Atalanta and the Arcadian Beast (3 page)

Shrunken as he was, he was still too heavy for her to carry. Instead she hooked her hands under his arms and dragged him wrapped in his blanket across the earthen floor and out onto the grass where her spear stood sentinel. There, with one last effort, she rolled her father into the open grave.

Looking down at his still form tangled in the blanket, she wanted to speak to him, wanted to tell him she was trying to be brave. Instead she bit her lip.

No,
she thought,
words will lead to tears and there is no time for more-tears.

She drew herself up wearily and began shoveling the loose earth over her father’s body. Slowly it disappeared from view.

Where is he now?
Atalanta wondered.
A sad shade drifting like smoke through the lightless passageways of the Underworld? Or has he found a route to the Elysian Fields where the blessed souls pass their days in eternal sunshine?
She hoped he was there, in Elysia, just on the edge of a little woods because she could not imagine him living forever without a forest to walk in.

She suddenly remembered Papa offering a prayer to the gods to guide and protect Mama on her journey. Atalanta rubbed her sweaty brow. What were their names again? Papa and Mama hadn’t invoked the gods very often, here in their woods.

Then she remembered. There was Demeter, goddess of the earth. And Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Papa always called Atalanta his little Artemis. And Pan, the goat-footed god of beasts and herders. That exhausted her memory.

“Demeter…Artemis…Pan.” How strange the words sounded coming from her lips. “Take care of my papa. Let there be trees and quiet streams where he is now.”

She couldn’t think of anything else to say. How could the gods hear her anyway? If they lived at all, it was in some far-off place. She doubted any of them ever visited Arcadia.

Her eyes rested on the freshly dug earth and, for a moment, she had a brief memory of her father striding ahead of her through the trees, full of strength and confidence.

“He
is
in the Elysian Fields,” she told herself. “With Mama.”

She would believe that always.

As she began to gather the memorial stones, she had a sudden thought:
They’ll have each other. And I…I am now utterly alone. It will be years before I am with them again.
She couldn’t think of any way to cure that. Not tears, certainly. If she killed the beast, would that still the pain in her heart?

But surely,
she thought,
the beast is long gone from here.

Just then there was a loud sound behind her, in the bushes by the side of the cottage, as if something were ripping its way toward her.

She sprang up in a fighting position, grabbing up the spear and holding it pointed at the greenery. The creature was between her and the cottage. She would have to fight it with the spear and knife.
And the shovel, too, if necessary.

Suddenly the bushes parted, and a great brown bear twice her size reared up before her.

Atalanta took a startled step back, and the beast dashed the spear from her hands with a mighty sweep of its paw. The impact knocked her to the ground and winded her. Before she could make another move, the bear pinned her down, its round hairy face blocking out the sky, the wide maw parting to expose long wicked teeth. Its breath was awful, like an opened grave, and the vast jaws descended upon her.

Atalanta shut her eyes against the horror.
Papa,
she thought,
I will be with you sooner than I expected.

T
HE VERY LAST THING
she ever expected to happen happened. Her skull was not crushed by a killing blow; her throat was not ripped open by those savage teeth.

Instead she felt the bear’s tongue rasp wetly across her cheek.

Slowly she opened her eyes. The bear’s head still loomed over her, its mouth wide open. But there was no flash of hunger or rage in his bright eyes. Instead they looked…friendly. His muzzle came down and his black nose nuzzled against her ear. Then he released her and rolled over on the grass, waving his paws playfully.

Atalanta sat up and at once the bear rolled back to her, pressing his snout against her ribs.

Hesitantly, she reached out and rubbed her fingers in the warm fur of his neck. Something about this set up a tingling at the back of her mind. It was all so familiar: the strong, musky animal smell; the roughness of the fur beneath her hand; the sound of the bear’s grunting as it turned from one side to the other.

She reached way back into her memory, and suddenly as if in a dream, she saw herself—small and dirty, growling and snapping like an animal—rolling across the grass with a bear cub. They bared teeth and cuffed one another, but none of it was meant to hurt. It was all in play.

