Elf Dog and Owl Head, page 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
It was Monday, so they were hunting wyrms in the petrified forest. That’s what the Queen Under the Mountain always scheduled for Monday. The pack of elf-hounds bounded past stone trees, barking and howling. They poured through the wood like a tide. Behind them rode dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, servants and sorcerers. Huntsmen blew huge, curling horns.
They chased a wyrm that was old and clever. She slithered over boulders and under fallen trees of metal, glancing back to see if she had lost the elf-hounds yet. Several times, they paused to catch the scent of her again. They sniffed the cavern air. Then one of the dogs spotted the flick of the wyrm’s tail, barked warning, and plunged after the monster. The whole pack followed.
The whole pack except for one. She was a young elf-hound, slim and elegant, with bright, sharp eyes. She held back. She watched the other dogs surge forward. Her eye was caught by movement far off to the side, up a hill of marble oak trees with spreading branches. She had seen the wyrm’s children, squiggly baby wyrms: the mother was leading the dog pack away from them on purpose so her children could escape. The elf-hound watched the infant wyrms flee unnoticed.
The lords and ladies rode up behind the elf-hound. They would reward her if she led the whole Royal Hunt to the fleeing young.
“What’s wrong with this one?” asked one of the knights. “She’s just standing there.”
“She’d be one of our best dogs,” said the Master of the Hunt, “if she wasn’t always dreaming of something else.”
“Well,” said a duke, “force her to get moving! She should join the rest of the pack!”
“Go, girl!” yelled the Master of the Hunt, and he kicked out at her with his boot to let her know who was boss.
The elegant elf-hound stared at him coldly. He didn’t deserve to know what she’d seen. Almost smiling, she started after the pack again, barking as loudly as she could, as if she’d never noticed the young wyrm efts scrambling to safety up the hill. As if she’d never figured out the old wyrm’s plan, leading the Hunt away from the precious young.
She reached the pack, hopping over huge mushrooms and shelves of fungus. Easily, she soared past stragglers.
The People Under the Mountain kept the petrified forest stocked with wyrms and basilisks and other hungry beasts, just so they could hunt them without having to risk going aboveground. Outside the caves, above the mountain, the woods were deeper and wider, but sometimes haunted by humans.
Usually, the elf-hounds only got to hunt in these two square miles of cavern, seeking out monsters that had been bred by their masters for sport. But the old blue wyrm was leading the pack out of the familiar tunnels and caves. The dogs could tell. She was leading them upward.
“Smart old cow,” said one of the dukes. “Should we let her get out of the caves? Shall we follow her? Or shall I order the gates slammed shut? What do we think?”
“Good day for a hunt,” said a count, squinting after the wyrm through his rune-covered monocle. “Let’s go above-ground. Hunt her up there. It’ll be good for the elf-hounds to have a change of scene. We have the wizards with us. They can hide us from the humans.”
And so, with great horns blaring behind them, the pack tumbled up the passage that led out of the petrified forest, out of the caverns, and into the bright sunlight of the forest aboveground.
The old wyrm flung herself along, delighted. She had saved her children. And she herself might escape into this new, bright world. She just had to lead the dogs a little farther. Then she’d give them the slip.
Outside, it was spring, and the woods were just starting to turn green. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the sun picked out the red riding jackets of the knights and lords and ladies and the gems on their swords and tridents.
Their wizards rode to either side of the Hunt, cranking magical machines that sputtered out smoke. The People Under the Mountain only lived half in the world of humans, as if they had stepped with one leg into another time or an unseen place. This smoke would make them completely invisible if they stumbled across any humans lost in the woods.
The dog pack was wild with excitement. They rarely got to visit the world outside the palaces and parks in the caverns under the mountain. Some of them were afraid of the light. Some of them were worried that there were no walls of rock to protect them. They just bounded forward and tried to focus on the retreating wyrm.
But the young dog with the sharp eyes was fascinated by everything she saw and wanted to see more. She was trained to explore forests and learn their secret ways. She wanted to investigate this sparkling woodland that lay on the top side of the mountain, where she saw colors she had never seen before.
Greykin, the young dog’s uncle, was close on the wyrm’s tail. He was a prize elf-hound, a leader of the pack. The wyrm reared up and slashed at him. He ducked back.
The dogs were all around the wyrm then. They did not know that she was trying to protect her young. They only knew that they had been trained to kill beasts like her for the amusement of their masters. They barked furiously.
Except the young and elegant elf-hound, who had spotted something she had never seen before. It was the back of a gas station. It was made of cement blocks. The woods went right up to it.
Her uncle Greykin caught her eye. What was she doing? She should start barking, screaming—she should prepare to leap and tear at the scaly monster.
The wyrm was cornered. Behind her was a road. A highway. Humans drove past in cars, unaware that a few inches from their windows, a great and bloody battle was about to begin.
