'Can you explain any of it?'
She shook her head, vastly amused. 'Not in your terms. Why seek reasons?'
'I don't know. There's a reason for everything.'
She began lowering herself to the ground. They were a surprising way up, he saw, at least thirty feet. A red squirrel regarded them curiously from a nearby branch, unafraid.
He retrieved the shotgun, cleaning dirt from the muzzle anxiously whilst Cat sniffed the air and peered through the trees like some lithe animal. He wanted her again, but could not bring himself to say anything.
The forest floor was a lot less congested than it had seemed the night before. There were bare spaces under the trees, the brambles dying back with the turning of the year, and the sun flooded the ground through the thinning leaves. Wood pigeons somewhere, and a thrush. Other songs he could not identify. Apart from that there was near silence, broken only by the clamour of his empty gut. He was filthy, and so was Cat. She seemed not to mind, wood creature that she was.
Michael broke open the shotgun and pocketed the spent shells. Cat shot him a disapproving look, and he snapped the weapon shut without reloading. There was a glass rattle in his game bag and he knew that the flask was broken.
'I'm for it,' he said with a groan. Out all night without a word. His grandmother 'Would flay him alive.
Cat beckoned impatiently and they started off into follow-my-leader again, a steady lope through the trees.
'How do we go from one place to another?' he asked when his breathing had-settled a little. The shotgun jigged painfully on his shoulder.
'We walk, being poor,' she replied shortly.
'No. You know what I mean. From my home to here, this place. How do you do it, how do you get us through?'
'It's not my doing.'
'Whose then?'
'Yours maybe?'
'Don't be daft. Tell me, Cat. Or do you not know yourself?'
She slowed to a walk and allowed him to catch up. 'There are holes here, leading to where you have your home. There always have been. They move and shift, disappear and reappear, but some are permanent. And we can go through them.'
'How do you know where they are?'
'I just know, likeI1 know which way is north, or where open ground lies.'
'Is it all forest like this over here?'
'Mostly. The forest stretches for uncounted leagues in all directions. Beyond it are hills and a great river, and mountains to the south. Huge mountains no one has ever climbed.'
What about towns, villages, people?' Fox-People.
'We have those also.' What are they like?'
'You will wear me out with questions, Michael. These things you will find out soon enough. For now I am keeping a lookout for breakfast.'
'Breakfast!'
'Hush! Not so loud. Breakfasts are caught on the hoof in this country.' Her eyes danced at him and his throat tightened with ... love? Lust? The feeling was powerful enough to dizzy him. He felt like shouting aloud.
'I'll shoot you something,' he said. 'We can roast it on the spit.'
'You will not. There will be no bangs and blasts in this place. The forest will not like it. Did you learn nothing from last night?'
He remembered the hulking shadow, the flashlit face. Human and yet inhuman, like a giant Neanderthal. 'What was it?'
'Troll, most likely. Hard to tell if it was a good one or a bad one. You didn't give it a chance.'
'Good and bad trolls,' Michael mused. 'They didn't have those in the stories.'
'This is more than a story.' She stopped. 'Have you flint and steel?'
His fell fell. 'No, I'm sorry. Only matches.'
She giggled. 'They will have to do, I suppose. What about a knife?'
'I've a penknife.'
'How splendid. Give it to me.'
He handed it over doubtfully. 'What's it for?'
'Breakfast. Light us a fire. I will be away a while.'
Then she stripped off her shift and rolled naked in the earth and leaves of the forest floor whilst Michael gaped. When she rose again she was a matt-haired brown-skinned savage, the knife blade glinting in one fist. She winked at him and scampered off, as silently as a—as a cat.
'Bloody hell,' Michael said. He set about building the fire.
A LONG, HUNGRY morning inched along. There was a stream nearby, a transparent rivulet hardly a foot wide. There Michael drank and scrubbed himself, stripping to the waist and gasping at the coldness of the water. He dried sitting by his little fire. There was dead wood littering the ground among the trees and he had a respectable pile. He had even fashioned a crude spit, breaking branches between his fingers. The fire was smokeless, the air above it shimmering with heat.
He wondered what she was trying to catch for them to eat. Not bacon and eggs, that's for sure.
He whipped round, staring. Something in the trees, darting behind a trunk.
'Damn you, Cat.' His hand crept to the shotgun.
There was a flickering movement. He could hardly catch it, and he thought he saw spider-like limbs scrabbling in the beech leaves.