by Justin Wayne
***
The trail was fairly recent and easy enough to follow what with the snow giving the prints extra definition, but it took the strangest winding path he had ever seen. Rather than take a simple route to some sheltered area as typical of deer, this one went around obstacles and sometimes through them only to double back on itself and take a wide arc to circle around. He could picture the deer making it but not why.
He crept through a copse of trees and turned sideways to squeeze between two trunks through a narrow space then grimaced as thorns caught his cloak and noisily tugged free.
A twig snapped nearby and he froze mid-step; perched awkwardly on one foot.
His eyes raked the whirling forest as snow and ice crisscrossed the air and blurred his vision. The grid pattern of tree branches, shrubbery, vines, and their shadows across from them, all shook and swayed with disorienting delays. The gap between light and dark disrupted depth perception and the ground rolled as the wind shifted the powder.
He relaxed his eyes then rather than attempting to focus on any specific part of the mottled background. The scene steadied and seemed to calm as the motion became irrelevant. He held the entirety of the picture before him only as it was and expected nothing more to appear.
Then something did.
