Re: In the orchard: Daniel/Aubrey
The wolf understood that the town was a strange place. Sometimes it smelled like a sick place. Deer carcasses showed up in the woods, rotting and uneaten. The lake water smelled like sulphur. But the town was within his land because the man had claimed it, however inadvertently, when he’d come back here from the desert and brought the wolf along with him. The wolf understood humans. He thought little of them, but he understood them. But there was something about the town that drew that same sort of sickness, that strangeness, out in the people who came to live here - or attracted the ones that already had it in them.
So it had not been that unusual to hear the sound of two-legged footsteps plodding their way through the carpet of old, wet leaves along the ground between the rows of the orchard. The humans did all sorts of unnatural, dangerous things away from town and inside of it. The wolf would carve a wide enough berth around their path that they wouldn’t even realize they’d been so close to a monster with the shine of blood against black fur on his muzzle and paws. This deer had not been dead or rotting when it had been found. The human would continue on unbothered, and so would the wolf, looping around to the place where the man had parked off the road and under a pine grove. Then he would shift and the man would drive them back to the cabin. Tomorrow the wolf might not come out to run at all, languid with the lack of a moon to call him.
He had already trotted through several more rows, might have made it all the way back to the car if the wind hadn’t shifted and with it brought the stench that hauled all three hundred pounds of the wolf to a stop with his claws dug into the earth. His head was up now, eyes burnished gold and glowing steady through the fading light as he lifted his head and breathed in. More dead things. The chill of woody decay as if winter had already come. He stepped between two bony trees and into the path where the thing that looked like a man and smelled like a corpse called out to him.
Somewhere in the back of his head, he had the unbidden mental image of the man sitting up and peering intently forward.