Ike Hamill - The Hunting Tree Trilogy

Crooked Tree remembered the summer gatherings of his youth, when families would come together. Boys would leave their mothers to join the bachelor groups and girls would be wooed by young men. The largest of those gatherings Crooked Tree had attended hadn’t equaled the magnitude of the village beneath him. He wondered what his father would think of these sights.

He shook his head to break his reverie and ran down the other side of the hill in a wide arc so he could turn back east to his eventual goal. Once he had crossed a few more hills, still running at full-speed, he paused at the top of another ridge to assess the progress of the pursuit. A stand of tall pines gave him a perch from which to survey. Echoing in the distance, howling dogs drove wildlife through the forest, away from the village. The sound of baying and crashing was soon muffled by a thumping, chugging sound coming from a flying thing, hovering over the woods to the west. Crooked Tree saw the lights of the effort on the ground and in the air and realized they had underestimated his speed, but wouldn’t make that mistake for long. They were poor trackers, and slow at the chase, but they learned quickly and possessed unfamiliar advantages.

Before climbing down from the pine tree, Crooked Tree spun around its trunk, looking each direction to plot his strategy. With their ability to move through the sky, he needed to stay well ahead of his pursuers and that would mean moving in an unexpected direction. Back west, and to the north, he spotted a set of bald mountains, which would mean rough terrain, but exposure from above. To the right of those mountains the glow on the horizon meant another large village, perhaps even bigger than the one he had just left. To his south he saw a black hole in the landscape signaling a large body of water. He made his decision—he would move south until he found that lake, and then head east if he could.

When he had climbed halfway down the tall tree, Crooked Tree jumped to the next tree and made his way halfway down the hill without leaving the branches. His descent made a crashing racket, but he wanted to shake them off his scent. With that in mind, Crooked Tree took a route that led him up and down smaller hills where he could spring from the forest floor up to a rock ledge, or down from a ridge to a tree below. He suffered scrapes and bruises, bouncing off the terrain, but they healed almost instantly.

Once he descended to the foothills, Crooked Tree was unprepared for the thick, scrubby swamp he found. To stay clear of the hard-packed road to his left, he had to circle to the right, bringing him closer to the hunt. He could hear them, still several hills away, but closing the distance. To his dismay, he could also sense a mounting pursuit gearing up to the west. They focused on where they believed he would emerge from the woods.

Just west of the swamp he found an open forest of tall, protective trees. Crooked Tree ran at full tilt, as fast as he could towards the smell of the lake to his south. He ran alongside a small creek that joined forces with another, tributaries of the water ahead. He jumped across the waterway, clearing an amazing distance downstream.

As he neared the lake, Crooked Tree discovered a row of houses lining the edge of the body of water. The wind changed and he smelled their campfires and roasting meat. He kept his distance and skirted the swamp. Soon he found himself back in the proximity of the paved road, and men streaking north to try to cut off his escape. He crouched in the brush and waited for an opportunity to cross.

One more set of men passed, packed into their conveyance, and Crooked Tree crept out from the brush to cross. Red lights flashed from his left and he felt that someone had perceived his presence. He melted back into the tall grass and waited. The men continued their movement north, but Crooked Tree knew he had just been very lucky. A very intuitive tracker had passed by and almost detected him. As he sprinted across the road, he resolved to increase his prudence even further and not underestimate these hunters again.

Crooked Tree maintained a fast pace for most of the night, stopping only to drink from springs and climb the occasional tree to spot the chase. Before dawn he ascended another hill and reached out with every sense to find a trace of the men on his trail. He couldn’t find any evidence of their pursuit in the distance. He rested on a rocky ledge and considered next move.

Through the night, his exertion had brought several realizations. He seemed to be learning about this world at a faster pace than experience could justify. With very little interaction with its inhabitants, other than killing or being chased, he had acquired details about their language, society, and culture. Crooked Tree supposed that he had gained some of this knowledge just from sensing the thoughts of the sleeping people around him, but guessed that most of it had been from ingesting the organs of his prey. He thought about that first night after plunging off the cliff—it had seemed natural to learn and grow from his relatives, but somehow the idea of learning from these soft, mysterious denizens of this foreign world felt unlikely and distasteful. Nonetheless, he couldn’t deny the new facts swirling around in his consciousness.

The roads he had used the first few nights were dangerous to him now, because they also carried cars with police who were looking for him.

Crooked tree rolled these words around on his tongue—“Khaaaars,” he pronounced slowly.

“Pole-eesssss,” he continued.

He rose to his feet and climbed halfway down the rocks before continuing laterally, to make his scent harder to track. He sprung over a gap and clutched the wall on the other side of the drop. Pausing to look at the sky, he realized that dawn would be on him before long. He had run most of the night and would need cover soon. It seemed unlikely he would find another empty house in this sparsely populated area, and caves were few and far between. The mountains in this region seemed older—more overgrown and eroded—and not likely to have good cover.

Climbing down from his low ridge, Crooked Tree took to the forest floor and set off to seek shelter. With dawn approaching, he doubled back to a familiar smell and found the remnants of a bear den dug into the hillside. The interior barely accommodated his bulk, but he bent and twisted until he fit. Pulling a long, flat rock across the entrance, he sealed himself in and closed his eyes. A pair of frightened mice scurried across his arm, fleeing their hideout’s new occupant.

Against his eyelids, Crooked Tree pictured the chase of the night before. The memories he had stolen from his victim’s brains together with the behavior of the police forced Crooked Tree to realize the real strengths of his pursuers. They had firepower, speed on roads and in the air, and instant communication. What they lacked was courage, confidence, and instinct. Self-preservation weakened these warriors.

As dawn broke outside, Crooked Tree drifted off to sleep, packed into his underground hole.

“HEY KID, THAT WAS a pretty good catch back there,” said the girl, catching up to Davey as he walked towards the building.

“Thanks,” said Davey.

He glanced over at her and recognized her from the adjacent field. She had been doing fielding drills while he was training to catch foul pop ups. His coach hadn’t even begun their lesson on foul pops, but when the ball had popped off the coach’s bat and disappeared above his head, he had reacted instinctively. Head tilted back, he saw the ball even before he shed his mask. Jogging evenly, Davey tracked the ball towards the fence.

With one hand out, Davey saw the ball land in his glove and then begin to quickly skitter away. His hand closed fast, but the ball was faster, it rolled off the end of his glove and fell towards the dirt. Davey saw everything in slow motion: the wicked backspin of the ball, the dust kicking from his glove, the arc of the descent. His legs triggered, dropping his body at the same rate as the ball. When he saw that he couldn’t catch up to the speed of the ball, he thrust his arm out and down, picking up the extra speed he needed. He scooped the ball before it even travelled half the distance to the ground and this time he clamped his fingers tight around the spinning baseball, and slapped it still with his right hand.