Ike Hamill - The Hunting Tree Trilogy

He caught the little squirt of blood in his open mouth and felt the liquid spread through his awaiting tissue.

His eye blinked twice and he spotted another bat swopping into the cave.

Almost half the colony fell victim to Crooked Tree that night before he returned to sleep in his narrow chamber.

WHEN CROOKED TREE AWOKE for the fourth time, he knew that this would be the night of his escape. He wasted no time on bats, and instead began to claw at the rocks around the small patch of starlight. By midnight he estimated that he might just barely fit through the opening, but he was too tired to try. Instead, he positioned himself at the mouth of the cave and snatched the last few bats brave enough to attempt refuge in the cave.

While he waited for his flying refreshments, Crooked Tree reached out and attempted to sense the boy. The boy’s thoughts were elusive, as if he had learned how to disguise his mind amongst the masses, but eventually Crooked Tree was able to hone in on him. Crooked Tree was dismayed to find that the boy had been developing rapidly; closer to outbreak than Crooked Tree would have imagined.

He mustered his strength and pulled himself through the hole, breathing plentiful fresh air and turning his face to the sky.

How many winters does it take for the stars to change? Crooked Tree wondered as he beheld the sky.

The effect was disorienting: not only had some of the stars moved, but hundreds were missing. It took him several deep breaths to realize the issue. Even though the moon had set, the sky looked as bright as if the moon were nearly full. In several directions the horizon glowed, as if giant fires burned. When he closed his eyes, Crooked Tree realized that the directions with the most light coincided with places where he sensed multitudes of human minds. He wondered again how long he had been unconscious in the cave.

He crossed the small clearing and compared the landscape to his memory. Rocks had tumbled from the cliff, leaving the clearing littered with their debris. Some of that he attributed to the attempts to wall him into the cave, but others were too big to have been influenced by human hands.

A breeze lofted up from the valley and Crooked Tree tilted his head back to receive the information it carried. He gagged on the air, it was tainted with foreign, acrid smells. Under the local noises, far in the distance, he detected a rhythmic hissing sound, droning like rushing water.

Reducing himself to shallow, cautious breaths, he stepped through the thick bushes into the forest. Forced to duck and step over crowded limbs, Crooked Tree noted how dense and tangled the forest had become. The inhabitants were different as well—more rodents and prey compared to apex predators. He tilted his head down and listened to them scurry away from his unusual presence. He was glad to find a path that wound through the trees, but still had to hunch over to account for his height.

Moving downhill at an even pace, Crooked Tree made his way to the river while stretching his muscles and cracking his joints. Each breath helped him stand taller. At the river’s edge he knelt and lowered his face to the deep pool carved off the main current in the lee of a rock. The water’s surface bubbled and foamed with foul-smelling contamination, but his thirst overpowered his revulsion. He drank through pursed lips, sipping slowly so as not to overwhelm his tight knot of a stomach.

He drank for hours, pulling in a tiny amount of water with each sip and letting it find its way to his dehydrated extremities. He took long breaks from drinking, propping himself up against the rock and memorizing the new patterns of stars through the gaps in the canopy. Many of the trees were shorn and re-grown, several feet from the tops. Others were dead and leafless, waiting for the next strong breeze to topple them. Crooked Tree wondered what had visited all this devastation on the valley he had once known so well.

When he stood again, thirst completely slaked, he felt firm and plump. He flexed his naked muscles and admired his own form in the dim light. Crooked Tree cocked his head and listened for the hissing he had heard from the from the clearing. It was there, but greatly filtered by the trees and leaves. He was anxious to determine the source of the noise, but it emanated from the other side of river in front of him. Upstream from this point he could find a spot where he could leap across the running water, but that wouldn’t solve his entire problem.

Crooked Tree knew the boy he sought lived east, far east of this valley, and running through the center was a river he could not hope to cross. He had traversed the river before, when he was a boy, but that was when he was human and not afraid of the consequences of submerging his body in rushing water. He picked his way south along the riverbank as he considered his problem. The big river ran as far north and south as he had ever ventured, and although he knew there must be headwaters somewhere, he couldn’t gauge how far that would take him astray from his quarry.

Hundreds of paces south from where he drank, Crooked Tree climbed a small hill and found a location where the river narrowed to squeeze between walls of rock. He estimated the distance and backed away from the edge, preparing to make the leap. Just as he prepared to run, a grinding, hissing sound caught his attention to the south. Dropping to a crouch and focusing all his senses towards the sound, Crooked Tree discovered something completely unexpected. A light flickered, moving through the woods faster than a human could run. But he sensed a human associated with the light. The sound, light, and person moved from left to right and he tracked the presence until it disappeared to the west.

He stalked towards the spot where the thing had passed. As he neared the trail of the thing, he detected its odor—the same foul-smelling mixture he had whiffed earlier. He ascended a mound of gravel and found himself on a hard, gray surface, etched with countless black streaks, and bisected with both a solid and a dashed yellow line. It was clearly the hard-packed path of a huge entity. Crooked Tree guessed immediately that the trail had been formed to provide a path for a human conveyance, and he marveled at the work it must have taken to create such a trail. He was pleasantly surprised to see that the trail continued unbroken over the river he had been following.

He moved tentatively on to the bridge, bouncing to ensure its stability before committing his weight to the span. Dropping to all fours, ready to pounce for the opposite shore, he stalked across the bridge. When he had reached the other side, he heard the same hissing behind him. The lights followed almost immediately. The thing moved at a blinding speed. Crooked Tree whipped his head around and leapt into the boughs of an overhanging tree just as the lights swept over his position.

Crooked Tree held his breath as he watched the giant thing streak past on the trail below. The smell it left on the wind was disgusting, but Crooked Tree had become accustomed enough to refrain from coughing. Once it passed he dropped back to the hard surface and laid his hand on the tracks. He could feel the vibrations of the thing moving away, and felt no more smelly things coming his way. He decided to keep to the hard-packed trail. It was nearly straight, and provided enough headroom for him to run comfortably.

He covered several miles, stopping only to creep off into the woods occasionally to find his bearings. Once away from the occasional interruption of the fast-moving things, he could meditate and pinpoint the boy’s location to be sure he was moving in the right direction. Soon, his path was joined with a high strand, stretched from pole to pole. Crooked Tree’s mouth hung open as he regarded these bizarre artifacts created during his long slumber.