Chapter Nine
Several days had passed since Nakomii had gone away. Dekani wasn’t sure what to make of it, but she continued to return to the bone pile. And, slowly, she started to regress. Some things she remembered, but her new habit of thinking with words was starting to disappear again. Dekani wasn’t sure what was happening to her, but she wasn’t sure she minded. Before she had started to use words, things had been simple. Eating was good, pain was bad. Noise was bad, but after starting to use words, noise had become good. Now that she didn’t talk, she stopped making noise. She wanted to be good.
It was a rare rain, late in the season. If it had been a few weeks later, it would have been the first snow. As it was, Dekani was cold and stiff, curled up against the bone pile, the skull. No matter where she went, she was going to be wet. Every so often, she would shake her head and send water droplets flying through the air, but she was also soaked almost immediately. Dekani glared out at the blurred, cold landscape. She was unhappy, she knew that, and so she had no way of showing it, except glaring.
It seemed the weather was crying for her. Dekani was alone. Even when her mother had lived, Dekani had been alone. But once she had stayed with Nakomii, she hadn’t been alone. She didn’t have to do everything herself. If she was hungry, and hadn’t caught anything, Nakomii caught things bigger then he was. And he was always willing to share. And she shared with him.
Closing her eyes, the small huntress pulled her knees closer to her chest. She didn’t want to be alone. It hurt, she was surprised to find. Sniffing the damp air, she looked around and rested her chin on her knees.
The cold time would be coming soon. Nakomii wasn’t around to warm her when she got cold. But there was nothing to take to clothe herself with. The two legs, the pests, didn’t live in the flat place. She didn’t know how to make the coverings herself, but… She’d have to. Or she would die.
Decided, Dekani shifted her position, and slept. When the rain ended, she would hunt something with thick fur. Then she would find a way to keep the fur on her. But hunting was hard in the flat place when it rained. The scents were washed away.
When Dekani woke, dawn was a few hours away. But the rain had stopped, and the faint light coming from the stars and moon was more then she had gotten on the mountain, where the brightest time was the day time, and even then it was a bright twilight. The leaves blocked out all but the strongest light.
Not so in the flat prairies. There, nothing blocked even the faintest light. Dekani could see, and so she started walking.
Starting off, she was stiff, her muscles knotted from sitting in one place in the cold rain. But as she moved, her muscles loosened, even if she didn’t warm up. She wasn’t sure which direction she was taking, only that it seemed vaguely familiar. That was what she wanted, something that hadn’t changed when Nakomii realized what she was. Everything had changed when she had first noticed her color.
It was the bank of the river. Where she had first met Nakomii, one of the few places with trees. Stunted trees, she realized. She could reach around a few, and real trees were much too big to reach around. But they were trees. And there was mud.
Walking out into the mud, where early spring rains were soaked up by the dirt and kept. Dekani fell to her hands and knees, a position she was unfamiliar with but it was useful. She started to roll, and didn’t stop until the slick feel of mud was all over her. She had kept her mouth closed, and her eyes closed, but her nose was clogged with the sludge, and large clumps were tangled in her hair. She didn’t care. She didn’t look like Dekalagh any more, and that was the important thing.
Her pale eyes seemed to blaze out from a dark, dirt colored face. Dekani used her claws to clear her nostrils, and then ran her claws through her hair. Once finished, she started to walk. Where, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t care.
But she stayed near the river, though it had turned into nothing more then a small trickle after a summer of drought. Even the rain that had fallen but the day before didn’t change it. It just made the mud watery.
Dekani was used to the plains, where everything was bigger. But bigger also made more noise.
With a few exceptions.
There, Dekani’s sense of smell and, in some cases, taste, kept her out of trouble. Avoiding certain scents and tastes in the air kept her in one piece. But this time, she was after something special.
She had eaten the meat once, but she had seen the creatures several times. Big, graceful, and with thick fur, they were exactly what she wanted. How she was to catch one and kill it was beyond her, but she had never planned her hunts before.
