Atalanta and the Arcadian Beast

CHAPTER FIVE

ON THE TRACK

AS SOON AS SHE reached the spring, Atalanta felt a tingle of alarm run down her back. Could the beast be here, lying in wait? She knew it was intelligent.

Intelligent enough to set a trap? She held her breath and listened. All she could hear was Urso, snuffling and pawing at the ground beside her. Her stomach lurched sickeningly and a hot flush spread over her face. The urge to run away was almost overwhelming.

Urso rubbed his muzzle consolingly against her back. “You’re right, Urso,” she agreed, looking over her shoulder at him. “I have to do this.”

Gripping her javelin firmly in both hands, she stepped into the shadow of the greenery. Snapped branches and mashed ferns marked the beast’s passage, but there was nothing to show if the tracks were old or new.

“We can backtrack him,” she told the bear. “Maybe find where he came from.”

The bear went ahead, sniffing out the way. Where the trees thinned out on the other side, she found a jumble of footprints.

Urso made a low, unhappy growl at the back of his throat. Like all bears, he had a muscular hump on his back just below the neck, and the hairs on it were standing straight up.

“You smell something you don’t like,” Atalanta said.

Urso stood up on his hind legs and whined.

Reaching into her shirt, Atalanta drew out the tuft of orange hair, shoving it under his nose. “Here. Is this what you smell?”

The bear grabbed up the tuft of hair in his mouth and shook his head back and forth with such ferocity, he looked as if he were going to shake himself in two. Then suddenly he dropped the orange tuft to the ground, turned around, and urinated on it.

“Uck,” Atalanta cried. There was no way she would pick up the tuft now and shove it down the front of her shirt. But that didn’t matter. Urso was clearly furious that the creature had invaded their forest.

“Come,” she said to the bear, and bending low, she followed the tracks for another hundred feet.

Once again, the prints just stopped.

Jamming her spear point into the ground, Atalanta paused to take a swallow from her water skin. “I don’t understand,” she said. “This creature seems to appear out of thin air and then disappear again, just as it pleases.”

A sudden rustling in the branches behind put her immediately on alert. Urso bared his teeth.

Carefully, Atalanta lowered the water skin and slid the bow from her shoulder. Then in one quick movement she fitted an arrow to her bowstring. Spinning about, she loosed off a shot. The arrow clipped the bushy tail of a squirrel, sending it chittering into cover.

Atalanta gave herself a slap on the leg, partly for being so foolish but mostly for missing the target. What would Papa have said if he’d seen her waste an arrow like that? Probably, Think, Atalanta—a good hunter’s most useful weapon is the brain.

She looked until she found the arrow, buried lightly in the trunk of an oak that was twisted with the silvered leaves of an ivy vine. Pulling the arrow out carefully, she checked to be certain that the arrowhead was still whole before smoothing its feathers and replacing it in her quiver.

She shook her head. “That’s it, then, bear. We’re going to have to search the whole forest.”

He grunted in return.

They searched for the rest of the day without finding any more tracks. Not the beast’s trail—nor any deer’s or boar’s trail either. Atalanta knew she was a good stalker. Her father had boasted to the hunters they occasionally met that she was the most natural trail-finder he’d ever known.

But there was nothing.

Nothing!

The longer they searched, the more Atalanta worried. The beast was huge and smart, and she feared he might be invisible as well. Even if they found the thing, she wondered if she was strong enough to kill it, with or without Urso’s help.

Urso seemed baffled, too. He made curious little snuffling sounds, and more than once simply sat down in the middle of the path, as if to say he wasn’t going a step farther.

By early evening Atalanta was beginning to think about finding a campsite.

“A cave,” she said to the bear. That would be more easily defended than an open clearing.

Urso was walking ahead of her when all of a sudden he crouched low, his back hump bristling. He began to growl.

She ran over and put her hand on his back, whispering, “What do you smell?” Her fingers tightened around the haft of the javelin. “Is it the beast?”

Urso started forward through the bushes and Atalanta followed close behind. The bushes snapped back against her bare legs but she never noticed. She was intent on what was ahead.

They entered a small clearing. It was filled with the stink of recent death, a day or two old at the most. Flies buzzed around a corpse. Or what was left of one. It was clearly a deer, a big stag by the antlers. But the rest had been stripped, flesh and innards devoured, bones scattered. Only a few tatters of brown skin were left, some dangling from branches of a tall tree. It was around those tatters that the flies were buzzing.

Urso growled, long and low.

“What is this creature?” Atalanta whispered. She had never seen such a kill before. The deer had simply been ripped to pieces. And there were no tracks leading to or away from the place.

None.

They found a nearby cave and once Urso had sniffed it out, declaring it safe, they sheltered there for the night. He slept by the entrance, filling the opening with his big furry presence.

Atalanta put her head against his flank, using it as a kind of pillow. With each breath the bear took, his body rose and fell beneath her head. After the grief of the day, she was happy to be lulled to sleep that way.

Her last dreaming thought was that tomorrow would bring the start of a new life. A life in the wild. Or maybe, she thought—remembering the bear that had mothered her—maybe it was a return to her old one. Either way, she promised herself she would be ready.