1
The animal that had been tracking her for days through the feverish tangle of the escarpment forest finally found her as she stumbled and fell into a shallow pool of muddy, brackish water. She had been dimly aware of the animal since it first picked up her trail. They both seemed to agree she was easy prey.
“With a lot of wild animals you just have to stay still,” Merah had told her once, when they were children. “But where we live most animals will run away from you anyway.”
Merah was gone now, and all of Pama with her, and the animals of the escarpment forest had little inclination to heed her sister’s wisdom. It hadn’t rained for months; the land was parched and aching, its fauna starving. At least, she thought, her first real thought for so long. I can’t help but stay still.
The creature was hovering over her within a minute of her collapse. The woman could feel the cold dampness of its nose where it prodded her bare skin, its sickly warm breath as it tested her scent, already intoxicated by her proximity to death. Clearly it was unafraid. The woman was beginning to realize she couldn’t breathe. The creature ignored her weak struggle to lift herself from the mire; instead she felt a heavy paw on her shoulder and gently sank further and further until her legs suddenly clutched strength, thrashing and kicking, a scream desperately bubbling out of the mud around her. Out of panic, or maybe frustration, the creature raked her back with long, hot claws, from her shoulder down to her hip, then scurried off. The welling of blood made her head swim; the searing pain threatened the edges of her consciousness with blackness, much deeper than her blindness in the mud.
Slowly, aching and burning, she pulled herself out of the pool, gasping from agony and exertion. Her pounding head and blurry vision were swimming away; her attacker had left her with more clarity and sense since she’d first fallen ill. She remembered what Ahi had said once, after Merah had been kicked in the chest trying to take down a wily buck, dazed and glassy-eyed from shock: “Count your hurts.” Wincing, the woman rolled over onto her back, scanning the surrounding brush for any sign of the animal that had just carved her up, and pushed herself up with her elbows.
Of immediate concern was her back. She couldn’t see the damage, only felt the wet hum of blood, and resigned herself to finding some disinfectant and hoping for the best. Her feet were sore and blistered. She had lost her shoes up on the ridge, along with the rest of her clothes, sweat-soaked, bloodstained, and torn to ribbons. Her legs were tired. The arrow wound in her left calf burned and throbbed; that smell was a pretty bad sign. Pangs of hunger rang emptily in her gut, and her arms were weak, hands trembling. She noted with a curious serenity how they seemed to have changed back so quickly: the right size and shape, nails as short as anyone’s, mostly hairless. The hands of a human being on the outside. They had touched much that should’ve been left alone lately. Her skin overall was fairly flush again, a lively chestnut brown when days ago she had been pale and clammy. She sighed and groaned, the noise and breath scraping against the rawness of her dry throat, and pivoted on her hip, turning back to face the pool. Her reflection was murky. The same brown eyes, just sunken into dark circles; the same jet black hair, tangled and oily and flat against the low slope of her forehead, back to its original length; the same crooked nose. Dried spittle and blood clung to her cracked lips and stubble threatened the underside of her chin.
She cupped her breasts. Still bigger somehow. She gently squeezed her thighs together. Her pecker and sack were unchanged. She wouldn’t pretend to understand for now.
A mockingbird trilled somewhere nearby. All at once she remembered Merah fully, and Ahi, and Engo and all the rest. A cold, hard sob wracked her body like a fist, forcing all the air out of her chest, and her heart broke. She sobbed on the forest floor. In her wild grief her memories of Pama, all of its old walls and leaking roofs, its trees and goats and fires, all seemed to dissipate in her mind, as if she had paid so little attention to her life her heart had taken them away from her as punishment. All she could see were her sister and grandmother and everyone they knew, far away from her, eating a big dinner quietly, politely, so unlike how they were in life. They had left her here alone and there was nothing they or anyone could do. There was nothing she could do. Her fists pounded uselessly against the earth. She couldn’t think. She could only wail, and wail, and wail, choking on icy shards of grief, a newborn lost in the woods, her family all gone on ahead without her. She had never been alone before, and now she was completely and utterly alone, maybe forever, until her death, which was stalking her even now, circling its quarry with patient claws until it was time to strike. Her empty shell of a body went on crying.
