weapon arm and felt her wrist slowly leave the ground against the pressure of the white man's grip. In her darkness, she heard a frenzied hiss escape her assailant's lips as he released her throat to pull at her grip on his face. Magiere gasped in air, filling her lungs.
"No… no… no!" he screeched. "You are no match for Parko."
Straining against his grip, she could neither swing the blade, nor force her other hand back to his head. His body began to jerk forward, accompanied by a strange snapping sound. As her vision began to return, she made out the blurred oval of his head surging toward her face—click— then back and in again—crack—straining against her own pushing force. The sound was an animal's jaws snapping closed.
She realized what he was doing. With their grips meshed, he was desperately trying the only thing left to break the deadlock. He was trying to bite her.
Magiere arched her back, pushing her face up and away out of reach, then shoved hard with both arms. A vicious snarl came from her left, and her body was suddenly dragged along the ground for half a foot. The white man let out a wail of anger as his grip on her wrists faltered, and Magiere lost her concentration in trying to understand what had just happened.
She caught sight of Chap flying in from her left, striking the man and rebounding away. The man's body jerked hard to the right, and again Magiere felt herself dragged across the ground with him. The snarling blur came again, and Chap struck the white man in the side. Both dog and man tumbled off Magiere and across the ground into the darker night shadows of the trees, their snarls and growls indistinguishable one from the other.
Magiere hurried to get off the ground and between the two of them, worried that Chap was no match for this opponent. She stumbled, catching herself against the limbless trunk of a tree. The strange hunger gnawing in her belly was still there, but had grown weaker. Lightheaded and dizzy, she found her footing unsteady as she stepped toward the scuffle, trying to distinguish man from dog.
The white man spun toward her, but he was still out of her reach. Chap lunged at the man's leg, and the man swung his hand back at the animal. The dog was too quick, and a squeal of pain stabbed Magiere's ears as Chap bit down on the man's wrist.
In that moment, sound and feeling and sight flickered from Magiere's mind. Dog and man seemed far away, too great a distance for her to reach. Her throat still felt half constricted and her breath came hard.
The squeal of pain had barely ended when she gripped the falchion with both hands and slashed out sideways, throwing her whole body behind the blow. She aimed high but blindly, unsure of her target but knowing the man would likely rise up to pull his arm out of Chap's jaws. The swing overbalanced her and forest shadows blurred together, spinning.
Magiere's head thumped off the soft mulch of the forest floor when she fell. All the hunger washed out of her in a sudden flood. Trying in panic to find which way was up, she rolled before the man could descend again to finish her. But he didn't come.
She gave up and lay still, unable yet to sit up, let alone stand. As the spinning night settled into a heavy pain inside her skull, she heard the sounds around her. There was the gurgle of the river moving across its rocky bed, and the light chatter of tree branches in the breeze. She heard the rasp of her own desperate breathing, and the crackle of fallen pine needles and leaves beneath her as she shifted her body, trying again to get up.
And that was all. All the tiny sounds, the night sounds, slipped from her attention and between them was only silence. When the shadows above her started to focus again, changing from muted blurs into branches and stars in the sky just above the treetops, she rolled heavily to her side.
Two glistening eyes stared at her.
Breath caught in her throat until she made out the shape of the stained muzzle and canine ears. Chap looked at her expectantly.
On the ground at his feet lay a tumbled form of white flesh and tattered clothes. Chap looked down at it, and his jowls wrinkled with a low growl that ended in a whine