Hunting the Hunter by chrissystriped

Hunting the Hunter

Read Hunting the Hunter

Beleg followed the tracks of the boar through the forest. They were still searching for Elwe, but they also had to eat and Mablung and he had gone hunting. He walked slowly, the light of the stars barely made it through the thick canopy above them and he didn’t want to stumble over the boar unprepared. They were dangerous. He had his bow ready to shoot, an arrow on the string. Mablung, walking behind him, tapped his shoulder and Beleg stopped.

“Do you smell that?”, his friend whispered into his ear.

Beleg took a deep breath. There was blood in the air. He nodded quickly.

“Let’s investigate”, he murmured. “Can you make out the direction?”

He might be the best tracker in the retinue of their king and no one was better with the bow than him, but Mablung’s sense of smell was superior to his. Mablung turned around slowly, scenting the air and pointed in one direction with his spear. Beleg let Mablung go first, all his senses trained on the forest around them. The smell of blood got stronger until Beleg could have followed it himself.

After a while that felt longer for the tenseness in his body, Mablung halted and motioned him to come forward. They looked out on a clearing. Whatever had killed the hind seemed to have been disturbed, the carcass was almost intact, apart from it’s neck where the predator had set the killing bite. They shared a look.

“Would be a shame to let all that meat go to waste”, Beleg said.

“My thought exactly. Do you think it’s still around?”, Mablung answered. “This looks fresh.”

“Let’s look at it more closely. I’ll give you cover.”

They slowly walked toward the dead hind, Beleg scanning the border of the clearing while Mablung crouched down beside the animal.

“It’s still warm”, Mablung murmured.

Beleg slowly turned in a circle, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. He wished there were more of them, wished they could form a circle. There might be a predator watching them from the trees, just waiting for him to turn his back on it. He just wanted to ask Mablung to leave, forget the meat, even if he risked being laughed at for his skittishness, when his friend said with a tremble in his voice: “Look at this, Beleg.”

Beleg hated to turn his eyes away from the trees, but Mablung’s tone told him it was important. The print Mablung was looking at was huge, larger than his hand he’d spread out beside it.

“What was that?”, Mablung whispered.

Beleg gulped, his eyes flicking again to the trees. “Looks like the print of a cat.” He didn’t say that it must surely be as big as a horse if it had paws like that. A lot bigger than the spotted or black cats they sometimes encountered. He almost shot at the Onod when he moved into the clearing. He looked like an oak-tree and was not one he knew.

“Hoom, easy now, young one”, he boomed. “You are not in danger.”

Beleg lowered his weapon and bowed to the Onod.

“I did not mean to attack you, Guardian of the Forest. We found some concerning tracks and thought the animal might still be around.”

“It would have been, this dark-shadow-long-claw-yellow-eye, if I hadn’t come by. This was a stealth-deceit-capture meant for any of the Speakers to come by.”

“A trap?”, Beleg said.

The Onod swayed back and forth, a motion that might have been a nod.

“It is intelligent?” Mablung asked what had gone through Beleg’s mind also.

“It comes from cold-mountains-treeless-frozen-waste up north.”

Beleg shared a look with Mablung, a shiver running down his spine. The Powers had fought their evil brother in the north. The Hunter had told them that they’d destroyed the Evil One’s fortress, but what if some of his creatures had escaped?

“Thank you for chasing it off, Guardian”, Beleg said. It was always pertinent to be courteous to an Onod.

“It ran when it saw me”, the Onod answered. “Be alert, young ones. There are many things in this world that are dangerous to you and we are here to protect the trees, not you.”

“Yes, Guardian.” Beleg bowed again.

The Onod left them with long, slow steps that made hardly any sound.

“We need to do something”, Beleg said to Mablung. “What if it succeeds in setting a trap next time?”

Mablung nodded. “You’re right. We can’t risk that, even if we warn our people, there might still be others around.” No one knew exactly how many stragglers there were. “Back to the camp or…”

“Follow the tracks while they are fresh?”, continued Beleg and bit his lip. “I doubt we’ll find it, if we give it any more time to get away.”

“I feared you’d say something like that.” Mablung sighed with a wry smile. “Just the two of us, then?”

“Don’t we work best like that anyway?”

If they really had to battle a cat as tall as a horse, Beleg would have liked them to be more than two, but it was true that they were a good team.

“Let’s go.”

 

They followed the trail through the forest, going as quickly as they dared to. Beleg almost lost the track twice. Once, when the cat had waded along a small stream for a while — even if he had doubted the words of the Onod, this proved to him that the beast was intelligent — the second time, they stood at the bottom of a steep, rocky incline. Beleg looked up the wall.

“I think, it jumped up there”, he said. “I can’t prove it, though.”

Mablung sighed. “As much as I wish you were wrong, if you say the prints stop at the bottom of the wall, I believe you.”