Once she was spent she laid nearly motionless for an hour at least, shuddering from the cold, in the dry leaf litter by the pool she had just escaped drowning in. Everyone was gone. She was here. “Count your hurts,” Ahi had said. “And then get up.” The woman wiped her face numbly and struggled against days of exhaustion to her hands and knees.
There was nothing but the forest and her. Ancient oaks wound their way towards the light between sycamores and the odd longleaf pine. As far as she could tell the Auye had never ventured this far before, or at least not for some time. No burn sign, just fuel; ripe for a wildfire. She thanked Mother Gar for depriving her addled self of her kit, imagining herself, dumb with fever, trying to light some kindling and burning herself and the forest for miles. Still, once she left the forest—once, she reminded herself, not if—she would need to secure some new flint, new fibers, new medicine. At that moment a honey locust revealed itself to her from the shadows of a primal live oak. Something resembling a grin contorted her face and she began to half-crawl, half-stumble towards it. There were quite a few good seedpods left. She fumbled at her waist for her kit, forgetting herself, and decided to carry the bunch in her mouth for now. In her haste she pricked her hand deep on the honey locust’s thorns. Another hurt for the count.
Carefully propping herself up on the trunk the woman stood, legs quivering. The light was still good; she guessed she had three hours before nightfall. She couldn’t risk lighting a fire, not with the escarpment itself so close, peppered neatly with corpses that would be well missed.
“If you’re ever out on your own, and you need to sleep or rest, find something that can watch your back for you,” Merah had said. “It can be a tree, if it’s big enough, or a boulder, or a log, but you always want a wall behind you. The best shelter will be open on all sides but the one behind you, so if danger comes from one direction you have to others to help you slip away. That’s why I always go for rockshelters.”
The woman, who had really been a young girl then, forced herself to swallow the tough cut of hare their neighbor Ghisel had shared with them. She hated being talked to mid-chew. “I know,” she had said, annoyed and rolling her eyes. That earned her a sock on the arm from Merah. Pouting and wincing, she continued, a pinch less obstinate: “When have you ever had to spend the night away from home by yourself? Doesn’t Sudha always come with you?”
Merah grinned. “You don’t know what I’m doing all the time.”
The woman pushed the memory out of her mind the way Engo would push his little raft out into the creek, biting her lip against the threat of tears, or to at least give the tears something else to blame, another flavor of pain. She only had to stumble through the woods for a little while before a beautiful walking stick presented itself to her. It was a bit longer than was useful but she couldn’t stop to hew it down to size, and without a knife or a handaxe she’d risk breaking the whole thing. Grinning madly again, she hobbled along where the understory was thinnest until she found a game trail. She stripped bark and berries from an ash juniper along the way. Sunlight glanced through gaps in the canopy, warming her as she went. The forest came alive with birds and insects. She crested little rises where the trees thinned and forded streams choked with overgrown underbrush and scum. Along one of these streams, carved a bit deeper and flowing fairly faster than the others, the trill of a frog rang out. The woman stopped to wash her face, then the dried blood off her hands and forearms and chest, then her arrow wound, only lingering long enough to drink before setting off again. Mulberries, agarita, and pawpaws reached out from the walls of leaves and thorns on either side of her; she picked as much as she could carry, which was very little but still more than she had eaten or even seen in days. The cry of a hawk rang out overhead.
Eventually the trail began a slow climb up a gentle ridge past dense stands of shadowy juniper, dotted here and there with aloe and yucca. The woman had to duck low through the foliage, nearly crawling at some points, until the junipers thinned. The stones at her feet grew larger and looser, and she wobbled unsteadily as she went along, slipping more than once. She finally found herself under open sky at the edge of a little mesa late that afternoon, the sun careening towards the deeper forest to the west.
Her lungs burned. She had worked up a good heat despite the chill of the midautumn wind, warmed her tender muscles, brought herself back into her body, thankfully not as wrecked as she feared. Her head was still pounding in time with the throb of sick heat off the wound on her back and the likely infected gash on her calf.
