by Grace Draven
“Yesterevening I did.” The ring of Burung Gagak’s rocks sat dully, tempting Raven to rearrange them ever so slightly. Why not at least use prettier stones? It made no sense. “After I finished my gathering, I followed that noise and I found some things.” It wasn’t exactly true, but Raven didn’t think that small lie would matter.
“Oh, child. What did you find?”
“Blood spatter. So much blood left behind.”
Burung Gagak glanced up, gaze sharp. “One of us?”
“No. I don’t think so. No one is missing. It was a smaller something, maybe.”
“Ah.” Burung Gagak nodded. “You did not see either of them, though—the animal or the thing that took it?”
“No, or I would not be asking you what the Thing is.”
“I know no more than you. I haven’t gone to look.”
“Why haven’t you gone to look? I don’t understand why none of the others have, either. I’m sure they must have heard it. What about curiosity in all things?”
“Sometimes, child, curiosity serves us well. It leads us to new food, interesting groves to explore, even new forests to dwell in. Curiosity is what lifts us above, keeps us from being only animals scrounging for the basics of existence. By wondering, we become more than those we eat for food. Only by following the pricking of inquisitiveness do we discover the larger world.”
She fell silent and Raven waited. Burung Gagak could be this way—sometimes the loudest with her opinions, other times she began a thought and then suspended it. Testing the patience of others and their sincerity in wanting to hear the rest.
“But along with the larger world, there are other worlds. The ones we pass into when our mortal bodies no longer serve us. Curiosity can also hasten that passage. This is what the noise means and why no one has gone to look. This is how I use my blind eye, so as not to see. Sometimes not seeing is as important as seeing.”
But Raven had two good eyes. “What other worlds?”
Burung Gagak picked up one of her own rocks from the careful circle. “If the circle is our tribe, and this stone one of us. Observe.” She tossed it away, leaving a gap in the symmetrical pattern. “Gone. You understand?”
Oh. Gone. Like her twin brother who hadn’t lived long enough to have a name, his empty body so obviously not alive anymore, so boneless and wilted, like a plant left too long in in the sun, until her parents took him away. So much blood meant death. Another world beyond this.
“What is it like there?” Perhaps her brother had trees to wander through, sunlight to warm him and water to cool his throat.
“No one knows, child. The passage into that other world goes in one direction only. Those who travel there never return to speak of what they see.”
Like her, going into the woods to see the Thing. She had returned, but whatever the Thing had taken had not.
“So the Thing in the forest—it kills.” She’d known this, in her heart, in the frightened thrumming of her blood and bones. Nothing shed that much blood and lived. “It’s a bad Thing.”
“Not all creatures eat the food they find as our people do. You know this. And some creatures we do kill, to eat. It’s the way of this world.”
“Only small things.”
Burung Gagak shrugged. “Big. Small. All is relative. Perhaps we are small to the thing in the forest. Do not go look again, Raven. I would be sorry to lose you, and your curiosity.”
“But, shouldn’t someone go? We need to know what it is.”
“This is a matter for the elders, not a youngling.”
“You are an elder.”
“Thus I know whereof I speak. Leave it be.”
Something in Raven’s bones told her that would be a terrible decision. “I can’t. I found something besides blood. I brought it back.”
“Show it to me.”
She nearly hadn’t mentioned it. Wouldn’t have if Burung Gagak had given a better answer. But Raven went to fetch the tuft of bright fur, retrieving it from the secret place where she kept her treasures. It took a bit of extra time, because her sister Havraní and brother Ronk spotted her and wondered what she was about. It wouldn’t do for them to know her hiding spot. Once they left—and once Havraní left again, having snuck back to spy on her big sister—Raven circled back to an old log, half-charred from the great fire. At one end, ferns had grown up over a crevice made by the burning. An excellent hiding place.
