A sudden rustling in the branches behind put her immediately on alert. Urso bared his teeth.
Carefully, Atalanta lowered the water skin and slid the bow from her shoulder. Then in one quick movement she fitted an arrow to her bowstring. Spinning about, she loosed off a shot. The arrow clipped the bushy tail of a squirrel, sending it chittering into cover.
Atalanta gave herself a slap on the leg, partly for being so foolish but mostly for missing the target. What would Papa have said if he’d seen her waste an arrow like that? Probably, Think, Atalanta—a good hunter’s most useful weapon is the brain.
She looked until she found the arrow, buried lightly in the trunk of an oak that was twisted with the silvered leaves of an ivy vine. Pulling the arrow out carefully, she checked to be certain that the arrowhead was still whole before smoothing its feathers and replacing it in her quiver.
She shook her head. “That’s it, then, bear. We’re going to have to search the whole forest.”
He grunted in return.
They searched for the rest of the day without finding any more tracks. Not the beast’s trail—nor any deer’s or boar’s trail either. Atalanta knew she was a good stalker. Her father had boasted to the hunters they occasionally met that she was the most natural trail-finder he’d ever known.
But there was nothing.
Nothing!
The longer they searched, the more Atalanta worried. The beast was huge and smart, and she feared he might be invisible as well. Even if they found the thing, she wondered if she was strong enough to kill it, with or without Urso’s help.
Urso seemed baffled, too. He made curious little snuffling sounds, and more than once simply sat down in the middle of the path, as if to say he wasn’t going a step farther.
By early evening Atalanta was beginning to think about finding a campsite.
“A cave,” she said to the bear. That would be more easily defended than an open clearing.
Urso was walking ahead of her when all of a sudden he crouched low, his back hump bristling. He began to growl.
She ran over and put her hand on his back, whispering, “What do you smell?” Her fingers tightened around the haft of the javelin. “Is it the beast?”
Urso started forward through the bushes and Atalanta followed close behind. The bushes snapped back against her bare legs but she never noticed. She was intent on what was ahead.
They entered a small clearing. It was filled with the stink of recent death, a day or two old at the most. Flies buzzed around a corpse. Or what was left of one. It was clearly a deer, a big stag by the antlers. But the rest had been stripped, flesh and innards devoured, bones scattered. Only a few tatters of brown skin were left, some dangling from branches of a tall tree. It was around those tatters that the flies were buzzing.
Urso growled, long and low.
“What is this creature?” Atalanta whispered. She had never seen such a kill before. The deer had simply been ripped to pieces. And there were no tracks leading to or away from the place.
None.
They found a nearby cave and once Urso had sniffed it out, declaring it safe, they sheltered there for the night. He slept by the entrance, filling the opening with his big furry presence.
Atalanta put her head against his flank, using it as a kind of pillow. With each breath the bear took, his body rose and fell beneath her head. After the grief of the day, she was happy to be lulled to sleep that way.
Her last dreaming thought was that tomorrow would bring the start of a new life. A life in the wild. Or maybe, she thought—remembering the bear that had mothered her—maybe it was a return to her old one. Either way, she promised herself she would be ready.
CHAPTER SIX
THE WOODLAND GOD
THE BEAST’S TRAIL WAS not to be found. For days the two of them hunted for it, casting larger and larger circles with the deer’s few pitiful remains as the center of their search.
They returned each night to the cave that had become their home.
For the first few days, the search was all that had mattered. But as it became clear the beast had really disappeared, the two of them began to enjoy sharing the wild together. They chased through the trees, splashed happily in the streams, found wild berries and sweet honey, and ate fish the bear caught in his big claws. He even learned to like the fish cooked over an oak fire, for Atalanta could not stand eating it raw.
However, one morning when Atalanta woke, Urso was not in the cave.
She got up slowly, stretched, poked her head out of the cave entrance, thinking he was off fishing on his own.
“Urso,” she called.
There was no low growling answer.
“Are you hiding?”
Still no response.
Taking her javelin and knife and water skin, she went down to the river. She checked their berry bushes, their honey tree, even tracked halfway back to the deer clearing.
There was no sign of him.
So she did what she should have done at first, would have done at first if she’d not been in such a hurry: follow his trail from the cave.
He’d made no attempt to disguise his tracks. They led north.
“Now why are you going there?” she whispered. She was resolved to follow him. But something stopped her, something her father had once said about male bears. “They are solitary creatures.”
Well, he hadn’t been solitary in the past week.
She thought about that. Perhaps he had done that for her, to help her, his old littermate. But now he needed time to himself.
Sitting on her haunches, Atalanta stared northward. “You’ll return, bear,” she whispered. “When you’re ready.” She was sure of it.
But now, for the first time, she felt truly alone. She tried the word out loud. “Alone.” It was less frightening that way. “Alone!”
Actually, she’d never had much to do with people. Never really wanted to. Her mother and father and the forest had been enough for her.
Oh, once in a while her father brought home hunters he knew who were in their woods. Sometimes she’d accompanied him when he went on a trading journey to the villages of the Arcadian plain. There they’d bartered deerskins, rabbit pelts, tusks and antlers for corn, cheese, olives, wine. He seemed at ease with the villagers, bantering back and forth with them.
But on those visits, when she’d stood in the marketplace, Atalanta had been aware of the stares she drew—from children and adults alike. Somehow they could sense her wildness and wanted no part of it. Many were the fights she’d gotten into, wiping the smirk from a mocking face with a slap from the butt end of her small spear. No matter how outnumbered she was, she always held her own—kicking and clawing like a crazed wildcat.
“There’d be no trouble if they’d only leave me alone,” she’d told her father. “All I want is to be left alone.”
“You’re too wild, daughter,” he told her.
“I like being wild.”
She thought about the villages now.
“I can manage just fine out here,” she told herself. “They have nothing I need. Nothing.”
But she missed the bear.
Urso was away for almost a week before returning.
The second time he left, Atalanta was anxious about it, but by the third time, she understood his pattern and was comfortable with it.
Each time they came together again, it was a grand reunion. They would seek out rivers and pools where they plunged under the water with a huge splash to see who could come up with the biggest fish. They ran races through the twisting forest tracks, Atalanta forcing her legs to move faster and faster until she could just about keep pace with Urso as he bounded along.
They no longer looked for the killer beast. It was gone as if it had never been.