Then she remembered something else—that bear cub had a large ragged piece missing from his left ear, from an encounter with an angry wildcat.

She pulled the great head down toward her and examined his left ear. There was a ragged piece missing.

This
had
to be her old playmate grown large. He must have recognized her smell, just as she knew him from the tear in his ear.

A sudden awful thought occurred to her. What if he were the very beast that had killed her father?

The bear nuzzled her once more and she laughed at her own fears. The death creature had orange hair. The tuft was still in the cabin, near her father’s pallet.

Scratching the bear behind his mutilated ear, she whispered, “So, old boy, we have certainly changed from our cub days, you and I.”

The bear tossed his head and barked in response.

Atalanta pushed him onto his back and rubbed his big soft belly, thinking that it was good to be alive after all. It was good not to be abandoned. She had lost mother and father. But she had gained a…brother.

“I wonder what brought you here now?” Atalanta asked, still stroking the bear’s fur. She was careful to keep her voice low and soothing. “Because if you had been here for a while, my father would surely have hunted you down.” A bear would have meant meat for the winter, a fur mantle for them both, and teeth and bone for jewelry to trade at the market.

The bear rolled over and raked a row of furrows in the earth with one big paw.

Atalanta smiled at him. “I expect you are just lonely. No mother. No father. No sisters or brothers. No mate. So you let your nose find your old littermate.”

The bear sat up. He looked a little foolish, his tongue lolling out.

“There’s something out there that killed my papa,” she said, standing. “Something big. Something awful. With orange fur and claws that can deliver a death wound. I’m sure it’s still around here and I have to find it. For my papa’s sake. Will you come, too?”

Almost as if he understood her, the bear gave a grunt and stood up, padding after her to the cottage door. He sniffed loudly but would not cross the threshold.

Going inside without him, Atalanta turned. “I’ll just get my things,” she said, leaving the door open so he could see what she was doing.

Pausing in the middle of the room, Atalanta took a deep breath. Memories filled every corner: the smell of her mother’s freshly baked bread, the sharp scent of a clutch of fish hung up to smoke in the hearth. Here was the doll her mother had fashioned for her with a walnut for a face and dried rushes for hair. Here was the little skull of the first rabbit she had shot with her bow. Her father had set it proudly over the hearth as a trophy and there it had remained. Here was her mother’s loom, the
peplos
half woven and left there to gather dust.

Best to be away from here and forget,
she decided suddenly.
From now on home is wherever I choose to be.

She took a pouch and filled it with dried fruit, olives, and apples. Then she filled a water skin from the big earthenware jar in the corner. Folding an extra wool cloak over her arm, she slung her bow and arrows over her back. Finally she stuck a gutting knife in her belt and picked up her javelin, the knotty ash handle well worn from her days of practice with her father.

As an afterthought, she stuffed the tuft of orange hair down the front of her garment. It was scratchy and stank.

She was just about to leave the cottage when her eye caught something glinting on the floor beside the bloodstained pallet.

The signet ring!

Crouching down, she picked it up between two fingers, examining it as if it were the spoor of an animal.

Can this guide me back to my other father?
she wondered.
To the one who lost me?

She hung the ring around her neck on a leather cord and, for a moment, pressed it against her chest. But only for a moment. She had other business to tend to. It was not her past she was hunting, but the creature who had slain her father.

The bear suddenly poked his muzzle through the open doorway, sniffing warily.

“There’s nothing for you here, boy,” Atalanta told him. “Nothing for me anymore either.” She pushed past him, then walked outside, closing the door behind.

With the bear ambling by her side, Atalanta set off for the woods.

“The orange beast,” she told the bear, “vanished from the clearing. Perhaps it has gone back to where we first came upon it—the spring.” It was a guess only. She had nothing else. “Maybe it’s got a lair nearby.”

The bear growled as if offering help.

Well, he might be useful,
Atalanta thought.
He has a good nose.
She had the tuft of hair to let him smell.