The fur burned in its own way, bright and exotic amid the rest of her treasure: three sparkling stones, a dried dragonfly wing that looked like rainbows if you held it up to the light, and her greatest prize till now, a bit of something that glittered like the sun itself. Much as she’d prefer to keep the fur there, safe from sight, where no one could steal it from her, she took it to Burung Gagak. The tribe’s wellbeing outweighed the value of her silly treasures.
She laid it before the elder, setting it inside the circle of stones as a special gesture of respect. Hopefully Burung Gagak wouldn’t want to keep it for her own. The older female cocked her head, studying it before picking it up to turn it over. She tasted it, then laid it down again and stared at it.
Raven fretted enough to touch one of Burung Gagak’s stones, though she didn’t move it. The gap bothered her. It seemed to stare in accusation. So easily could one or more be lost. Enough gone and it wouldn’t be a circle.
“Fur,” Burung Gagak finally said and Raven tamped back her impatience.
“Not fur like any I’ve seen.”
“No, this is other. You are right that this is a new Thing in the forest. It, however, is no concern of yours.” Burung Gagak pushed the tuft of fur back to Raven, to her relief and consternation. Yes, she wanted to keep it, but why didn’t the elder? Perhaps it held ill-luck. “Take your keepsake and remember, but stay out of the old forest. Leave it be. Do not fret.”
“But, I hear that noise and ...” She shuddered, images of blood droplets like berries spinning in another, larger circle of meaning she couldn’t grasp either.
“Don’t listen. Put your head down again. The price for some answers is far too high.” Burung Gagak plucked another rock from the tumble nearby and placed it where the other had been, the one she’d tossed away. “One is lost, but another found. See? Balance is restored. But this is not always so. Sometimes what is lost can never be replaced.”
“It seems to me,” Raven said, keeping the words slow to rein in her impatience, “that perhaps curiosity in all things is not our central tenet. Not if fear rules over it.”
Burung Gagak chuckled, nudging the stone into a position she liked better, though it looked the same to Raven. “It seems to me,” she replied, “that our fledgling grows wise. Continue to exercise that wisdom and heed my words. Only sorrow can come of chasing the Thing in the woods.”
She stayed away from that part of the forest for a while after the talk with Burung Gagak, as an obedient daughter of the tribe should. Also a frost had come, turning the leaves brighter than the fiery tuft of fur she’d once again tucked away in her secret cache. Soon there would not be so much to eat and an empty stomach demands attention as much as curiosity. One of her mother’s sayings, not Burung Gagak’s. Uwak had a far more practical bent, but then she was also not an elder. It seemed to Raven that the elders spoke more of philosophy than prosaic concerns like the coming cold season and gathering nuts and grasshoppers.
But that didn’t mean Raven stopped listening for the Thing in the forest.
She couldn’t help herself. At night, when the small birds and bugs went quiet and all the tribe slept, the noise of fur sometimes wakened her. It murmured of sleepy death, of softness, warmth, and always the liquid spurt of blood. She tried to heed Burung Gagak’s advice, putting her head down, turning a deaf ear to the sound, and snuggling in with her siblings, all tangled together in a circle like the elder’s stones, under their mother’s wing and their father’s watchful gaze.
Still, it wound its way into her dreams, both hounding and luring her. She dre
amt she flew through a clear blue sky. She’d always loved the flying dreams, gliding over new places and fantastic lands, soaring high on the thunder wind, ecstatic and free. But since the fur Thing had sounded into her life, the flying dream had changed.
The noise always came first, with its guttural snarl. Hot breath flowed from behind, the scent of blood swamping her. Then the slice of long, sharp teeth snatching her from the sky, tumbling her back to the ground. The ring of blood awaited her, like a cycle of Burung Gagak’s stones, the pattern circling to greet her death.
Always she awoke before she hit the earth. Sometimes a bare moment before.
Lying there in the dark, her family’s gentle breath whistling around her, she knew it made no sense for her blood to be spattered before she hit, but that’s how it was in the dream. Perhaps that was another of Burung Gagak’s other worlds, where events went in a different order. The blood was always hers and she knew in her bones that the dream where she finished the fall would be the night she died.
