Aiyana Redfeather's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

The tribe camped at the edge of the forest, halfway between the swamp and the stone hills. Aiyana slept badly. A cry woke him before dawn. One of the hunters had gone to the trees to relieve himself. He came back pale, dragging a bloody spear. Something had slashed his arm and vanished. Aiyana walked the camp's edge and found it. Deep tracks in the mud. Three clawed toes, each longer than his hand. A beast had followed their trail out of the swamp. Kaya crouched beside him and studied the tracks. She had scouted the cavern with him. She knew what these creatures could do. "It's wounded," she said, touching a dark smear on a leaf. "It bled here. A hunt gone bad in the swamp, maybe." She looked at the tree line. "Wounded means desperate. It will keep taking us one at a time." The beast could not be seen against stone. But they were not in the stone hills yet. Aiyana looked at the tangled roots and towering ferns around them. Here the beast had to move through leaves and mud, not gray rock. Its scales matched stone, not green. "In the forest it can't hide," Aiyana said. "We fight it here, or it picks us off all the way home." He knew he could not chase it. It was faster and stronger. So he made it come to him. He tied a fresh beast haunch to a low branch near a wide-rooted tree. Then he told the tribe to build fires in a ring and stay inside. He and Kaya waited in the dark with the drilling spear. Naia had warned him such beasts hunted by scent and movement. He kept still and breathed slow. The creature came at first light. It broke from the ferns, huge and low, its jaws already open. Against the leaves its mottled hide showed clear. It lunged for the bait. Aiyana saw the old wound in its flank, crusted black. He drove the cone-tipped spear into that soft, torn place with all his weight. The beast screamed and thrashed. Kaya rammed her spear beside his. Together they held the shaft down while it tore the earth. Its tail struck a snapping carnivore plant near the roots, and the blossom's teeth closed on nothing but air. At last the beast shuddered and went still. Aiyana pulled his spear free, breathing hard. The camp had survived. No more stragglers would die in the dark. But he stood over the body and understood something colder. This beast had come from the cavern. He had seen its wound. Its brothers held his home, and they would not lunge at bait in open forest. They waited in gray stone where no eye could find them. Killing this one had taught him how they moved. It had not taught him how to win. He wiped the spear and looked toward the hills.