Chapter Two

    I woke up the next morning shivering. Guess I missed some holes yesterday, I thought. I groaned and sat up in my bed, trying to adjust to the light, put on my boots and heavy coat, and walked out the door into the winter morning. As I walked to the deer carcass that I had killed yesterday, I grabbed some berries from a bush to take back home. When I got to the carcass, I expected it to be mostly intact still. There weren't a lot of scavengers in the woods, so I should have had one or two more legs to carry back. Instead, I found it ripped to shreds, with only little scraps of meat on the white bones. No scavenger could have done this. I walked around the carcass, examining it for the telltale signs that I normally saw from scavengers, just to make sure one wasn't ravenously hungry. That's when I found the tracks. They were huge, proving even more so that this wasn't a scavenger's doing. The uneasy feeling that I had yesterday was right. Something was wrong in the woods.

    I hunted for another deer, but something was off. The deer seemed skittish. It might have been the carcass, but I wasn't so sure. I thought it was the predator, whoever was hunting the deer. I shot it with my crossbow and cut off a leg like the day before. As I was just closing the door to his cabin, I swore I saw a pair of lightning-blue eyes staring out at me from the bushes. I flung open the door and checked. Nothing. I closed the door, worried.

    I chopped up the leg, cooked it, and ate it with the berries. I saved the fat and bones for lamps and sharpening sticks. After I had eaten, I went back outside to patch up the holes I had missed yesterday. It had begun to snow, so I had a hard time seeing all the little cracks in the wood. I kept hitting my thumb with the hammer and cursing. Part of why was because I was distracted by the scene I had seen earlier in the day. What had attacked that deer? Why did it attack? Was it going to stay? What if it did? What would happen? So many questions were running through my head that my thumb was sore after I was finished from the hammer hitting it. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to use my crossbow.

    The eyes were another thing that had me worried. I had never seen an animal in the forest with blue eyes. Owls have yellow eyes, and so do foxes, so the eyes and the deer weren't a coincidence, I was sure. Something was in the forest, and I didn't know anything about it: what it looked like, what it was, whether it was hostile, the list goes on. I only knew it was big and ate meat. Not exactly helpful for preparing for defense. Maybe I could set traps or lace meat with poison, but I didn't know where to find any poison, and I didn't have any metal to make traps. I was stuck with the crossbow and my wits.

    Whether I was going to stick around for this predator was another question I had. If it turned out to be a cougar or something, what was I going to do? I couldn't fight it, surely, so my only options were to take a chance of it catching me, or fleeing. I like my life, as previously stated, so I would flee. If I had the information, I would be able to make a better decision about what to do, but I was in the dark at the moment. I had to take a chance. I didn't see any cougars in Kilkenny, and these woods were my home. Fleeing would mean starting over from scratch. I would stay, but also would have to keep a sharp eye out for the predator. Whatever it was.