Superstitious, unreasonable thoughts, but—though she snuggled back into the tangle of her sleeping family and tried to sleep—the noise of fur muttered at her from the old forest, promising that, though her tribe all put down their heads, ignoring its presence, that would not make it disappear.
Perhaps turning a blind eye like Burung Gagak’s would protect them, and Raven risked its wrath by giving it so much attention. But it seemed beyond her to stop.
And when it happened, she wasn’t the first to die.
It was the day of the first snowfall.
All the tribe loved first snow. The tumble of fat, fluffy flakes brought fresh crispness to the air. As the snow accumulated into drifts of white, her tribe—youngling and elder alike—set aside their tasks to frolic in it. They chased each other about, sending the flakes whirling into new dances. Others made designs in the snow, complex patterns more delicate than could be made with rocks or flower petals.
Even Burung Gagak joined in, brushing the snow from her stolid stone arrangements and adding to them with furrows and walls of ice in fanciful whorls that softened their stern lines.
The time of play meant suspension of the usual tasks. Besides, it heralded the beginning of the quiet season, when they would sleep in warmth, raiding the tribe’s communal caches to keep everyone’s bellies full through the cold season. There would not be much more time to add to them, and what winter forage they could find would not change now.
The time of play meant a group of younglings spiraled out in their game of chase, past the far end of the meadow and into the old trees. It wasn’t night, so Raven didn’t think of it. Didn’t remark the youngling’s path or that it might bring them near the Thing. Except for that lone late afternoon, the noise of fur muttered only at night. But the snow sky hung low and gloomy, making a false dark.
She never heard it, that time.
But when two of the younglings returned in a panic, the dread knowledge settled hard into her bones, colder than any snow.
“A Thing!” young Korppi cried, Grajo hopping from foot to foot beside her in wordless agitation. “With fur! And teeth! And Ċawlun is...” She gulped, unable to finish.
But Raven knew.
When the elders went to investigate, she did not go with them, of course. A youth of her station would not be trusted with so august a mission. This is a matter for the elders, not a youngling. Burung Gagak, of course, stayed behind with her circles of rocks. With her blind eye, she did better to stay back with the tribe, where her age, wisdom and rank ensured all brought food and bedding material to her. Neither did the elder betray Raven’s secret, that she’d already been to find the Thing and spoke no warning.
Perhaps Burung Gagak shared her guilt over that. Perhaps not.
When the elders who’d gone returned, all the tribe assembled, crying out raucous questions, a cawing cacophony until Elder Fiach Dubh silenced them with a long, searing stare from his obsidian eyes. With the blanket of snow behind them, the elders all looked stark in their blackness. Or maybe that was Raven’s fear, making her think they seemed grim in contrast.
She stayed well back, Havraní and Ronk huddling up with her, all behind Uwak, as if their mother could shield them as she had when they were younglings.
Con Qa moved up beside Fiach Dubh, the fourth elder, Kara Karga, flanking their leader on the other side. Burung Gagak grudgingly left her usual station, hobbling over to show solidarity with the elders, though they couldn’t know she had information, too. Burung Gagak caught Raven’s gaze with her good eye, bobbing her head once in acknowledgement. Of what, exactly, Raven didn’t know.
“Young Ċawlun is lost to us,” Fiach Dubh announced, voice ringing harsh in the chill air, the only other sound the rush of the snow wind in the canopy. Until Ċawlun’s mother, Holló, wailed, a broken cry of pain. Korppi and Grajo were barely visible, miserable heaps squashed between their two parents, as if they still needed protecting.
“What killed our daughter?” Ċawlun’s father asked. He might not wail as his mate did but he sounded no less wounded. “What Thing is in the forest that could kill one of us? The tribe has no enemies.”
“Korppi and Grajo did not see,” Fiach Dubh spoke to them all.
