previously: Martin had been woken in the middle of the night as an intruder wandered into their camp.
and now: we flashback to Zilla, one of the villagers with Martin, and her encounter with the bear
Zilla (The Attack)
Zilla bent down to examine a patch of earth where an animal's tracks had been captured in mud. The front paws looked oddly similar to a person's hand, only in miniature, with a wide palm and five thin fingers. But the back paws looked more animal-like, stretching out nearly twice as long as the front.
A raccoon, Zilla knew.
Whenever she had to get out of the house, get away from her parents, she ventured into the Wilds. The buzz of insects, the tangy scent of pine, the seemingly endless variety of animals that she could name by their tracks … it all took her mind off the latest argument with Father. Always the same disagreement. One that sprouted up so often it had become part of their daily routine, beginning at the breakfast table and often ending with her storming out of the house.
"Zilla, please, come ba—" were the last words Father had spoken to her this morning, just before she slammed the door shut, cutting him off.
Because again, Father had told her that she could not join the Tracker's Guild. Said he would not pay her admission into the nearest guildhall nor allow her to earn her own way.
But who will he rely upon during the next hunt? Zilla mused. They were still eating meat, dried and salted, from a boar she had tracked last fall.
Zilla stood up, letting her long strides carry her farther into the Wilds. Deeper into its shadows. She had no destination in mind other than putting distance between herself and Father.
And Mother, she thought.
Father didn't have the heart to say no to any of his girls. Not young Marna, only a couple years out of diapers. Nor the mischievous Bella. And definitely not her, who could pick out the scat in leaf litter on the forest floor that his pale old eyes overlooked.
But Mother …
Zilla had stayed awake late enough, into the wee hours that parents reserved for such talk, to hear Mother tell Father what and what not to say to their eldest daughter. It was her voice fueling his protestations.
The more Zilla thought about it, the more she fumed. The longer her striders grew. And the less aware she became of her surroundings. She trudged through the Wilds, pushing underbrush aside carelessly.
On any other morning, Zilla would have noticed the vibrations in the earth of a large animal quickly approaching. She would have been aware that the chirps and twitters of birds had been replaced by snapping twigs and rustling leaves. Not when anger blinded her senses. Not until the loud crack of a tree startled her.
What … ?
Zilla turned to see a small birch topple. Then the forest split open, like a giant axe had fallen from the sky, and a large dark shape burst through the opening.
A bear! she gasped
Zilla staggered backward, as if pushed by her own bewilderment, and tripped, falling into shrub.
She clasped one hand over her mouth to keep from crying out, from gasping, from making any sound that might attract the bear's attention. The other held a leafy branch that she pulled in front of her.
The bear appeared as a dark blur, noisily crashing through the forest.
Zilla squinted her eyes closed and silently cursed. She was angry with herself for being so careless, for not being more aware of her surroundings, for letting her parents' obstinance distract her. All of that led to this moment of helplessness.
In the instance her anger transitioned to fear, the bear had charged past her, its footfalls quickly fading into the distance.
Zilla let out a sigh of relief. Then she scrambled to untangle herself from the shrub she had fallen into, but before she could completely free herself, she heard another sound. More footfalls. Not heavy thumps like the bear’s. But lighter. Quicker. More urgent, and they followed the bear's path.
Zilla leaned back into the foliage and slipped one hand down to the dagger at her side. It wouldn't have been of much use against a bear, but whatever approached was something else.
The figure that appeared was familiar.
“Fitcher!” she shouted.
But he was out of sight, nearly as quickly as the bear, before she finished calling out his name.
Then a question came to her, is he chasing after the beast?
Fitcher had likely been out hunting in the Wilds, but not even he was foolish enough to hunt a bear on his own.
As soon as she was clear of the shrub she had fallen into, Zilla raced after Fitcher. He was quicker than her. Nearly a quarter mile ahead, and with the thick foliage of the Wilds surrounding her, she did not hear, yet, the sounds that began to urge him on.
The curses of surprise.
The roars of the bear.
But then the piercing screams of pain shot through the forest like a stray arrow. While they caused Fitcher to quicken his pace, Zilla’s faltered. She slowed to a jog, fearful of what lay ahead, and by time she exited the forest, she was moving at just a fast walk.
The bear’s path had led her back to the village, and horrific sights and sounds of the scene Zilla stepped into assaulted her senses. She turned away, searched for something else to focus on, and that’s when she saw the fresh scars in the earth from the bear’s passing.
Keeping her eyes downcast, she followed the tracks to Fitcher, who screamed his brother’s name, “Carpin! Carpin!”
He struggled against someone’s grasp, and as Zilla continued to follow the bear’s tracks, she glanced up to see Tack, teeth gritted in determination, holding Fitcher back.
“Let … the ranger … see … to him,” Task muttered.
Zilla covered her ears to muffle their shouts, and followed the tracks until they led to Carpin, writhing and groaning in pain on the ground. A bearded man in a dark green cloak hovered over Carpin. He was not someone Zilla recognized.
The ranger? she wondered.
He used his weight to hold Carpin down by the shoulders and yelled, “Someone, hold him still, so I can treat his wounds!”
People gathered around the pair, but everyone appeared too stunned to react to the pleas for help. They just milled about until Brann and Renkle burst through the crowd and began to wrestle with Fitcher’s flailing limbs.
Zilla skirted around the growing mass of people. Her head down, scanning the ground, hoping to find evidence of the bear’s passing. When she spotted claw marks cutting through the grass and exposing bare earth, she looked up to see that they led away to the opposite end of the small break in the Wilds that her village was tucked into.
By then, Fitcher’s shouts had turned to whimpers. There were calls for bandages and water, and people broke from the crowd to retrieve whatever was needed.
Zilla dropped her hands to her sides as she followed the tracks toward a smaller collection of people, who stood in front of a wall of trees. All the while, she kept her eyes focused on the ground, searching for the next set of tracks, making sure they did stray off in another direction.
At a spot where the earth turned somewhat sandy and the grass less thick, Zilla noticed something odd about the bear’s tracks. She bent down to examine a paw print which had dark ooze pooling inside it.
Blood? she wondered.
Zilla reached down to grab a handful of earth. Black oily ooze seeped between her fingers.
No, not blood, she thought.
She brought the handful to her nostrils, and the stench caused her to gag.
It smells of the Waste, she thought. The Waste was beyond the Wilds, an endless swamp that she had only seen once as a child, but the memory of the unnatural stench that rose up from it had stayed with her.
Is that where the bear had come from? she wondered.
Zilla stood and followed the tracks to the smaller group of people stood. Past them, she saw a gap in the underbrush, looking like a recent wound the forest had suffered.
“Is that the way the bear went?” Zilla asked.
A man twice her age replied, “Yeah, we chased it that way.”
“Can I borrow that?” Zilla said, motioning to another man who leaned on a spear.
“Um … I guess,” he replied, clumsily handing it to Zilla.
She took the weapon from him and then entered the gap in the underbrush made by the bear’s passing. With the thick foliage of the Wilds enveloping her, she felt like she was closing a door, like she had done with Father earlier, and leaving the horrific scene behind her.
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I'm really enjoying this format. Moving back and forth from present to flashbacks gives the feeling that the reader is zeroing in on the story's climax.