Hunted(15)

Doe-Eyes accompanied her on days when the sun was high, the temperatures otherwise too harsh for her slight build. Though Asenka promised to lavish her with affection on the days Yeva left her behind, the sight of the dog with her head slung low, haunting the doorway, often made Yeva relent at the last minute and allow the dog to come. She was grateful for the company, and for Doe-Eyes’s ability to flush prey out of brush and thicket that Yeva might never have discovered on her own.

She never came back to the house empty-handed, and often with more than they needed for the day’s meal. Albe constructed a rudimentary smokehouse by the shed, and they began to supplement their stores of food rather than deplete them. The prey Yeva took was too small and unremarkable for saleable pelts, but she cleaned and scraped each hide anyway in the evenings, to save for their own uses in the burgeoning winter. They could not afford to waste anything.

She made a point of rising early enough to avoid her sisters, but once she woke to find Asenka kneeling at her side, stirring the fire. Yeva started to rise, but her sister set the poker down and laid a hand on her arm.

“Yeva,” she whispered, her eyes anxious. “Stay. You don’t need to go out every day. We have food. Stay with us today.”

Yeva’s eyes blurred, and she blinked hard. “I can’t,” she whispered back.

Asenka’s hand shifted to touch Yeva’s cheek, then brushed some of her sleep-tangled hair out of her eyes. “What is it you’re looking for out there?”

Yeva blinked again, about to reply that she wasn’t looking for anything, just game for their survival—but her throat closed. How was it her sisters knew her so well, better even than she knew herself? She drew a shaking breath. “I don’t know,” she breathed. “Something more.”

After a week had passed, their father returned. He arrived in the evening, knocking his feet against the doorframe to dislodge the snow on his boots, a thick, wild growth of stubble half masking his face. Pelei came barreling in so that he and Doe-Eyes could turn circles around each other, sniffing and sniffing and remembering.

Yeva’s father threw himself into his chair by the fire while Lena made tea. “It knows I’m here,” he said, stabbing a finger at the arm of the chair. “It is driving the other animals from me. Tracking me. I’ve seen not even a single rabbit all week.”

Yeva exchanged glances with her sisters. Not one of them mentioned the gradually increasing store of dried meats in their larder. Yeva took her father’s chilly hand in hers, as much to keep him from harming himself in his frustration as to comfort him. “Perhaps you are still learning the forest again,” she said carefully, “and that’s why you haven’t come across any game.”

“No,” grunted her father, sinking back into his chair and watching the fire, pulling his hand free of Yeva’s in order to rub at his bristly face. “No. There is something out there. Something cunning.”

“Father, surely there can’t be—”

“I have seen it before.”

Yeva glanced up to find Asenka watching them, her expression bathed in concern. Yeva tried again to touch her father’s hand, but he would not be calmed.

“What did you see before?” she asked softly.

But her father only shook his head, and shook his head again.

Eventually Albe and her sisters ambled off to bed and it was only Yeva and her father by the fire. And after a time, because she was tired from her day’s hunt, Yeva too drifted off to sleep. She had no memory of her father leaving the chair for his own bed.

He could not be convinced to stay, planning to depart again with Pelei at his side when the morning dawned clear and cold. He took food from the stores, not noticing that they had grown since he was last home. The single-mindedness with which he planned his return to the forest chilled Yeva. Always, he had confided in her. She had seen hints of this passion in him when she was very young, when he would tell her stories of the things he had seen in the heart of the wood. Things he’d hunted—things he’d killed. Things that had escaped.

The creatures he used to tell her about—the monsters and the wonders hidden deep within the forest, where the other hunters refused to go—they were stories. Fantasies invented to teach children good manners, to fascinate them on cold winter days when they could not play outside. Her father had always spoken of them as if they were real, but that was to delight Yeva, to let her believe, when she was still too small to know better. The way he was acting now, muttering about the thing tracking him, pacing as he recounted the old stories to himself, still acting as though they were true—it no longer delighted her. She was frightened.

“Father!” she shouted finally, on the morning of his planned departure. “Father, you must stay. Something is wrong. Please—let Lena make you some tea.”

“I don’t need tea,” he said, strapping his crossbow to his back and stamping his feet into his boots. He rubbed at his arm, which had been stiff and sore all morning.

“Then bring me with you,” she said, moving forward to take his hand. “If there is some creature out there with intelligence then two sets of eyes, two minds, will be better than you alone.”

“Too dangerous,” Tvertko grunted, jerking his hand away.

“You don’t know that,” she argued.

He stopped, looking up from his pack to meet her gaze, though he seemed to be staring through her at a distant memory. “It is a Beast,” he said. “A monster unlike anything in any story. It was there twenty years ago. When your mother asked me to give up hunting, it was the one thing I had not, could not catch. And it is there still. When I kill it, its head will bring such a price that we will be able to return home.”