Hounded

And a most excellent hound you are. I appreciate your help. Can you tell me if the plants you smelled were floral and sweet smelling, or perhaps bitter, maybe earthy?

That told me she wasn’t into love potions, and she wasn’t into siccing demons on people or sending plagues and agues either. It meant she probably wasn’t up to anything too dangerous at the moment, and I could ignore her safely. Thank you, Oberon, that’s very interesting. You just earned yourself a sausage.

It’s a deal. I’ll be out soon, the line’s moving.

Once I got to the counter, I bought a blue handmade ceramic mug and had the supercrunchy barista, Xypop, fix my San Francisco cappuccino in it. Since I enjoyed saying her name so much, I asked her to get me a few more things (“Xypop, do you still sell Cosmic Ray’s guide to mountain bike trails?”) and wound up buying stuff I didn’t need. She even sold me some baked vegan dog biscuits, which I purchased gleefully as a joke. I’d wait for Oberon to choke a couple down, then I’d tell him they were meatless and it was all Xypop’s fault.

I forgot about the three-coffee witch for ten whole minutes. Just before we left town to the east and the road curved north and turned to Highway 89, I saw her in the passenger seat of a maroon Honda Civic that was waiting for an opportunity to pull out of a gas station. That opportunity came right behind me, and I quickly checked out her companions in the rearview mirror to see if I’d been right about the maiden-mother-crone thing.

I hadn’t. “Damn it, now I’m paranoid,” I said aloud.

Oberon observed.

“What? Where’d you hear about Thorazine?”

“You want sensible? Fine. Sense and Sensibility it is. We’ll see how you like it.”

I returned my attention to the rearview mirror. Three young women raised unsettling possibilities when I couldn’t see their auras well. It was possible—even likely—that the other two were simply sorority sisters of Coffee Witch (as I’d come to think of her), and not witches themselves. But since they had almost identical auras to Coffee Witch, and they were also wearing velour tracksuits, it suggested to me a unity of purpose for which covens are known. The driver was blond and had a pink suit on and dark sunglasses—I’d call her Pinky. She had really thin lips and she was flapping them in an irritated manner, arguing about something with one or both of her passengers. In the backseat, on the passenger side, sat another brunette in a royal blue tracksuit with a deep tan. I named her Coppertone, and she was leaning forward to better hear what Pinky had to say, a frown on her face.

I really hoped I wasn’t looking at a coven of young witches. With auras like that and the illusion of invincibility that all young people have, they were liable to try something immensely stupid. In maiden-mother-crone covens, the mother figure tends to balance out the other two. The maiden says hell, let’s do some unspeakable shit because I’m strong and I’ll survive the consequences if things go wrong, and the crone says why not, let’s do some unspeakable shit because I’m going to die soon anyway, but the mother usually says let’s all chill out and think about this, hedge our bets and play it safe.

Whatever their argument was, they subsided after a while, and drove in silence behind me all the way onto the plateau. It actually made me nervous: Were they following me for some reason, or was this merely a coincidence? Had they spotted my aura after all, and now they wanted to find out exactly why the guy who looked twenty-one had an energy signature of extreme maturity and magical power?

The few people in Tempe who know what I really am have secrets of their own to keep, so I didn’t think they’d tell anyone (much less these youngsters) that I’m older than the New Testament. But you never know: It seems like everyone wants the secret of eternal youth, and they’re willing to do most anything to lay hold of it. Maybe somebody suggested to these ladies that I had the answer. Or maybe their trip was nothing more than what it appeared to be, three college girls taking a trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

I took Highway 67 for a short stretch south of Highway 89, then cut west on Forest Service Road 461 toward Jacob Lake. At that point I finally lost my tail: I took FSR 282 south, skirting Jacob Lake and continuing down a sinuous dirt track for several miles, while Coffee Witch & co. continued on 461, presumably to visit the inn above the lake. I relaxed and pushed them out of my mind; they were doubtless going there for a slice of the famous pie before they drove down to the North Rim.

I pulled off to the side of the road and parked once we got to a densely forested area. I sucked in a lungful of early-autumn air and admired the trees before me. Mostly old-growth ponderosa with a few mixed conifers here and there; pockets of aspen were scattered about, the thin white fingers of their trunks waving hello in the wind.

After I let Oberon out, I kicked off my sandals and sent a greeting to the earth through my knotted tattoos, which were much more than personal decoration: They were the visual evidence of my magical bond to the earth. The indigo knotwork began—if Celtic knots can be said to begin anywhere—on the back of my right hand, then the threads of it traveled up my arm, circled beneath my shoulder, and continued down my right side all the way to the sole of my foot. While in contact with the earth, I had all its power on tap if I needed it, for as I am bound to the earth, it is bound to me.