She turned in place. To the south was the escarpment itself; she could barely see it, a deep blue haze amongst the indigo horizon, steadily dissolving into night. Merah was back there, and probably Sudha too, among all those coffins, and days further south lay the ashes of Pama. There were cities to the west, though they and the roads to them were almost certainly watched. Eastwards ran the coastal plain and the inland sea, and beyond the curve of the great gulf were the mountains and the deserts they hid. That roaring she had heard echoing through the woods the night before her life became a nightmare, the face of the escarpment they had intended to roll her corpse down before she started changing, the feeble bird in her heart nursing its broken wings: they all pointed north.
Her eyes refocused, and the actors of the world returned to their places on the stage around her. The wind had died down. The birds were silent. She realized she was exposed atop the highest point for leagues. Her stomach dropped. There, in the background, behind her hot, ragged, feverish heartbeat, was the beating of wings.
She didn’t wait to look for it in the sky, dropping her walking stick and scurrying back down the trail, nearly choking on the seedpods still in her mouth. To her left was a large granite outcropping, neatly obscured by an old juniper. She slipped and fell on the scree trying to pivot towards it, finally crawling just beneath its shadow as the thrumming reached its zenith. Merah’s voice rang out amidst her panic, muffled by the din of her hunters. “The only problem with rockshelters are the ceilings,” she said. “You’ll be lucky to find one not half-open to the sky. It’s their only flaw, really.” She had made to squint up at the sky then, as if something were up there. “I hate getting rained on.”
The carrier bird was hovering right above the mesa. She could feel the dust whipping wildly through the air, propelled on thermals of captive stench, the gurgling heat of the thing’s un-breath rattling through whatever torn throat remained to it, the thrum of devil machinery through the earth. The junipers swayed wildly at the mouth of the rockshelter. She begged Mother Gar to keep her hidden, pressing herself further against the rough granite. A copperhead squirmed past her bare feet and down the side of the rock face. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Without discerning its purpose or intentions—though the woman guessed confidently who the pilot must have been searching for—the carrier bird moved on. She could only catch a brief glimpse of it as it flew away to the northwest, a dark shape in flux against the deepening fire of sunset, awkward in the way it hung in the sky like a baby’s plaything. With a pang she realized how little of a bird remained of it.
The woman stayed curled in on herself for a long while. The sun lit the canopy below ablaze, then sank beneath them into the forest floor somewhere far away. A star winked awake high above her in the indigo gloom, and the choral shrieking of millions of cicadas emerged from the night to blanket the pain of survival.
Before she could eat or sleep she needed to do something about her wounds. She chewed up the already softened locust seeds until they were a pulp, then deposited about a quarter of the mash into her palm. In her other hand she collected rock dust from the game trail, rubbing it into her calf wound painstakingly slowly. Then she applied the seed paste. The rest she rubbed into the deep scratches on her back, where she could reach them, still raw and hot to the touch. None of them were so deep as to be really concerning but there was never such a thing as too careful. Sudha’s parents had both died of infection one particularly hard winter. They had denied hers or Merah’s or anyone’s care until the very end. The woman remembered how Ahi wept that day, gently, in a way she had never seen before but that she marked whenever it happened since, which became increasingly frequent as time dragged its lizard belly across their lives, so that from then on the timid trembling of an elder in grief always unsettled her.
Her hip was getting sore. The woman flipped over in place, a process that took far longer than it should have for a hale woman her age, as sleep began to tug at her. She set herself to small yet important tasks: eating as much of the pawpaw and mulberries as she could without getting sick, stripping the juniper bark into fibrous strands, weaving them together haphazardly into a little kit. A few desirable granite bulbs presented themselves to her, each fitting better in her hand than the last. Even a weak hammerstone would go a long way so far from safety. Still the woman wished for a knife, or a handaxe, or her beloved spear, lost in the ashes somewhere, its obsidian blade likely chipped irreparably. Worse, it could be in the hands of the harrier’s men, just another spoil of war on a murderer’s belt, or scavenged by some itinerant pilferer, seduced by the column of smoke that was once Pama, the life of the Auye, all gone to ash but for her.
