William let go of the rope. "You're planning to eat those?"
She stuck her chin in the air. He'd touched a nerve. "Yep!"
"All right. First of all, squirrels aren't good to eat. The only thing you can make with them is stew, and even then, they're bony and they stink. Rats, same. Don't eat rats. They carry a sickness that will give you fever, cramps, and chills, and your skin and eyes will turn yellow. All these over there are too rotten to eat. That one over there has been picked on by birds, and that one's got maggots. Your fish over there is hanging too close to the trunk and there are spots on it - that's because the ants from that hill over there have been going up the tree and eating your kill."
Lark's eyes turned as big as saucers.
William pulled the rope, lifting the ermine thing. "Not sure what this is ..."
"It's a Mire weasel. He killed those squirrels over there and ate their babies."
That explained things. The weasel raided a nest and was punished. "I wouldn't eat him either," William said. "Unless I was really hungry. But since he's fresh, he'll do."
He cut the corpse from the rope and laid it on the tree. "The reason you hang things is to drain the blood, cool them down, and keep creatures like that dimwit under us from eating your food. If you take a creature's life to keep you going, you have to treat it with respect and not waste it." He split the carcass. "The first thing you do is pull the insides out. That's called dressing. Pay attention to the stomach and the guts, you don't want to cut them. This right here is the liver. This dark blob is full of bile. You cut that open and the whole thing is shot. It's too bitter to eat."
He dumped the innards on the ground and shook the weasel to fling off any of the old blood.
"Now you skin it. Like this. If you leave a bit of fat on it, the meat won't dry out. Also, you have to keep flies off of it. Steal a can of black pepper and sprinkle that on the meat. Flies don't care for it." He finished skinning and held up the bare carcass. "Now, you can cook it, or you can store it. If you want to store it, you can - freeze it - but I don't see how you could here, so your choices are curing it or smoking the meat ..."
The tiny hairs on the back of his neck rose. He felt the weight of a gaze on his back sharp as a dagger.
William turned slowly.
Two eyes glared at him from the darkness between the branches of a pine.
"What the hell is that?" he whispered.
Lark's voice trembled. "The big monster."
The eyes took his measure. William looked deep into them and found an almost human awareness, a cruel and malevolent intelligence that shot a wave of icy alarm down his spine. He tensed like a coiled spring.
The diamond pupils shrank into slits, looking past William, at the girl in the branches behind him.
William pulled the crossbow from his back and locked the weapon's arms.
The eyes shifted, tracking Lark. Whatever it was in the pine was about to pounce.
"Run."
"What?" Lark whispered.
"Run. Now."
William raised the crossbow. Hello, asshole.
The eyes fixed on him.
That's right. Forget the kid. Pay attention to me. William gently squeezed the trigger. A poisoned bolt whistled through the air and bit below the eyes.
A snarl of pure pain ripped through the night.
Behind him Lark scrambled down the tree.
The creature didn't go down. He hit it with a poisoned bolt, and it didn't go down.
The eyes swung up, the bolt moving with them. He caught a glimpse of a nightmarish face, pale, hairless, with elongated jaws flashing a forest of teeth.
The beast bunched its powerful back legs and launched its enormous bulk into the space between them. William fired a second time and leaped to intercept it.
THE huge body hit William in midair. Like being hit by a truck. William slammed against the oak, the creature on top of him. The air burst from his lungs in a single sharp grunt. Pain blossomed between his ribs. Huge jaws gaped an inch from his face, releasing a cloud of fetid breath. Sonovabitch. William snarled and sliced across the beast's throat. Blood poured.
A thick muscled paw smashed his head. The world teetered. Colored circles burst before his eyes.
He sliced again, pinned down by the creature's weight. Two bolts, two cuts across the neck. It should've been dead.
The next hit knocked him into a woozy, furious haze.
Half-blind, William thrust the knife into the beast's flesh and locked his hand on it.
A thick leg swiped him, clenching him in a steel-hard clamp. William shook his head, gripping the knife. The woods slid by him in a flurry of green stains - they were moving. The beast clutched at the trunk of the oak like a lizard and climbed up to the crown, dragging him with it.
William twisted, spreading the fingers of his left hand, jammed the sleeper against a vein bulging underneath the creature's pale skin, and squeezed. The needle punched into the blood vessels, squirting the contents of the capsule into the bloodstream. Enough narcotic to drop a grown man where he stood.
The creature snarled and shook him like a dog shakes a rat. William snarled back, punching the needles into the beast's neck in rapid succession: one, two, three. The sleeper clicked, out of ammo.
The beast hissed and dropped him. William plummeted in a shower of broken branches. His fingers caught a tree limb. He grabbed it, nearly dislocating his shoulders, swung himself up and over like a gymnast, and dropped down to the forest floor.
His vision cleared. He jerked his head up. Above him, the beast descended the tree, moving down the trunk upside down, headfirst.
Bolts, poison, knife, enough narcotic to drop a twelve-hundred-pound bull in mid-charge, and it still moved. William backed away.
The brute leaped to the ground. The moon tore through the clouds, flooding the beast in silvery light. Long and corded with hard muscle, it stood on four massive legs, equipped with five thick, clawed fingers. Coarse brown fur grew in patches on its powerful forequarters and along the sides, thickening to cover the pelvis but failing to completely hide the wrinkled flesh-colored skin. Flat cartilaginous ridges guarded the curve of its spine, flaring into bony plates to sheath the top of its narrow skull. The long serpentine tail lashed and flexed, coiling. Two deep bloody gashes split his neck.
In his entire life, William had never seen anything like it.
The creature dug the ground with a clawed paw, more simian than canine. The malevolent eyes glared at William. The flesh around the wounds on its neck shivered. The edges pulled together, the red muscle knitted, the skin stretched, and suddenly the cuts were gone. Nothing save the lines of two thin scars remained.