I picked a cartridge out with my foot, turned it over. “Catch that bull yet?”
“No.”
I pried the clip back with the tip of my machete. It was good. “Let’s go,” I said.
“Check the rest first.”
While I did, he finished stringing the bow, went in and got a second one for me; then we went down to the river.
Silt stained the water yellow. The current was high and fast, bending ferns and long grass down, combing them from the shore like hair. We kept to the soggy bank for about two miles.
“What killed Friza?” I asked at last.
Lo Hawk squatted to examine a scarred log: tusk marks. “You were there. You saw. La Dire only guesses.”
We turned from the river. Brambles scratched against Lo Hawk’s leggings. I don’t need leggings. My skin is tough and tight. Neither does Easy or Little Jon.
“I didn’t see anything,” I said. “What does she guess?”
An albino hawk burst from a tree and gyred away. Friza hadn’t needed leggings either.
“Something killed Friza that was non-functional, something about her that was non-functional.”
“Friza was functional,” I said. “She was!”
“Keep your voice down, boy.”
“She kept the herd together,” I said more softly. “She could make the animals do what she wanted. She could move the dangerous things away and bring the beautiful ones nearer.”
“Bosh,” said Lo Hawk, stepping over ooze.
“Without a gesture or a word, she could move the animals anywhere she wanted, or I wanted.”
“That’s La Dire’s nonsense you’ve been listening to.”
“No. I saw it. She could move the animals just like the pebble.”
Lo Hawk started to say something else. Then I saw his thoughts backtrack. “What pebble?”
“The pebble she picked up and threw.”
“What pebble, Lobey?”
So I told him the story. “And it was functional,” I concluded. “She kept the herd safe, didn’t she? She could have kept it even without me.”
“Only she couldn’t keep herself alive,” Lo Hawk said. He started walking again.
We kept silent through the whispering growth, while I mulled. Then:
“Yaaaaaa—” on three different tones.
The leaves whipped back and the Bloi triplets scooted out. One of them leaped at me and I had an armful of hysterical, redheaded ten-year-old.
“Hey there now,” I said sagely.
“Lo Hawk, Lobey! Back there—”
“Watch it, will you?” I added, avoiding an elbow.
“—back there! It was stamping, and pawing the rocks—” This from one of them at my hip.
“Back where?” Lo Hawk asked. “What happened?”
“Back there by the—”
“—by the old house near the place where the cave roof falls in—”
“—the bull came up and—”
“—and he was awful big and he stepped—”
“—he stepped on the old house that—”
“—we was playing inside—”
“Hold up,” I said and put 3-Bloi down. “Now where was all this?”
They turned together and pointed through the woods.
Hawk swung down his crossbow. “That’s fine,” he said. “You boys get back up to the village.”
“Say—” I caught 2-Bloi’s shoulder. “Just how big was he?”
Inarticulate blinking now.
“Never mind,” I said. “Just get going.”
They looked at me, at Lo Hawk, at the woods. Then they got.
In silent consensus we turned from the river through the break in the leaves from which the children had tumbled.
A board, shattered at one end, lay on the path just before us as we reached the clearing. We stopped over it, stepped out between the sumac branches.
And there were a lot of other smashed boards scattered across the ground.
A five-foot section of the foundation had been kicked in, and only one of the four supporting beams was upright.
Thatch bits were shucked over the yard. A long time ago Carol had planted a few more flowers in this garden, when, wanting to get away from the it-all of the village, we had moved down here to the old thatched house that used to be so cozy, that used to be . . . she had planted the hedge with the fuzzy orange blooms. You know that kind?
I stopped by one cloven print where petals and leaves had been ground in a dark mandala on the mud. My feet fit inside the print easily. A couple of trees had been uprooted. A couple more had been broken off above my head.
It was easy to see which way he had come into the clearing. Bushes, vines, and leaves had erupted inward. Where he had left, everything sort of sagged out.
Lo Hawk ambled into the clearing swinging his crossbow nonchalantly.
“You’re not really that nonchalant, are you?” I asked. I looked around again at the signs of destruction. “It must be huge.”
Lo Hawk threw me a glance full of quartz and gristle. “You’ve been hunting with me before.”
“True. It can’t have been gone very long if it just scared the kids away,” I added.
Hawk stalked towards the place where things were sagging.
I hurried after.
Ten steps into the woods, we heard seven trees crash somewhere: three—pause—then four more.
“Of course, if he’s that big he can probably move pretty far pretty fast,” I said.
Another three trees.
Then a roar:
An unmusical sound with much that was metallic in it, neither rage nor pathos, but noise, heaved from lungs bigger than smelting bellows, a long sound, then echoing while the leaves turned up beneath a breeze.
Under green and silver we started again through the cool, dangerous glades.
And step and breathe and step.
Then in the trees to our left—
He came leaping, and that leap rained us with shadow and twigs and bits of leaf.
Turning his haunch with one foreleg over here and a hind- leg way the hell over there, he looked down at us with an eye bloodshot, brown, and thickly oystered in the corners. His eyeball must have been big as my head.
The wet, black nostrils steamed.
He was very noble.
Then he tossed his head, breaking branches, and hunkered with his fists punched into the ground—they were hands with horny hairy fingers thick as my arm where he should have had forehooves—bellowed, reared, and sprang away.
Hawk fired his crossbow. The shaft flapped like a darning needle between the timbers