Amber's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Amber ran east with the hare's blood still on her teeth. She reached the hidden nest before the moon cleared the trees. The six eggs lay where she had left them, two in the northeast pocket under the fern roots, four in the deeper hollow under the split log. She pressed her snout to each one. All warm. All whole. Then she circled back toward the lean-to to sleep where she could watch the low ground. That was her mistake. She smelled them before she saw them. Sour fur, old teeth. Small scavengers had found the hare bones. The scatter lay torn apart now, white fragments flung wide, tufts of fur stuck between the pieces. Two ratty things crouched at the marker post, gnawing. A third dragged a rib into the brush. They were not the danger. The danger was the noise. Tooth on bone carried far in still air. Amber crouched at the split rock and counted. More were coming. She could hear them in the leaves on three sides. By dawn the ground around her shelter would look like a kill site, stones kicked loose, bones piled, branches snapped where they fought over scraps. Any tyrant working the wind would read it from a thousand paces. The hare had bought her one night and was now spending it back. She moved fast. She drove the first two off the bones with a hiss and a snap, then grabbed what was left of the carcass in her jaws. Skull. Spine. The biggest leg bones. She ran them three hundred paces south of the lean-to, into a dry wash she had hunted last spring, and dropped them at the base of a stump. She kicked leaves over the trail behind her. She came back and gathered the scattered fragments, every piece she could find, and carried them in two more trips. She left the marker post standing. She left her own scent thin. When she came back the third time, the scavengers were following her south, drawn by the drag scent. The ground around the lean-to was almost clean. Almost. A scavenger had piled stones and skull bits at the foot of the split rock while she worked, a low ugly heap of stacked rock and small skulls and broken branches. A scent pile. A claim. She knocked it apart with one sweep of her tail and scattered the pieces into the brush. Then she stood still and listened. The gnawing had moved south. The wind was still with her. No heavy thuds. She had pulled the noise away from her nest. She had pulled it away from herself. But she had laid a fresh blood trail south of the river line, straight toward the ground the tyrant had walked at moonrise. By dawn it would find the wash, or it would find her tracks leading back.