She wasn’t about to start. That would require thinking, and with thinking came thoughts of Nakomii, and that hurt.
She caught the musky scent of the big cats long after the sun had risen in the sky. The scent lead away from the river of mud, and so she followed it. Out of the shade of the trees, small and twisted that they were, the mud covering her body dried up and cracked off. It didn’t matter. Her skin had turned dusty brown from the mud, and if the darker color fell off, well… so long as she didn’t look so pale.
The sun set before Dekani could reach the big cats. She continued walking. The lack of light didn’t bother her, and she didn’t want to rest.
The night was active, as compared to its more sedate opposite, day, where almost everything rested in the heat. Hunters especially enjoyed the cooler time, where if they expanded a lot of energy it wouldn’t matter so much.
To Dekani, it didn’t matter. Her temperature matched that of her surroundings, but too cold and she would sleep. Too hot and she would die from the blood boiling in her veins. But it took the extremes of temperature before either would happen. And, though faint, she had her own body temperature, which was always a few degrees higher then the cold, and a few degrees lower then the heat. It took a lot to make her uncomfortable.
Halfway through the night, she tired. Dekani found a place to sleep, a large clump of grass that were rougher then the rest, and there she curled up to sleep. Not for long though, for a curious fox sniffed her. It was a mistake, its last mistake. Dekani was used to waking on an instant, a strange noise or scent was all it took. The touch of a fox nose on her leg and she kicked out, her toes raking down the creature’s side. Before the fox could run away, she had already broken its neck.
Dekani kept the fox skin. She wasn’t sure what to do with it, but she remembered her decision to get fur. The fox had fur. But the meat and marrow she ate. Everything disappeared down her throat in chunks, and she started walking soon after wrapping the fox skin around her shoulders. The blood left on the skin mixed with the dust that covered her, turning her shoulders and a little of her back a dull red. She smelt of blood, but she didn’t mind.
She walked along the big cat scent as the sun rose to her side, and stopped when thirst baked her mouth dry. She hunted down a rabbit, staying close to the scent trail, and drank its blood. She wasn’t hungry, and besides, the blood was enough. She left the drained carcass behind as she started to walk again.
Time seemed to pass strangely, she thought. Large rocks were blurred in the distance, and it was in that direction the scent trail led. She had been walking for a day and a half before she started to get bored. But boredom was no stranger to her, and she didn’t want to think, so she continued walking.
Again, as night fell, she continued walking. The grass was getting shorter, and there were rocks strewn about. When she decided to rest, it was broken by a weasel that was drawn by the scent of blood. Like the fox, Dekani woke before it could do more then sniff, and killed it. She again took the pelt and ate the meat. Wrapping the weasel pelt around her waist, she started to walk again. The scent trail was stronger, not weaker, the closer she got to the rocks, and there were more paths she could take.
She followed one that led to water, probably the favorite place for the big cats to drink. Now that she was getting closer, and more cat scents were mixing in the air, she took more care. If she smelt the slightest hint of cat scent, she took another route. If the scent trail was old, which became a rare occurrence the further she went, she didn’t hesitate to cross. If the scent trail was strong, or new, she found another way.
Several times, she’d had to stop in order to rewrap her skins around her. Finally, she found a way that kept the furs on her. After ripping a few holes in the skins, she threaded the tail through. But she’d had to move the weasel skin because her waist wasn’t small enough for it to encircle. She put it around one arm.
Soon, it became almost impossible for Dekani to avoid the scent trails. She had caught rabbits a few times, and wrapped their skins around her arms the same way she had done to the two hunter skins, and ate the meat and drank the blood. Her fingers were stained the same dull crimson as where the pelts were or had been. Her chin was also the same color, while the rest of her was the color of dust. That was how she liked it, how she wanted to keep it.
