From Below

Hunger Clock: 96%

I spent the next morning doing what I always did with a problem I didn't understand. I watched it.

The Loamback came up three times before noon, always near the water, always where the bank was soft. Once for a frog, once for a fish that had swum too close to the edge, and once for nothing I could see. That time it just pushed its head up out of the mud and lay there with its eyes half closed, the sun on its stony back. It stayed like that for a long time. Then it sank and was gone.

I learned a few things. It never came up on the rocks. It never came up in the root-tangled ground around the big trees. It liked the soft, wet soil by the stream, and it came up fast and went down slow. When it was resting in the sun, its back was right there, broad and flat, only half a body length below my branch.

That was the part I kept looking at.

The plan I made was simple, and that should have warned me. When it came up to sun itself again, I would drop onto its back, the way I'd dropped on the piglet and the weasel and half the things I'd ever killed. I'd hook in behind its head before it knew I was there. Its back scales looked hard, but its neck was thinner, and the skin where the head met the body would have to bend. Things that bend have soft places.

I waited on the branch above its favorite spot all through the afternoon. The Clock barely moved. That was the strangest part of it. For the first time I could wait for a whole day without hunger making the decision for me.

Near evening, the ground below me rippled, and the broad stone back pushed up out of the mud and settled in the last of the sun.

I let Stillness take me, picked my spot, and dropped.

I landed right where I'd aimed, just behind its head. Both scythes came down and hooked.

And slid.

Its scales weren't like the Mud Sleeper's skin, slick and soft. They were like stone, hard and rough and set close together, and my hooks skated across them and found nothing to catch. I felt the whole body under me go tight. I struck again, lower, at the bend of the neck, and this time one hook caught the edge of a scale and held for half a breath.

Then the ground took it.

It didn't roll or throw me. It just sank, straight down, the dirt flowing up around its sides like water filling a bowl, and in a heartbeat I was standing on bare, wet mud with nothing under me but a soft spot where it had been.

I should have run right then. I hesitated for one breath, staring at the mud.

I felt it through my feet. A pressure coming up, fast, right under me.

I jumped. Not far enough. The ground burst open where I'd been standing and its head came up through it, mouth wide, and one of its shovel claws came up with it and hit me in the side while I was still in the air.

Shell: -7

The world spun. I hit the mud, rolled, and came up with one side of my body screaming. Something hot and red rose under the pain, the pull that wanted me to turn around and go back in, scythes first, and tear at that head until one of us stopped moving.

[Will check]
Frenzy resisted.

I pushed it down and ran.

I didn't think about where. My body knew. It took me back toward the big tree with the knot of roots around its base, the one I'd been sleeping in, and I ran the way I'd run from the sow, low and flat out. Behind me I felt the pressure under the ground, following. It was faster down there than I was up here. I could feel it gaining, coming up under my back legs.

I hit the roots and kept going, up onto the big knot where they twisted together like a fist, and something slammed into the ground right underneath me.

The roots jumped. Dirt sprayed up between them. I clung on with every leg I had and looked down, and there was the Loamback's head, pushed halfway up between two thick roots, gold eyes fixed on me, jaws working. It shoved. The roots creaked. It shoved again, harder, and I saw the brown shimmer between its scales get brighter, and the dirt around the roots shivered and loosened.

But the roots didn't move.

It could make dirt move. It couldn't make wood move. I watched it understand that, the same way the heron had understood the shelf. It stopped shoving. It looked at me a moment longer. Then it pulled back, and the dirt closed over its head, and the pressure under the ground went away toward the stream.

I climbed higher before I let myself shake.

When I'd stopped, I checked the damage. There was a long dent along my right side where the claw had hit, and one of my front walking legs didn't want to bend all the way. Nothing was broken through. My body was already warming around the hurt places, doing its slow work. The Clock had dropped a little from the run and the healing.

Hunger Clock: 93%

I lay in the tree that night and went over it, and I wasn't angry. I'd been beaten before. The possum had beaten me, and the sow, and every time I'd come out of it knowing something I hadn't known going in.

So what did I know now?

It felt me through the ground. That was how it had come up under me so exactly, and how it had found the frog and the fish and the Root Rat. Every footstep on soft dirt was a knock on its door. That was why it came up by the water, where things walked on mud.

It couldn't go through roots. Wood stopped it cold.

And it came up wherever it felt something worth eating.

I looked down at the big knot of roots below me, and at the soft wet mud running from the roots to the stream, and an idea started to come together.

"I can't follow you down there," I thought. "Fine. Then I'll pick where you come up."