Heavy Steps

I slept through the morning and woke when the sun was already high, my bitten leg stiff but working. The Clock had slipped while I slept, though not by much.

Hunger Clock: 82%

I didn't go far that day. I hunted around the base of my own tree, caught a couple of flies and a fat green caterpillar, and spent the afternoon practicing the strike I'd used on the shrew. Plant the legs, offer something, wait for the stop, strike. I used a twig as the bait and a falling seed as the target. By evening, I could hit the seed in the moment it touched the twig almost every time.

When the light went, I stayed on my ledge. One night hunt had been enough for a while. I settled in, folded my scythes, and let my eyes go soft and gray with the dark.

I heard it a little after the frogs started.

At first it was just a sound I didn't recognize, low and uneven, off to the north. Then it came again, closer, and I understood it was footsteps. Not the quick patter of a rat or the rustle of something small in the leaves. These were heavy. Each one was a soft, deep thump that I felt in the bark under my feet a moment after I heard it.

Every other sound in the forest stopped. The frogs, the insects, the birds that had been shifting in their sleep. All of it went silent at once, the same way it had by the clawed tree.

I didn't move. I couldn't have if I'd wanted to. Stillness took me without my asking, and for once I was grateful to be a thing that could freeze.

[Stillness] active

It came out of the trees below and to my left, and walked along the stream bank. In the dark, I couldn't see much of it. Just a shape, a big hunched back that went up and up, higher than the lowest branches, and the shine of something wet on its side. It moved slowly, like nothing in the forest had ever given it a reason to hurry. It smelled like wet fur and old blood.

It stopped at the water, almost right under my tree.

Something screamed farther down the bank, a short high sound that was cut off fast. Then there was a wet crunch, and another, and the sound of something heavy being dragged. I stayed frozen on my ledge and listened to it eat. It took a long time.

When it finally walked away, back the way it came, the steps faded slowly. The forest stayed quiet long after they were gone, as if everything was holding its breath to make sure. Then, one at a time, the frogs started again. I didn't sleep much after that.

In the gray before sunrise, I climbed down to look. I went slowly and stopped often, but the bank was empty. Only the signs were left. There were prints in the mud by the water, each one wider than my whole body, with deep holes in front of the pads where the claws had dug in. There was a patch of torn-up ground and dark stains in the leaves, and a single long leg bone, cracked open and licked clean. Caught on a low branch, there was a clump of thick dark fur, coarse as wire.

Hunger Clock: 70%

I stood by one of the prints for a long time, doing the math. The prints. The grooves on the tree, twelve feet up. The way it walked, like it owned everything. I could kill a crab, a spider, a shrew. I could not kill that. Not now. Maybe not for a very long time.

That should have frightened me more than it did. Instead, the cold part of me that had been there since the first day was already taking notes. It drank at this stretch of stream. It came from the north. It hunted at night and moved slowly when it wasn't hunting. It was loud. Everything in the forest went silent when it came, and that silence was a warning I could hear from far away.

"Then I'll listen for the silence," I thought.

The carcass it had left behind wasn't empty. Flies were already on the stains, thick and buzzing, and while I watched, a beetle crawled out from under the torn leaves. It was big for a beetle, shiny black with orange marks on its back, and it was busy chewing at a scrap of meat.

[Sense]
Target: Carrion Beetle ~ Lv.4
Threat: Low

I almost laughed. The big creature had made a mess, and the mess had brought me breakfast.

I came at it from behind, low and slow. Its shell was thick, but I'd learned about shells from the crab. When I struck, I didn't go for its back. I hooked it under the edge of its shell where the legs came out and flipped it, and once it was on its back, it was only a matter of finding the soft places. It sprayed something foul at me as it died. It stank, but it didn't hurt.

[Kill] Carrion Beetle ~ Lv.4
XP gained.

I ate the beetle, then picked off flies until the Clock was where I wanted it.

Hunger Clock: 85%

Then I washed the stink off in the stream and climbed back up to my ledge, and I looked at it properly for the first time in days. It was a good ledge. But it was also right above the place where the biggest thing in the forest liked to drink.

I spent the rest of the morning climbing higher, past my old ledge and up into the part of the tree where the branches got thin, too thin for anything that big. I found a new spot, a hollow where a branch had broken off long ago, with a lip of bark around it and a good view of the stream below. From up here I could see the bank, the path the creature had taken, and the trees to the north, where it had come from. I settled in and looked out at all of it.

Ten days ago I'd woken up not knowing how to stand. Since then I'd learned to walk, to hunt, to climb, to wait, and to fight on the ground and on bark and in the dark. I'd learned my scythes well enough that they did what I wanted without me thinking about it. I'd gotten good at being this.

And last night I'd learned the most important thing of all. I wasn't the biggest thing out here.

Not yet.