By the time the sun found the high branches, he was already lower than he liked, working a narrow deer path with one good leg and one that only pretended. The bandage under his trouser stuck to the wound; each step tugged at it in a small, mean way, like a child that hadn't learned a better trick. He leaned on the spear as if it were a third limb, planting it lightly, letting it test the ground before he put himself there.
Once, this posture would have felt like hiding. Now it felt like breathing.
He caught himself thinking that and let it sit. He was bent forward, weight over the balls of his feet, shoulders loose and ready to turn. He had stopped looking at the place he wanted to go. He was looking past it, the way wolves did—eyes soft, head angling to bring the wind across one cheek so it could tell him things.
Hare tracks like commas stitched the path where the frost thinned. He crouched to touch one, feeling the cold not with skin but through the tiny changes in how the print had slumped—new enough to hold an edge, old enough to have lost the glitter. He followed where sense and the slope suggested, not trusting the obvious line where the ground had been scuffed too plainly. Nothing here moved in straight lines for long and survived.
The leg started its deep ache—low thunder under the skin. He let his breathing shorten and deepen at once, counting the rise and fall inside the ache until the two were out of each other's way. Not a wall, he told the pain. A stone in the stream. Go around.
When he reached the place where the cedar gave over to alder, he stopped completely. Waiting cost less than limping. He settled into a squat that would have burned his thighs a month ago but now felt like a chair had been placed there for him by someone who knew his shape. He set the spear across his knees and let his eyes unfocus. Minutes passed. The forest moved in its usual grammar: a jay's complaint, the far crack of ice loosening its grip, the delicate, private sound a squirrel makes when it believes nothing is listening.
The hare showed itself as absence—the place where the frost did not sparkle because something warm had taken it for itself. Then a flick of ear, the small test-hop, the go-or-stay breath. It nosed along the edge of the alder shade, pausing to sit up tall, lean, alert. The throw it asked for was easy, but the stance it required wanted both legs.
Instead, he shifted his palm on the spear just so, slid its weight forward and let the haft bear most of his own. He waited for the hare to turn the way they turned when they chose victory over caution, the little leap that showed the shoulder. It did. He pushed—not a throw, not a lunge, but a short, mean shove that sent the point across the small space between there and here.
The point took it deep under the ribs. The hare made a sharp sound and lay down as if it had meant to. He breathed once, twice, and went to one knee to finish it cleanly with the knife.
He skinned it with cold fingers and a piece of cedar bark serving as tray, turning the little body in his hands, cutting where meat gives way and sinew argues. The pelt would line a boot heel. The liver went in a twist of leaves to eat at camp. He set the gut pile under a thorn where crows could work it without telling the whole ridge, then eased back to the path.
Downhill, the creek would give him fish if he gave it patience. He took the long curve to it, following the ground's suggestion rather than his own desire to be there already. Desire was loud; the ground spoke softly.
The creek was narrow where he found it, running clear over a wide bed of polished stones that looked like the backs of sleeping animals. He had no line left—he'd used that two weeks ago to bind a split in his satchel strap—but he had hands and a spear and time. Time, because the leg demanded it, and the wolves would smell it on him if he tried to pretend otherwise.
He crouched above a knee-deep run where the current tightened and then eased under a half-fallen log. He watched until he was no longer watching: until the ripples became only ripples in his mind and not movements, until the silver flashes were as unimportant as birds at a distance. When his thoughts went quiet enough to pass as part of the water, a fish came up from the darker pool to test the moving light. It hung there, not trusting, body correcting with little angles of fin.
He slid the spear tip into the water slow enough that it made no new language on the surface. He waited for the fish to shift again—its head toward him for a breath—and drove the point down.
The shaft rang off stone. The fish thrashed. He closed his hand on its body through the water and felt it whip his wrist raw, and then he had it, heavy and certain. He brought it up and killed it with the heel of his hand before his body could decide to eat it alive.
The sound of breathing behind him came late.
He didn't turn his head. He placed the fish on the bank, rinsed his hands, and started to stand, slow as a thought a man would keep secret even from himself. He matched his breath to the creek as much as he could. Water distracts scent a little. Not enough to make you lies, but enough to soften the edges.
On the far side, screened by alder and the spill of a mossed boulder, a pale body moved. Wolf. Alone or just the first—he couldn't tell. It was close enough that he could hear the soft click of a claw on a hidden stone and the small puff of breath at the end of an exhale. Close enough that if he were an animal mind and not a boy pretending, he would have called it too close.
