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.