Partial Chapter 4

Rhythmic swishing of leaves woke her with a start. She heard the rustle, but realized something else woke her. Thrum. Thrum. The ground under her vibrated. Footsteps. Laehry knew immediately that they did not belong to a deer or a raccoon or even a man. Only something much, much larger and many times heavier could shake the ground like this. The thudding stopped suddenly. Laehry pulled her cloak up over her head and willed her body to sink into the leaves. Fear crept into her limbs and they started to tremble. She prayed that whatever-it-was wouldn't hear.

The sniffing and snuffling of a large nose filled the air. It moved toward her. She tried to burrow further into the rock. Where was her dagger? She had gone to sleep with it in her hand and had obviously dropped it. Her fingers crept over the leaves around her stomach. At last, her shaking hand gripped the cold metal hilt with a small sigh of relief. She didn't know how big this beast was, but she wouldn't go down without a fight. The snuffling stopped and the thudding started again. Laehry held her breath until she realized that the footsteps were actually moving away from her back down the path.

Laehry sat up, all hope of sleep gone lest the beast return. Where was her father right now? She had seen no sign that anyone else had traveled this path in the past few days. Was she even going the right way?

Laehry decided that she would walk swift and far today and try to catch up to the beasts who had her father. If she still saw no sign of them by nightfall, she would head for Nightvalley, the last village before the mountains reared up to form the Great Boundary between the ocean and Ellwood, to try to get information.

Laehry had never been to Nightvalley, but she had often heard of it in the stories the children told each other on the playground at school. Strange wanderers came down out of the mountains, it was said, solitary and lean men and not a few women who roamed the Great Boundary. In many of the stories, these Wanderers had power over the creatures of the mountain. They would come into Nightvalley accompanied by a pet grizzly bear or mountain lion to trade. Lizzie's mother had grown up in Nightvalley and she said it was true. She once saw a tall woman walking down the only road that ran through Nightvalley with a black bear by her side. The sausage peddler was on his was home, towing his car behind him. The bear ran toward him and when it had almost reached the cart and the terrified man, the Wanderer reached out her left hand, uttered a charm, and the bear returned to her the way a dog would return to its master.

Near dawn, she heard the swishing again, coming closer and closer. She crouched and held the knife ready. The source of the sound emerged from behind a huge oak tree and Laehry collapsed in relief. This particular foe, a large gray squirrel, would be no match for her knife.

She headed back to join the main trail just as the sun peeked up over the ridge. Laehry forced herself to jog over the trail even though her heavy limbs now demanded sleep. It was midday when she finally rested on a large boulder near the trail. Her biscuit tumbled from her sleep-clumsy fingers and when she bent to retrieve it, she saw a streak of blood smeared onto the opposite side of the rock. Dropping to her knees, she peered closely at it. Long black hairs were stuck in the smear - long black hair just like her father had. She touched the blood and found that it was still sticky. Fresh, she thought.

Forgetting the biscuit, she sprang to her feet, grabbed her pack, and ran down the trail.

Chapter 3 - Hunting

This is the chapter I am least pleased with at the moment. I've been working on adding more color to it - bits of Laehry's personality and history. To help some of my student writers, I often suggest what I would like to see more of - a more complete description of a certain place, more about a certain character, etc. As a reader, I can see gaps in the story that the author sometimes cannot. Please feel free to include such suggestions in your comments.

She slung the rucksack over her shoulder and marched toward town. She would find her father and bring him home safely.

She walked all night. Past the edge of town, she stepped off the road and into the forest where the men had found her father's bloody shirt. After several minutes stumbling through dried leaves and over dead trees, she found a trail. Without a clue where she was going, Laehry decided to follow it, her sleepy mind simply focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

Near daybreak, she reached a small stream and filled her water skin. The woods were waking up. Birds started to sing in the branches and several chipmunks scampered across the path near her feet. She trudged on.

When the sun was high, she wearily sank onto a fallen beech and ate some biscuit and cheese. She wasn't really very hungry, but she knew her body needed the fuel to keep it going. Her stomach remained knotted with worry for her father and now competed with a fear that she would disappear into the wilderness. Pushing these thoughts from her mind, Laehry resolved to be fearless and bold.

Don't ever let fear make you hesitate, she remembered her father telling her during one of their sword-training sessions. When she finished eating, she took a few slugs of water, brushed the crumbs from her lap and continued on down the trail, her steps wider and more confident now that her fear was defeated at least temporarily.

The trail itself was quite pretty. The forest was a mix of pine and broadleaf trees. Eons of fallen needles and leaves padded the trail and the sound of her own footsteps kept her company. She walked on, going up and down ever bigger hills until she reached the top of a ridge. Here another trail ran perpendicular to the one she was on. She stood a moment and gazed about her. She was clearly at the highest point around.

Ahead of her, through the trees, the sun was sinking lower in the sky - dusk approached. She felt safe up here on the ridge - anyone who came near would have to climb a hill to get to her and the chances of someone stumbling blindly over her were slim. She turned left and followed the new path up a slight incline until she reached its end.

The trail appeared to just stop in mid-air, but as she came closer, she saw that several huge boulders marked its end. Laehry climbed up on the first of these and felt her stomach clutch as she looked over the other side. Here, the ground fell away quickly down into a beautiful valley full of trees. Far in the distance, she could make out some cleared fields marking habitation of some sort, human or otherwise.

She remembered coming with her father to a remote location similar to this one. They had hopped and leaped among the boulders. Her father encouraged her to run the edges of the widest boulders and fallen trees. Laehry knew she could out-balance any of the children at the village school. She once beat them all by walking the ridgepole of the small school building. Her father and mother sent her to bed with only bread and water for supper,

"How dare you put yourself in such danger!" her mother had wailed.

"How dare you make such a spectacle of yourself!" hissed her father.

Now, she expertly walked the edge of the outer boulder. She kicked a stick out of her way and watched it tumble, end-over-end down into the trees below. Then, she hopped down and unrolled her blanket in a bed of leaves. As the last of the suns rays dipped behind the mountains to her right, she snuggled in and fell fast asleep.

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Bati Midwood woke early in the chill morning air and reached for her husband. He wasn't there. A desperate and lonely feeling washed over her as she remembered the events of the previous morning. Her gut told her that Fort was still alive, but with three children to care for, she could scarce do anything about it.

She swung her knees over the edge of the bed and carefully placed her feet on the woven rug. Tugging on her woolen socks and long robe, she made her way down to the kitchen to start breakfast for the children. They would go back to school today. Returning to normal life as quickly as possible would be good for them.

She stopped short at the sight of the rough oak table. A piece of parchment lay curled and neatly tied with blue yarn. She was sure it hadn't been there last night. Bati pulled off the yarn and unrolled the parchment,
Dear Mother, it began. Tears welled in her eyes as Bati finished reading the short note. She had expected nothing less. Fort had been training Laehry to hunt and fight since she was old enough to hold a wooden sword. Of course Laehry would go after him. Bati worried momentarily about her daughter, wondering where she was right now, before her mind rested on something - something that had been said long ago that, she was relatively sure, assured her daughter's safety - at least for awhile.