Ranger Rising

Part 9: Into the Thorns

"One. Two. Three!" I counted aloud as I shoved a bale of hay off the top of the pile in the barn. It hit the ground with a heavy, hollow thud. It didn't roll towards the smaller pile like I'd hoped it would but it wasn't that heavy or hard to carry it over there. "That should do it!"

I brushed my hands off on my skirts and brushed some wayward hair from my face. The sun had risen the morning after my declaration with a grand anticlimax. Father hadn't said a word about my foray into the forest or made any further comment about the time I'd spent with Aust the day before. He'd left me a long list of morning chores to complete and a promise that he'd be back a little past midday meal. Then he'd set out to finish hashing out a payment deal for the piglets with Fields. There'd been an unspoken expectation of more chores to follow once Father returned.

However, I'd worked through enough early spring seasons to take a guess at what those tasks actually were.

And I'd done them along with all my other listed chores.

I'd watered, fed, mucked, shucked, plucked, and tried to get as many things as I could think of done.

Well, maybe I'd half-arsed a few things but not too terribly. Nothing that Father hadn't already come to expect of me. And it was pretty clear that none of the pigs were going to die in the handful of time they spent unattended to while Father was still out.

I stepped out of the barn and shut the barn doors behind me. They were looking rough after the winter. We'd need to do repairs on them eventually but that was a fall job after all the barley had been harvested and the winter crop planted. Today, I could put that in the back of my mind though. My mind was firmly on the Edirk Forest and on the path that I'd picked out for myself.

Not Father. Not the others in town. Not the gods. Me. I wanted this.

Now I just had to prove that I had what it take!

I let that thought carry me directly towards the forest. With a little bit of luck, maybe there was a possibility of catching up with Aust before midday!

Luck already seemed to be on my side because I found the trail from Erickson's quickly enough. A good thing too. Another night and morning of wear and tear obliterated the tracks I'd worked so hard to find the day before. All that remained were small little mounds and divots that vaguely resembled the shape they'd been in the day before. I found the clearing mostly by memory as well. Again, a much quicker trek that only took a fraction of the time. Not even a half hour or so after I'd started, I came across the monstrous slashes on the trees.

Aust was nowhere nearby. He'd probably had a much earlier start than I and was further up. The question now remained, where had the beast gone after devouring the boar and leaving the clearing? I found Dílis's hoofprints easily enough along with mine and Aust's. However, the beast's tracks seemed to vanish completely outside of the clearing.

I tried to ignore the weight that dropped into my stomach. Aust had been so impressed with my ability to make it this far. Now, I couldn't figure out which way to go next.

I tried working my way out from the center of the clearing to its fringes in a spiral pattern, just to see if I could find any tracks that I might have missed. There were none. Well, not none. Several tracks were either degraded to far to be useful or walked over by other animals that had crossed through the clearing.

Once more, I glanced up at the gashes on the tree. Still they took my breath away at the sheer size of them. What could possibly make cuts that big? I curled my fingers into claws, imitating whatever had made the marks, and dragged my hand down the tree. At the bottom of the carve, I looked to the next set of slashes. Tentatively, I wandered to the edge of the clearing. Part of me hoped that there would be more slash marks further into the forest.