An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  We were desperate enough for protein that we went out hunting leather birds. We’d thought about it for a long time before we organized a hunting party — the leather birds are so vicious-looking, no one wanted to go near them. Finally, Orrin carved us bows and arrows and he and his dad taught us to shoot.

  Cheyenne Taylor and Maria Sounds had scouted out the area and noticed a pattern to the creatures’ flights around the lake, suggesting a nesting site on the far side. It proved a long walk, and we camped overnight at the northernmost end. The forest here is not like the forests I’ve known on Earth. There is a silence out here, a thick and heavy silence unbroken by crickets or frogs or any voiced thing. I lay wrapped in my blankets beneath our tarp and watched the gray mist roll across the ground, swallowing up my friends in their makeshift shelters. It was as if I was all alone in a gray realm, a realm of nothing solid, a realm that watched me and judged me and knew me alien. I didn’t sleep until the mist drifted away.

  When sunrise came, the feeble rays did not drive away the feeling of being watched. We saw no creatures, but I felt as if the woods looked back at me, as if the horsetail trees had eyes and not green fronds. The others took no notice. I wished I could find some small reason to stay on the lake shore, but instead we cut a trail into the depths of the forest. There is no hint of humanity out here, not even survey markers. Songheuser’s surveys of the area were done by satellite. I walked quietly, but every step felt heavy, as if my footprints drilled into the very heart of Huginn.

  Matthias found the roost first, a rotten hole in the side of a horsetail with ten or twelve candelabra branches. There were at least twenty-five or thirty leather birds moving in and out of the hole and gathered around it. I’d never seen one so close before. Here in their tree, they showed no signs of fear.

  The plan was for each of us to pick a critter and shoot it down. But the things made it too easy. They didn’t even try to fly away. They just sat there shrieking, and a few came down out of the tree and sat on the ground beside the dead ones. Shane Vogel walked right up to one and stuck a knife in its side, and it didn’t move a muscle to get away or protect itself. It just made one of their thin screechy noises and let him cut off its head. I picked up my one, but the others, they didn’t stop there. They killed all the leather birds that came out of the tree and tied their feet together to carry back to camp. Not all of them were even dead. They cried and screeched for a long time as we walked, and the few that were left in the tree screeched and cried back at them. The sound made the hairs on my neck stand up.

  Back at camp, we finally took a good look at our harvest. Leather birds are even uglier up close than hanging upside down by their talons: they’ve got no eyes, and their hides are all smooth greenish-brown. Their bellies open like a mouth lined with yellow hooks that rotate out as the slit flares open — if I had to, I’d guess they’re used to grab prey. It’s easy to imagine a big one flying into your face and grabbing onto your cheeks with those horrible hooks. Too easy. I’ll probably have nightmares tonight.

  Orrin used his ugly hunting knife to gut the first of the creatures. We brought out our kitchen knives and finished up a handful more to roast their gray meat over the fire. There was a chance it was poisonous, Cheyenne said, like the fungi and the ferns, but we were hungry enough to risk it.

  The meat tasted like death.

  I can’t explain that flavor. It was just wrong. I put a piece in my mouth and I knew we had made a terrible mistake.

  I couldn’t make myself even swallow the stuff. Orrin forced down a bite and immediately threw up. Matthias tried a little and spent the rest of the day sick, laying on his side, moaning with pain. We gave him ipecac and hoped for the best. (His stomach is still sore today, but he seems to have recovered.)

  We left the dead leather birds in a heap next to our camp fire. Twenty-five dead, and not a one of them worth eating. What a waste. What a horrible, horrible waste.

  STANDISH SHOULDERED her pack and doublechecked the reading on her hand unit. She hadn’t done any wilderness trekking since her school days, but GPS would keep her from getting too lost.

  All night, her meeting with Matthias Williams had replayed itself in her head. Brett had sent her an invitation to join him at Heinrich’s, and she’d ignored it. Instead, she’d gone through the box she’d found beneath the house again, her mind running through thoughts of Matthias Williams and Duncan Chambers.

