The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [8]
After a sleepless night, she led the bear back to the waterfall.
She had to stop now and then to let the bear catch up with her, though normally they were much of the same pace. Her heart was beating so fast she felt it might fly away, and she slowed her pace only when she noticed an unnatural sting in the air.
The cold death had spread and encompassed more area now. She looked down to her paws to see that the ground itself seemed changed, even where the cold had not fully taken hold. The plants were not as green as they had been. They were tinged with brown and wilting, though there had been plenty of rain this spring.
It was worse closer to the stream, where the plants looked as if they had simply withered up and been blown away by wind. There was a gentle blanket of gray chaff everywhere, and all sign of life was gone.
The hound pointed to the stream and pantomimed the cat man reaching for the fish and knocking it against the rock. But that did not truly explain what she had seen. Frustrated, she tried once more to think.
But the bear did not wait for her. He moved a hind leg into the line of gray that marked the cold, then tottered and fell into it.
CHAPTER SIX
The Bear
THE BEAR COULD feel the cold seeping into his body, making his nose go numb at the tip as if there were snow falling outside and a wind howling deepest winter. But in a true change of seasons, he could still feel his heart beating, and the warmth at the core of his body. This unnatural cold made him disconnected from himself, as if his mind were no longer part of his bear’s body but rising above it and watching with no feeling at all as it lay down and began to die.
The hound tugged at him from her place outside the line of full gray, but his body was a useless weight. At last she went into the stream and pulled at his bulk from there.
Immediately the water warmed him, chill as it was.
There was a deeper warmth, of nature, that the water drew from other parts of the forest.
He and the hound rode the stream past all hint of gray on the forest floor. About half the distance back to the cave, they fell on a bank and lay there, side by side, panting.
It was some time before the bear noticed the quiet. The animals were afraid of the cold death. But fear alone would not protect them if the cold death spread farther into the forest.
And he had no idea how it could be fought.
Perhaps there was one who did, but the thought of the wild man made the bear’s jaw clench. He would not seek out that one willingly a second time.
Slowly he and the hound made their way back to the cave. He thought of how the death of that one section of the forest would affect it all. What of the insects that fed on the plants? The birds that fed on the insects? And those creatures that ate the birds?
It was almost too much to hold in his mind. He wished he weren’t the least bit human, that he could not imagine how much worse things might become. But then he saw how the hound walked, slumped to one side, with no hope in her. She seemed to feel it exactly as he did.
So perhaps it had nothing to do with being human, after all.
They reached the crossover to the cave, and the bear stopped short. It was the scent of cold death that stopped him first, and then he realized there was something else. A figure standing in front of the cave.
A man, but not a man.
The bear remembered how the hound had tried to describe a man and a cat to him, and her shivering.
She tensed now and the bear could feel her ready to spring, to attack.
He roared and went forward himself, the hound close on his heels.
But the man-creature ran with a wild cat’s speed and grace, leaping from stone to tree, and then from tree to tree without stopping.
The bear lost track long before he gave up the chase. The dark had aided the cat man, and the bear could see no farther than a paw in front of his eyes.
The hound whined at him, but he pushed her back toward the cave, toward home. Until they both felt the cold again.
Where the cat man had walked from the cave to the stream