He let his eyes lower, not a flinch, not a drop. He turned his body a fraction so he was not facing the wolf squarely. He shifted his weight to show that he would turn away if it asked. He did not move his hands. He did not let the spear swing. He held still three breaths. Four. He let the creek do the talking.
The wolf's ears tipped forward, then canted sideways as if measuring his outline against some other outline it knew. It took one quiet step along the stones, lowering its head to sniff the place where the fish had shed scales in the air. Its tongue slid out and drew back in. It made no sound.
Something in him wanted to say words at it, to fill the thin place between them with noise that would prove he was human and therefore… what? Worth more? Safer? He recognized the urge for what it was: a habit from a life where voices solved things. Here, they solved very little.
He turned his head a degree toward the fish and then back toward the wolf, the motion small enough that a blink could have hidden it. An offer, not the open-handed generosity men give when they are showing off. This was more modest: a quiet, if you want it.
The wolf stood in the shape of thinking. Then it turned away, taking the path that would give it a line of wind across his back without going nearer. It vanished into ferns. Only the creek remained.
He sat down hard on the bank and let laughter come up, silent and a little wild, nothing to do with humor. He had not died because a thing that could have decided decided otherwise. A foolish sentence to build a life on, and yet men did, and so did wolves.
The leg cramped when he rose. He let the pain be a thing that lived next to him for the walk back and not a thing that sat on his shoulders. He stopped twice to breathe into the bandage, to tell the blood to mind itself. It minded less than he liked.
His camp was a lean-to of fallen trunk and woven saplings, dark with weather, and warm with the smoke. He refreshed the coals with thin cedar, coaxed flame where his breath could carry it, and set the fish to roast on two green sticks shaved clean with the knife. The hare went into strips to dry, a string of meat like red letters along the low branch overhead.
While the fish cooked, he turned to work that would keep him from thinking about eating it all at once. He stripped willow with his knife and twisted the bark into cord, wetting it with spit until it braided smooth. With that he made two small snares and set them in the runways under the thorns where the hare had taught him they loved the idea of safety. He baited them with a smear of crushed berries he'd saved—barely a flavor, more a suggestion.
Back at the fire, he tried for Fire Elementum, because sitting stung his pride and because the leg would not allow the old rituals of pacing and drill. He cupped his hands and held them inches above the coals, not to steal heat but to remember how it felt. He breathed slow, then slower. He let the ache in the leg float to a place behind him. He focused on the line of warmth crossing his palms, the way air thickened there, the way skin can feel light before it sees it.
A thin fur of heat woke under his hands, separate from the fire. He pulled away from the coals to be sure. The warmth stayed for a breath, two, then faltered when his mind went to good, keep it, keep it—and wanting turned the shape of the heat brittle. It broke.
He didn't curse. He had learned what kind of words heat did not like. He pictured the night by the river—the one where flame had taken his blade without being asked and held it bright as a truth. That had not been skill. That had been a mind empty of everything but a single, clean strike. Certainty had fed it. He could not live in that place. You went there and did a thing and left, or it burned you out and called it justice.
"Later," he told the air. "We'll try again later."
The fish gave up fat onto the coals with the eager sound of rain on a warm roof. He ate half and saved half, fighting his own hands for control. He salted the saved portion and wrapped it in bark before he could change his mind. The hare strips darkened at the edges, becoming the kind of food you can carry for days without becoming a story the flies would like to tell.
He kept the fire small. Smoke drew straight, the way it does when the air promises cold later. He limped the perimeter of his camp in a low arc, as had become habit without him choosing it. He paused at places the wind thickened. He faced the way a thing might come rather than the way it would be polite to look. When he returned to the fire, his body understood itself a little better.
Afternoon wore down into the blue part of day where sound travels farther than it should.
On the way back, he found a track pressed fresh into the mud—a paw print as clean as a carved bowl. He crouched, careful not to touch, and let his eyes move from it to the way the grass leaned, to the scratch on a bark strip nearby that had not been there this morning. He breathed and let himself want to follow. He did not. He was slow today. Slow meant you died if you pretended you weren't.
