Yes.
“Good. Remember that.”
I don’t understand.
“You will, Pup. Go with my love.”
In a stalemate, the wolf knew, you must focus on incremental changes, any shift in the balance. Was the pursuit of the outsider making him stronger? Was it making his enemy stronger? How could tactics be changed to ensure the fight was enriching him and diminishing his foe? If he couldn’t reach victory with a sprint, could he reach it an inch at a time?
He didn’t have the answers.
What he had was the imperative. Chase the thing. Understand the thing. Banish the thing.
He could grapple with the outsider’s mind, stilling its body with the assault.
That was something.
It mattered little because he too must still his body during the mind struggle. Two statues.
Stalemate.
Slow, stagnant, bitter stalemate.
The sun set and the wolf waited to feel the hateful touch of the deer on the land.
The deer bit into the sky’s fur during the day, hung there like a fat tick drinking the blood of the world.
It must.
Anywhere else and the wolf would have found its hiding place.
It came.
It blurred.
It ran.
It blurred.
It slowed.
It was by a human place. A horse place.
The wolf shot off as fast as a diving falcon, but he was a creature of matter and followed matter’s laws. He could not just blur through space like the enemy. Perhaps he could beg the mountain to shift him as fast as the deer, but pride said,Not yet.
When he arrived, he saw something surpassingly strange.
There was the deer, moving to destroy an old human for the crime of simply living.
And there was the not-man, charging the enemy, running in defense of the human.
Was that possible?
He was slow, but the deer was, what? Insulted by the very idea of his approach?
The deer turned.
The not-man faced it.
