Ridgeline - Part Seven: The Inside Place

The brush closes behind. Branches press along the flanks. The nose drops to the ground and the ground is a map — layered, dense, each inch carrying what the eyes can't reach. Deer scat, twelve hours cold. Fox urine on a rock, sharper, fresher, the territorial line of something that passes through here nightly. Leaf mold. Fungus. The chemical signature of rain that hasn't arrived yet, somewhere above the canopy, building.

The body moves through the dark without seeing. The nose leads. The feet follow. The right rear leg aches — three weeks of rough ground, the pad split on a rock edge and healed badly, a thick ridge of new skin that pulls on every step. The body compensates. Weight forward. The ache absorbed into the gait. The limp becoming the walk.

Behind, far behind, the baby-sound. Faint. The frequency that fires the chest — the vibration low and constant, not in the ears anymore but in the sternum, a thrum that eases when the source is close and tightens when the source is far and the source is far now. The body keeps moving. The thrum pulls.

The woods at night are scent-loud. Every surface exhales. The bark of a tulip poplar leaks sap-smell into the cooling air. A dead thing — small, days old, the sweet-rot signature — somewhere to the left, under leaves. The nose catalogs it and moves on. Water downhill. The mineral tang of creek over rock, colder than the air, pulling from the east.

The body angles toward the water.

The descent is steep. The footing loose — shale and clay, the surface crumbling under the pads, the body skidding sideways on the grade and the claws catching on a root and holding. The nose pulls forward. Water-smell filling the sinuses now, close, the mineral sharpness cutting through the leaf-mold and the fox urine and the dead thing.

The creek is narrow. Shin-deep where the rocks make a shelf. The dog steps in and the cold shoots up through the pads into the legs and the body startles — a flinch, the muscles bunching, then releasing as the cold settles into the legs and the body adjusts. The mouth drops to the surface and drinks. Long pulls. The jaw working against the current, the tongue curling water into the throat, fast, steady. The drinking has a quality — hunched, the eyes scanning the bank even while the mouth works, the body unable to lower its guard even for water. Three weeks of drinking from puddles, from ditches, from the condensation on a dumpster lid behind a restaurant that closed in April. The body doesn't catalog when water comes. It comes or it doesn't. The drinking goes on until the stomach presses against the ribs and the ribs send back a dull protest — not injury, just the compression of a body that hasn't eaten in two days filling itself with the only thing available.

The head lifts. Water runs from the jaw and drops back into the creek. The nose works the air above the creek — wet rock, the ozone-tease of the coming rain, and beneath it, beneath everything, the thread. The baby-sound. Farther now. The thrum tightens a half-turn in the chest.

The body climbs the far bank. Mud under the pads. The right rear leg slips and the claws dig and the body hauls itself up the slope and the brush closes again — honeysuckle, thick, the flowers still open in the dark, their sweetness a wall the nose has to push through to find the trail-scent underneath.

A sound from the left. Distant. A door closing.

The body stops. Every muscle. The ear — the intact one — rotates toward the sound. The tail lifts an inch from its low hang. The weight shifts to the front legs, the posture leaning, the whole body canting toward the direction of the door-sound because the door-sound is the oldest sound, the sound that organized the body's day for years — door opens, voice, bowl, hand, the floor warm under the belly, the couch with the dip in the middle where the body fit. The legs take three steps toward the sound before the new pattern catches them.

The legs lock. The tail drops. The weight shifts back.

Three steps. The body covered three steps toward a door that isn't there, in a house that isn't there, and the three steps opened a channel in the chest that the thrum now floods — not the baby-sound thrum but something older, deeper, a pull toward the inside-place that has no scent-trail and no direction and no endpoint because the inside-place doesn't exist on this ground and the body stands in the honeysuckle with the muscles locked and the ears forward and the breathing fast and shallow and the channel in the chest wide open and nothing coming through it.

The door-sound doesn't come again.

The thrum stays. The baby-sound thrum. The one with a direction.

The body turns from the door-sound. The nose drops. The ground-map resumes. The legs carry the body forward through the brush and the honeysuckle gives way to undergrowth and the undergrowth gives way to a section of cleared ground — the trail, another part of it, the same gravel the body has walked on before. The scent of the gravel is new-cut stone and dirt and the chemical residue of the machines that laid it.

Something at the trail edge. The nose drops to it before the eyes register.

A shoe. Small. A child's sneaker, the rubber sole cracked, the canvas faded to a color the dark won't show, caught in the undergrowth where the mowing stopped. The lace knotted. The tongue pushed to one side. The scent-pattern fires — layers, quick, overlapping: rubber and canvas and the salt-residue of a small foot and the particular sweetness of skin that hasn't been alive long and the pattern is a cascade, each scent triggering the next — small-thing fires first, then inside-place, then warmth, then the whole sequence at once, just the body pulling toward the scent, the muscles softening, the mouth opening.

The jaw closes on the shoe. The teeth find the canvas. The tongue presses against the rubber sole.

The dog lifts it. Carries it.