The dogs closed in. It looked like several of them were about to die in the fight. The People Under the Mountain did not care. They had plenty of dogs.
Growling, the pack closed in, step by step. The wyrm swung her front claws. She snapped at them.
The dogs’ muscles twitched. They were ready to leap.
The huntsman blew the horn—the signal for the kill.
And the wyrm threw herself backward and hurtled across the road, swaying her long blue body to eel between speeding cars.
The dogs just stood there, astonished, their mouths open. A few still remembered to bark.
They saw the wyrm jump up on top of a van with a loud thump. Then they saw her leap off the other side, into the safety of the woods there.
The van swerved: the driver must have heard the thump and maybe even caught a glimpse, out of the corner of their eye, of flashing blue scales. There was a lot of honking.
The dukes and duchesses and knights and ladies all were angry. They had wanted to see a spectacular fight. Now the wyrm had escaped, and the dogs couldn’t reach her over the tide of humans in their vehicles.
The hunt was over. The duke made a sign to the huntsman, who blew a retreat on his horn. The People Under the Mountain turned their horses around slowly and headed back toward the entrance to the cave, muttering angrily.
The dogs still barked at the wyrm across the busy highway. A Chihuahua in a truck barked back, furious. But no one else could hear them.
The hunting horns blew again. From the highway, the car horns honked. The dogs knew it was time to go home. One by one, they turned tail and trotted toward their masters.
The mystical fog drifted through the trees, growing fainter. Soon, the spring breeze blew it away completely. It was as if the hunt had never happened.
Except there was one dog left behind. The young, elegant elf-hound with the sharp eye. She was standing in the middle of the gas station parking lot, inspecting cars. She had never seen cars before. They smelled strange. She had never smelled plastic before, and she’d only smelled gasoline when the Queen Under the Mountain went up in her flying machine. The door to the gas station opened with a jingle. The most incredible smells wafted out. The elf-hound was used to being served food in a golden bowl in her kennel far beneath the earth. But she had never smelled pizza before. This, surely, was a food so royal that the Queen herself had never dined upon it.
“Look at the dog,” said a little girl. “She’s pretty.”
“Wonder where her owner is,” said a father, looking around the parking lot.
At this, the elf-hound realized that she had fallen far behind her pack. She looked around, startled. She had planned to catch up with them. Time to run.
She sprinted away from the gas station and the highway and back into the forest. She ran through spruce woods and pine woods and a stand of maples. She ran to the bottom of the mountain.
It was almost night when she got there. She sniffed at the ground, following the scent of her brothers and sisters. She smelled the horses of the Royal Hunt. Their track led right up to a huge cliff face.
Then it stopped.
But wasn’t that where they had come out? Hadn’t they all tumbled out into the sunlight in exactly this spot?
But now time and magic and the curtain between wo
The dog huffed deep in her throat—irritated to be left behind. She walked back and forth through the underbrush, sniffing.
They were gone. All of her pack. Her brothers and sisters. Her parents and aunts and her uncle Greykin. They were all gone, deep under the mountain, and she had no way to follow them.
She pawed at the blank stone. Her claws scratched across the granite.
Deep in her throat, for the first time in her life, she whimpered.
But no one would come for her.
She was all alone, trapped in the world aboveground.
There is no dumber game to play alone than Frisbee.
That is what Clay was thinking as he was walking through the forest with a Frisbee. He was alone.
There was a virus all across the country and the world. Pretty much everything had shut down. Even school was closed. None of his friends were allowed to come over. He could play with his sisters, but he would rather die in a pit than do that. His little sister, Juniper, was a know-it-all, and his big sister, DiRossi, spent all of her time playing war games online, hogging the computer.
Clay hadn’t seen his best friend, Levi, for a couple of months. He didn’t have anyone to kick around a ball with, or build stuff with, or throw a Frisbee with.
As he walked along through the forest, he tried a game where he threw the Frisbee straight up. Maybe he could perfect the flick of a wrist so when he saw Levi again, he would be a Frisbee master. The Frisbee sliced upward above the tops of the pines. It spun there for a second in the sun, wobbled, and then fell helter-skelter back down toward the ground. Clay ran to grab it out of the air.
It clunked him on the head. Then it flopped over onto the moss.
Clay bent to pick it up. He was kind of glad no one saw. It was better to practice being a Frisbee master alone.
Except it felt like someone had seen.
Clay looked around the clearing. He felt watched.
He did not notice, behind him, the glint of blue scales. He did not hear the six crooked claws pacing toward him across the moss. But somehow, he felt the glare of the large golden eyes on his back.
Half bent over, the Frisbee in his hand, Clay inspected the dark woods in front of him. There were deep shadows under the firs and spruce. He took a careful step backward.
Though he did not know it, something behind him was taking careful steps forward and opening its toothy mouth.
Clay backed up slowly, right toward that mouth.
The golden eyes behind him slowly blinked, and the creature’s smile widened.
