Atalanta and the Arcadian Beast (2 page)

She knelt beside him, lifted the tunic, saw the wound. It was jagged and wide and blood seemed to be gurgling out like the spring from the crag.

“Papa!” she whispered.

He tried to answer but could only manage a croak. He pulled down the tunic and pressed his hand against it to try and staunch the bleeding.

From outside came a low growl followed by a snuffling noise. Something was sniffing at the door.

To her horror, Atalanta realized that the beast must be smelling the blood.

She pulled her father away from the door and got him up onto his pallet.

“Stay there, Papa,” she said, but he did not hear her, having fainted with the pain.

Drawing her knife, she went back to the door where she stood silently for a moment, listening. The scratching and the growling came again, then stopped.

Her father had always said a hunter’s ears were among his most important weapons. She strained to understand what she was hearing. The beast seemed to be padding around the little house, rubbing itself against the rough stone walls as if marking its territory. Then it went around a second time.

The house had two small windows, each protected by a leather curtain. Those curtains were open. Atalanta stared out as the beast went by, its bulk blocking the light.

It’s huge!
she thought.
Big as a bear. Bigger.

She kept listening as the thing made yet another circuit of the house. Her palm was clammy against the handle of the knife. Beads of sweat dripped down her face, tracing little rivulets.

Silently, she stepped over to one of the windows, pressed her back against the wall, and waited for the beast to pass by again.

It must have smelled her sweat or heard her breathing, for—like lightning—it stuck its huge paw through the window, sharp claws shredding the leather curtain.

Atalanta reacted without thinking, jamming the knife into the paw, right where a wrist would have been.

The beast roared with pain and jerked the paw back, knife and all. Then it roared again. This time the sound seemed compounded of rage and pain.

Standing frozen by the window, Atalanta found she could not move.

A groan from her father was so loud, it startled her. Suddenly her frozen limbs worked again. She stood on tiptoe and stared out the window. She could see nothing, hear nothing. It was as if the beast had disappeared.

“Atalanta,” her father called.

Running over to him, she fell to her knees by his pallet. “What is it, Papa?”

“Is it…” he whispered with difficulty. “Is it…gone?”

“I don’t know, Papa,” she said, her voice almost as weak as his. “But I wounded it. I stuck my knife in its paw. Through the window.”

“Wounded badly?” His words were so quiet, she had to bend over and put her ear close to his mouth.

She shook her head. “I’m not certain. But the knife was still in when it backed away.”

He managed to sit up. “You need to find out. We cannot leave it wounded.” He coughed, an awful frothy sound. “Take the small spear. But for Artemis’ sake, be careful.” He fell back.

“I will, Papa.” She knew a wounded beast could be even more dangerous.

Going over to the corner by the door, she fetched her father’s short spear where it was propped beside their nets and snares. Carefully, she slid the beam from the door, then stood for a long moment listening for any hint of danger.

It was quiet outside.

Perhaps,
she thought,
too quiet.
But she went out anyway. She had no other choice.

A
TALANTA KEPT THE WALL
of the house to her back for protection. Step-by-step she edged her way around the cottage, spear point raised to meet any sudden attack.

Large footprints, one of them outlined in blood, led from the window. Four great claw marks were gouged out of the door.

The footprints led to the middle of the clearing and then—impossibly—vanished.

She found her knife lying on the grass, a streak of dark blood staining the blade. Picking it up, she saw a tuft of orange fur sticking to it.

“So…” she whispered. “You pulled the knife out with your teeth. Smart boy.” She stuck the bit of fur down the front of her tunic and glanced quickly around the clearing. The sun was about gone. It would be too dangerous to remain outside in the dark.

As soon as she returned to the cottage, Atalanta set the bar across the door again.

“Not there,” she told her father. “Not anywhere.”

He nodded. “Now you must tend my wound, child.”

She felt tears start in her eyes, hot and prickly. “You’ll be fine, Papa. I’ll take care of you.”