She was not wholly alone. There were others like her apart from the Auye and their neighbors, the extended family that stretched uncounted across the continent: Dog Eyes had been one of them, once Talashi but changed into something else, and she had changed the woman with a glance, bringing her into a new family with some lineage long untold, missing from the annals of stone and thicket and rush but belonging more to the world than she was comfortable to admit, than perhaps anything else. She was becoming something else. She could only hold on desperately to her old skin for now.
Night fell fully. The woman slept in feverish fits. Her calf throbbed. Her head was splitting open. The waters of an ancient ocean rushed in to fill the canyons and valleys where her mind had been. Nocturnal animals conversed with one another. There was a stranger in their forest, they whispered, and she would surely be dead soon. Deep in the thickest brakes of oak and pine her hunter was waiting. It would finish her off before long, she decided, and she would never hear what she so deeply wished to hear again, that pained, mournful, resounding roar, from what must have been the biggest animal to have ever walked. She listened against hope through the night but registered nothing but the nightjars and owls and crickets and frogs. Once near dawn there came a whip-crack snarl, a sound like a tree falling into a lake but compressed and rounded out carried across the still air. She wondered at that until the sky lightened and the forest bloomed into color. Probably a saber cat, she realized. Bad news for sure, but it wasn’t the beast that had wounded her; its claws had been far too long. A saber cat would have just flipped her over with a paw and torn her throat open.
Sore and cold beyond belief, the woman crawled wretchedly out of her rockshelter. In the morning light it seemed a much worse place to rest than she had previously thought. She told herself it was what she deserved for trusting Merah’s advice. She finished off the last of the pawpaw, tucked the berries into her kit, tied smartly to a juniper fiber band across her shoulders, and started off down the ridge, doubling back once she remembered the walking stick, abandoned near the top of the mesa.
She needed clothes, and water, and to make her way north, as far as possible from the escarpment, likely out of Auye lands entirely. The carrier bird, and other horrors like it, would be back. Armored warriors on foot had no chance at finding an Auye huntress through the woods, even woods unfamiliar to her, even starving and wounded and weak. They might even be less inclined to confront her having found her handiwork back at the coffin camp. Aerial pursuers were a different story. The woman grimaced and forced herself into a jog. Her body screamed at her but she was quickly warmed all the way through, and she managed a good rhythm with her walking stick supporting her injured leg. Her spirits lifted as the sun rose, even as she found herself glancing over her shoulder, imagining a saber cat bearing down on her, or the sound of torn wings descending nearby, masked murderers pouring out of its shadow in the dozens. She had always been adept at scaring herself. Merah loved to say so.
Small chances at life presented themselves to her as she went. The Auye had taught her to keep her eyes and ears open to any opportunity the land let slip: berries, prickly pears, honey, and medicine. The woman was especially delighted to find a yaupon holly on the trail north. “If you can meet preparation and opportunity in the same place,” Engo had told her once, “You’ll live.” Then he laughed, which was more like a pained wheezing, and cast his big net into the creek. He didn’t catch anything that day.
Tears brimmed her eyes. She wanted to scream and hit herself on the head but Engo would have stopped her, or whacked her himself, telling her to get a grip. The woman listened, thanked Engo, and kept walking. There was time yet before despair was inevitable. She had streams to drink from and the fruit of the land to keep her strong and fleet footed. If a saber cat or a cave bear or even a coyote were to run her down she wouldn’t go out without a fight. The stench of death followed her everywhere; it cut a path towards survival.
Morning rolled into midday. The sun boiled away the last wisps of clouds still holding on above the dry earth. Even as roads of chill wind traversed the map of autumn, the heat of the day hushed the land, the summer sun as reluctant as ever to loosen its vice grip on the world. She could only hear her own breathing, stronger today, and the occasional sigh of the breeze in the canopy, and her bare footsteps over the cracked husks and silent stones of the forest floor. With a little less focus on her own impending death she could have registered some embarrassment. Auye rarely covered their chests but no one had ever seen her like this before, only whatever eyes the woods hid; she was truly exposed, completely herself, a woman in all respects but for one. She grimaced as she clambered up a limestone shelf on the narrow game trail, remembering Sudha, how even when she was clothed he seemed to know every detail of her before even she did, leaving little of herself to discover on her own.
