Atalanta and the Arcadian Beast

CHAPTER FOUR

URSO

THE VERY LAST THING she ever expected to happen happened. Her skull was not crushed by a killing blow; her throat was not ripped open by those savage teeth.

Instead she felt the bear’s tongue rasp wetly across her cheek.

Slowly she opened her eyes. The bear’s head still loomed over her, its mouth wide open. But there was no flash of hunger or rage in his bright eyes. Instead they looked…friendly. His muzzle came down and his black nose nuzzled against her ear. Then he released her and rolled over on the grass, waving his paws playfully.

Atalanta sat up and at once the bear rolled back to her, pressing his snout against her ribs.

Hesitantly, she reached out and rubbed her fingers in the warm fur of his neck. Something about this set up a tingling at the back of her mind. It was all so familiar: the strong, musky animal smell; the roughness of the fur beneath her hand; the sound of the bear’s grunting as it turned from one side to the other.

She reached way back into her memory, and suddenly as if in a dream, she saw herself—small and dirty, growling and snapping like an animal—rolling across the grass with a bear cub. They bared teeth and cuffed one another, but none of it was meant to hurt. It was all in play.

Then she remembered something else—that bear cub had a large ragged piece missing from his left ear, from an encounter with an angry wildcat.

She pulled the great head down toward her and examined his left ear. There was a ragged piece missing.

This had to be her old playmate grown large. He must have recognized her smell, just as she knew him from the tear in his ear.

A sudden awful thought occurred to her. What if he were the very beast that had killed her father?

The bear nuzzled her once more and she laughed at her own fears. The death creature had orange hair. The tuft was still in the cabin, near her father’s pallet.

Scratching the bear behind his mutilated ear, she whispered, “So, old boy, we have certainly changed from our cub days, you and I.”

The bear tossed his head and barked in response.

Atalanta pushed him onto his back and rubbed his big soft belly, thinking that it was good to be alive after all. It was good not to be abandoned. She had lost mother and father. But she had gained a…brother.

“I wonder what brought you here now?” Atalanta asked, still stroking the bear’s fur. She was careful to keep her voice low and soothing. “Because if you had been here for a while, my father would surely have hunted you down.” A bear would have meant meat for the winter, a fur mantle for them both, and teeth and bone for jewelry to trade at the market.

The bear rolled over and raked a row of furrows in the earth with one big paw.

Atalanta smiled at him. “I expect you are just lonely. No mother. No father. No sisters or brothers. No mate. So you let your nose find your old littermate.”

The bear sat up. He looked a little foolish, his tongue lolling out.

“There’s something out there that killed my papa,” she said, standing. “Something big. Something awful. With orange fur and claws that can deliver a death wound. I’m sure it’s still around here and I have to find it. For my papa’s sake. Will you come, too?”

Almost as if he understood her, the bear gave a grunt and stood up, padding after her to the cottage door. He sniffed loudly but would not cross the threshold.

Going inside without him, Atalanta turned. “I’ll just get my things,” she said, leaving the door open so he could see what she was doing.

Pausing in the middle of the room, Atalanta took a deep breath. Memories filled every corner: the smell of her mother’s freshly baked bread, the sharp scent of a clutch of fish hung up to smoke in the hearth. Here was the doll her mother had fashioned for her with a walnut for a face and dried rushes for hair. Here was the little skull of the first rabbit she had shot with her bow. Her father had set it proudly over the hearth as a trophy and there it had remained. Here was her mother’s loom, the peplos half woven and left there to gather dust.

Best to be away from here and forget, she decided suddenly. From now on home is wherever I choose to be.

She took a pouch and filled it with dried fruit, olives, and apples. Then she filled a water skin from the big earthenware jar in the corner. Folding an extra wool cloak over her arm, she slung her bow and arrows over her back. Finally she stuck a gutting knife in her belt and picked up her javelin, the knotty ash handle well worn from her days of practice with her father.

As an afterthought, she stuffed the tuft of orange hair down the front of her garment. It was scratchy and stank.

She was just about to leave the cottage when her eye caught something glinting on the floor beside the bloodstained pallet.

The signet ring!

Crouching down, she picked it up between two fingers, examining it as if it were the spoor of an animal.

Can this guide me back to my other father? she wondered. To the one who lost me?

She hung the ring around her neck on a leather cord and, for a moment, pressed it against her chest. But only for a moment. She had other business to tend to. It was not her past she was hunting, but the creature who had slain her father.

The bear suddenly poked his muzzle through the open doorway, sniffing warily.

“There’s nothing for you here, boy,” Atalanta told him. “Nothing for me anymore either.” She pushed past him, then walked outside, closing the door behind.

With the bear ambling by her side, Atalanta set off for the woods.

“The orange beast,” she told the bear, “vanished from the clearing. Perhaps it has gone back to where we first came upon it—the spring.” It was a guess only. She had nothing else. “Maybe it’s got a lair nearby.”

The bear growled as if offering help.

Well, he might be useful, Atalanta thought. He has a good nose. She had the tuft of hair to let him smell.

Besides, without the bear at her side, would she have the courage to face whatever was out there? Most likely she’d be curled up in the cottage, nursing her misery like a wound.

“Bear…” she began, then stopped. “If we’re going to be partners, I need to call you something.”

The bear waited patiently for her to continue.

Atalanta thought for a while. She’d never needed much in the way of names before. “Papa” and “Mama” were all she’d ever used.

“Urso,” she declared at last, turning to look directly at the bear, for this matter of a name suddenly seemed important. “Urso. That sounds like a fine bear’s name to me. How does it sound to you?”

The bear sat up on his hind legs and clapped his paws together with a strange clacketing sound as his nails hit against one another.

“I thought you’d like it,” Atalanta said, and grinned.

Urso grinned back, showing two rows of very large teeth.

Atalanta appreciated those teeth. “Now,” she said, “let’s get on with the hunt.”