Bumble's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Bumble left the clearing at a run. The hooded figure had slipped between two pines, and Bumble meant to catch them before they reached his cave. The fox and the bear stayed with his mother. He crashed through drifts alone, breath white, big feet tearing the crust. He caught a glimpse of the dark cloak between trunks. Small charms flashed red and blue in the moonlight. Then the cloak was gone. Bumble ran harder. The pines closed above him. The moon dropped behind branches. The trail thinned and split and split again. Bumble stopped. He did not know these trees. He had followed his mother's trails all his short life, but this stretch of wood was strange to him. The snow here held no fresh boot prints. No hooded figure. No sound but his own breath. He turned a slow circle. Every direction looked the same. Black trunks. White ground. He tried to find his own tracks and could not. The wind had already dragged snow across them. Something moved to his left. Bumble spun. A black wolf stood between two trees, yellow eyes steady on him. It did not growl. It did not crouch. It watched him the way the bear had watched him in the clearing. Bumble understood, cold in his chest, that this animal belonged to the hooded one. The wolf turned and walked. After three steps it looked back. Bumble knew this trick. A fox had used it to bring him to his mother's body. He did not want to follow. But he was lost, and the wolf was moving with purpose, and he had no other thread to pull. He followed. The wolf led him through the pines and up a low rise. At the top, the trees opened. Bumble stopped at the edge. In a hollow below stood a house. It was tall and narrow, three stories of peeling green wood and broken shutters. Cobwebs hung across the porch rails. One chimney leaned. A dead tree grew in the yard, trunk split and hollow, bare branches reaching like fingers. No smoke. No light in any window. The wolf trotted down the slope and sat at the porch steps. It looked back at Bumble one last time. Then it slipped under the porch and was gone. Bumble stood in the snow above the hollow. He was small in the ways that mattered, and he was far from his cave, and he did not know the way back. But he knew, now, where the hooded one lived. He knew the shape of the house. He knew the dead tree in the yard. He crouched behind the ridge and watched the dark windows. His mother's rule sat heavy in him. Keep the cave safe. To keep the cave safe, he had to know his enemy. Tonight he would learn this house.