“Seriously, I swear I’ve never shot—”
“You’ll shoot the stag,” said Simon, finally dead serious. Between the two of them, Simon was the more reasonable, or at least the more stable and coherent, and his tone confirmed this wasn’t a joke. Whatever lane of logic they were running on had brought them to this point and there was no going back—they had planned on taking me out here to do this exact thing. They truly believed I was capable of shooting a deer from a hundred yards away, that my arm muscles, which had faded and leaned out considerably over the months, were more than just inflated vanity projects.
I sighed and looked around the meadow. Wulfric tightened his grip. “OK then can we at least get a little closer?” I asked.
“Some soldier.”
“Well that’s correct because I’m not.”
We crouched low and shuffled around the edge of the meadow. The grass was dry and snappy no matter how slowly I tried to move and I could sense the gathering skittishness of thedeer, they were about to bolt. No, I didn’t want to shoot a deer, but there was an emotional detachment in having to use a bow and arrow—it didn’t feel real and I knew there was no way I’d actually be able to hit anything. I’d scare them off with my bad shot and we’d all go back empty-handed and hopefully Wulfric wouldn’t shoot me.
When we were closer, I drew the bow—I had never done this before, save for maybe a Scouts camping trip when I was ten, shooting targets with blunt plastic sticks. The bow was wound tight and difficult to pull back. My arms strained, the arrow wobbled, the stag’s muscles twitched, it knew what was about to happen, and in a split second, just as the whole herd was about to vanish, I let go.
The arrow thunked off a rock ten feet away and twirled into the bushes. I flushed with relief. The deer scattered and fled and—
“What in God’s name is that?” Wulfric cried. He dropped his bow in shock. As the deer parted...
There was a dog.
“No way,” I gasped.
It was Matilda.
I erupted into a fit of laughter, I couldn’t hold it back. All tension gave way to delirium.
Matilda the Afghan hound was sitting prim and proper in the shade of an oak tree, too unbothered to run for cover with her newfound family of deer. I couldn’t believe it. She watched me from across the meadow with her panting smile. If she remembered me at all, she couldn’t care less.
“What kind of bastard deer...” said Simon.
“It’s a wolf!” Wulfric readied his bow and pulled back hard with the arrow.
“No, wait!” I lunged and grabbed Wulfric’s arm as he let go. The arrow whipped through the air and disappeared into the trees. Before he could pull another, I jumped in front of him, putting myself between him and the dog.
“Stop! Look. Just stop for a second and let me talk. I am what I told you—I was a dog walker. I swear to God. I traveled through time and right before that happened, I was with that dog.” I pointed at Matilda. “That’s my dog. I was holding on to her. I must have pulled her through whatever wormhole I got sucked into.” My English stumbled over itself. Even if I had gotten every word exactly perfect in this new dialect there was no way I was making sense.
“That’s no dog,” said Simon.
“It’s some kind of hellhound. A wolf at least,” said Wulfric.
I tried to explain the concept of a Russian oligarch’s purebred Afghan hound worth more money than any of us could imagine and insisted this was irrefutable proof that my story was true, that I really had come from the future, but Wulfric and Simon remained apathetic, more in awe of the dog. Even if my rudimentary description of time traveling was understood, it meant nothing to them. I could be an oracle, a god, it didn’t matter, I had been their prisoner the past three months, wasting my time not on reading tea leaves or predicting the weather, but staring with traumatized awe at dirt, wood, insects, people’s eyes. My personality was only just reawakening with my ability to communicate and engage and I had nothing to show for it, I had nothing to offer these people. I wasn’t a soldier and had just proven it. Anything else I was didn’t matter.
Wulfric raised his bow again and pointed it directly at myhead. Instinctive terror fired and snapped through my body. “Wait! Wait! Please—wait,” I cried with my arms raised. “Just watch.”
Slowly, I made a fist and lowered it. I held it out toward Matilda and jiggled it. I called her name and whistled. And despite these methods never really serving me well before, her tail wagged, she stood up. Wulfric and Simon gasped at her height. She trotted over to me, smiling her devilish smile. Her fur was matted and her eyes read a touch more feral than normal, but otherwise she looked healthy and happy. Three months in the untamed wild had to be a nice escape for a pampered dog like her. The only thing that gave away her modernity (besides her exotic breed) was the thick designer collar still firmly around her neck, with a little gold-plated, diamond-encrusted name tag dangling from it.
A silence of calculations ticked between me and the two men. Wulfric and Simon saw the collar, saw my familiar maneuvering with Matilda, how she licked me, they looked at each other, and I looked at them, their twitching bows, a frenzy of silent, split-second communication. Before anyone could move, I unclipped Matilda’s collar and jumped away from everyone with my hands up. Wulfric pointed his bow. Simon violently twitched. Matilda kept wagging her tail and panting.
“Just wait,” I said, arms raised. The collar glittered in the sunlight. “Let’s come to an agreement that works for all of us.”
“Put your bow down,” Simon muttered to Wulfric, but Wulfric refused.
“Simon, that’s gold!”
It was gold plating at best, I thought. The diamonds had tobe cheap if not completely fake, but in the twenty-eighth year of King Edward—whoever the hell that was—surely there was no way of knowing any better. Plastic hadn’t been invented yet.
The boys argued with each other over their next move.
“We’d have more money than the whole parish combined.”
