Hunted [Wild Hunt Series: 1]

22: Above and Beyond

When raising cattle, the weather is something you have to think about, especially towards year's end, when simple things such as grazing and walking and staying warm become a lot harder. The wind and those precious trees capable of breaking the brunt of the chill start to matter more and more. And when you get early storms like the one that arrived on Halloween, you pay even more attention. With the advent of cellphones and increasingly reliable weather equipment, it was becoming a lot easier to pick up the days when the weather would turn from bad to worse.

Not so, in the Mid. The weather was what the weather was going to be, and neither Dakota nor myself had any true idea what "season" it was, or if seasons even existed here. The nights weren't unpleasantly cold, not for my blood anyway, and the forest leaves were thick and richly colored, leading me to believe it was perhaps the end of spring or early summer here, though I couldn't say for sure. This could be what the weather was year round. I had to keep reminding myself I'd been here a little over a week. It felt like a lot longer.

Whatever the case may be, the lovely morning tumbled into a darkening afternoon.

Clouds rolled overhead, the grey-green pale of an impending storm. A bad one, if it was anything like those skies folks claimed they saw before tornadoes. I'd never seen a tornado nor a storm bad enough to warrant one, though I had seen by boat the fiery storms dredged up from the heart of Aleutian mountains. This sky made me uncomfortable, though thunder had yet to roll and not a single drop of moisture stained the ground. A hair-rising current filled the air, air  thick with moisture and seemed to worsen, despite the cloud-cover, into a dank humidity that made my back weep.

Dakota did not glance skyward like I did, however. She lacked that instinctual warning for weather I'd developed growing up around the cattle. In fact she so busy sweating through the forest, focused so hard on pretending to be scared and promptly listening for a response that  when something did finally reach her, I was worried she'd forget what to do and run for the hills.

Aware that a Lord could come from anywhere at any time, I was careful to watch my back, to leave minimal markings when passing, knowing full well that if he could track our scent, we were both doomed. At some point, when Dakota had stopped to get fresh water for herself from a trickling stream, again ignoring the heaven's dire reflection, I took a chance and lingered a couple minutes after her to splash some mud on my limbs and face. The earth beside the running water didn't smell particularly fetid when I slathered it on, but it carried a subtle tang that bothered my nose. It wore off as I relocated Dakota trudging through a weedy clearing, but by then I'd already experienced the stirrings of a mild headache.

As we delved further into foreign territory, the terrain only seemed to grow warmer. The ground held an almost porous quality, spongy and mossy and a bit more like the swamp where Dakota claimed she'd seen another girl get swallowed by the mud. With that in mind, I eyed my sweat-streaked paint job and kept a lookout for signs that we were approaching a true swamp: dead trees, decaying odor, still water and insects...But for now we were absent everything, except glimpses of waning sunlight in weedy patches before the wind whisked it all away.

A nagging pain chipped away at the back of my mind as we trekked on toward nightfall. The sky's belly had swollen thick and full. Even Dakota was aware of the threat now. In the past half hour she'd stopped drawing attention to herself and from the look of it was working on finding a safe place to ride out the storm. My stomach felt unsettled but not unfamiliar, as though gripped by that subtle knot of hunger when you've skipped a meal you shouldn't. Maybe we should have fished some more before setting out.

Nature, of course, was filled with innocuous treats I wasn't sure I could eat. We walked past several types of berries, more gemstone-bright lizards and fork-tongued rodents with smooth skin, but I couldn't stop for any of it. Watching Dakota parade about in her bare feet, I thought I glimpsed the strain of hunger on her face, too. The woman in the white dress headed for a narrow clearing, where the trees were just a bit shorter than the other giants, and if she didn't stop soon I planned to call her back and look for shelter there.