George the Masked Hunter Bug's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

George crouched over a scrap of bark and copied the claw mark exactly as he found it. The hunter who walked this path before him had smelled the hidden grove and never come back. George would not guess the way that hunter did. He read the old scratches, the pressed leaves, the faint drag marks on stone, and he wrote them down. Every mark brought him one step closer to the grove where the first masked hunters were born, and to the blessing his kind had been denied for as long as anyone remembered. He kept the mask on. He always kept the mask on. The problem was paper. George had claimed a low wooden table at the edge of the field, its top already scattered with his loose sheets. He weighed the corners with pebbles. He copied a track. He copied another. Then the wind shifted and he smelled rain coming in from the west. He looked up at a sky the color of wet slate. One storm would smear every line he had drawn. Weeks of work would run off the table in gray streaks. He gathered the sheets against his chest and ran. He found the shed at the far end of the lot, half-collapsed, its roof patched with old boards and layered tarps knotted down with twine. Inside, dry air. Dust. And in the back corner, tipped on its side, a small steel safe with a dial on its face. The door hung open a finger's width. George pushed it wider with his shoulder. Empty. He shoved his stack of notes inside, then went back through the rain in three trips for the rest — the bark scrap, the pressed leaves, the master sheet with the route he had built mark by mark. He fit them all in. He swung the door shut and spun the dial as the first heavy drops hit the tarps above him. The rain came down hard. George stood in the dry shed with his back against the safe and listened to water sheet off the patched roof. His notes were safe. The table outside was already ruined, but he had beaten the storm by a minute. Then he heard it — boots. Heavy, slow, human boots crossing the wet ground toward the shed door. George froze. The safe was not his. The shed was not his. Someone was coming back for both. He pressed himself flat behind the safe and listened as the boots stopped just outside the door.