“We spoke to the younglings extensively,” Kara Karga added. “They only know that our lost daughter went beyond the big boulder and did not return. When they went to find her they found nothing more than we did. The evidence of her passing.”
“What?” Uwak called out, gathering Raven and her siblings close. “What did you see there? Con Qa—you know I will make you tell me and then we will all talk amongst ourselves. You may as well speak to us all, here and now.”
Raven’s father seemed weary. The snow hurled around them, no longer festive or joy-making. “Only blood, Uwak. We found only blood left behind and nothing more.”
Raven waited until Havraní and Ronk were too occupied to follow her to her secret hiding spot. It helped that they kept close to their mother and the rest of the tribe, even though they’d only been forbidden to go into the old forest. However, fear had also made them more likely to cling to Raven.
She knew better than to go directly to her secret cache, as Havraní in particular could be clever about following in stealth—and she idolized her big sister, determined to go everywhere Raven went, do everything she did. Which meant getting into Raven’s special treasures, too.
When Havraní had first left the nest, Raven showed her baby sister the shinies, mostly to keep her occupied as their mother, harried by Ronk’s more demanding nature, had asked her to do. Havraní had never forgotten about them, far more interested in stealing—or beguiling them as a gift—from Raven than acquiring her own.
With Havraní so clingy—and suspicious—Raven wouldn’t have gone to her secret cache, but the guilt nibbled at her, pecking away at her sleep, much as listening for any mutters from the fur did. Though she hadn’t heard the noise since it took little Ċawlun.
She should show at least her father the tuft of fur she’d found. Perhaps he’d know what it meant. He didn’t possess Burung Gagak’s blind eye, so he might have a different perspective on what to do about the Thing. She would show only Con Qa, as her father and not an elder. He might deem her unwise in listening to Burung Gagak’s advice—or unwise in disregarding it by showing him the fur. Either way, it would remain between them, and any punishment he set her would remain private. She hoped. Or perhaps he’d share with the other elders and Burung Gagak would be disappointed in her and refuse to share her wisdom any further.
This growing wise was far more difficult than it seemed on the outset.
The forest, though young on this side, still had many old trees, both standing and fallen. The snow wind whistled through their branches, sending scuds of white flakes falling here and there, drawing her eye. Just snow and trees. A few small birds. Nothing more.
Raven edged closer to her hiding spot, the big charred long just over there. Snow whumphed, a twig cr
acking with it. Not a normal forest sound.
“Havraní?” she called. No answer. Only the groan of trees, the scuttle of mice under the snow. Her skin prickled. She scanned all around her for the Thing with fur. Above? Beneath? How could she look for it when she didn’t know what it looked like? She listened hard for the noise. Nothing.
Then a flash of black, darker and glossier than the tree bark and charred shadows.
“Havraní!” She let her fear become anger, infusing her harsh call with command. “I know that’s you. Come out. You’re not supposed to be here.”
Havraní edged out onto a log, balancing there sullenly. “You’re not supposed to be here either.”
“That’s not true. You’re to stay with Mother, Ronk and the tribe because you’re younger. This part of the forest isn’t forbidden to me.”
“But what are you doing? There’s no food to be gathered.” Havraní hopped from log to log, nimble and quick, black eyes flicking to survey the grove with bright curiosity. “Is this your hiding place?”
“No, it’s not.” Raven could lie convincingly when she tried. Something else Burung Gagak had taught her.
“Then what are you doing here? I don’t want the Thing to get you.” Havraní used her guile, yes, to get what she wanted, but she also loved her sister and the worry was genuine. Ronk and Havraní had each other, but after Raven’s nameless brother died, she’d had no siblings until these two were born the following season. She’d spent a great deal of time playing with them and showing them things she’d discovered while she played alone, and so they’d grown far more attached to her than they might have otherwise.
“The Thing won’t get me,” she reassured the youngling. “It’s in the old part of the forest.”
“But what’s to stop it from coming here?”
“Why would it? It lives over there.”