Talking to the earth is tricky, because it doesn’t follow the syntax of human language and it works in geological time. If I want to commune directly with what people call Gaia, it takes a deep trance and about a week to say hello. What I do instead is speak to her proxies, the elementals who dwell in a defined ecosystem. It’s akin to talking to a worker bee instead of the queen, since the queen is rarely available and the bee in this case can speak for her.

The speaking itself is not speaking at all. It’s more like pheromone emissions containing my emotions bundled into nouns and verbs—though that explanation doesn’t really cover it, and it leaches away a good deal of the fun. It’s simpler to just call it Druidry, the magic of binding the natural world. It’s tough to render such communication into mere words, but here’s an approximation of what I sent to the local elemental: //Druid greets Kaibab / Health / Harmony / Query:: Hunt?//

The response thrummed quickly through my tattoos. //Kaibab greets Druid / Welcome / Rest / Hunt / Nourish self / Harmony//

You don’t know what warm fuzzies are until you get personally welcomed to a forest by its avatar. //Gratitude / Contentment / Harmony// I replied.

Oberon said, his tail wagging as he spun in excited circles.

He didn’t have to ask me twice. I shucked off my clothes and put them in the trunk, then I hid the car keys inside the front tire well. Going onto all fours, I triggered the transformation into a wolfhound and sneezed, because the abrupt ability to smell fifty times better can do that to a fella. I can bind myself to four different animal shapes, but when I’m a hound I have a thick red coat with dark markings on my right side where my tattoos are. We lit out into the woods with gusto, a red dog and a gray dog, friends in the forest padding across a carpet of needles and drinking in the crisp scent of pine.

We caught the scent of the Kaibab deer herd after about a half hour, and we split up. I drove a three-point buck south to Oberon, and he pounced on him successfully and brought him down. I’m not a huge fan of raw venison, even in hound form, so I let Oberon go to it and found a nice spot in a meadow to sun myself some distance away.

I was rolling around on my back, enjoying the smell and tickle of the grass, the sound of my own playful thrashing, when terror and loathing seized me.

//Kaibab needs Druid / Jacob Lake / Help / Discord//

The air rushed out of my lungs and all sound stopped, as if there were a temporary vacuum. The chirp of birds and hum of insects, the wind whispering in the trees—all of it was gone. The sounds came back tentatively after a few seconds, but a deeper silence remained.

//Query:: Kaibab?// I got no answer, not even to repeated calls.

Worry clenched at my heart. Had I become unbound from the earth, unbound from my friend? I tried something else. Oberon, can you hear me?

he said, and I sighed in relief.

Yes. I need you in the meadow to the east.

There is trouble at Jacob Lake. Coffee Witch came immediately to mind, but I had no idea what she and her friends could have done to upset Kaibab. Can you find your way there by getting back to the road and following it north?

I’m going to fly there. I unloosed the knot that bound me to hound form and tied myself to a different shape, this time a great horned owl. Look for me nearby or wait by the lakeshore if you don’t see me.

I don’t know. Maybe.

Oberon trotted into the meadow as I leapt into the air, flapping hard to gain altitude.

Thanks, buddy. I’ll see you soon. I circled to the north and tried to gain speed. Owls are more renowned for their silence than their swiftness, but I still figured it was the fastest way for me to get back to Jacob Lake, and if there was trouble there, then a silent approach would serve me well.

Jacob Lake is actually a dissolution sinkhole formed in the limestone of the plateau. It’s been there for ages, and it’s the main watering hole for wild animals in the area. A large meadow surrounds it, and farther back the ponderosas and aspens give it a majestic skyline. There’s also a tiny village by the same name a bit to the north, where the inn is located, so I didn’t know if the trouble was by the actual lake or “in town.”

I floated just above the tops of the trees so that I wouldn’t waste any time in maneuvers, taking the straightest line to the lake. Once in range of the meadow and the lake in the center of it, I spied nothing down there but a dozen wild horses munching on the last grasses of the season. I thought a circuit of the lake would be prudent, so I began to circle it counterclockwise, staying above the trees and looking below. When I got around to the west side—nine o’clock in dogfighter’s terms—I saw a flash of pale flesh below the canopy and banked around to take a better look. I heard odd screeching noises, too, and then tense voices:

“I don’t think you should kill it, because that will be like releasing it.”

“It can’t break the circle even if it escapes the animal. It’ll still be bound.”

“Fine, but how do we get its power into us?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t expect this half-assed splicing of spells to work!”

“So you didn’t even plan for the eventuality?”

