Hunted [Wild Hunt Series: 1]

4: Pursuit

Luc's eyes lingered on the heavens with the same trepidation I felt toward the forest. The wind had slowed to a winnowing breeze, allowing for snow to accumulate on bough and branch, narrowing the path ahead.  Setting his lantern down, Lucas adjusted the rifle strap.

"Sunset's around five-thirty. It'll come on quicker under these clouds, let alone if the snowfall picks up. Things could go from clear as glass to disorienting in a matter of seconds."

"I've found stray cows before," I said, crunching through layers of snow and mottled leaves. Lucas was right; visibility wouldn't last long. "Snow this rate and her tracks are still visible? We're in good shape."

"Are you prepared to end things if the calf's not?"

The gun weighed heavy around my waist as I adjusted the brightness of my lantern. Our lights were heavy, but the liquid fuel burned bright. Luc carried a couple flashlights inside his coat for use as required. I trudged on ahead of the grumbling man, directing the light into the shadows. Inch by inch my surroundings transformed into a hallowed, golden wonderland. 

But the woods beyond the light only grew darker. Out there, the snow hissed.

Since I certainly wasn't, here and there Lucas would stop long enough to take a field knife and gash a trunk as a marker. 

"If things gets so bad I start feeling up some wood, we're screwed," I told him. "And not how you'd like."

He gave me a flat look. We kept walking.

In the flat yard sighting her trail was easy, but here where rocks and branches puckered the ground and several dozen small animals made their runs, plodding little hoofprints were a four leaf clover in an acre of ivy. God, this calf had some good calves to navigate this mess.

"You don't have to prove anything to me," he said after an unsuccessful ten minutes.

"I'm not proving anything."

"Remember the last time you admitted you were scared?"

I shook my head.

"You claimed you were scared of cliff diving. Ring a bell?"

My face reddened underneath my wool scarf. "I still jumped."

"Climbed to a rock higher than all us idiots, then jumped. You ripened like a blueberry that summer."

"Dislocated my elbow, too," I added. "Thanks for reminding me about almost drowning in this my time of terror."

"I just want you to know it's okay to quit." He caught up to me, pulled me from my hunched examination of piling snow. Hooves. We were headed the right way. "You were staring at Dakota like you were next. You don't have to be next. We can head back to the car and if it's too bad to go out we'll throw a log on the fire and chill like we used to and morning will come and everything will be okay. Don't kill yourself trying to make up for a moment of weakness."

I touched the holster at my hip. "I'm not."

"We're all human, Tay. Be a smart human and take me home." He released my arm. Almost immediately I jogged after the fading tracks. Lucas threw up his hands and ran after me, caught me around the waist and pushed me back against a tree to hold me still. "For Christ's sake, Tay, it's a cow! At this point it may as well be in your freezer."

"That calf," I corrected, panting, "is the future of this farm. She's my responsibility. I'm not losing her."

"Tay," he said, the ice in his eyes melting.

"I could've killed Ajax," I murmured. 

His glove brushed my cheek. "Mav could've caused a further rock slide, not you. As it stands, Ajax went over the edge because of Mav. People react to tragedy in different ways. It's okay. Let's go back where it's warm and we can talk about what you've seen."

I pushed away from him and started to run. "I'm not losing that calf, Luc."

*

Lucas scratched bark from ten or eleven more pines before the trail went cold. He was sweating heavily and clutching his knees to catch his breath.

The air had dimmed to a pseudo twilight, filled with the grey static of giant snowflakes- which I took as an entirely too optimistic sign that the fast-moving storm's end was near. "For being an outdoorsman, you sure have pitiful endurance. How do you ever catch a crook?"

"By surprise," he breathed, wiping his brow. "Where the hell did the tracks go?"

I paced back to the last location. The errant calf had wound its way through a thicket of young pines beside the ridge where generations of coyotes had raised their pups. One late June afternoon Ajax had caught Lucas and I leaning over the ridge to spy on the pups below. We may as well have waltzed into the elephant graveyard the way he'd puffed up like Mufasa and bellowed at a lurking yearling in the scrub nearby. 

The tracks and dung were clear as day, fresh beside a snow-burdened shrub, so close to the spot we'd hidden all those years ago I could almost glimpse our ghosts. 

"They don't go anywhere," I said to Lucas, edging carefully toward the ridge with a bad feeling weighing down my stomach. Visions of blood stains danced through my head. "They end."

Braced against me, Lucas held a lantern over the edge. Light bounced off smooth sheets of snow. If anything had fallen -and considering the shit was still warm- we'd be viewing now the mangled evidence.

I touched one tender print. "No sign of a scuffle. It's like she was just plucked into the air."

"Seen eagles snatch fawns," Lucas said doubtfully, "but even they leave minimal mess."

"An eagle's not swooping around in this," I replied, taking one more look below. "And-"

"Tay," he said in sharp warning. Below his tone came something deeper and filled with visercal malice. He reached for the rifle. "Turn around real slow."

I did absolutely no such thing. I didn't have the training or presence of mind to turn around real slow. I was halfway around and pulling out my handgun before he'd gotten out all the words, before the lantern he'd dropped exploded on the rocks below.

Head down between its shoulders, embers glaring between its teeth, the Smiling Dark lunged. My fingers struggled with the kind of safety I'd flipped a thousand times before. Lucas couldn't get the shot off in time either. He pushed me to the side as the wolf closed in. I shrieked as I fell, stumbling into the brush, one branch away from a deadly fall. I pulled myself free. 

The wolf had torn Lucas off his feet. He was screaming, his head over the edge, his fingers sliding through the dark mane as the wolf bore down on him. It held him pinned, one massive black paw searing a hole through his jacket. It snapped inches from his nose, spraying his face and hands with burning threads that seared flesh and fabric alike. The side of his wrist was melting off in a tarry slurry.

"No!" I shouted, raising the gun. The wolf  spun with unearthly speed, jaws swallowing the gun and my entire forearms. I pulled the trigger. There was a bang as hot pain closed over my flesh, a bang and a flash of vibrant foxfire out the back of the thing's skull. The bullet nailed a tree several yards away. With a snarl I felt in my burning bones the thing thrashed me left and right. Lucas writhed beneath us, crushed and gasping for air. 

Then, with a sudden wrench of its head, I was free.

My foot hit a rock or stump or Lucas. I tumbled off the ridge into a world of spinning snow, didn't stop until my back slammed into a trunk. Branches shivered. Lucas's screamed died somewhere high above.

I braced myself for the wolf, straining to hear the hiss of steam as cinders winked out of existence along my arms, but the rush of blood through my ears drowned out all further noise. Flakes skipped gaily across my cheeks. I couldn't help but think of Dakota as my consciousness surrendered to the dark.