Clay saw something burst out of the woods in front of him—a violent blur of white—something darting forward, barking crazily.
A dog! A mad dog! It was sprinting right toward him, growling and baying.
It must have rabies! he thought. It’s going to bite me!
He looked around for something on the ground—a branch or a rock—to protect himself. Nothing!
Stupidly, he held up the only thing he had with him—the Frisbee—as if it were a knight’s shield. He waited for the dog to strike.
But the dog ran right past him.
He swiveled around. Something was scrambling into the woods. The dog was chasing it, barking warnings.
From the crashing in the blackberry bushes, it sounded like it must be something pretty big.
The slim white dog stood at the edge of the clearing, legs stiff, tail straight up, ears out, and issued barks like threats and commands.
It must have been a bear behind him, Clay figured. There were black bears in this forest. They didn’t usually bother people. They were scared of people. But maybe this bear hadn’t been a normal bear, but a bear with an evil turn of mind.
That must be it. This dog had just saved him from a bear with an evil turn of mind.
“Thanks, dog,” Clay said.
She turned to look at him. She didn’t want to take her eyes off the forest for long. With a piercing gaze, she studied the shadows. A few spruce boughs wriggled as something big climbed under them.
Clay had never seen a dog like her. She was thin like a greyhound or a whippet. She was milk white. She had tall, pointed ears. And the inside of those ears was red. That was the strangest thing. The red pointed ears.
She was someone’s dog. She had a collar on. It was an ugly collar, too glitzy, with lots of fake pearls and diamonds and rubies.
“Is the bear still around?” Clay asked the dog, walking over to her side. “You going to protect me, huh?” He knew it was polite to talk to dogs like they can talk back.
The dog quivered with watchfulness.
“You’re a good . . .” He leaned down and checked. “A good girl.”
She turned and looked into his eyes and blinked once. As if to say: Of course I am.
That was how Clay met the elf-hound.
For a long time, she watched the woods. And then she sniffed the air, her black nose flexing, trying to find a scent of the beast that had passed.
“Do you know how to play Frisbee?” Clay asked the dog. He twitched the Frisbee as if he were about to throw it. He wanted to see if she knew the game, if she ran in anticipation. She just stared at him.
So he tried shouting, “Fetch!” and threw the Frisbee. It soared across the clearing, hit a pine, and thudded to the dirt. The dog watched it all with mild interest.
“No,” said Clay. “You’re supposed to go get it. Fetch. Fetch!”
She looked at him like a queen trying to decipher a foreign language.
He trudged over and picked up the Frisbee. “Stupid dog,” he muttered.
He threw the Frisbee over her head. It was a good throw. She peacefully watched it swish right by her and land in a blackberry bush.
Clay rolled his eyes. That blackberry bush was going to be a pain to crawl through. He shook his head and groaned.
And then he blinked, because the dog was right at his side with the Frisbee in her mouth. He had not seen her move. She was sitting daintily on the moss, presenting the Frisbee to him like a gift.
He took it from her mouth. How had she done that? It was like she had run invisibly.
Clay threw the Frisbee again, to see if she would repeat the trick.
The elf-hound was a little confused by this human child. She knew he was not one of the People Under the Mountain: he looked like them, but his ears weren’t at all pointed. He seemed like a nice person, but he could not keep hold of his odd little shield. Did he really expect her to keep picking it up if he was going to drop it all over the forest and hurl it into treetops? She supposed it was worth the trouble—it was made of some precious substance, subtle in color as jade but tough as bone and light as paper, smelling of this new human world and its miracles.
They played Frisbee for a while. Several times, the same odd thing happened: when Clay threw the Frisbee into someplace hard to reach, he would not see the dog fetch it, but she would appear right next to him, laying it at his feet.
So he deliberately threw it into a treetop. It swayed in a pine branch, then dropped down, skittering from branch to branch, and came to rest about ten feet from the ground.
Clay watched the dog carefully. He wanted to see when she disappeared.
She sat on her haunches and watched him back.
“Okay, do your trick,” he said to her. She stared at him without blinking.
“Fetch with magic!” he said.
She wagged her tail slightly, but not much.
They had a staring contest for several minutes. Then he went to climb the tree and get the Frisbee out of it. He was pulling himself up from branch to branch when the dog gave a quick, sharp bark from down below.
“One sec,” said Clay, straining to reach up. He fumbled in the pine needles, trying to feel the rim of the Frisbee.
She barked again. He looked down. She had the Frisbee sitting in front of her.
“You are a really good dog,” he said.
She looked at him as if to say, Yes. We both already know that.
When it came time for him to go home, he said goodbye and set off on the path that led back through the woods. The dog trotted after him.
“Your owner is going to be mad,” he told her. “Go home. Go home!”
She looked at him with surprise. She seemed a little hurt.
“Go home!” he ordered, and flicked his fingers in the air.
