loose and undid the cap, taking a long slug. Half the contents vanished in a couple of gulps before he recapped it.
He looked around.
And that was when he realized that he was no longer on the trail. In fact, he couldn’t even see where the trail had been. It had just petered out in the low shrubs and grasses here on this long, low ridge. Everywhere he looked all he could see were pines interspersed by thickets that seemed poised to claw at him with spikes of broken limbs and an array of thorns. Something croaked nearby; his heart leaped painfully in his chest.
Dodd gasped and stumbled back as a black form shot out of a nearby clump of vegetation. A bird. He sighed in relief. It croaked again as it vanished low against the horizon. What kind of bird was that? It had looked like a crow. The reporter walked over to the fallen trunk and leaned against it, in a half-sitting posture. A corn snake slithered away from his left foot, sliding over his right one before vanishing into the shadows, out of the hot sunlight. Tim Dodd yelled, his voice echoing through the pines as he danced away from the dead tree, finally stumbling and falling to the stony ground, where he gouged a healthy chunk of skin off the heels of both hands as he braced to keep from hitting his head.
There was blood, and his hands were singing a song of complaint. “Ow. Goddamit,” he muttered. And then, “Damn,” much louder.
Off at the far end of the low ridge, where the oolitic limestone dipped down to the low country again, the Scarlet paused as it heard the sound of the man’s pain. And it breathed in, scenting for something in the warm air.
In a moment, carried on a slow, hot breeze, there it was. The few, interspersed molecules floated on the currents and he breathed them into the great nasal canals where he savored the tantalizing clue: blood. A part of it, something learned long ago, a lesson drummed time and again into its psyche, said not hunt. The Egg Father taught that it was not good to hunt this creature. The Egg Mother had taught that one must not move in the Sun, that one must not hunt in the Sun, that to do so would be to invite death.
Egg Mother and Egg Father were wrong. The Scarlet had hunted much in the Sun. It was good to run through the yellow light and chase down the deer while they lay waiting for cool dark, for the stars. He had learned other things that were good, that meant some of the lessons he had been taught were so wrong. He sniffed again. The red scent was drawn in, down the sensitive nasal passages, into his throat, across his tongue. His gigantic mouth opened wide, trapping the smell there where he could savor it for a moment. Why was it dangerous to hunt the Man? They walked like the Flock. But they were slow and clumsy. He had seen them so often, from the time of his hatching, and onward. They were almost blind and deaf, stumbling around the Flock and never seeing them.
Why not hunt the Man?
The Scarlet turned his great head, as large as that of a big horse, in the direction from which the sounds and the smells were coming. It lowered that heavy head and made a soundless move toward the source. Scaled feet took quiet steps, leathery skin molding over the edges of sharp stone. Holding its forearms close to its powerful chest, it unfolded the claws there, then tucked them back in close to the body. Quietly, it worked its way toward the man.
Slowly, Dodd got to his feet and examined his hands. It wasn’t as bad as it felt, he discovered. He had merely knocked a healthy chunk of skin off of each palm, but the wounds were superficial, though painful. Even the bloodflow wasn’t heavy, with just a trickle or three inching down his wrist. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the blue towel he always carried there. Lori, his ex-wife, had given him a number of the cloths when they’d parted company. She was a nurse and used to bring them home almost daily from the hospital where she worked. Well, his time with her had been good for something, it seemed. The bitter thought passed quickly as he recalled her smile in