Dha'je-Khan's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The trapper returned at dusk. Dha'je-Khan let her cross the yard and open the door of the pine cottage before he stepped from the trees. She saw him and did not scream. She set her basket down and put one hand on the gray animal at her hip. The animal did not bristle. It watched him with pale eyes that caught the last light like glass. He held up the curved black tooth. He spoke in her tongue, the few words he had learned from listening. "Where." She looked at the tooth, then at his face, then at the sky. She said nothing. He stepped closer. She still said nothing. He set the tooth on her table and drew his blade and laid it beside the tooth so she would understand the shape of the question. Her mouth stayed shut. Her hand on the animal did not shake. He had hunted enough prey to know when fear would not work. This woman had lived alone in these woods and kept a shell fragment under a stone by her woodpile. She was not going to speak because he showed her a knife. He put the blade away. He sat down on the floor of her cottage, across from her, and waited. The gray animal left her side and crossed to him. It pawed at his shin, then at the pouch on his belt where he had stored the obsidian shard. He took the shard out and set it on the floor. The animal touched it with one small hand. Then it walked to the door, stopped, and looked back at him. It did this three times. The trapper watched the animal, and then she watched him, and something in her face changed. She spoke at last, low and flat. She said the animal had found the place first. She said she had followed it once and turned back because the smell was wrong and the trees around the hole were scored to the heartwood. She said she would not go there again. But she would draw it. She drew on the boards of her table with a piece of charcoal. A stream. A ridge. A split rock shaped like a tooth. A black mark for the den. Dha'je-Khan memorized the map before the charcoal was dry. He left the tooth on her table as payment and stepped back into the trees with the shard in his fist and the raccoon watching him from the porch. He had a direction now, and a place, and one full night to reach it before the thing that had killed his brothers woke and hunted again.