Mine to Hunt

Prologue

Katie

I loved it up here. That was the thing I kept reminding myself as my boots crunched over the switchback and my lungs started to work a little harder. The Sandias were my favorite mountains in the state, which was saying something because New Mexico was not short on mountains.

So why did the back of my neck feel like someone had run a cold finger along it?

“Katie, you’re falling behind.” Mark was maybe thirty feet ahead of me, his trekking poles clicking a cheerful rhythm against the rock. He grinned back over his shoulder. Mark had the kind of grin that made you feel like everything was fundamentally fine with the world.

“I’m appreciating the view,” I called back.

Jen, who was somewhere between us and had the fitness level of a person who had done something incredible in a previous life to earn it, just laughed without looking back.

I picked up my pace and told myself the feeling was nothing. Altitude, maybe.

The trail broke from the tree line briefly and opened onto a ledge that looked west over the Rio Grande Valley, the city of Albuquerque far below. I stopped and put my hands on my hips and breathed. Three seconds of that, and then it came again.

That feeling.

Not anxiety, exactly. I was super used to that: tight chest, runaway thoughts, the general conviction that I had left something important behind.

This was different. This was directional.

It came from behind me, from somewhere back in the trees we’d just passed through, and it was not abstract.

It was specific. It was pointed at me with the precision of something that knew exactly where I was and exactly what it wanted.

Something was watching me.

I turned around.

Just trees and the trail dropping back into shadow. A bird shrieked from a branch and then went silent.

“You good?” Mark was beside me now, following my gaze.

“Yeah.” I turned back to the valley. “Thought I heard something.”

He tilted his head, listening the way people do when they’re humoring you. “Wind, probably.”

“Probably.”

We kept walking.

It followed.

It?

So my primitive “don’t get eaten” instincts had decided there was an “it” now…

That couldn’t be good.

Was I ready to tell Mark about “it”?

No. I was not.

So I pressed on, definitely not scanning the ground for sharp rocks and pointy-ended sticks that I could use if “it” got hungry. But every time I looked back at the tree line it was just trees. Each time I scanned the granite outcrops above there was nothing.

Nothing but whatever invisible fucking sasquatch was taking a big dump on my weekend.

Stop it, I told myself. You vaped too much last night and had too much coffee this morning and you’re on a nice fucking hike with perfectly normal people in the most unscary mountains in the world.

By the time we hit the turnaround point and started back down, I had constructed a fairly convincing internal argument for the position that I was fine, everything was fine, and the hills definitely did not have eyes.

The argument held up well enough that I was able to eat half a granola bar and take a photo of a particularly dramatic cloud formation and laugh at something Jen said.

But when we reached the section of trail that wound back through the densest part of the pine corridor, the part where the trees came close on both sides and the light dropped and you couldn’t see more than fifteen feet into the forest, I stopped dead in the middle of the path.

Every hair on my arms stood up. Something old spoke deep in my mind, something ancient and primitive that had nothing to do with my conscious thoughts and did not consult them.

My body wanted to run.

Not in the generalized, anxious, “I’m uncomfortable” way an introvert like me feels at a party. In the very different manner of a prey animal that has identified a predator animal and is now executing survival logic that long predates the capacity for rational thought.

I walked faster instead of bolting, because I was not prey, I was a law student who did bouldering on weekends, and I was not going to run for my life because of a spooky feeling.

By the time we were back to where we’d parked, the feeling had faded to something I could hold at arm’s length and analyze on the drive home.

After a shower and a dinner of leftover green chili pasta eaten while standing over the sink, I put on a podcast about American Supreme Court oral arguments because while I enjoy bouldering, I get off on Supreme Court oral arguments.

By ten o’clock I had myself mostly talked down and by eleven I was in bed.

The city was making its regular sounds through the cracked window, and if I lay very still I could convince myself that the mountains were just mountains and whatever I’d felt up there was just a mood.

I was probably about to start my period.

I almost believed it.