Chapter 1 Love #2
Apple sighed. “Okay. Fine. Yes. You’re very tough.”
“Speaking of streams”—Blacktail stretched his back, yawned—“do you fancy some water? I’m thirsty.”
“Thanks, but no. I’ve got to get back to the burrow. Those acorns aren’t going to hide themselves. Kits to feed and all that.”
“Suit yourself.”
Blacktail looked off in the direction of the departing bear, thinking. “Did you get a look at that bear? The size of it?”
“Indeed. Healthy specimen.”
“Apple?”
“Hmm?”
“Are they…are they all like that? Grizzlies, I mean?”
“Well, I haven’t met them all,” Apple said, “but from the ones I’ve seen, yes. That’s the general range.”
The two of them looked at each other. “Right. Well, that’s it. I’m off. Got quite a thirst all of a sudden.”
“I imagine,” Apple said. “That’ll happen when you wet yourself.”
“Hmph.”
“You be careful out there,” Apple said. “There’s lots of scary things in the woods.”
“I will.” And then, before he disappeared over the ridgeline, he called, “Apple?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
ii
Blacktail went to the stream at least once a day, but he tried to vary the path he took.
Partly this was caution. But he also liked to cast about for scent poems left by the wolves who had lived here before him.
By now he’d read most of them more than once, but they soothed an ache he felt when he went out to hunt alone.
Today he got lucky and found a few he hadn’t read under a fallen tree:
Lord Claw rules this land
and he is great.
Next to it in a female scent he read:
Lady Render rules Lord Claw.
Who is greater?
Blacktail snickered. There were a couple more in the series, but the rain had gotten to them. He couldn’t make them out. But at the far end of the log he found this one in the scent of Lady Render:
…lone now.
As with the sunset
so the coming of men.
Blacktail frowned, disturbed. Alone now? What happened to Claw? But he was used to unanswered questions. At the stream he drank deeply. When his belly was full, he walked over to a nice patch of sunshine, sniffed around in a circle a couple of times, and lay down for a quick nap.
Sometime later a bright summer breeze rolled in from the west carrying a faint whiff of mule deer. His nostrils flared. Don’t get too excited, he thought. There won’t be any fawns about this time of year. He wasn’t quite hungry enough to have a go at a full-grown buck. But a doe…
His stomach rumbled. Yawning, he raised his head and looked around to take the lay of the land. About a hundred yards downwind, there was a steepish hill—not quite the highest point in sight…but high enough. And convenient. Maybe go up there? Have a sniff?
There were, he knew, flatlands to the west…but that was a place of men. At night, you could see the sky glow in the distance. Men. That reminded him of his mother. He flinched at the memory of her—gunshots—and hated himself for it.
Blacktail stood, shook himself off, and trotted off upwind.
The hill was steeper than he would have liked, with a couple of slippery spots. But deer are very tasty, especially this time of year—by the end of summer they will toughen up. So he made his way up without killing himself.
At the top you could see for miles. Mostly it was flatlands broken up by a few thin lines of forest. There were no deer in sight, but he did see a mother moose with her calves.
The next time the wind rose he raised his head into it, drew the scents in deep, surrendered himself to them. No deer. In the valley below, the mother moose gave him a suspicious look, then moved between him and her calves.
Another gust. He sniffed again, deeper this time. Still no deer.
Well…shit. All that climbing for—
Then…something. Something new. His mind went blank, all thought driven from him.
He’d never felt anything like this. The only thing roughly comparable was a time last winter when he’d fallen off the bank of a lake and broken through the crust of ice below.
The cold had usurped his mind even as it blasted the air from his lungs.
What. The. Fuck.
This wasn’t cold, though. This was something else…something good. Whatever it was stirred in him an entirely new feeling—something like hunger, perhaps? That was the closest he could think of. Yes. It’s not unlike hunger….
He focused on his stomach, but that wasn’t quite right. It’s…what? A bit lower than my belly.
Just between his hind legs.
When the wind rose, he sniffed again. He couldn’t have stopped himself even if he had wanted to.
He set out upwind, not quite sprinting but not wasting any time, either.
As it happened, his path took him past an old scent poem of his mother’s that concerned itself with the relationship between wisdom and caution.
