The Honey-Hunter
A Story from The Naked Viking
Tórberg arrived the morning of the last hot week of summer, walking the long track down from the high pass with a heavy leather pack over his shoulders. He came alone. He always came alone. That was part of the trade. Men who hunted wild honey were solitary predators by necessity; the pungent bundles of dried willow, rotted oak, and sulfur tucked into their packs carried a bitter, resinous scent that unsettled farm dogs and made the cattle wary long before the man even came into view, and because the work itself was a thing a man did better without an audience.
Ósvif was at the door of the farm by the time the dogs sounded. He had been watching the track since first light. He had been watching the track, in truth, most of the month, but only that morning had it carried what he wanted.
He was twenty-six. He had inherited the farm from his uncle the previous winter, when the old man went under the ice on the lake, and he was still getting used to being the master of the estate, the man in charge whom the workers and the land answered to. The alder woods at the boundary of his land held three wild hives that his uncle had marked years ago and never harvested himself, because the old man had grown slow and unwilling to climb. Ósvif had thought about climbing them in the spring and had thought better of it. The honey-hunter was the better choice. He had sent word in the early summer. The honey-hunter took his time.
He met Tórberg at the gate. “Ósvif,” the man said. “Tórberg.”
That was the only introduction. The honey-hunter un-shouldered his pack inside the gatepost and then turned and looked at the younger man properly for the first time.
He was not tall. Ósvif was half a head taller. But he was made the way a length of well-tarred rope is made, lean down the long bones, thick at the wrists and the throat, with a kind of weathered density to him that suggested he had been doing the same hard physical work for a quarter of a century and had stopped noticing it.
His hair was dark, cut short above the ears and longer on top, and a black beard, close-trimmed, framed a hard, serious mouth. He wasn’t a man who wasted smiles on politeness. His eyes were a colour Ósvif could not quite name, somewhere between grey and the deep brown of pond water in autumn.
“You’ve kept them,” Tórberg said. “Sir?” “The hives. You’ve kept them. The smoke off your fields. No one’s pulled the combs.” “My uncle wouldn’t let me,” Ósvif said. “Good.” The man nodded once. “A wild hive that’s left undisturbed for years gets vicious. The colony grows massive, the combs pack tight, and they get mean as hell protecting that much honey. We’ll see what kind of fight your trees are going to put up.”
He looked then, openly, at Ósvif’s chest and arms and shoulders, and there was nothing furtive about the look. It was a heavy, purely physical assessment. His eyes traced the raw width of Ósvif’s frame before dropping down to linger hard on the thick, prominent bulge straining against the wool of his trousers. Ósvif felt himself stripped bare right there at the gate. There was no politeness in it, just the intense, calculated hunger of a man who took exactly what he wanted. Ósvif found himself standing a little straighter under that weight, his pulse hammering, suddenly acutely conscious of the friction of his linen shirt against his skin and his own flushing warmth in the morning sun.
“Let’s go,” Tórberg said. “The day’s already warm. The bees will be slow. That’s what we want.”
They walked into the woods together.
The path was narrow, alder roots breaking the soil, and Tórberg went first. The torch he carried smoked white. He had packed the head with damp moss and rotted oak and a few green leaves picked from a hedge as they left the farm, and the smoke that came off it was thick and slow and smelled of summer earth. Ósvif followed two paces behind, watching the way the smaller man moved through the trees the pack riding high on his back. The line of his shoulders. The set of his hips. The way the cloth of his breeches stretched and slacked tightly over his muscular thighs and heavy glutes as he stepped over roots.
“You’ve never climbed a hive,” Tórberg said over his shoulder. He had not asked.
“No.”
“Most men want to try. They watch the first one, and they think it’s nothing.”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“And?”
“And then I thought about my uncle on the lake.”
Tórberg made a sound that might have been amusement. “Wise.”
The first tree stood in a small sun-shaft of clearing, half a verst into the wood. It was an old alder, taller than the rest of the canopy, with a knot at twice a man’s height where the trunk had split forty years ago and grown back unevenly, leaving a deep cavity in the heartwood. Bees moved in and out of the cavity in slow gold arcs. The drone of them, in the green warmth of the clearing, was a sound like distant water.
“There she is,” Tórberg said.
He set down the pack. He set the torch into the soft earth so it stood smoking upwards into the canopy. Then, without ceremony, he pulled his linen tunic over his head and laid it folded on a stone.
Ósvif could not have said why he stopped breathing for a moment. He had seen men shirtless his whole life. The bathhouse, the harvest, the dock. He had been raised among men and bodies and had no shame about any of it. But the man in front of him was something different. Tórberg’s chest and stomach were dense with the kind of muscle that comes from twenty-five years of climbing with a heavy pack, and his skin was a deep summer-brown across the shoulders, marked by a long pale scar that ran down the outside of his left arm and three smaller silver lines across the right ribs.
He didn’t stop at the tunic. Without a shred of hesitation, Tórberg unbuckled his leather belt and pushed his wool breeches down his thick thighs, stepping out of his boots and clothes entirely. He stood completely naked in the centre of the sunlit clearing. His chest was thick with dark hair that thinned at the throat and gathered again at his stomach in a heavy vertical line, dropping down into a dense, dark forest of pubic hair. His cock hung exceptionally thick and heavy between his muscular thighs, a brutal, uncut length swinging free in the warm morning air above his solid balls.
He stood openly in the clearing and reached for the rope coiled on his pack, entirely comfortable in his own skin. Ósvif found, to his own intense embarrassment, that his mouth had gone completely dry and his dick had begun to throb, thickening into a hard, painful ache against the wool of his own breeches.
The forest is thick, the hives are heavy, and the midsummer heat is about to snap. Unlock the full, graphic 5,000-word account of the honey-harvest and the raw, uninhibited passion by the river pool and culminating in thrusting passion on a remote beach.
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