23. Naming the Thing
Naming the Thing
Kain rode into town and found it going on much as it always did. Sasha was out front of the Kettle sweeping the steps, with Matthew crawling about at her feet.
She looked up as he came near and leaned on the broom.
"Kain." She nodded. "Everything all right?"
"Maybe. Maybe not." He didn't want to set her worrying, and he didn't want to be a fool about it either. "Keep Matthew close to you for a while. Inside after dark."
Sasha's look sharpened, but she knew better than to push him for the why of it. "I will."
Kain rode on to the general store, swung down and hitched Roan to the rail, and went in, and Sam looked up from behind the counter.
"Didn't look to see you in here again so soon." Sam set down what he was holding. "What can I do for you?"
"Information." Kain leaned on the counter. "Any farmers around here losing stock to something? Monster trouble."
"What kind of monster trouble?" Sam asked. "You saw off the wolves, didn't you?"
"Wolves are done." Kain shook his head. "Jeremiah lost three goats in the night. Whatever did it, it wasn't wolves."
"And you're fixing to ride out and deal with it?" Sam asked, a glint to his eye.
"No." Kain held up a hand. "Just turning over stones. I know my own business well enough not to go charging at a thing I can't put a name to yet."
"If you say so." Sam reached under the counter and brought up a tattered notebook. "Give me half a moment. I want to give it to you right. Folk tell me things, and I write the things down."
Kain almost asked what sort of things, but Sam was already going on.
"Odd bits, mostly. Tools gone missing, which is likely just a man mislaying his own hammer, though it could be a thief working through.
Somebody seen slipping along a fence line in the night.
Probably bored boys, but it could as easy be adventurers or sellswords come to make sport of country folk.
I keep a note of it regardless." Sam ran a finger down the page.
"Here. North of town, John Marge's place, near two miles out.
Lost four sheep in a night, back end of last week.
Said it was the strangest thing he'd seen, and asked me to send word if anybody else had the like. I took it for wolves."
"Wolves don't come down out of the sky." Kain frowned. "I'll ride up and see him."
"You work out what it is, you tell me." Sam put a hand out, and Kain shook it. "I'll need to spread the word."
Kain nodded, though he had no intention of spreading any word until he was certain of it. He went out, climbed onto Roan, and turned north.
The two miles went quick, and Carol lifted a hand to him as he passed the Martinson place, though her father, out by the paddock, made a point of not doing the same.
Beyond them he passed a scattering of farms, and then the farms thinned out, the people this far from town being the sort who liked their room.
It was a good half mile from the Marge place to the nearest farm to it. The land around it stood thick with trees grown well apart, cottonwood and hackberry and oak, and the farmhouse sat small under the shadow of a barn far bigger than itself. Past the barn a gap in the trees opened onto pasture.
A farmer came out as Kain rode up, well short of old, somewhere in his sixties, with the look of a man who had spent the most of his life out of doors.
"Hello there. You'd be the new fellow in town."
"That's me." Kain shook his hand. "You'd be Mister Marge?"
"John. John Marge." He nodded. "Been on this ground the better part of forty years. What can I do for you?"
"Sam sent me up. He said you lost some sheep." Kain looked toward the barn. "I'd be obliged if you'd show me where."
"Suppose I can. Sheep are long seen to, but I can show you the place." John tipped his head toward the pasture. "Come on."
Kain swung back up, and John got onto his own horse, and they rode out past the barn and through the gap in the trees into a broad sweep of pasture.
The land rolled away over a good many low hills, fenced the whole way round, with the dark wall of the forest standing close behind the rails. A pond sat in the low middle of it, and the sheep moved in loose bunches across the grass.
"When I came up here it was all forest, every foot of it." John spoke as they rode. "My wife and me, and the children after, we worked the better part of twenty years to beat the woods back to where they sit now."
"Took some doing," Kain said.
"The trees keep the most of the predators off.
The big cats and the bears find a way through now and again, but I set a row of cedar in along the tree line, and it grew so thick that most things would as soon go find easier prey.
These were the first sheep I've lost in ten years.
" He pointed up a slope. "Right up over here. "
He led the way up onto one of the higher hills, the one that looked down over the pond, and drew rein. The grass had come back over whatever mark had been left, but Kain thought he could make out a faint dish in the dirt beneath it.
He got down and knelt, pressing his fingers into the ground, and after a moment found what he was after: the small, telltale scrapes that talons leave, the same as the ground at Jeremiah's had shown him.
"What did the sheep look like?" Kain asked.
"Only the one of them was eaten." John leaned on his saddle horn. "The rest were just killed, like they'd been stood too near when it came down. All of them with the same holes punched in, talon marks to my eye. I've watched a hawk take a rabbit. Looked to be the same kind of thing, only big."
"How far apart were the marks?" Kain asked.
"Foot and a half, maybe two foot. Somewhere in there. I didn't set a rule to them." John shook his head. "My guess is some big bird of prey. An eagle, a large one. There's been nothing since, so I'm hoping it just passed on through and kept going."
Kain climbed back onto Roan. "Might be it didn't. Jeremiah lost three goats last night, down south of town."
"Jeremiah, down south?" John shook his head. "That's a hard thing. I'd best start bringing the sheep in to the barn of a night, then."
"Might be wise." Kain folded his arms and looked out over the land, across the fences and the hills and the forest standing beyond them.
A thing with wings would want somewhere high and out of easy reach to lie up in, and he had spent years reading country like this for where a beast might den, so the ground gave him three answers without much trouble.
A little to the north stood a stand of taller trees, old growth that would carry the weight of something large. Due east the land rose to a hill he couldn't make out well from where he sat. To the southeast ran a ridge with rock breaking along the top.
"Obliged to you." Kain nodded.
"You going to see to this one, like you did the wolves?" John asked.
"That's the question I keep getting." Kain turned Roan back toward the road. "And the honest answer is I don't know yet."
He rode back into town turning it over the whole way, and when he came into the store Sam looked up and spread his hands.
"Well?"
"Same creature both times. Near certain of it." Kain came up to the counter. "You have anything on the wildlife hereabouts? A guide, a book of beasts?"
"Right here." Sam turned and pulled a heavy book down off the shelf behind him and dropped it on the counter. Kain read the spine of it. Holloway's Field Guide to Hazardous Fauna, Volume Three. He opened it and started down the entries.
The book ran by kind of creature, and he turned to the aerial predators. The guide gave a dozen of them as living in the region or near enough to it, and he went down the list.
"Minor dragon, no. Wyvern, no. Flying serpent, no. Harpy, no. Manticore, no."
Only two of them fit what he had read in the dirt. The first the guide named a leatherwing, a great toothless flying lizard, but the note beside it placed the creature only in the deep jungles of the far south, and added that even there the better opinion held it a thing of story and not of fact.
The second fit every part of what he had seen.
Talons and a hooked beak to the fore, the guide said, the head and wings of a great eagle, and behind them the body and hind legs of a lion: a bird to the fore and a cat behind, the same shape he had read out of the ground at two farms now, and the same name he had carried off from Jeremiah's pen without once letting it past his teeth.
He closed the book and laid his hand flat on the cover.
The word he had kept to himself across two farms had a real beast standing behind it after all, and naming a thing was the first work a man did before he set about the rest. A gryphon had come down into the valley around Tillamore, and now he knew it for certain.