George the Masked Hunter Bug's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The boots outside the shed moved on. George waited until the sound faded into the rain, then peeled himself off the back of the safe. His notes were dry. He was alive. But the storm had shown him something worse than water. He had a page in his stack he could not read, and until he read it, he could not take another step toward the grove. He spun the dial and swung the safe open. He pulled out the master sheet and spread it on the dusty floor. Most of the marks he knew. Beetle drag. Split hoof. The looping scrape of a centipede in wet moss. But one set of claw prints, copied from a stone near the last known camp of the hunter who vanished, matched nothing in his memory. Four points. A hooked fifth. A deep pit behind them, as if the creature had pushed off hard. Guess wrong about what made them, and he would walk into whatever ate the last hunter. George took the small glass magnifier from his belt pouch. The lens was beaded with old dew that would not wipe off. He held it over the copied marks. Under the lens the hooked fifth claw showed a curl he had missed. It was not a claw at all. It was a thumb. That changed everything. No forest cat had a thumb. No beetle either. He knew of only one place that kept records of every track ever walked in this country — the layered stone hive the elders spoke of, where scholars of his kind had stored their findings for generations. Masked hunters were not welcome there. He would not reach it before the trail went cold. He searched the safe again. At the bottom, under his own pages, he found a sheet that was not his. Folded small. Yellow at the edges. He opened it on the floor. The handwriting was cramped and shaky, half the letters wrong, as if the writer had been running out of time or light. The name at the top belonged to the hunter before him. George Sr. George held the magnifier over the page and read it line by line. The bad spelling slowed him, but the meaning came clear. George Sr. had reached the edge of the grove. He had seen the thing that made the fifth-claw prints. He had drawn it in the margin: a small figure standing on two legs, armored, with orange eyes and a hunter's mask. Not an animal. One of their own. An older masked hunter, still living out there, guarding the way in. Beneath the drawing George Sr. had written, in letters pressed hard enough to tear the page, Do not fight him. Show him the mark. George folded the page into his pouch. He put the notes back in the safe and spun the dial. He knew what the claw prints meant now. He also knew the grove had a guard, and the guard was kin.