First she built up the fire, for he was shivering with cold. Then she began to wash and dress the wound with folded lengths of sheepskin. But no matter how many bandages she wrapped around his side, the blood still seeped through.

Her father didn’t stop her. Her touch seemed to soothe him.

“What sort of beast was it, Papa?” she asked in a trembling voice. The tip of her dark braid was now sticky with his blood. “I saw a back as high as the window, a paw with claws like a mountain cat’s, but bigger.”

The huntsman shook his head, shutting his eyes tight against a surge of pain. “I don’t know.” He took a deep breath. “Perhaps it’s some beast migrating from one land to another and only passing through Arcadia. It must have come upon us by accident.”

Pulling the hank of orange fur from her tunic, she showed it to her father. In the firelight, it looked flecked with gold. “Look what I found, Papa.”

He touched the fur with a stained finger. “This is my last trophy.”

She didn’t tell him it was
her
knife that had cut that swatch.

He coughed, a thread of blood sliding from the side of his mouth into his white-streaked beard. “Whatever it is, the creature has dealt me my death blow.”

The tuft of fur dropped from his feeble fingers.

“Papa!” she whispered. He didn’t answer, but she could tell by the rattle of his breath that he was not asleep.

She added more wood to the fire till the room was uncomfortably warm. Then she made him a tisane of heal-all, feeding it to him as if he were a baby, using a leather bottle and a cloth teat. After that he dozed until midnight.

When he woke, he whispered hoarsely, “I’m dying, Atalanta.” His watery eyes were the color of an autumn sky.

“No, Papa, no,” Atalanta cried. But looking down at him, she knew he was telling the truth.

“You must be a brave girl,” he said.

When had he become so small?
she wondered. All her life he’d seemed tree high, a big man, striding ahead of her in the woods, following tracks and spoor as surely as if they were signs engraved in stone. He could throw his javelin with deadly accuracy across the widest glade. The arrows leaped from his bow like hawks taking flight. As his only child, she’d always been his constant companion, learning all the lore of the forest at his side.

But since her mother’s death three years earlier, he’d seemed to shrink a little every day. And now, coughing out specks of blood, he was scarcely her own size.

He struggled to sit up in the bed and she helped him. “But I must tell you now how you came to us,” he said. “I’ll not die until you know it all.” He coughed again, groaned, and the wound seeped like a bog.

Atalanta shook her head “Do not speak, Papa, it wearies you.”

“You must know.”

“I know you found me in the woods, Papa, when I was four years old.”

“Found you by a great she-bear who was long dead,” he said between coughs.

She brushed his thin fair hair back from his forehead. The skin was burning hot, his blue eyes cloudy.

“I know, Papa.”

“And you covered with bites, some…” He bent over with the coughing and she held him till he was done.

“Some long healed and some quite new,” she whispered. It was a story they had often told together. “I know, Papa.”

“You were like a wild thing yourself,” her father resumed. “Abandoned on Mount Parthenon by uncaring parents and by some miracle of the gods suckled by that she-bear for who knows how long. How slowly I had to approach you, how softly I had to speak to keep you from fleeing.”

“It was only by luring me on with food that you were able to make me follow you,” Atalanta continued for him as he stopped to suck in a few last breaths.

“And I brought you home to Mama who wanted a child and had none.” His voice faltered twice, on “Mama” and on “none.” He caught himself, then said, “A miracle of the gods she called it. How else would a wild beast give life to a helpless baby? I told her that most likely one of the she-bear’s cubs had been stillborn so that she accepted a human child in its place.” It was the most he had spoken since getting his wound. The speaking had exhausted him and he fell forward.

Atalanta caught him and rocked him as if he were a child. She knew the story, even though her own memory of the events was dim. When her father had found her, she couldn’t even speak, only growl and snap like an animal. She had run about on all fours. Had eaten raw meat. Perhaps—she thought—perhaps it was because she had no words to form her memory of those early days that all she could recall was the sharp smell of the old she-bear, the warmth of the fur when she pressed her face into it, the rough-and-tumble company of the cubs who suckled at her side.

