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YEAR ONE, VERY FAR TO THE SOUTH: HUNTING AND GAME
Alan cursed as his rifle clicked and failed to fire. The hog deer he had had in his sights startled and bounded away, terrified in a way that he had never seen in years of hunting in his native mountains. Then he saw what had been following the deer, and felt the same terror that it had shown.
The thing might, once, have been a dog. Finding a loose feral dog was not unusual here, even finding one that was big enough and savage enough to attack a man. That was why, when he walked in the wilder parts of the land between his home in Erica and his brother’s land in Walhalla, or as far up into the mountains as Wood’s Point, Cooper Creek or Maidentown, he carried a rifle even when he wasn’t hunting. There was also the rumour of the big cats. Alan wasn’t especially worried about those. They might stalk a human, but from what he had seen, they seemed to act more from curiosity than from malice or hunger, but one could never be too sure.
So before he went any nearer to the thing that was following the deer he checked his hunting rifle, standing as still as he could while doing so, and trying to remember what his Cornish grandfather had told him about going unnoticed should he meet something dangerous in the bush. Focused on its prey, the thing seemed not to see him while he made sure his hunting knife was loose in its sheath and checked that his rifle was clear, with nothing stuck or jammed. Then he began to creep closer.
He soon realised that whatever this thing actually was, it certainly wasn’t a normal dog of any kind. There were far too many teeth, some of them in places where no kind of dog he had ever heard of should have teeth. And he was used to dogs that were dumped out here being the kinds that turned out to be bigger or hungrier or less well behaved than their owners had assumed the cute puppies they bought would become, while the dogs that were lost or just left behind by hunting parties were most often beagles or pigdogs.
This dog was in no way normal. It might at some point have resembled an Akita, a breed of dog that Alan neither liked nor trusted even when it was not wandering loose in an area where feral dogs were a dangerous nuisance. But this was bigger than any Akita he had ever seen, and it seemed to be in some way.......deformed?
What troubled him most, however, was the smell of the animal, and how it....... felt? Alan didn’t know what to call that sense, but he was glad of it when it gave him warning of a snake too near his feet, a branch about to fall, or when it just produced a strong feeling of ‘don’t step there’ in an area of swamp that turned out to be far deeper than he had expected. His grandpa had always said that back in Cornwall he might have become a bard or even a druid in the Gorsedh Kernow, but Alan wasn’t even sure what that actually was. However, what he did know was that this thing just felt......wrong.
He was still debating what to do when the creature charged.
By pure instinct Alan brought the heavy knife up in time to deflect the strange dog from his face, and to drive the blade into its heart. Or into where he would have expected its heart to be. But nothing happened, other than that the thing twisted in midair and locked its jaws around his forearm. He could not suppress a scream of pain, but managed to bring the knife around and stab it into the side of the dog’s head. He was surprised when it fell off the blade with a pathetic whimper and did not move again.
Alan wrapped his scarf around his bleeding arm and began to walk shakily back toward where he had left his ute. He was almost there when the cat stepped into his path. The panther-sized, jet black cat, with faintly glowing eyes and an oddly curled tail. Before he could raise a weapon the cat spoke in his mind.
“You did well” it said. “But you need to have help for when this happens again. Welcome this young creature as a friend. It will help you to call on the Land as you need, and warn you when these......things are near. Feed it, care for it and it will stand by you and keep you safe to do your task, as its children’s children’s children will do for your descendants until this plague has gone from your world. This is not my world, but I live here, and would not see it fall in such an unnatural way. Talk to the marngits at Lake Tyers, then to your brothers, and see what, with all of you working together, can be saved. Farewell, and good luck.”
Before Alan could speak or move, the huge cat was gone, but from the bushes in front of him stumbled a very young and somewhat battered-looking quoll joey. Alan recognised what it was because his older brother kept a similar-looking one that had wandered into his house last winter. He knew that the proper term for it was a joey, because it was a marsupial baby, but he could not help thinking of the tiny animal as a kitten.