Besides, without the bear at her side, would she have the courage to face whatever was out there? Most likely she’d be curled up in the cottage, nursing her misery like a wound.

“Bear…” she began, then stopped. “If we’re going to be partners, I need to call you something.”

The bear waited patiently for her to continue.

Atalanta thought for a while. She’d never needed much in the way of names before. “Papa” and “Mama” were all she’d ever used.

“Urso,” she declared at last, turning to look directly at the bear, for
this
matter of a name suddenly seemed important. “Urso. That sounds like a fine bear’s name to me. How does it sound to you?”

The bear sat up on his hind legs and clapped his paws together with a strange clacketing sound as his nails hit against one another.

“I thought you’d like it,” Atalanta said, and grinned.

Urso grinned back, showing two rows of very large teeth.

Atalanta appreciated those teeth. “Now,” she said, “let’s get on with the hunt.”

A
S SOON AS SHE
reached the spring, Atalanta felt a tingle of alarm run down her back. Could the beast be here, lying in wait? She knew it was intelligent.

Intelligent enough to set a trap?
She held her breath and listened. All she could hear was Urso, snuffling and pawing at the ground beside her. Her stomach lurched sickeningly and a hot flush spread over her face. The urge to run away was almost overwhelming.

Urso rubbed his muzzle consolingly against her back. “You’re right, Urso,” she agreed, looking over her shoulder at him. “I
have
to do this.”

Gripping her javelin firmly in both hands, she stepped into the shadow of the greenery. Snapped branches and mashed ferns marked the beast’s passage, but there was nothing to show if the tracks were old or new.

“We can backtrack him,” she told the bear. “Maybe find where he came from.”

The bear went ahead, sniffing out the way. Where the trees thinned out on the other side, she found a jumble of footprints.

Urso made a low, unhappy growl at the back of his throat. Like all bears, he had a muscular hump on his back just below the neck, and the hairs on it were standing straight up.

“You smell something you don’t like,” Atalanta said.

Urso stood up on his hind legs and whined.

Reaching into her shirt, Atalanta drew out the tuft of orange hair, shoving it under his nose. “Here. Is this what you smell?”

The bear grabbed up the tuft of hair in his mouth and shook his head back and forth with such ferocity, he looked as if he were going to shake himself in two. Then suddenly he dropped the orange tuft to the ground, turned around, and urinated on it.

“Uck,” Atalanta cried. There was no way she would pick up the tuft now and shove it down the front of her shirt. But that didn’t matter. Urso was clearly furious that the creature had invaded their forest.

“Come,” she said to the bear, and bending low, she followed the tracks for another hundred feet.

Once again, the prints just stopped.

Jamming her spear point into the ground, Atalanta paused to take a swallow from her water skin. “I don’t understand,” she said. “This creature seems to appear out of thin air and then disappear again, just as it pleases.”

A sudden rustling in the branches behind put her immediately on alert. Urso bared his teeth.

Carefully, Atalanta lowered the water skin and slid the bow from her shoulder. Then in one quick movement she fitted an arrow to her bowstring. Spinning about, she loosed off a shot. The arrow clipped the bushy tail of a squirrel, sending it chittering into cover.

Atalanta gave herself a slap on the leg, partly for being so foolish but mostly for missing the target. What would Papa have said if he’d seen her waste an arrow like that? Probably,
Think, Atalanta
—
a good hunter’s most useful weapon is the brain.

She looked until she found the arrow, buried lightly in the trunk of an oak that was twisted with the silvered leaves of an ivy vine. Pulling the arrow out carefully, she checked to be certain that the arrowhead was still whole before smoothing its feathers and replacing it in her quiver.

She shook her head. “That’s it, then, bear. We’re going to have to search the whole forest.”

He grunted in return.

They searched for the rest of the day without finding any more tracks. Not the beast’s trail—nor any deer’s or boar’s trail either. Atalanta knew she was a good stalker. Her father had boasted to the hunters they occasionally met that she was the most natural trail-finder he’d ever known.