The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [48]
Now she longed for a few words of companionship. In the morning she waited for Richon’s simple “Good morning” and to be able to speak back to him before his face went blank. She longed to hear his curt “Good night” before they rolled into their clothes and slept near a tree or a large boulder that had been warmed by the spring sun.
She and Richon shared food, and she made sure that she touched his hand when they passed the food between them. She knew that was selfish, but it felt good and she could not resist. She was becoming weak, she thought. Weak and human. Only at night was she a hound, in her dreams.
She thought it must be the magic of this time pressing on her, but the dreams were very strange and vivid. One night she dreamt she left Richon where he lay and went into a forest so thick with trees that there was not even a hint of the stars and moon overhead, and she had to travel by sound and scent.
She wore her hound body again and she could not remember feeling this deeply animal ever in her life. There had been humans everywhere in her world, humans who hunted in the forest, humans close by with their homes and their scents. But here there was no touch of humanity and a peacefulness that held her still.
Then she heard them.
The pack of wild hounds.
There were at least twenty of them, and at first she only meant to listen to them, to keep her distance, and to observe, as she had done once when her daughter was young.
They would not take her presence as a challenge unless she was close enough to be scented, and she knew exactly how far back to stay to avoid that.
But how she enjoyed the conversation among them.
“I saw it first!”
“No, I did!”
“It was my stroke that brought it down.”
“But I was the one who tired it.”
They argued over a recent kill presumably, but Chala could not smell the blood of it, so the carcass must have been left wherever it had been taken.
“Your greediness was unfair. I deserved more than that.”
“If you deserved more, you would have taken it. I am stronger than you, therefore the largest portion of the kill was mine by right. Come and let me show you why, if you wish to argue further.”
And then the sound of tussling in the dark, of growling, and nips, of whining when a wound was taken, and then licking and dragging away.
“Any others?”
But it was only a formality. There was only ever one challenge to the lead male of a pack at a time. Unless it was the final attack, and the challenger had already taken charge. Then it would be merely the finishing up of old business, the chance for all of the pack to take a bite of their old leader. As if that would give them some of his strength, some of his memories of the past.
The wild hounds roared out their approval for their leader by howling to the skies, and although Chala could not see him, she knew he would be strutting among them, his head held high, his mate at his side.
She stayed even when the moment was over and the wild hounds were quiet once more, and she hardly heard the flutter of wings overhead announcing the arrival of a full-grown falcon. But when the falcon spoke, she could understand it. It was not the wild man’s universal language, but a language of squawks and screeches that she somehow heard as clearly as the language of the hounds.
That astonished her almost as much as what the falcon said.
And then she remembered it was only a dream.
“There is a place of death in the east. Come, all of you. Come and help battle it,” the falcon cried out.
Chala’s heart grew chill.
The falcon flew away and the wild hounds did not hesitate a moment. They immediately rose up and followed after him.
Chala could hear the falcon continue to give out the same cry as it went along through the forest. And somehow all other animals understood. She smelled squirrels and mice and deer and bears and wolves and wild hounds and all kinds of birds. Frogs and toads