Beleg hated to have to put his bow on his back, but if they meant to scale it, he needed both of his hands. He slipped out of his boots and pushed them under his belt. For this he’d need his toes. Mablung had strapped his spear on his back and was just bowing down, to get out of his shoes, too, when he froze.

“Beleg”, he hissed.

Beleg reached for his bow, before he followed his friends line of sight. Two large, green eyes that reflected the starlight looked down at them from a ledge on the rock wall. It was indeed huge, a black mass on the lighter stone of the rock. Its muscles bunched when it made ready to jump down at them. Beleg hurried to shoot at it, but the cat swatted the arrow out of the air and hissed at them. Mablung had scrambled up, fighting with the straps of his spear. Beleg got in another shot but his hands were trembling so badly that it skidded along the cats shoulder without doing much visible damage.

Mablung had finally gotten his spear free and gave a shout when the cat jumped at him. Beleg stood frozen, watching as the cat flew toward his friend and collapsed on top of him as the spear hit it in the chest. Beleg’s heart skipped a beat. The cat gave a last whine and the light went out of its eyes. The fingers on Mablung’s left hand, just visible under the mountain of cat, twitched.

Beleg could suddenly move again, his breath racing and a lump forming in his throat for worry for his friend. He pushed at the cat, barely able to move it, but he heard Mablung’s muffled groan and that gave him a burst of strength he hadn’t know he possessed. The cat rolled off his friend and Beleg fell down on his knees beside him, running his hands over him, checking for wounds. Mablung groaned as he touched his ribs.

“I’m fine”, he said, “just a little squished.”

He struggled to sit up but was thrown down on his back again, when Beleg threw his arms around his neck.

“Oh, thank Eru and the Powers!”, he sobbed. “You’re alive!”

For a short moment, when Mablung had been buried under the cat, he’d thought he’d lost his friend.

“It would have broken my heart, if you’d died”, he continued.

“There, there.” Mablung patted his back awkwardly and Beleg blushed embarrassed.

“Sorry”, he said, sitting up and wiping his eyes. “Can you stand up?” He offered Mablung his hand and helped him to his feet. “Let’s find a place to set up camp, somewhere away from…” Beleg trailed off as he stared at the spot where the giant cat had lain. It was gone, only the broken off tip of Mablung’s spear lay on the ground.

“Let’s get away from here”, Mablung croaked, his face pale.

Beleg nodded, a shiver ran down his body. If he’d needed any more evidence that this hadn’t been a normal animal, this was it.

 

They walked until they found a place where the trees felt friendly. It was a little too close to where they’d “killed” the cat — Beleg wasn’t entirely sure that whatever it had been really could be killed — but Mablung was limping, leaning heavily on the broken shaft of his spear. He’d have walked on, if Beleg had let him, so he’d insisted on setting up camp. He wished they’d taken some meat from that hind, but at that time it had seemed more important to follow the cat. As it was, they sat at the fire, Beleg had built from fallen branches and ate some dried meat from their supplies.

“Let me look at your ribs.”

“I’m fine!”, Mablung protested weakly, but he allowed Beleg to push up his shirt.

Beleg let his fingers slide over his sides, feeling for fractures, Mablung hissed. Beleg pulled a bandage from his satchel — he always had some with him, injuries easily happened during a hunt.

“I’ll bind your chest. You know you’ll feel better.”

Mablung grimaced but nodded. A string of expletives came from his mouth as Beleg wrapped the bandage around his chest as tightly as he could. He knew it hurt, but it would support Mablung’s upper body and stop the broken ribs from moving around.

“Thank you”, Mablung gasped, when he’d finished.

Beleg wiped a bead of sweat from his friend’s temple. “I think, we’ve had enough adventure for a while.”

Mablung wheezed. “Don’t make me laugh, you idiot!”, he said. “But you know what I’ve thought about? What are we going to tell our kin? That we fought a monster-cat that vanished after we killed it? They’ll ask us, what mushrooms we’ve eaten!”

Beleg chuckled. “No, we’ll have to frame it less insanely. We’ll tell them, we fought a creature of the Enemy and that they should be wary. There might be more.”

They shared a look.

“Yes, I guess there might be”, Mablung answered with a shudder, then I grinned. “I’m still mad that it didn’t have the decency to leave a corpse behind. Those claws would have made fabulous trophies.”

Beleg laughed and squeezed Mablung’s shoulder where he was sure he wouldn’t hurt him.

“I, for my part, am just glad that you are alive. I feared for you for a moment, my friend.”

“I gathered that.” Mablung leaned into him. “I wasn’t so sure myself when I lay under that thing.” He sighed and smiled. “Thank you for being always at my side.”

Beleg smiled back. “And thank you for being at mine.”

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Chapter End Notes

Written for TSS 2021