  She’d gotten up first thing this morning and headed out to Matthias’s place. She’d been excited when she stood at his front door, she had to admit. One part of it was the strange little mystery of Duncan Chambers and one part was something else, something that had everything to do with Matthias’s kind voice and his patient way with kids and dogs. It was entirely ridiculous to feel so hot and bothered by a man who didn’t even use electricity, but she had to admit he was somehow sexier than Brett the Hot Security Guard.

  She’d been more than a little irritated when he wasn’t home.

  Now here she was, on her day off, trespassing on company property to figure out what happened to her dead boss. Sure, he’d only been her boss while she’d been in transit to Huginn, but she’d liked the guy in all their emails and interviews, and now the mystery he’d left for her prickled her conscious like a burr. Duncan Chambers had been investigating something out here in these woods. Maybe it was worth digging into.

  A drop of rain found the seam between the top of her coat and bottom of her knit cap and trickled down her neck, jolting her attention back to the forest around her. She stomped her feet and stretched her calf muscles.

  “Well, what do you think, Hattie? If you were Duncan Chambers, why would you have come out here?”

  The dog turned her head to look at Standish, then turned her dark eyes back toward the forest, her ears pricked up.

  “You hear something, girl?” Aside from a few small rustling sounds high up in the canopy, the woods were silent. This forest, Standish realized, was nothing like the forests she’d explored back on Earth. There were no birds to sing, no lizards or snakes to rustle in the undergrowth. It was utterly alien.

  She put her hand unit in her pocket and made sure it was zipped tight. She didn’t want to lose it out here.

  She took a few slow steps away from the UTV. Peter Bajowski had claimed Chambers was an experienced woodsman who knew the area well. People took it as a given that the forest was dangerous, but she couldn’t believe Chambers had gone into the woods of Sector 13 and simply vanished. Standish paused to adjust the straps of her pack. There was something obstinate inside her that didn’t like it when things didn’t add up. She couldn’t overlook them or turn her back.

  If there were any answers, they lay out there in Sector 13, and the only way to get there was to hike through these woods. She’d looked over the maps enough to get the lay of the land, and she didn’t think she faced any rough country. She might have to ford a few streams, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle.

  She hiked briskly, moving between the horsetail trees and the smaller plants whose names she didn’t know. It didn’t take long for the forest giants to close out the sky entirely. Some of the trees stood straight and tall, their long needles bursting from branches the size of her arms. Others stood like huge candelabras, their trunks ridged and bulging under the weight of limbs thicker than she was. She kept up the pace a good twenty minutes, her mind occupied by the task of finding a path between the trees and the thickets of ferny undergrowth. The forest smelled strange, layers she couldn’t quite place. Something like ozone and old bones with the bitterness of a crushed aspirin tablet.

  But the green and the dampness reminded her comfortingly of the Olympic National Forest. She kept expecting an elk or a raccoon to walk across her path. But instead she saw a new wonder, some kind of opalescent puffball growing on a fallen horsetail frond. It shimmered in the frond-filtered light.

  Her feet slowed. There were sounds now, a soft scurrying coming from the bases of the trees and the occasi
onal tiny chitter. She couldn’t see the tree scooters, but she found herself looking hard for one.

  She paused to bring out Hattie’s collapsible water dish and gave them both a slug of water. It seemed like the forest opened up just ahead, beyond the next stand of human-sized purple-green ferns. With a frown, she slipped the dish into the pack and then slipped around the ferns. Her boots crunched on gravel.

  “This is a road, Hattie.” She risked a glance at the sky, now dense with gray clouds, and redirected her gaze to the gravel road. A UTV could drive this easily; there might even be enough room for a second to pass. A good-sized horsetail tree had fallen across it a few meters away, and she went to sit on its trunk. The tree was thick enough that her feet dangled as she took out her hand unit.

  She checked the GPS. “We’re in Sector 13 now, girl.” She knew the dog didn’t understand a word she said, but she’d grown used to keeping her updated on the world. It felt rude not to, somehow. Standish expanded the image on her screen and frowned. “But this road isn’t on the map.”

