Night made the basin smaller.
It pressed the trees inward until the cedars stood like dark ribs, the sky a narrow seam between them. The boy lay awake inside the root-tangle, furs around his shoulders, counting the spaces between sounds. There were fewer tonight. No drip from the windfall's edge. No late sparrow mutter. Even the creek seemed to hold its voice. The quiet wasn't empty—it was the kind that gathers before a thing decides.
He slid the sword strap across his chest and felt for the hilt behind his right shoulder until the leather sat where his hand would find it without thought. The spear he tested twice—binding tight, head snug. The furs did their old work: breaking his shape, holding cedar and musk close to skin. He breathed into them until his own scent went thin.
A low brush through leaves touched his ear and was gone. Not close; not far either. One wolf, maybe two, moving in a line that was not yet a line at all. His chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with fear. In weeks of forest, these were the only steps besides his own that meant anything. The thought of them moving out there without him sat wrong, as if the day had already left him behind. He tilted his head and let the sound find him again.
There. A soft thump of pads landing where the humus turned to root. The answer to that sound came from a different angle, a beat later: another landing, measured and light. Spread wide, then. Not the casual night drift. Hunters in their work-shapes.
He stepped out of the shelter and became the sort of body the ground could tolerate—knees loose, feet feeling for edges, breath small. He wasn't chasing a meal. He was chasing the shape of not being alone, if only from the edge of it.
The push came as absence. On the ridge's far side the crickets were speaking; along the slope nearest camp they were not. He moved toward the not. The cold thinned around him where their trail wound. Even without seeing them, the scent was a kind of company.
Half-burst only. Heel to arch, arch to ball. Let the hill spend you. The lightning was there as a suggestion under the skin—calves coiling, a cleanliness at the joint, a spark that wanted to be a word and would not be one yet. He used just enough of it to land where he'd planned, letting the earth take the leftover.
Another brush, higher this time. The soft click of claw on stone, then nothing. He paused where two deer runs met and listened with his shoulder, with the hinge of his jaw. Matteo had taught him once that the bones of the head are a kind of drum if you let them be. The night tapped there, faint and regular.
He angled left into a stand of dwarf pine, furs catching on the short limbs. Once, a tuft of hair stuck and he left it. Wolves knew where he was whether he wanted them to or not.
A raven, sleeping nervous, lifted with a racket somewhere to his right. He stopped dead. The sound was wrong for bear and much too sudden for boar. Wolves passing under, then. He did not see them. He saw the dark move the way water shows a fish without needing to show the fish itself—a ripple, a trick of the eye. He did not trust the eye.
Half-burst, half-burst, nothing. His legs began to take the spacing without asking him for permission. On a rock lip he nearly spent too much—caught it with his back foot and let the ground have the cost. He thought of his father's mouth tightening when he overreached; thought of the grunt Regnar made when a correction took; kept moving.
The scent of goat came small and threadlike on a shift of wind. Fresh enough that the grass still remembered where hooves had been. The wolves would have found that far ahead of him. He wasn't trying to arrive—only to be where arrival might happen.
Silence thickened to his left. No insect talk, no night mouse scrape. He eased that way and learned the shape of a new quiet: the hush that comes downhill when a thing above is waiting.
He flattened a palm to the bark of a cedar and felt the tremor through its skin. A body had brushed it, fast and low. He counted to eight to see if the next touch would come on the same beat. It did. Wolves circling. The pattern was a slow tightening, not a chase yet.
He moved the way a thought does when it knows where it's going but wishes not to be seen traveling. A small burst across a bare patch where leaf mold went thin, then breath held while the dark decided if it minded. It did not.
Sound traveled oddly in the cold. A footfall came up out of a hollow ahead and painted a clear line in the air, as if he could have reached and plucked it like string. He turned with it and found the ridge's shoulder where the wind fell away. The creek spoke again here, barely, then went shy.
He made the mistake then that he would have made three weeks ago and would have made a mess of. He took high ground on the assumption that the wolves would cross below, and when their sound veered, he felt the old pull to sprint and catch up—close the gap before they forgot he was there. But he held still. Wolves chose their circles for a reason, and if he wanted to be part of them one day, even at the edge, he'd have to learn their patience.
The half-bursts were beginning to feel like a language he could read but not write. He could sound out the simple words: a sloped run between two stones, a fold in the hill that would spend him toward a log he ought to cross on the side away from the wet. When he tried to add flourish, the sentence collapsed. He kept the words small on purpose.
The hare burst first. It went from nothing to white blur in the alder flats, back legs snapping like bowstrings. Three wolves were after it—not a full run, more a shepherding. He saw them only in pieces: a tail flick taking a corner, the round of a shoulder sliding past fern-heads, a mouth open without sound. He fixed on the hare's path and moved to where a hare would rather not be.
The flats pinched into a dark slot between two old windfalls. He cut for the slot, using two spaced bursts and a luck that felt undeserved. He arrived a breath too late to reach and a breath early enough to be of use. The hare saw him and didn't see him, his furs making him a different kind of thing. It veered uphill, away from the slot, into the mouth of a waiting muzzle. The takedown didn't make a sound. The night swallowed it and only the wet rustle told the truth.
He stood with his spear low and his eyes softer than his heart, and he did not move to look. He waited until the rustle went steady and then eased a circle around the kill from far off, letting the wind have him first. The wolves were feeding where the alder made a blind.
Something small dropped near his boot. He looked without letting his chin rise and found a torn ear, still warm enough to steam in the cold. It had not fallen from the blind. It had been placed. The marks in the cartilage were careful, almost neat. He felt the warmth in it and, for a strange heartbeat, it was like touching another voice. Not a welcome, not yet—but not a denial either. It struck him then how little else in this forest had offered him anything without asking for something in return.
He knelt. He did not take it at once. He touched it to his forehead, feeling the slick and the heat, and laid it back down between his knees. He breathed once and then took it, tucking it inside the serow strip at his shoulder so the musk would take the new scent in.
The feeding moved on through the alder toward the shadow of the ravine. He could have followed and made himself unwelcome. He did not. He gave them the gully and turned where the land asked him to turn.
On the ridge above the basin the stars cut hard white lines through the cedar's lace. The creek's voice returned as if nothing had happened; the crickets remembered their songs. He set himself to the practice he had wanted out of the night all along and let the hunt be its own.
Half-burst, then nothing. A long step with the knee soft and the ankle not arguing. Landings that were arrivals, not collisions. He ran the deer paths as if he were a memory the paths had always had. He did not reach for the lightning. It reached for him in small ways—the prickle along his forearms, the tidy click in the knuckle when he closed his hand around the spear shaft.
He stopped when the ache behind the eyes gave him his old warning. When he breathed into his palms, heat answered—quiet, obedient. "Later," he told both fires, and both behaved.
On the way back to camp, the urge to find them tugged at him like a rope at his ribs. Somewhere, beyond the shoulder of the ridge, the pack would be sleeping in the heavy wet grass with their sides full and their noses tucked. He wanted to see them that way, not as shapes vanishing into cedar, but as they were among themselves. He wondered if they ever wanted the same from him.