, which was supposed to create fine particles from the groove and then ignite them by heat coming from the friction.
Amberlike matter, that I thought to be the insulating layer formed of fat, simply melted as the temperature rose. Semitransparent body tissues turned jellylike and were especially disgusting. But a wide, flakelike spicule worked fine, finally producing thin wisps of smoke.
It took more time and some really rapid repetitive movements to keep the temperature up through friction, but finally some fine strands of skin, fur and random finely-ground materials caught fire.
When I tried to feed the small fire, it turned out that contrary to bones, the spicules burned well on their own. I smashed the rest of the bisected spird, and after gathering enough fire material, tried to set the remnants in fire.
---
Surprisingly, those creatures burned well on their own.
I got an idea and dragged over the rest of the dead spirds, setting them into circle around the fire. Soon, the ice was melting from the fur, and I was busy keeping the pelts from burning. While two of the carcasses got their fur singed in few spots, the remaining one was perfect.
It took even more time to skin those three spirds. While there was no ice hindering me, I now had to be careful to preserve the fur. But finally, I got it done.
I gathered all the hides and spread them out, leaving them to dry. What was odd, compared to the skins of the animals from Earth, spirdhide did not lose its flexibility at freezing temperatures.
---
Having obtained the leather and fur, I could continue with studying the spirds. I added the two with damaged heads to the fire and focused on the one with pierced back, as it was least damaged.
Something about the spirds felt unnatural. Mostly I was puzzled by that purple gas that came out when they got wounded.
And soon I found out why. After cutting open the abdominal area of the spird, I encountered an undamaged vessel. It was filled with purple liquid, which instantly expanded and turned into gas as soon as the vessel was pierced.
“Now, is that hydraulics or pneumatics here?” - I muttered.
I moved my attention towards the thickest and largest vessel I knew - the one connected to the skull. Reaching the undamaged skull, I carefully observed it. Soon I found something interesting.
Signs of external interference.