Yarima Gonzalez's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The collector took the mask at dawn, and by noon Yarima still could not find his trail. She stood where her village kept its oldest shrine. The carved wooden face of her ancestors was gone. Only the empty stand remained, and the broad dent his boots left in the mud. Her people had guarded that mask for six generations. Now a stranger had it, and she did not even know which way he had run. She knelt and studied the ground. Boot prints led to the riverbank, then stopped. He had taken a boat. The water carried no tracks. Yarima pressed her fists into the mud and swore she would get the mask back, even if it meant leaving the jungle she had never left before. Her otter slid from the reeds and pawed at her knee. The animal's glossy fur dripped river water. It had swum the channel since birth and knew every bend. Yarima lifted its chin. "Which way, little one?" The otter chirped and darted downstream, then circled back, impatient. It wanted her to follow the current east. Yarima almost rose. Then she stopped. A boat could go east or west. A chirp was not a lead. She forced herself to think. The collector was a foreigner. Foreigners did not vanish into the jungle. They came through places other people used. She remembered the trader's cabin downriver, a small wood house where outsiders bought supplies and hired guides. Anyone fleeing by boat would pass it. Yarima ran to her hut and grabbed her woven reed basket. She filled it with dried fish, a coil of rope, and her knife. The otter climbed in on top, nose twitching. She slung the basket across her back and pushed her canoe into the water. The trader's cabin sat on a low bank, smoke rising from its chimney. An old man leaned in the doorway, whittling. He knew her face. He had traded with her village for years. "A foreigner," Yarima said, breathless. "This morning. He carried a carved mask." The old man's knife stopped. "He came at first light. Paid in foreign coin. Asked me to draw a map." Yarima's chest tightened. "A map to where?" "The high ridge, past the falls." He set down his carving. "He hired a guide who knows the winged wolves. Said he needed one to cross the cliffs." The old man frowned. "Nobody crosses those cliffs, Yarima. The wolves hunt anything that climbs." She gripped the doorframe. She had her lead now. The collector was headed for the high ridge, days ahead, guarded by a man who commanded winged beasts. The otter climbed from the basket and sniffed the foreign coin on the counter. Yarima looked at the old man's hand-drawn map, still damp with ink. She knew where the mask was going. She also knew the only path there ran straight through the territory of the winged wolves.