Chapter 2

The sun had moved only two palm-widths on the sky, but I could already tell that the Guardians didn’t trust my skills at all. Once we were on our way, I tried to get some more information about the creature we were chasing, but none of them wanted to talk about it. Should I be helping them to catch or kill some creature when they didn’t want to tell me anything about it? What’s more, the Lieutenant wanted to start the chase from the point they had stopped chasing it - which would put us more than three days behind it. I took a deep breath to calm myself down and allowed the others to pass me. I didn’t continue walking until I was several steps behind the last Guardian. Then I regulated my breathing and started to pick up the feelings of nature around us.

When I was on my own, I usually found a safe, secure spot and began from there but I had been doing this also while hunting with my father. Ignoring the distraction caused by the walking Guardians took some time and I could not really reach the same sense of detail as I could in ideal conditions. At first, I was almost sure that I wasn’t working correctly or that I had lost my skill. Then I realized that it was not the case: The birds were there and they were flying and singing as usual and all the small critters were there. But most animals larger than squirrels were playing hide and seek. They were there, hiding and ready to run. That made me wonder, since I had never before noticed anything like that. If an occasional pack of wolves or a hungry bear came close enough, all the other animals were cautious but this was something much more.

All of a sudden, I sensed it. I just had no idea what it was, but it was like a bit darker spot in a dark gray background. It was almost like an opposite of the idea for finding suitable prey. The closer I looked or sensed in that direction, the less I sensed anything of interest. It was like nature was trying to play that there was nothing living there. That was probably why I hadn’t noticed anything while I had been hunting - there had been absolutely no reason to go in that direction. The problem was that whatever the creature was, it seemed to be going in a different direction than where we would be looking for it. I had no illusion that I could convince our party to change the direction in which we would be looking for the creature. Not without telling about my special skill - and even if I told them, would they believe me? Considering my current treatment, hardly.

My mood didn’t get any better when we continued walking away from the creature. By the time we had stopped for the night, I was fuming. I excused myself and set some snares so that we might be able to get some fresh meat for the next dinner.

I took extra care while setting the snares, since I had a feeling that I really needed to prove myself here. The Guardians probably still felt the effects of the previous evening and after a light evening meal all the men were soon asleep by the fire. Cajsa and I stayed awake a bit longer but I made sure to address her as Ma’am again. The only new thing I learned about them that night was that she was their negotiator and mediator. She even spoke some foreign languages.

Even though I had been the last one to fall asleep, I was the first one awake. I checked my snares and was quite happy to find two young rabbits in them. I moved a bit further away to clean them. I didn’t have any conscious thoughts to scan my surroundings, but suddenly I found myself a quite bit further away than I had initially planned. The sudden silence that surrounded me made me shiver, and I could feel the hair in my neck rising up. Then came the smell. I took two more steps forward and became also aware of the flies flying around. I looked at the scene in front of me, and turned away. On my way back to the campsite, I was deep in thought.

While hanging those two rabbits to a branch of a tree close to the fire, I noticed that the Sergeant was already up and finishing some of his morning business. He noticed the rabbits but stopped when I addressed him quietly.

“Sergeant? Sir? May I show you something?”

“I’m no ‘Sir.’ What is it, son?”

I looked around for the stirring men and Cajsa, and turned back to him.

“It’s better if you see it with your own eyes.”

He was relatively quiet as he followed me through the forest. I could tell that a few times he wanted to interrupt me, but he followed me silently all the way to the site I had found. Once we got close, I stopped and allowed him to come next to me and take a look.

I followed him closely when he took a look at the scene in front of him. I remembered most if it already - not that there was that much to see anymore. It was a dead elk - or what was left of it. It looked like someone, or rather something, had caught the elk but after that the beast hadn’t been able to decide which parts of the elk it wanted to eat most. Some of the internals were gone, as were the biggest muscles. But the thing that really bothered me a bit was the fact that the beast had been able to bite away half of the scull and the inside of it looked like it had been licked clean. In fact, it bothered me quite a lot.

“I assume that this was done by the creature we are after.”

“Yes.”

“That carcass cannot be more than two days old. It seems that the beast wasn’t that far from you when you were heading towards our village.”

He didn’t pale, but his jaw tightened and he just nodded to me. On our way back to the camp he turned to me.

“Do you think that you can follow it?”

“There were some tracks on the other side of the remains. Once we start from there I’d like to be the first one to examine them.”

The Sergeant just nodded to me and didn’t say anything more on our way back.