He darted past it without so much as a sniff.
All that afternoon he trotted to and fro, casting about for the scent.
By midafternoon he was farther south than he had ever been.
At first he tried to deny the obvious, but by twilight he was forced to admit the truth to himself.
The scent came from somewhere beyond the black path that marked the farthest edge of his forest.
It came from the land of men.
Despite the extreme urgency rising from his nether regions, the black path gave him pause. The path was known to all creatures of the forest as the hunting ground of Car, who was the most furious and insane demon of the two-legs.
Blacktail didn’t know much about Car personally.
But word gets around. He had heard enough to be cautious.
For one thing, the squirrels had consecrated a death cult in Car’s honor.
That in itself was no great distinction—squirrels love nothing so much as a good death cult—but unlike most predators, Car would not be appeased.
The squirrels seemed to take this as a challenge.
Every night was the same. When the moon came up and the cicadas buzzed, the wails of the chosen squirrel and his family rang out.
Then came the blubbering terror, the roar of Car, and finally silence.
The noise kept Blacktail up nights. Whether the offerings went on to the Far Hill, or the Happy Grassland, or whatever afterlife was in fashion that week was, he supposed, debatable.
But from a practical standpoint, the squirrels were wasting their time.
Not only was Car not appeased by the sacrifices, it didn’t even seem to notice.
Curious to see the altar of sacrifice, Blacktail sniffed his way up and down the road for a few minutes. He found the scent of rot next to a stand of tall grass and pushed through for a better look. Seeing what lay beyond, he had to stifle a gasp. It’s one thing to hear about it, but…
Flattened squirrel corpses lay all along Car’s black path, rotting and uneaten. Had they been fresh, they would have been enough to fill Blacktail’s belly for a full winter. At least.
But more than the sheer number, the pointlessness and the brutality were what stung him.
These bodies had not been shown the respect of a hunter for his prey.
They had only been destroyed. One in particular caught his eye.
From the ribs down to about the middle of the tail, the squirrel’s body was squashed flat.
Its guts had been squeezed up into its torso, bloating it.
The little beast’s eyes had popped from their sockets.
Now they dangled on stalks of about the length of Blacktail’s foreclaws.
Why in the name of hell would it do that?
Blacktail wondered. Is that supposed to be funny? Is this thing insane?
He noticed some larger parts among the mangled corpses.
That’s too big for a squirrel. He sniffed the air, careful not to set foot on the path.
Possum. He frowned. Possums were crazy enough in their own way—among other things, each spring they held a Festival of Dung and seemed surprised when few chose to attend—but they didn’t tend toward religious nuttery the way squirrels did.
But here it was, smooshed with the rest.
This Car…must be terrible indeed.
Blacktail wasn’t afraid, exactly, but it would be fair to say that the carnage arrayed before him made him feel more cautious than usual. Bite this, he thought. I’ll stay out of Car’s way if he stays out of mine. He turned around and slipped back into his forest.
Likely that would have been the end of it, were it not for a chance breeze that carried another whiff of the smell that had originally brought him here.
It was stronger this time. He was sure of it.
For just a moment the rot and decay fell away.
The smell woke some deep part of him that longed for…
what? He had no language for it. In his mind he knew nothing of mating, of family, of the warmth a pack may share on a cold winter night.
But his bone and blood knew enough that turning back was no longer a real possibility.
Blacktail closed his eyes. He made himself still, calmed his heartbeat, and listened for Car. When he was sure that he detected no hint of its roar, the thrum of road that you felt underfoot when one was close, he stood up and darted across the path.
Thus did Blacktail enter the dominion of the two-legs, also known as men.
iii
Before very many steps he was in the thick of it.
Man-stink lay over everything. That was bad enough—every so often he had to stifle a gag.
But the shapes he saw here were even worse.
The things of men dotted the landscape, each rigid and regular in a way that correct things, proper things, things that grow cannot be. It was terrible to his eyes.
But Blacktail was young. His lust would not be denied.
As the sun sank he worked his way deeper into the unnatural world.
He was careful. He moved in a series of quick, silent dashes, paused, then moved again.
It was slow going, but by the time the moon was up, he found himself in the shadow of yet another unfathomable thing of men.