Somewhere, down in the unending dark where the world’s weight walked on four paws and licked its children clean of all memory of the frowning sky, did his mother watch? Did his failure put an ember on her back too?
No.
He wouldn’t allow the thought.
She was in the forever deeps now, where the loyal pack remains beyond all danger and sadness.
Each of that pack endured the trial of the shallows, defying the open air, and it was his turn now.
Hateful months passed and the frozen deer grew bolder.
It defaced the world’s works and arts. It grazed on soft, fragile lives beneath the skies, a coward’s prey, not even honoring them by consuming their flesh, the fleeting wildflower creatures that glimmer across the ground like sparks, bright then dark within moments, lovely temporary things like storms of ghost lights in the cavern lake.
Its empty appetites changed as the year ripened. He did not know why, only that whatever it sought must be denied.
Birds.
Squirrels.
Humans.
Purposeless vandalism of all the life-forms the mountain called to root in its gardens, but the mountain had a guardian.
If only it had a stronger one.
One night, by the human dens above the racers’ maze, he saw the outsider fail to take its prey.
This was new.
A pattern change.
An opportunity?
A trap?
A human in a car endured the frozen deer. Watching the fawn’s failure was like seeing a great horned owl crack its talons on the hide of an April cottontail kit. It was absurd.
The outsider fled at his coming, and he faced the human.
The human’s mind met his mind. Another first.
He knew people were clever the way a badger was fierce, but he had never spoken to one.
Its mind was fear stink and panic, but there was something else he couldn’t place.
It was a man.
No.
It was a not-man.
He broke the not-man’s car to smell him. He tasted his sweat and blood.
He wasn’t from the outside.
Were his senses failing?
The not-man had something in him that tasted of mountain-kin, of deep scent.