All other members of our party were also awake when we returned. The men were happy about the rabbits, but not so happy about the fact that they had not been cleaned. Too bad, I had quite a lot dried and smoked meat with me so I was not that dependent on fresh meat yet. The Sergeant had a quick talk with the Lieutenant, and soon the Lieutenant came to the men and prepared to say something. All the time I could feel Cajsa’s eyes following me.

“Our Sergeant confirms that our guide managed to find fresh tracks of the creature we are after. Once we’ve eaten we’ll go to the site and start following those tracks.”

The change in mood in the camp was clearly recognizable but I could not really tell the direction. In a way, everybody seemed anxious to start the hunt again; but there was something else, too. Somehow I could understand that, too. I wasn’t so sure how anxious I was to face a creature that was able to crunch the skull of an elk and eat its brains afterwards.

Once we were back at the site of the slaughter, I started by going around the site and taking a look at it. It was not too difficult to find the place where the beast had been lurking. It seemed to me that it had been standing with two feet hidden behind the bushes and a tree looking over the small freshwater pond where the other animals came to drink. That much was easy and clear. What wasn’t that easy to understand were the other things I found. The first one was the tracks left on the ground. My father had taught me the different kind of tracks the animals left on the ground and I could quite easily identify several animals based only on the tracks they left. If the track was one I hadn’t seen before, I probably could tell which animal it would be related to and make a good guess about the size of the animal.

The problem was that I hadn’t ever seen any animal leaving tracks like these. Not a single animal. I looked at the tracks and evaluated their depth. Then I estimated how far the steps were from each other when the beast had attacked the elk. Almost absentmindedly I picked up something from the nearby branches and looked. They were two brownish-green feathers. The feathers were short but the hollow shaft at the end of it was quite thick. Quite thick indeed and the uneven color wasn’t very noticeable when I placed the feather against the tree. In a way everything made sense but at the same time nothing made sense.

“Hey, guide! Did you find the new track? Do you know which way the beast was heading?”

I felt slightly irritated because of the interruption by one of the men. I had been sure about the direction from the beginning but it worried me a bit that I was quite sure that the creature had made a sharp turn quite soon after leaving the site.

“I’m quite sure about it. Just a moment and I’ll check it.”

I carefully smelled the feathers but I couldn’t pick anything recognizable. The lack of smell would explain something: It would make hunting much, much easier for the beast, if the prey wasn’t able to smell it. I moved away from its hiding place and I could not help thinking what kind of bird would be at least four times my weight and according to the length of its steps, able to run around me twice while I was still trying to get started. I really didn’t want to think about its mouth. I hadn’t seen any animal leaving tracks like that - but instead I had seen some bird tracks that had been a whole lot like these.

The sun had moved only one finger-width when I found the new track, and the direction in which I assumed the creature to be headed. I could not really sense it, but the track led in the direction where I had last sensed it. I hoped that the beast was so full that it would not be able to move very fast. I was the one leading the pack - which wasn’t too difficult in this kind of forest now when I knew what I was looking for - and because it hadn’t rained. Once that changed, things would certainly be different. I’d need to really earn my keep.

All the time I followed the track of the beast, there was a nagging reminder at the back of my head. Up until the moment the beast had killed the elk, it had been following the Guardians, and not vice versa.

During the following day and a half we managed to get a bit closer to the creature - and then it started raining. This rain was not one of those gentle ones that cleans the air and refreshes the nature. No, this was one one of those that can bring three feet of snow during the winter in a single day. Not that there was any snow, but nevertheless it made us all very wet and miserable. Of course, it also washed away all the tracks.

Since the spring weather had been almost extraordinarily nice for a long period of time, I knew this could happen - or rather, I was sure that it would happen at some point. As soon as I had found the trail, I had also been pushing my ability to track the creature without any physical trail. When the rain started I was quite certain that I could do it. The only problem was how I would be able to do it without explaining anything to the Guardians. Despite the rain, we slowly pushed on. In the beginning I was able to find some evidence that we were still on the creature’s track. The sparse remains of two dead rabbits were hardly indicative of any animal, but to me the tooth marks were enough. Besides, I knew that we were heading to the right direction. Or I wanted to believe that I knew.

What really started to bother me was that none of the Guardians was willing to give me any extra information about our target. What’s more, sometimes I got a distinct feeling that they weren’t at all eager to actually catch the creature. They were very happy that I was able to catch an occasional rabbit - or catch some fish from some of the small streams we passed. They thanked me for the food, but otherwise they kept their distance. I had been gathering some of the feathers that I had been able to find while following the track. Unlike the feathers of the birds these ones were short, but strong. So, most likely, this bird wouldn’t be flying away.

