Woodson's Arc

Chapter 2 of 10

They set out at first light, as Yuki had promised. She walked ahead on the trail, her leopard tail low and stiff. Woodson followed with his bow strung, the map folded in his coat. He kept turning one problem over in his mind. His quiver held plain hunting arrows, made to kill deer and boar. But the silver stag was a woman who could speak, who could think, who could dodge. He did not want to kill her. He wanted to bring her down and let her live. He had no tool for that. "Yuki," he said. "My arrows are made to kill. If I loose one at her, she dies." Yuki stopped. She looked back, and her grey eyes held his. "Then you had better not loose one." "A miss costs me. A kill costs her." He shook his head. "I need something to stop her, not end her. A blunt tip. A weighted head. Anything." "You carry a hunter's kit, not a hunter's heart," she said, soft. "Perhaps that is the point." He knelt in the snow and opened his quiver anyway. Six broadheads. Sharp iron, barbed to hold in flesh. He drew his knife and started to wrap cloth over one tip, hoping to dull it. His fingers, old and scarred from years of shooting, worked fast. The cloth slipped. The barb bit his thumb. The sky changed before he finished. Clouds dropped low and grey. Wind rose and threw snow sideways into his face. Within a breath the trail vanished under white. Yuki's ears flattened. "Storm," she called over the wind. "A bad one. We turn back." "We're close," Woodson shouted. "We're dead if we stay!" She grabbed his sleeve. "I know these mountains. This one kills. Come now." He would not leave. The pass lay just ahead, and with it the answer to six weeks of hunting. Yuki saw his face and let go. "Then you're alone, Ranger," she said. "Same as you like it." She turned and ran back toward her tavern, swallowed by the snow. Woodson pressed on into the wind. He could not see three steps ahead. Above him, snow piled thick on a pine branch. The branch cracked. He heard it too late. It struck his shoulder and skull, and he went down hard into the drift. The world turned black. He woke to warmth and a low fire. He lay in a cave, wrapped in a fur that was not his. His bow leaned against the wall, untouched. His quiver sat beside it. Someone had unwrapped the cloth from his ruined arrow and laid the broadhead bare on the stone, tip pointed away from him. A woman sat across the fire. Pale skin. White hair to the floor. From her head rose two antlers, curved like white bone. She watched him with shimmering eyes and did not reach for a weapon. "You came to hunt me," she said. "Yet here you are, hunted by the cold, and I am the one who found you." Her voice was mysterious, enchanting yet wise. Woodson’s eyes widened in shock at not only her beauty, but how dangerous she is. She sat there calm.