The sun dropped behind the ridge with the steadiness of an old man sitting down. He brought the saved fish nearer the coals to warm it, turning it with two fingers, listening to the hiss when fat found heat. The night came up and the forest found a new grammar for its speaking: small feet in leaves, the steady conversation of water, the way silence thickened at the edge of sight.
They came earlier than he'd expected.
Not at the meat he'd hung, not at the fire. From the dark between two alders, two bodies pressed themselves out of the black as if the night had been wearing them and then set them down. Pale and mottled both, one a hand's breadth larger than the other. Wolves. Close enough this time that he could smell them as separate from the world: clean musk, old leaf, damp fur dried and wet again.
He did not rise. He did not reach for the sword; it lay near, but not for this. He shifted his eyes to the side, lowered his head a fraction, turned his chest away. He pushed a piece of fish toward the edge of the fire's light with two fingers, then withdrew his hand into the shadow of his knee. If they had meant to test him with closeness, he would test himself with stillness.
The larger stepped forward and stopped where the light touched the tips of its whiskers. The smaller came half a pace and leaned, stiff-legged with interest. Their ears made small adjustments the way men tilt their heads to catch a better word. The larger drew air over its teeth and made a nearly inaudible sound like a thought someone had decided not to say.
The boy held himself like a map of patience.
The larger stepped past the fish first, ignoring it, angling instead toward the low branch where the hare strips hung. He felt a surge of possessiveness hot as panic—food was rent and safety both—and let it pass through without expression. The wolf stopped beneath the meat, lifted its muzzle, and did not jump. It stood there, inhaling until its chest filled and emptied twice. Then it turned and came back to the edge of light, unsatisfied with what hung but satisfied with having not taken it.
The smaller wolf slipped to the fish, took it in a quick movement like a breath too sharp, backed into the dark, and ate it with the sound of someone trying not to be heard eating.
He breathed out once, very softly.
The larger one approached the offering place he had made the night before—flat stone beside the fire pit where he put bones when he kept some. It nosed the stone, found nothing new, and then looked at him full-on. Not challenge. Inspection. Weighing. He had been weighed by men and found wanting in more ways than one; this weight was different. It had fewer questions and more answers.
He lowered his eyes again. He felt foolish and absolutely correct. He felt like a boy and also like something that had been a boy for a long time and was now being asked to consider other options.
The larger wolf made the small sound again and turned, losing its shape to the dark the way a mouth loses a word when it knows the listener has taken it in. The smaller followed, pause, glance back—some habit of youth persisted even here—and was gone.
He let the heat from the fire find his hands. He found the shape of warmth without flame again for a breath, and this time he did not try to carry it beyond what it wanted to be. He let it be small and was pleased by its smallness.
He ate the last of the hare liver and did the work of the night: cleaned the knife, checked the knots on the snares, banked the coals to a red seam. He did not speak aloud except once, when he said, "Still here," to the place and to himself and perhaps to anything that cared to hear it.
Sleep came warily. He woke once to the lightest touch of paw on stone—almost delicate, cautious as a thief who has no wish to be a thief and yet has learned how. He kept his eyes closed, because he had learned how too. The sound went away and left him with his own breathing and the slow, regular ache of healing.
Morning came cold and direct, thin sun like a coin with most of the shine worn off. The snares held one hare this time—neck caught quick and clean. He thanked the snare with the same awkward impulse he had when fire did as asked. He skinned the hare, set fresh strips to smoke, salted them with care, felt the small thrum of victory that doesn't need witnesses.
He walked the edge of camp once, twice, letting the leg tell him which ground it trusted. He measured the land by scent and wind instead of by distance. He realized only after the second circuit that he had not thought in words for several minutes—not because he had forbidden them but because they had stepped aside to let other ways work.
On the way back in, he found a paw print at the very edge of the fire's old ash where the ground stayed soft. Clean. Pressed in with deliberation. Not an accident. He crouched and looked without touching.
"Alright," he said, and it meant many things. It meant thank you and I see you and I know you see me. It meant we'll try this again, and better.
He fed the fire a little and coaxed a thin heat into his hands, not a flame, not yet, and felt it settle there like a truth that doesn't need to be proven today.
The leg would heal. The hunger would return. The wolves would circle, now nearer, now farther. He would keep his weight low, and his eyes soft, and his breath quiet. He would follow not after them, not before them, but along some narrow line where two lives could move side by side and neither be a lie.
He broke his fast with a strip of smoked meat and a sip of creek water, then took up the spear and the day.