  She swung her legs over the trunk and jumped down on the far side. The road continued in a roughly southeasterly direction; if it didn’t end or turn, it seemed like it could even connect to the main road. But there were several fallen trees blocking its length, making it impassable.

  Storms happened all the time on Huginn, and when they hit, the thin soil and constant rains meant plenty of trees fell — hell, it looked like half the work orders that came into her office were caused by falling trees and broken branches. But a sudden notion made her check the tree’s stump. If it had toppled in a storm, it would be uprooted or splintered at the base.

  She followed the trunk into the ferns and stopped beside the flat stump top. Not fallen, then. Someone had cut this tree and left it laying across the road, and a tree this size had to be worth a lot of money.

  So it was somehow worth more to someone as a road block.

  She jumped onto the tree trunk and looked around her. The fallen trees were close enough together that their branches nearly obscured the gravel, and the other trees had enough overhanging branches to make a patchy tree canopy over the road. Anyone looking from the air would probably never even notice this road was there.

  Was that why Duncan Chambers had been so interested in Sector 13? But how did it connect to the other papers she’d found in the crawlspace, like the shipping papers and the diary?

  Standish remembered the map she’d tucked in her back pocket and pulled it out. It was just a printout of the same basic survey map she had on her hand unit, but Duncan had scribbled a few things on it in faded pencil. She found the first note: nitroscribble scribble. It meant nothing to her. Maybe it was just some kind of note about a cleaning product or something. She could check his desk about that later. But there, at the bottom, a penciled line — very faint — connecting the bottom of Sector 13 with the top of Sector 12. It was her road. This one.

  Standish jammed the map back in her pocket. She had to find out where it went.

  The leather bird is perhaps the most formidable of Huginn’s fauna. Their strange — some would say unpleasant — appearance is analogous to some of Earth’s most discomforting creatures, including bats, vultures, and pterodactyls. Perhaps that is why so little research has been done on their life cycle or even their eating habits. In fact, my studies suggest the relationship between the leather bird and the tree scooter goes far beyond the simple role of predator-prey.

  — from “In Symbiosis: Tree Scooter and Leather Bird Relationships in Mixed-Stand Forests,” FORESTRY SYSTEMS JOURNAL, by Dr CM Yant.

  CHAPTER NINE

  STANDISH AND HATTIE HURRIED FORWARD, their feet crunching in the gravel. It seemed very loud after the quiet of the needle-covered forest floor. The trees on either side of the road grew even larger, and the density of their canopy leached the color out of the world. No vibrant lichen penetrated the shadows; besides the olive-green trunks of the candelabra trees, there was only the occasional ghostly outline of a Christ’s fingers plant, its juicy protuberances like the bloated white glove of a dead Mickey Mouse. Something rustled in the canopy overhead, but Standish saw nothing.

  Hattie stopped moving, her hackles rising. Standish unzipped her pocket and made sure the pepper spray was still inside, tucked beneath her hand unit. Duncan Chambers had come out here and vanished. Everyone had told her. But for the first time, she understood how something like that could happen.

  She heard the rustling again, directly above her, a dry sound like a sheet of nylon scraping against a branch. Standish scanned the trees, her neck muscles so tight they ached.

  The two leather birds stared back at her. No, not stared — those slits in their long faces were nothing like eyes. The moist edges widened and narrowed, widened and narrowed. The things were sniffing her.

  She shifted around so she could keep her gaze fixed on them as she walked, backward now, but still headed in the right direction. According to the guidebooks, they had no interest in Earth creatures. She wasn’t in any danger.

  The leather birds kept their nose slits trained on her. Another settled on the branch behind the pair. It looked bigger than the others. At this distance, she thought they might be the size of a crow or maybe a chicken. Hopefully. She had no idea how large the creatures could get.

  She forced herself to turn around and take a good look at the road ahead. It seemed to widen a little, or at least the sunlight looked a little brighter over there. She took a step forward. “Don’t run, Hattie,” she whispered.