She tasted iron in her mouth and realized she had been biting the inside of her cheek, and stopped to rest on an outstretched juniper bough. An arroyo cut across the clearing in her path, red earth upheaved and left to bake in the sun, the brittle grasses clinging to the edge for hope of space and life. Her teeth found her cheek again as a new memory, forgotten among the sweltering shadows of unconsciousness and the reminiscences of her old life, crept unbidden and acrid into her nose: the shadow of that demon of a woman looming over her in the smoke, the bright, clear eyes consuming her, missing nothing. The eyes of the harrier. The sight of them in her mind weighed her steps like stones, as if the forest floor she traversed were caught in the current of an icy river. One end of the trail smoldered and sputtered, kept alive by the echo of the great roar she had heard, while the other was aflame and burning towards her on the wings of carrier birds and the edges of the ceramic knives of the harrier and her band. She was caught in the middle, as Pama had been, and the shadow of that conflagration threatened to consume her.
“Count your hurts and get up.”
Smiling bitterly, the woman spat out the fresh blood coating her tongue and crossed the arroyo. A green lizard bobbed its head at her as she went, its throat inflated and inflamed. She nodded at the creature before carrying on.
The trail began to wind downhill, switching back on itself, gently at first before careening into a sheer cliff. Where the ground ceased there was only open air until the forest continued some twenty paces below. Another escarpment, she thought, much smaller and probably far shorter a span than the one I had leapt off some days ago. Going around to where the grade was less steep would certainly take some time but likely less than a full day.
A twig snapped behind her. She whirled around. Nothing moved. Her breath caught in her throat. Musk, or something just as rank, assailed her nose. My toes dug into the loose soil as she lifted her heels. The shadows beneath the junipers were too deep to see anything. A bird burst from the canopy alongside her squawking, and a larger branch broke, closer now.
She stepped once and dropped down the cliff, holding fast onto the edge above. Her feet scrambled and flailed, cut by the limestone, until the rock face stopped crumbling and she found a foothold. Her heart was sprinting away from her. Turning to face the drop she found an old live oak reaching toward her. She would really have to jump to make it. Sweat rolled off her brow, stinging her eyes, and the nerves in her spine sensed, or maybe imagined, that something large was coming towards her fast, its footfalls reverberating through the dirt, its heavy panting growing louder and hotter.
What would Merah have to say about this?
Her fingers slipped.
To survive sometimes you have to jump—
Count your hurts and—
Just let go—
She dropped again. Her fingers grasped for purchase and missed. The limestone skinned her heels and she fell fully, her back to the ground. She tried to twist in midair, too slow, and crashed through the canopy. A thick branch slammed her in the ribs.
She woke up on her back. Her left side was screaming. She coughed, choking, then inhaled, slowly. Maybe something was broken, maybe not; she hadn’t been injured very much up until now. Time to count the hurts again. Nothing as bad as her ribs so far. She tried standing after a moment and collapsed, a spasming bite in her ankle. The lonely call of a buck pierced the afternoon. Her stomach clenched.
“Oh,” she said.
She curled into a ball and puked into the dirt. It was mostly water. She coughed and retched again, the tightening of her throat muscles pulling down at her eyes. Tears mingled with the vomit, spattering on little red and green flecks. She couldn’t walk, so she was dead. Whatever had chased her off the cliff, if there even had been anything, and she hadn’t just scared herself, would find her soon and finish her off. Maybe a cat would gently tear her open, or a bear would take her skull lovingly in its jaws, dragging her limp corpse up into a homey cave. At least then it would be quick. If not, smaller scavengers would harass her until she was too exhausted, too hungry to go on, and they would pick her clean over days and days. Vultures and foxes would hop from bone to bone looking for any scraps of her worth worrying at. But no matter what happened, no matter how quickly and serenely or otherwise, she would be dead, which is what really mattered. No more of Merah or Ahi or anyone else’s advice would trouble her any longer.
“Oh,” she said again.
