Page 6 of Blacktail

“Hhhhn?” The rabbit drew in a final breath. “Wrong? No. Not wrong. It is the way of the Forest God. I will not question Him.”

“That’s very pious of you.” Hate probed one of the rabbit’s wounds with his foreclaw. The rabbit didn’t so much as twitch. But when Hate’s claw clicked against bone, his father’s words drifted up to him from the deepest burrows of memory.

Use me as You see fit.

Before him, bleeding in the frost below, the rabbit looked up, wide-eyed. He was not begging. “But it is very hard. Do you see?”

“Yes,” Hate said, not unkindly. “It is.”

He snapped the rabbit’s neck.

iv

Hate wasn’t particularly devout. He and the Forest God hadn’t spoken much since he was a kitten. But the rabbit’s faith stirred something in him. As Hate picked up the carcass and climbed up the elm to eat supper, Father’s voice came to him again. For whatever reason, Father’s ghost felt chatty tonight.

Use me as You see fit.

Hate was about four years old now. Or maybe five? Surely no more than that. He was probably older now than his father had been on the day he died. It had been a lovely spring day. Hate was not yet a yearling. The three of them—Father, Mother, Hate himself—were moving north, putting some distance between themselves and the ruin that had recently been their lives.

Hate remembered those days through a reddish-gray cloud of terror that only the very young can know. He thought of that time rarely, their fleeing, but the memory of it had deep roots. In the ways that mattered, it defined all that he had been or ever would be.

Now, today, Hate settled with his hare in the elm twenty or thirty feet off the ground. He lay his dinner in a nearby crook of a branch. The body was still warm. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of its mouth.

You were right, little one. Hate thought. It is hard.

As Hate ate the rabbit, his memories nibbled him. The night his father died, the three of them were fleeing north.

Why flee? No choice.

Why north? Why not?

Over the course of the previous summer, what Hate thought of at the time as Giant Metal Beasts tore down the forests of his kittenhood. By late fall, every green thing in eyeshot was dead, give or take. Around the time the leaves would have turned, men began to trickle in. By the time the first snow fell, they were everywhere. They swarmed like ants. Mother wanted to flee, but Father held out…for a little while.

Hate remembered the three of them hiding under a fallen oak. Father lay on his right, Mother on his left. It was snug. It was cozy. He hadn’t felt safe at all. He could hear Father’s heart hammering against his chest. Mother panted. Hate was trying to not embarrass himself by…well. He was frightened. The three of them watched, helpless as some terrible thing of men—he could not even guess at what—ripped away the deadfall where they’d made their den.

When there was nothing left of home but broken twigs and black earth, Hate looked at his father. His father looked at his mother.

“We should go,” Father said cheerily. “Take our kitten out. Let him see a bit of the world!”

For a moment, it looked like his mother might argue. But she didn’t.

They set out the next day before dawn. By midmorning Hate passed beyond the boundary of their woods for the first time. He remembered sniffing the faint pee marks on the rocks there, remembered being surprised at how close it was, how close it had been all along. Until then he had assumed that their forest ran on forever.

Maybe that was even true, once. When he was still young, Mother told him stories about the mountain kings of the north, the mighty herds of the south, buffalo and windigo and wolves that sometimes walked as men. A couple of times when Mother wasn’t around, Father told him that story is just another way of saying “bullshit.”

Hate didn’t argue with his father. But he did wonder. Who would make up such things? To what end? Bullshit or not, Hate liked hearing about it all—distant valleys filled with stones that might speak if they liked you, great chunks of ice that walked on three legs, beasts so old they remembered a world before men. Mother told him stories when the snow was too deep to hunt. It passed the time. And who knows? Maybe there was a nugget of truth in there somewhere.

Hate had given those times a good bit of thought over the years. Now he believed he understood what had been done to them, or at least understood better than he had at the time—probably better than his father ever had.

The three of them hadn’t gone far before they came to a long strip of what seemed like a black stone path, the thing he eventually came to think of as road. Road wasn’t made of stone, at least not as Hate knew it. It was too smooth, too straight. Road had a stripe down the middle, like the mark of a skunk. It smelled a bit skunky as well, particularly on hot days. Stones didn’t usually stink. Hate, honestly baffled, asked Father what it was. Father answered with a jolly swat.

“Stay back, you idiot.”

Hate took a perverse measure of comfort from remembering that swat, the last of an uncounted many. Our home was gone. We were hungry, terrified, thirsty, and confused…but some things you can always count on. Hate blew out a wistful breath. Miss ya, Pop.

A moment later he saw why. A bright-eyed thing stinking of smoke and men blew by fast enough to sweep back the hair of his whiskers.

“See?” Father said. “Careful.”