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happy to see her and had gone willingly and unknowing to his own destruction.
The boy flung himself into the effort of freeing the man.
The big man caught the boy's chin, eyed the wound on his temple, and then
turned the boy's head to see the damage in the back. The man's voice became a
low growl of anger while the Wolf Boy examined the man's restraining band of
steel. The metal cuff pressed deep into the flesh, nearly cutting off blood to
the hand. Even breaking the bones of the hand wouldn't free the man. While the
other cuff rode up and down the pole freely, giving the man some range, the
pole itself was solid in the floor and ceiling.
The man caught and stilled the boy, silenced his whimpers with a hard look. He
spoke for several minutes, words that the boy couldn't understand but would
always remember. The man stood, opened the window over his head and motioned
for the boy to climb out, into the gloaming.
There was no way to save them, but it felt wrong to leave them behind.
The Mountains
Day After Shooting
The Wolf Boy was so cold and so very hungry. He kept moving. He drank water
when he crossed streams. He ate meadow mushrooms, lichen hanging from pine
branches, late-seasoned blue elderberries, and huckleberries found as he ran.
He could keep moving on what he found to eat, but not enough to either stay
warm or heal.
During the night he used the pattern of the now-nameless stars to head west.
He was being followed. He could feel it. The sense of they splintered even as
he left the cabin, and some followed. By their very nature, he could not tell
how many followed, or in what form. By the same means he knew they pursued
him, they tagged after him, blindly following the tenuous link of shared
genetics. But they did not have the Pack's wolf instincts, nor his Wolf Boy
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experience and intelligence.
They could not hunt what they could not see, and so the night cloaked the Wolf
Boy, protecting him.
Then dawn came, and the hunt started in earnest. He heard the crows calling as
they moved through the forest, growing closer. He was drinking from a stream
when the first one found him.
The black bird landed in a soft flutter of wings. They eyed each other: the
Wolf Boy in terror, the bird in eager greed. The bird's eyes were all
black irisless just like
His had been when
He tried to kill the Wolf Boy days and days ago, back home.
The similarity in his enemies' eyes triggered the boy to action. He snatched
up a water-smoothed rock and flung it hard. He didn't expect to hit, and
perhaps for that reason alone he did. The crow hesitated, expecting a miss,
and the stone struck full on. Breastbone crushed and internal organs ruptured,
it fell out of the tree.
Blind hunger made the Wolf Boy leap the distance separating them and snatch up
the body. Hot fresh meat! He had it nearly to his mouth, when he remembered
the man who nailed him to the wall. He flung the bird away from him in
revulsion. He couldn't eat it it wasn't really a bird. Regardless of what it
was now, at one time, it was human.
The bird shuddered, cells trying to work around the damage. Growling, the Wolf
Boy picked up the body again, and tore off the wings and legs from the bird,
flinging them into the stream.
There! Be frogs!
Be fish! Be minnows! Leave him alone!
A
small brook trout he hadn't noticed came out of a shadowed overhang, heading
for the bits of alien bird. The Wolf Boy's eyes went huge and he pounced,
snagging up fish with skill learned in seventy years of running wild.
They were getting close, so he ran, biting through the silvery scales of the
fish to the delicious flesh below.
***
They had him cornered.
He had been running down the hill, and suddenly there was a cliff. He caught
hold of a tree to stop in time and hugged it tight, panting. Trees grew right
up to the edge, screening the drop, digging roots into stone to lean branches
out over dizzying space, disguising the actual lip. As best as he could judge,
the cliff continued north and south for wrinkled miles. At the foot of a
cliff, a river ran through a course of massive rocks, shallow and clear.
Behind him, toward the rising sun, he could feel them strung out, growing
close. Before him the sheer drop; it would take great physical strength that
he didn't have to get safely down. If a fall killed him, he'd be captured for
sure. Nor could he afford to injure himself further; he could barely keep up
the current pace. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]