Most in the countryside, being poachers themselves, didn’t.
Some did, however, which could make selling her kills in town a bit tricky. The king’s foresters, city folk who rarely made it into the actual forest, had no qualms about harassing townsfolk they suspected of harboring the true scourge of the countryside: untaxed venison. But to those who received their sustenance from the Lichtenwald, their hunters were poachers in the way a squirrel gathering acorns from the ground beneath its nest – without a permit, of course – was poaching from the oak; the way the oak poached sunlight from the sky.
But even if anyone was inclined to hold Anya’s wobbly legal definitions over her head, they wouldn’t, because they knew no one else in all of Gescany could bring them the richest meat, the plushest pelts, the strongest antlers, beaks and bones for grinding into fertilizer or medicine. It wasn’t a matter of pride. It was simply a matter of fact.
As was the fact that the best jobs she’d been able to get in recent years, as more and more of the countryside was tamed, were less stopping wild boar from terrorizing the fields or plying the butcher with prime venison to hawk to prosperous farmers, and more begging the tanner to give her even a cut-rate on yet more rabbit skins, or picking off overly ambitious skunks from poorly fenced vegetable gardens.
Still, as she sat waiting for her quarry to chance by, she liked to imagine the farmer had come from leagues and leagues away solely to solicit her services.Anya Degen, huntress extraordinaire. The others at the lodge would laugh at her, Perrine especially, for using such a fancy word, as they always did when she let her childhood vocabulary slip out.
But it was the only word that would do, for it was the truth. And if such things ever happened – if desperate farmers ever left their huts, trekking for dusty miles in order to beg for help, to sue for the aid of the most adventurous hunter in the land, their last and only hope – they would happen to her.
But such things didn’t happen; not in the Lichtenwald. Few were fool enough to venture into its depths in the first place. They paid Anya to, as they had paid Johanna before her, and she charged extra for it.
Though fear of the Lichtenwald was so great she could easily charge double without raising an eyebrow, she charged the farmer appropriately. It was plenty, still. She could finally afford to pay someone to properly fix the hole above her stove.
Once she caught the fox, of course.
A fox was no easy sport, even if you had a horse and a hound. Anya had neither, and her decades old shotgun had seen better days. A rifle would be better suited, but, well, you worked with the tools you had.
She had been out there for hours, waiting for the sun to set, for the wind to turn. She’d turned down easier jobs for this – trapping marmots that kept sneaking into the Baumanns’granary, picking off rabbits from Old Thom’s cabbage. Easier, and less paying – and these days, she needed the extra coin almost as much as she craved, at long, long last, a challenge.
The farmer said he’d run his hound after the fox, but with the hound being more the guarding sort than the hunting sort, and pitiful at both, that excursion had been fruitless. Meanwhile, the fox had made its way through half the farmer’s flock of hens. He’d grown desperate enough to sell Anya the other half at a pittance, if she asked it.
But she asked only the appropriate sum: less than a bear, ten times a badger – and a dozen eggs. Her own chickens, likely perturbed at their oft absent caretaker’s neglect, had stopped laying.
With no hound and no horse, she’d brought only her bow and two arrows – one kept nocked, and one in her quiver. The slightest sound, like the click of her shotgun’s barrel or of arrows clacking together on her back, could alert the fox to her presence, and the sneaky fellow would alter his route, though not his destination; not with the pickings being so good. She’d have to start from scratch, and she’d already spent days looking for signs of the shifty beast. And anyway, arrows were cheaper than birdshot. Carrying only two kept her sharper, more sparing.
Twilight painted the woods purple. Another reason no other hunter would ever take the job – foxes were nocturnal. The Lichtenwald, even the skirt of it, was as dangerous in the day as it was in the dark, but fear of the dark was not something easily reasoned out of. It had to be earned.
Anya was not afraid of the dark.
She’d circled the perimeter of the farmer’s property on the tree line and now crouched in the shadow of a rowan tree. She waited there, feeling the warm wind caress her neck and whip a few strands of her brown hair across her sight. The forest was peaceful tonight. She could smell the wet stone of the nearby stream. And, on the wind, from deeper in the forest, another smell. Indescribable, but a bit peppery, a bit piney. The scent of magic.
An east wind. Perfect; that put her downwind from the briar patch where, the night before, she had found a smattering of bloody chicken feathers.
Bad luck.She heard Johanna’s voice in her mind, pictured her chopped gray tresses under her favorite wide-brimmed hat, now sheltering Anya’s head, spitting her disapproval in the mud.An eastern wind’s an ill wind.
But good luck for me, old mother, she thought, plucking a leaf from the tree above her, kissing it and sending it flying.
She turned her attention to the forest floor. She kept her stride wide and stepped on moss and stones when she could to muffle her footsteps. A light rain had fallen that morning, so the ground was slick. She stepped lightly and purposefully, quickly and quietly. The shape her boots were in, it might have been better to go barefoot, but while the earth was awakening to summer’s trumpet call, the ground itself was wet and cool.
As she stretched a leg over a puddle, the smooth, worn bottom of her boot slid along a wet stone and nearly put her flat on her face. Stumbling, she caught herself.
Perhaps new boots before that hole above her stove, then. If her clumsiness hadn’t sent the fox running. She bit the inside of her lip, scanning the blue ground for signs of movement.
Then – in the corner of her eye – a slip of movement in the growing darkness. A pair of quail startled away from their nest. There, low to the ground, quick. Something was approaching, and did not stop for tiny quail eggs. He had a much finer feast awaiting.
There he was, making his nightly jaunt, off from the briar patch, straight for the farm. The fox had not yet smelled or seen her. She crouched.
As it trotted closer, quietly as she could, she drew her bow. The second arrow was there if she missed, but it would be much harder to catch it running away, and it wouldn’t come back this way. Her hours of work would be for nothing. She must make this shot, straight between its eyes.
It was headed straight for her.Good luck, see?
Her arm aching, her arrow drawn, she took a moment to appreciate the creature she was about to kill. Its pelt was beautiful; uncommonly beautiful, even for a fox. Vibrant. Almost glowing. Perhaps the farmer would pay extra for the skin.
She loosed her arrow.
In the second before it pierced the beast’s skull, the fox looked directly at her. She could almost swear it looked afraid.