  They moved resolutely forward. The trees rustled above them.

  Standish saw now that the road opened into a wide circular turnabout, a dead end save for a narrow trail leading into the forest, disappearing in the dark and the green. She walked steadily, her scalp prickling and creeping as if it could sense the creatures moving through the trees overhead. The clearing looked golden in the noon light. The drizzle had cleared up sometime while she’d been beneath the heavy tree cover.

  The blow between her shoulder blades sent her sprawling on the ground. Hattie growled and barked, lunging at the creature on her back. Standish threw herself sideways, hearing something crunch as she drove her weight down into the gravel. A fierce pain lit up her shoulder and she jumped to her feet, slapping at her shoulders, swearing and shouting. With a hiss, the creature let go.

  Standish raced for the narrow path leading into the woods. Fucking hell! “No interest in Earth creatures,” her butt. She needed to hide from these creepy things.

  A leather bird streaked across her path, but Hattie leaped at it, her teeth closing on air as the creature twisted around at the last second. Hattie yelped as it lashed out with the clawed tip of its wing, scoring a hit on her muzzle.

  Standish punched at the thing but hit only tail. They were so fucking fast.

  She reached the trail and skidded on leaf litter. “Hattie! Come on!”

  The dog bowled past, shoving her off the path and into the trees. Standish followed her. A ferny frond slapped her in the face, and she stumbled. Hattie barked back at her as if urging her faster.

  Then Hattie stopped in her tracks and Standish slammed into her, pitching forward and nearly braining herself on a low-hanging tree limb. She caught herself at the last minute on the slug-like limb of a Christ’s finger. The thing pulped in her grip, the briny juices running down her hands and into her sleeves. The smell, both sharp and somehow mushroom-like, made her stomach heave.

  Then she caught the other smell, the musk and sweetness of something long dead. Standish wiped her hands on her pants and glanced over her shoulder. The overgrowth hid them from the leather birds for a moment. Hattie made a perplexed little sound.

  She took a cautious step toward the dog. “What did you find, girl?”

  Hattie pawed at the heap resting against the base of the nearest tree. That red-and-blue plaid had never grown on Huginn.

  “Holy fucking shit,” Standish whispered.

  The dead man
said nothing. The meat had been stripped from his bones, leaving only a few yellowed scraps of skin clinging to his skull. Where the scalp remained, a few reddish curls still moved in the breeze. A glinting caught Standish’s eye as some many-legged creature scurried between his teeth and vanished inside the hidden crannies of what had once been a face.

  Then claws closed on her shoulder and a set of teeth drove into her ear.

  Standish ripped the leather bird off and threw it against the nearest tree. Her feet moved with a mind of their own, stomping over the dead man’s leg and careening into the forest, running hard. She crossed the trail again and leaped over a low-growing fern. There. Up ahead: a gigantic candelabra tree, the folds of its swollen trunk offering some kind of shelter. She slammed into the tree, looking for the deepest bulge to take cover behind.

  Her fingers found a crack in the trunk, a narrow gap ending at about shoulder height. She peered inside. It was too dark to see anything, but she thought the opening widened inside, curving into one of the trunk bulges. She tossed off her pack and wriggled through. A shelf-like structure ran around the inside of the tree, some kind of growth ring, maybe. It made a low seat to hunker on. She couldn’t really see outside — the folds of the tree nearly blocked off the slender opening. “Come on, Hattie. Get in here.”

  A thin, high pitched cry sounded someplace outside. The hairs on Standish’s neck rose.

  “Hurry!”

  Hattie squeezed inside. There was no place for the big dog to go except Standish’s lap. Standish grabbed her under the armpits and pulled her up. Hattie’s claws scrabbled against Standish’s legs, and then she was settled, her hindquarters filling Standish’s lap and her hot breath filling Standish’s nose. Outside, the cry sounded again, so high and thin it made Standish’s ears ache.

  How much time did she have before they found the opening in the tree? And how hidden was she inside it? With Hattie like this, she couldn’t fight them off.