It rained one more day. Half a day after that, I was able find some footprints that had remained visible - and then there was some scat that I couldn’t connect to the animals I already knew. I could almost feel the eyes on my back when we continued the hunt.

All the time, we had been moving Northeast and uphill. We had passed the first set of hills and we were already outside the coastline area where my home village was. As far as I knew nobody lived in this area, and not so many people ever visited it. The very coastline here was stormy and rocky and the mountain tops - the fjell tops - on the east carried some ice and snow all year long. We had gotten closer to the creature, but not as much as I had hoped, since every now and then someone from our group seemed to have problems maintaining the pace we had set in the beginning. All that frustrated me, since I just wanted to get this over with and return to our village in order to start my life with Saga. Somehow the rest of the group seemed quite happy with the fact that the creature was heading away from all habitation. Me, not so much, since I knew that there were plenty of hills and hostile marshlands in front of us. In theory there should be some reindeer to hunt, but since we were following the tracks of the beast I was lucky to get some more rabbits. Luckily there were several birds starting their nesting and there were fresh eggs available if you knew where to look. I knew.

One evening we were preparing our dinner when we could hear a distant roar that interrupted all the singing birds. We were on a plain that was rising slowly towards the Northeastern hills, and the sound traveled far in the still evening air. After the first roar, a second one started, but it ended abruptly - without any warning at all. I could feel the chill going slowly down my spine, since I recognized that kind of roar.

I still remembered the first time I saw a big brown bear. I was hunting with my father when he suddenly stopped me, and ordered me to stand still by using hand signs only. We had been following a herd consisting of half a dozen deer. For a moment I wondered why we had stopped until I noticed that we were not the only ones following the herd. It was probably the third or the fourth hunt for me, and we had gone a bit further than usual. It wasn’t until much later that I understood that it was exactly what my father wanted to show me. We really didn’t need a deer at the moment. No, my father wanted to show me the real king of our forests, the big brown bear.

I remember how my father explained to me in a soft voice how some hunters thought that you couldn’t be a real hunter until you had killed a bear and drank its warm blood. My father never ranted when he wanted to point out something to me. I already knew that eating boar meat that wasn’t well done could be dangerous and could actually kill you. He explained to me that the same applied with bear meat. While listening to him, I kept my eye on the bear which was following the herd that seemed totally unaware of the danger. Since there was some brisk wind and the herd was upwind of the bear it was not a great wonder. Our position on the high ground gave us a great view to what was happening in front of us and my eyes were focused on the big, soft-looking, furry animal that was carefully approaching the herd.

Suddenly everything changed, and there was nothing soft about the beast that charged through the high grass. I bit my lip, since I couldn’t really understand how something that looked so big, soft and furry was able to move so fast. The poor deer that had been the target had barely had time to raise its head and turn - and then the bear was all over it.

I was in awe of what I had just seen. That big animal had patiently moved closer than had been possible and once it was close enough, it charged unbelievably fast and then killed the deer without any hesitation and without any unnecessary pain to its prey. I would always remember that moment and I made a promise that I would never kill a fellow hunter who was able to do that if only I could avoid it. Later on, I had had an opportunity to see how a pack of wolves hunted and I truly admired their teamwork while killing an elk. But my first experience of the bear was the one that had affected me most.

After that I had seen bears a couple of times. I had heard or seen a bear roar when it protected its cub. I really wouldn’t like to imagine what kind of beast it would take to down a bear in the middle of its roar. I had some ideas, though, and my two crossbows started to feel quite small and inadequate. The short sword I was carrying didn’t help much. I knew that the others had heard the same thing I heard but I wasn’t all that sure if they had any idea what had happened. When I looked around, I noticed that the Sergeant was following me. At that moment, I was sure that at least he understood. I decided that I wanted some answers, but the darkening night was probably not the correct time to start pressing them out of my companions.

The following morning there wasn’t much discussion, and for once we managed to keep on moving at a decent pace the until late afternoon when we finally found the source of the incident we had heard last night. This time there was no need to follow the tracks, since the circling crows marked the spot very efficiently. The scene I had witnessed with the elk was still clear on my mind but I still wasn’t fully prepared to the vision in front of me. The mother bear had tried to protect its cub, and it seemed that it had managed to lightly scratch the other beast with its claws. Well, at least the blood of that beastly creature was red, just like the bear’s, or ours. After all the practice I had had tracking the creature I was quite certain that it was nowhere close. If I sensed correctly, it was now heading to even higher ground to the East, or almost Southeast. The hunter in me wanted to pursue. Our prey was wounded, and now would be the ideal possibility. As soon as I had formulated that thought, I heard our Lieutenant throwing up.