The large rocks turned out to be limestone. Dekani didn’t understand it, how such big rocks could exist, but she wasn’t going to question. The fact that, as she had trailed the big cat scent, she had gone down into an old sea bed didn’t occur to her. The limestone had formed by the shells of many sea creatures, and, while interesting, was unknown to the so called pest. What was known to her was that the big cat scent came from a certain crack in the stone, a gap where the softer limestone had eroded away. And that was all she needed.
Even after the fifth day of the hunt came to a close, Dekani explored the rocks and crevasses that sometimes occurred. And, halfway through the night, she wedged herself into a small niche and rested. The scent of the big cats kept her awake the entire time, but they would be unable to get her unless they were searching, and she didn’t smell like a hunter any more. She had walked in their territory long enough, stepped in enough of their messes that she had started to smell like the big cats.
When morning came, it was the first time she hadn’t been awoken by some small hunter or other that was interested in just what she was. The sun’s light woke her, and the small cries of young cats.
Dekani stayed in her spot, watching the cubs at play. She was certain that the mother was close by, watching them too. Her best chance of hunting one of the big cats would be to wait for night. Then she’d be able to catch one while it was away from the others. It would only take one of them to feed her and only one big cat pelt and a few small creature pelts to keep her covered.
So she would wait. Flexing one hand, she closed her eyes halfway, for the sun was shining right into them. It hurt, when that happened. So she rested, and waited. When the sun was on the other side of the limestone cliffs, the cubs returned to their den. And once true night had fallen, Dekani looked for where the big cats had left to go hunt.
She followed the scent trail. It was so new, so strong that she would only have needed half her sense of scent to follow. And in the light of a waning gibbous moon, her eyes gleamed.
Every sense seemed super heightened. The slightest brush of wind against her skin sent tingles along her entire body. Her sense of taste could pick out the big cats, her nose picked out each cat that had traveled the new path. Her eyes even seemed to work better then they ever had. And in the distance, she could hear the big cats grunt and grumble to themselves, almost too low to hear.
In one spot, a big cat broke away from the main group. Dekani sniffed the trail, then continued to follow the main group. Too small, that one. Much too small. Much too young. She would get one of the others, one of the bigger, older ones. That would be better.
Each time a big cat left the main group, Dekani sniffed the trail. And, the third time she sniffed the new trail, she turned down it. Older. Which meant one of the bigger ones. Her lips pulled back from her teeth, which gleamed pale in the light. She followed the trail, making no noise herself. It wouldn’t do to alert a big cat to her presence, no. She was hunting a hunter, and was smaller. She didn’t have the same claws or fangs like this big cat she followed. She would have to be quick, surprise it and then, maybe, she would catch it, kill it, and live.
If not, she would die. She held no false ideas. If she didn’t kill the cat, she would die.
Simple.
And true.
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Nakomii wasn’t sure where he was. He had flown for a long time. Dekalagh had set, and Anacin had rose and set twice. When Anacin started to set for the second time, Nakomii too had fallen to the ground. And then he had walked. Time had passed, and it all blurred together. Now, Dekalagh was starting to close her eye, high above him.
He had not returned to the mountains. He had followed their curves and bulges, but he had stayed almost the same distance away. He could not forget how he had hated living with the other dragons, always too small, too weak and worthless. And, no matter how hard he tried, he could not forget his little one back at the bone pile.
Stopping, Nakomii looked up at Dekalagh’s eye. It shone down as pale as ever, as pale as the little pest waiting for him back at the bone pile. It had rained, not long after he had left. She would be cold, alone and would miss him.
“Dekalagh, do you want me to stay with her? I don’t know if I can. She’s a pest. Nothing more, nothing less. But… If you want me to, I will.”
Dekalagh did not answer the dragon, and he sighed. Looking back at the ground, he started walking.
He hunted, sometimes. Just to live. Never enough to fly, never enough to walk longer then the barest sliver of time after Anacin had dove below the world to travel under it to the other side. Nakomii only hunted enough to keep his body going. If he came upon water, he drank. But he never searched out prey, never looked for water. He just didn’t know what to do.
And as he traveled, the mountains started to disappear. They turned into hills, then, into nothing.
He faced the sea.
