novelraw Chapter 144: Signs In The Wild
Chapter 144: Signs In The Wild
When the sun had barely kissed the horizon, Sera and the others geared up without speaking.
Rope. Shades. Knives.
The same order as the day before and the day before that.
Zubair checked buckles and gloves, tugged a line here, corrected a knot there. Elias passed the smoked-plastic eye shields down the line. Lachlan rolled his shoulders like a boxer before a bell. Alexei smiled at nothing and slid his blade along his spine where it belonged. Sera took what was handed to her and stood in the middle of them because that was where he put her.
Window up. Cold in. People out.
Zubair touched down first and listened with his entire body.
The ice complained once before it quietly settled down. He moved off the drop zone, pressing his hand flat to the wall more out of habit than necessity, then lifted his chin.
"Fan out," he grunted, never once looking behind him to see if the rest were obeying.
He knew without a doubt that they would.
And they did.
They spread out in a fan like shape.
Lachlan to the left. Alexei to the right. Elias on the rear. Sera in the middle.
Rope run clean through harness points. Thirty meters between, as much for rhythm as safety.
The world looked the way it had looked yesterday: white, open, wrong in its distances. The towers they used for bearing were angles and shadows under drift. The wind cut low. Nothing moved.
"Dark spot," Elias said after fifty meters.
Zubair saw it too. A scatter stain ahead, not a shadow and not ice. He brought his hand up and the line slowed as one. They angled downwind without him needing to say it.
Closer, it resolved: seal, big male, torn from throat to belly. Ribs cracked wide. Snow drifted into the cavity and froze where it touched, but the meat was still soft-red under the crust. Blood had gone dark but not black.
Lachlan stopped a meter back. "Well, that’s appetizing," he said, which was as close as he got to serious.
"No prints?" Alexei asked.
Zubair scanned the surface. There were prints. Several. The kill site was a mess of press marks, slides, and drag. The wind had skated over them and failed to erase the depth.
He walked the edge, careful not to destroy what he needed to see, and counted silently between tracks. He set his boot alongside a depression and didn’t like the comparison.
"Ursine," Elias said, already crouched, glove hovering, not touching. "Pad width... too wide." He pinched a pale hair caught on the ice and rolled it under his finger. "Hollow. Bear insulation. But the spread—"
"Big," Lachlan finished.
"Big," Elias agreed.
Zubair moved on. Ten paces out, another set cut across the first. Four toes, nails straight, pad wide. Canid, but the stride ate ground in a way modern wolves didn’t. The claws had cut deep, hooked outward at the toe. Weight carried clean through.
"Wolf-pattern," Elias said. He didn’t sound convinced it was a wolf.
"Stride?" Zubair asked.
Elias glanced up the line of depressions, took a short walk, then came back. "Long. Too long for an even above average size wolf."
Alexei had drifted to the far side of the site.
"Here," he called, and pointed with two fingers the way Zubair liked.
The tracks were feline this time: four toes, no claw marks where the footstep landed, but a pair of shallow, parallel scrapes behind the final print, like something long and hard had kissed the ice when the body shifted low.
"Cat," Lachlan said. "What cat lives outside in weather like this?"
Elias didn’t answer. He was looking at the depth, not the shape. "Whatever it is, it’s heavy."
Zubair kept circling. He found scat, frozen solid, half buried by drift. He broke one piece free with the heel of his glove and looked at the cut surface: fur, bone, fat.
It definitely belonged to a predator of some kind or other.
Beyond the cats’ line, the ice carried a different kind of press: big round plates spaced wide, with shallow crescent edges where toes had compressed the crust.
There were no nails cut into the ice. The pattern sagged slightly on the inside of the turn as it curved away: the way a very large body rolls when it commits weight.
"Elephantine," Elias said under his breath. Then, because words were a habit he couldn’t break, "But that should be impossible. Elephants only are found in warm, tropical climates. There has never been an elephant living in Country N outside of the zoo. They shouldn’t be found here... now."
"What happens if they aren’t an elephant?" asked Sera, her voice cutting through the cold around them.
"Not possible," replied Elias with a shake of his head. "I know tracks, and those are elephantine."
"I’m not arguing with that," Sera sighed. "What I am saying is that you are thinking a bit too... modern. There was a type of elephant here... a long time ago."
"Are you really saying that you think we have mammoths here?" asked Zubair, his voice low before he quickly shook his head. "They’ve been extinct for millions of years. I get that the world has gone to pot, but that’s just not possible."
Sera closed her eyes, remembering the whispers of the outside world from the cages in the depths of Adam’s labs. "A lot of things that shouldn’t be possible are coming back," she said at last. "I highly suggest that you keep your mind a bit more open."
"What are you telling us, Peaches?" asked Lachlan, his voice unnaturally serious.
"Tigers, and mammoths, and dinos," shrugged Sera, moving away from the tracks.
"Oh my," murmured Lachlan, his eyes going back to the proof in front of him. "Humans don’t really stand a chance, do we?"
"You’re putting yourself in with them?" chuckled Sera, looking at them from over her shoulder. "Haven’t you learned anything yet?"
She pointed back to the tracks that everyone was still standing around. There were also two shallow, parallel grooves cut in an arc a meter off that path, as if something long and heavy had been carried or dragged and briefly touched down.
They weren’t clean enough to trust, but Zubair didn’t like them.
"Direction?" he asked, the conversation they were just having disappearing with the wind. Now was the time to get back to the issue at hand.
"Northwest," Elias said, then corrected himself with a shake of his head. "That way." He pointed.
Zubair marked the main compass of each track with a quick scratch on the surface, then pulled a grease pencil and circled a bolt head on the near wall to give them a reference for later. He didn’t need it to remember. Others did.
Sera stood with her hands at her sides, watching the torn-open seal with a face that gave him nothing.
She breathed through her mouth like the smell didn’t matter. Her weight was set square. No recoil. No reach.
Alexei stood a step off her right shoulder, casual stance seemed almost purposeful.
He moved his head enough to look at the meat and then away like it meant nothing to him. His mouth had the same flat line he wore when he was thinking about something he didn’t plan to tell anyone.