Twenty yards down the trail. The shoe in the mouth, the canvas rough against the tongue, the weight of it almost nothing but the carrying has weight — the carrying has a shape that the body fits into the way a foot fits a track. The shape is: pick up the thing, bring it to the place, put it down. The circuit is old and the circuit is running and the body carries the shoe at a steady pace, head level, mouth soft, the way it carried the thing from the floor to the hand for years, and the place the thing should go to doesn't exist anymore. The hand isn't here. The floor isn't here. The body carries the shoe twenty yards down the gravel and stops because the circuit doesn't connect to anything and the carrying can't complete and the mouth holds the shoe and the shoe smells like small-thing, inside-place, warmth and the body stands on the trail with the circuit open.

It puts the shoe down. The jaw opens. The canvas lands on the gravel with a sound too small for the weight the body gave it. The nose touches the shoe once — a final read, the scent-compound still firing — and the body turns and walks and the firing fades with distance the way a sound fades, not all at once, the pattern still pulsing in the chest for ten yards, fifteen, then dropping below the threshold and the thrum taking over, the baby-sound ahead, the chest vibrating.

The body moves.

The trail climbs. The legs work against the grade. The right rear pad sends a pulse up through the leg with each step and the body absorbs it the way it absorbs the ache in the hip and the tightness in the chest — as conditions, not events. The conditions are: tired. Hungry. The pad. The hip. The thrum. The dark. The body operates within them the way water operates within a channel.

Halfway up the grade the legs slow. The gait breaks — the rhythm that has been carrying the body forward loses its pattern and the steps come unevenly, the front legs working while the rear legs drag, and the head drops, and the ears go flat, the intact one folding sideways against the skull, the alert system dimming. The body stands on the trail with its head low and its eyes half-closed and the dark pressing in from every direction and for three seconds the body is not moving toward anything.

The thrum fires. A pulse in the sternum, sharp, the baby-sound pulling from ahead, and the head comes up and the ears come up and the legs find the rhythm again and the body lurches forward on the gravel, the rear leg catching, the pad flaring, the gait ragged for ten yards before it smooths back into the compensated walk.

A sound.

Something large. Moving through the brush forty yards to the right, downhill, in the trees below the trail. Not the skitter of a small thing across leaves. This is weight — a body displacing undergrowth, pushing through it rather than over it, the sound of branches bending under mass and springing back. The body stops. The front legs lock. The ears go forward — both of them, the intact one rotating and the torn one lifting what remains. The nose reaches for the scent but the air is wrong — the sound is downwind, the breeze carrying the body's own scent toward the sound and bringing nothing back. The nose pulls at the dark and gets nothing.

The hackles lift. Not all the way. A ridge along the spine, the hair standing in a line from shoulder to tail, the body's oldest response: large thing, unknown, attend.

The sound stops.

The body holds. The breathing goes shallow. The ears strain forward into the dark, the shape of the sound undefined. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Nothing. The brush is still. Whatever was moving has stopped moving and the stillness has no scent and the body can't read what it can't smell and the hackles stay up and the legs stay locked and the dark between the trail and the sound is absolute.

Twenty seconds. The body locked. Every muscle flat against the bone. The ears forward. The nose open.

Nothing.

The hackles lower. Not all the way — from full ridge to half-ridge, the body reducing from large thing, attend to large thing, holding. The legs unlock. The weight shifts forward. The nose drops back to the trail. The thrum is still there. The baby-sound. The chest.

The body moves on.

The trail curves. The gravel thins and the dirt begins and the dirt is soft from the afternoon's heat still releasing from the ground and the pads sink a quarter-inch with each step and the scent of the dirt is rich — earthworm castings, root-rot, the musk of a vole that crossed here recently. The nose catalogs. The body moves.

The baby-sound. Closer now. The thrum easing — a fraction, a half-turn loosening in the chest. The frequency is clearer here, the pitch identifiable, a sound that has been pulling the body through the dark and the body follows it the way water follows a channel — not from choosing but from the shape of the ground, the gradient of the scent, the pull that doesn't ask and doesn't stop.

The trail widens. The gravel returns under the pads — the sharp-edged stuff, the new-laid stone that cuts differently than dirt. The body adjusts. The gait changes. The claws click on the rock and the clicking carries in the still air.

The right rear leg aches. The pad pulses. The hip catches on the uphill. The body is tired in a way that lives below the muscles, in the joints, in the marrow, the kind of tired that three weeks of sleeping in short bursts on hard ground produces — not exhaustion but erosion, the body wearing at its edges, the reserves that a bowl and a couch and a warm floor replenished every night now gone, spent, the body running on what the body generates and the body doesn't generate enough.

The thrum holds. The baby-sound pulls. The trail curves ahead and the scent on the air changes — blood. Human blood. The woman. The woman-and-baby-scent compound that the nose cataloged hours ago on the trail. The blood is old enough to have cooled but fresh enough to carry. Mixed with the baby-smell. Mixed with the mineral smell of the new gravel.

The body moves through the dark toward the sound that won't stop until it gets there.

Go to the next part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/ridgeline-part-eight-blood