She patted her father’s hand. “It doesn’t matter now, Papa.”

Her father sat up, eyes now shining brightly with the fever. “But it
does
matter. There is one thing you don’t know, my daughter. And you
are
my daughter, for all that you were born elsewhere.”

She would humor him and then maybe he would sleep again.

“What don’t I know, Papa.”

He reached a trembling hand beneath the pallet and pulled out a leather pouch. “Open it. I can’t…”

She took the pouch, pulled it open, drew out a signet ring.

“This ring was strung on a leather thong around your neck.”

She held the ring up to the flickering light of the hearth fire. On the stone was an engraving of a great boar.

Her father whispered weakly, “I kept that from you all these years. I was afraid, you see, that you would seek out your real father and leave me.”

“
You
are my real father, Papa,” Atlanta whispered, setting the ring aside. But she spoke to a dead man.

W
HEN ATALANTA WOKE IN
the morning, she was by her father’s side. For a moment she wondered why he seemed so cold, and then she remembered and wept again.

This time she wept not for him—he looked so peaceful now and free of pain—but for herself. She shook with the spasms and cried out loud. There was no one left to tell her to be brave.

At last, exhausted by all the weeping, she rubbed the tears from her eyes. Then hefting the spear and taking the knife as well, she went outside.

The tracks of the night before were undisturbed and there seemed no new ones, which was a relief. She crouched down to examine them carefully this time.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered, for the tracks were very puzzling. They looked something like a mountain cat’s, only twice the size. The toes were more widely spread, which meant they supported a heavier body. Also the weight seemed concentrated on the front paws, which was not how a cat walked.

She followed the tracks around the house to the window where she had knifed the beast. There was a dark stain on the sill and down the side of the wall. The bloodstains led directly to the clearing where the creature had taken the knife from its paw. And here was the greatest mystery of all, which she had only guessed at the night before. The paw prints simply disappeared.

This time she looked around carefully. The closest tree was surely too far away for the animal to have jumped to. So were the rocks. Yet that was surely what had happened—rock or tree. The soft earth of the clearing showed nothing more.

Atalanta tried to puzzle it out the way her father had taught her. If the beast leaped, with a wounded paw, did he do it to hide his trail? If so, she knew, he was very intelligent.

Big.

Fierce.

Intelligent.

She shook her head. It was the worst of all combinations.

By the time the sun was high, and she had not heard or seen anything more of the beast, Atalanta decided to go to the stream for a basin of water, but she carried her spear, knife in her belt, just in case.

It seemed unnaturally quiet by the water, as if the whole clearing knew of her father’s death and every bird, every little animal, was still in his honor.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the woods about her. Then she brought back a basin full of water to wash her father’s body in preparation for burying him.

Her grief had passed for the present. She would not let it return until she had done her duty.

Resting the flint shovel and the spear on her shoulder, she walked out behind the humble dwelling to where a mound of rocks marked where her mother was buried. Choosing a spot to the left of the simple marker, she anchored the spear, haft end down in the grass, where it would be close at hand should she need it. Then she stabbed the blade of the shovel into the ground and ripped up a tussock of grass and earth.

Soon a heap of earth was piled up at her side and sweat flowed down her face as freely as tears.

Her arms ached with the strain, but she had to keep digging. Having helped bury her mother, she knew that it was important to dig the grave quickly and pile rocks atop. Here in the heart of the forest, death was a lure to creatures both great and small who wished to eat without the bother of having to kill.

At last she stood, red-faced and panting, by the side of the open pit. Now came a harder task. She walked back into the cottage, all the while fighting down the small voice of hope.

Perhaps he’s just sleeping,
said that deceptive voice.
When you go inside he’ll be there as usual, his strong arms open to greet you.
But he lay just as she had left him after she’d washed away the dark blood.