A longleaf pine, monolithic, erect in a self-serious way where its sisters stood crooked and sprawling, seemed as good a place to die as any. Maybe if she had climbed down the rocks calmly, saving her breaths, counting and naming the strains across her battered body, and alighted safely on the forest floor instead of throwing herself off a cliff for the second time that week she would never have appreciated it: the stark elegance of its bare trunk, the fragrance of its needles as she crawled through them, the outstretched hands of its highest branches reaching up and up towards the sun, fixated solely on the sun, whispering to the sun. She was whispering to the sun. She dragged herself against the pine, heart hammering, stomach churning, ankle howling, and looked up, straight up. She thought she would fall forever into the sky, right along the trunk of the tree, or else tumble backwards over herself, the forest and the earth melting away all at once into nothing, into the night that hid behind the sun.
Merah and I stand in a white place, surrounded by nothing. She looks healthy, as usual, bare-chested and somewhat potbellied, pigeonfooted, hands calloused and heavy, with longer hair than I remembered. Shadows play behind her, shaped like tender partners, the suggestion of a child around them. My sister had never kept such intimate company, only me and Ahi and some friends in Pama. I had never asked why. Whoever the shadows are, they are silent, and after another moment of wild cavorting they vanish like smoke. Merah keeps standing there, smiling easily.
“How are your legs?” I ask.
“Better, now,” she says. “How are you?”
I shrug. She shakes her head, still smiling, her hair growing wildly, waving like river grass. Then she glances around.
“Do you see these, too?” she asks.
I look around with her. Masks, some wooden, some stone, have appeared in the blank sky, scowling, laughing, judging, motionless, watching. They aren’t Auye, I don’t think; maybe Talashi, or Nemayoto, or from somewhere even farther away. Only a few of them seem the right size to fit a human face. Many of them are small even for children; others are enormous, with elongated countenances, tongues lolling and nostrils flared. One, a wooden face entirely too oblong to be worn, lacks eyes entirely, and a few of the stone masks are either completely featureless or dotted with small holes all over. Something about them seems so old, like they have been carved from rocks and trees no Auye or any person has ever seen. I realize they are faces from the Long Before. None of them are looking at me. All of them are fixed on Merah.
“No,” I say. “I don’t see anything.”
“That’s a shame. You would like them.” She points behind me. “How about those?”
I turn around. A procession of animals is on parade. Mammoths and horses and camels and shoveltusks bellow at one another; foxes chase hares and squirrels underfoot while agoutis and ringtails climb across the backs of caimans and peccaries. Ocelots and mountain lions and saber cats prowl in the shadows of the larger animals; gar, carp, bass, catfish, paddlefish, eels, and turtles swim through the empty air beside them. Herons and grackles perch on tusks and horns and antlers. They are all enormous. They are all singing.
Beneath what I can see lurk shadows like the ones jittering behind Merah just moments ago, only these are truly massive, monstrous, their movements alien in their scope. Some walk like birds on the shoreline, carefully planting each foot, their rending talons distinct even through the murky shadows of the dream-haze, their massive heads scanning some unseen horizon, predatory, menacing, each eye seeing farther than distance should allow. Others, among the largest, support themselves on four legs, so inescapably huge I cannot see the whole of them and must turn my head. They do not lumber or plod beneath their girths but command the earth to support them, to lift them, to bear their weight, lest the foundations upon which all other things live begin to buckle. What system of muscles could allow something so large to exist? What bones could possibly support the weight of such a creature? What heart could pump blood through such titanic veins, down what seem to be leagues of flesh and sinew and scale unceasing?
“I can see these,” I say.
“Keep watching.”
The animals begin to scream. They rear in rampancy and fear, kicking up blood as if it were dust. A white tail buck explodes into a huge armadillo, crashing together like wet clay. Soon the whole parade is jumping into and out of itself, the greater shadows breaching the surface of the void, consuming everything, merging and evolving, nearing a synthesis of life before splitting again and reaching out for others with which to conjoin. Creatures of the deep past converge upon the fauna of the present. They become a river of flesh, a cascade of teeth and horns and fur, rolling into and inside and out of each other like waves. Only their eyes remain. They bore into me. The mass undulates and squirms, stretching and testing its new appendages, reaching out into the pale void for anything to hold. I am surrounded, encircled, such a weak star for so much panic and confusion to orbit.
I look for Merah. She is walking away, past the ring of screaming flesh and feathers but somehow in front of it still, like the animals have become the horizon. I call after her.
“Don’t worry,” she says. She doesn’t turn; she keeps walking.
“I’m sorry,” I cry. The animals wail with me.
“Your leg is going to get infected,” she says, still walking away.
It already is, I try to say, finding I can’t open my mouth anymore.
Then Merah’s face is inches away from mine. She is a child again, just after her coming of age, about nine years old. There is nothing but her: no animals, no white void, no sound, no fear. I sense somehow my dream has ended. My sister looks into my eyes, then to the right. I follow her gaze.
The creature nudged her with its head, pushing her hard into the trunk of the pine and jolting her awake. She backed away and hissed in pain. The gashes across her back had opened across the rough bark. She was cornered. She raised her claws in front of her face.
It was about the size of a black bear, only gray and brown with sickly green spotting across its spine. The front half of its body was bent low. A dimly pleased expression crossed its blunt muzzle, its small, dark eyes apparently unfocused. With a grunt, the creature reared back onto its hind legs, waving her own claws absentmindedly, like a toddler trying to swat away a bee. The woman flinched; eventually the creature settled back onto all fours. They both stayed still for a long while.
Just a little ground sloth, she thought. It thought you were dead and it just came back to check. You’re not dead. Sloths will only eat dead things, they won’t kill an alive thing. I’m alive.
The woman glanced down at her own claws. They were slowly getting smaller, retreating back into the shape of the hands she had been born with, if a little hairy still. One only needed claws like hers when in danger, she guessed.
“If you come at me I’ll tear you a new one,” she muttered, choking through her dry throat.
The sloth started nosing the roots at her feet.
“No touching. I’ll get out of your way.”
She stood too abruptly and nearly vomited again, leaning a shaking hand back against the pine, moaning in pain, and waited; slowly, carefully, she planted her injured foot, breathing solely through her nose. Her ankle wasn’t broken, maybe only sprained, twisted but intact, and she could keep her weight on it but the going would be slow. At least all her hurts were on the same leg. The sloth chuffed at her.
“Sorry,” she said, and limped aside.
The sloth continued on its way to the tree, the woman’s presence forgiven, or forgotten, now that she was no longer an obstacle. She wondered how such a clueless animal had any right to be so impatient.
Years ago, the summer of the only flood ever to hit Pama, Engo had seen a massive sloth, bigger than any of their huts, swimming lazily down the swollen creek, paying no heed to the rushing force of the floodwaters or the debris choking the bends. The old man had rushed up the bank, hollering his news right at the break of dawn. Engo later went on to embellish his story, weaving a whole retinue of paddlefish attendants and caiman knights around it, a great mossy crown atop its head. They still never ate sloth again after that.
The sloth, now finished with whatever business it had at the base of the tree, stretched its forequarters up against the trunk, squeezing its eyes shut and scratching deep gouges in the bark. Sap curled and bled. Four long, fresh scars peeled their way down the sloth’s back right leg; from a jaguar, the woman thought, or maybe a mountain lion. Her gaze flickered from its wound to its face, now turned towards her, and their eyes locked.
For one insane moment she tried to tell herself the sloth’s dim little expression reminded her of Merah. There was really no resemblance at all. She realized she was just seeing her face everywhere now.
“I’m Eio,” she said. “I’m looking for a big monster. It’s really loud. Have you seen or heard anything like that around here?”
Blinking, the sloth turned its back to the tree and pissed right against the trunk, misting Eio with the backsplash. It sat back on its haunches, lazily looking around at nothing in particular. Eio wiped her face dry.
“Okay. That’s alright. Listen. I need to find this monster. You’ve got a good nose, little sloth, and you’ve got good claws, which makes two of us, at least some of the time. I’m going to take you with me. You’re going to help me find it. It’s the least you can do after messing up my back like you did.”
The sloth lowed, a noise like bon. Eio nodded.
“Okay,” she sighed. She was talking as much to myself as to the sloth. It was relieving to talk again. “Okay, Bon, that works. Good old Bon. Do you like that name?”
Bon sneezed, which Eio took as approval, and from somewhere in the forest came a mournful roar, a sound like the flooding of valleys; a second roar answered, this one closer.