The voices belonged to three familiar naked women, who were all witches beyond a doubt now. They were clustered around something on the ground, and I decided to light in a pine tree behind them to take stock of the situation and prevent them from seeing me accidentally. What little noise I made upon landing was masked, no doubt, by the frantic animal cries coming from the vicinity of the women. Their bodies were blocking whatever was making the cries, and they were the types of bodies that cause distraction.

They were easy to tell apart even without their tracksuits on. Coffee was on the left, pale with an occasional dark freckle and her hair still tied in a ponytail; the blond, thin-lipped one whom I called Pinky was in the center, and Coppertone stood on the right—tanned all over, I noticed. None of them had neglected to visit the gym regularly. “No, I didn’t,” said Pinky with some asperity. “And neither did either of you, so you can aim that blame somewhere else.”

“Well, we have to try something,” said Coffee.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Pinky snapped.

Though I thought I knew what was going on, I couldn’t quite believe that they had managed it. I needed to know more before I leapt to any conclusions. I glided silently to the earth and released myself from the owl shape, back to my human form again.

I quietly cast camouflage on myself, which is the nearest I can come to invisibility. It binds my pigment to my surroundings, so that I become practically invisible when I remain still. People can see me if I move quickly, but if I imitate the Rock of Gibraltar they have to really know I’m there to spot me. I figured it was best: Naked women rarely welcome the approach of strange naked men, except in porn movies.

Tiptoeing around to the left of the trio, my suspicions were confirmed: Somehow, this coven of callow witches had succeeded in capturing and binding a forest elemental. A small metal cage was fairly bouncing on the forest floor, and inside was frenzied Kaibab squirrel in the most exquisite pain, because it was trying to contain the spirit of the entire forest in its wee little body. Kaibab squirrels are unique to the plateau, with white fluffy tails and black, tufted ears that look like tassels. They evolved there in geographic isolation and occupy a vital ecological niche—they’re the face of the plateau, in many ways—but they aren’t constitutionally capable of holding an elemental inside of them. I think the only reason this one was still alive was because the elemental really wanted it that way. Its fur rippled and its eyes bulged, it twitched and spasmed and chittered in terror, and I felt sorry for it.

And angry.

I looked around to see if I could discern how they had managed this. There wasn’t an obvious cauldron hanging over a fire with an unholy stench bubbling forth; there wasn’t a stone altar with a sacrifice on it, bleeding its life away. They had to have used some mechanism to bind Kaibab—they could not have simply bid him to come and take up residence in a squirrel. Finally I spotted it: Carved carefully into the bark of the ponderosa behind the stone circle was the Seal of Arielis, a pernicious seal from the Seventh Book of Moses originally intended to bind one of the Seven Great Princes of Hell. Since its publication in nineteenth-century Germany, witches of various stripes had been using it to bind all manner of spirits and compel their obedience. They’d found it to be one of the few fail-safes in magic: Either the spirit would come and be firmly bound by the Seal, or it wouldn’t work, period, and all they’d lose was some time and maybe an eye of newt. These witches had traced the carving with crushed knotweed, a common herb used in binding spells, and the same Seal was printed on a piece of parchment resting underneath the squirrel’s cage.

I sighed. “You know, when that elemental gets out of there,” I said, “you’re going to wish you’d left well enough alone.”

“Who said that?” Coffee spun in my direction but utterly failed to see me as I remained still. Pinky and Coppertone started looking all around, even up in the trees, but they had no better luck than Coffee did.

“Where are you?” Coppertone asked.

“Who are you?” Pinky called.

“Who I am doesn’t matter. What I am is a Druid, and you’ve broken Druidic law by binding an elemental against its will.”

And they’d picked one of the weaker, more vulnerable ones, probably on purpose. I doubt they would have been able to bind Amazon, for example, or Appalachia. They’d settled for one of the smallest elementals on earth, thinking perhaps its wee size and isolation would keep anyone from noticing what they were doing. But I would have heard Kaibab’s call from anyplace on the planet and come running; it was their bad luck they’d tried it when I was so close by.

They were all gazing directly at me now, because I’d helpfully given them a direction to look by speaking again. They still didn’t see me, though.

“How does he know what we’ve done?” Coppertone whispered.

“I thought the Druids all died before Rome fell,” Coffee said.

“All but one,” I said. “The Romans never found me.”

“I still can’t see him,” Pinky complained in a frustrated whisper. “Can’t do anything.” That told me they would have thrown some juju at me already if they had line of sight.

“Show yourself!” Coppertone shouted, taking a couple of steps in my direction. They weren’t shy. They’d made no move at all to cover their nudity.

“I’m sorry for you ladies,” I said over the pained cries of the squirrel. “You obviously have some magical talent, and you might have turned out to be great witches. But I can’t let you have Kaibab’s power. It needs to be free.” I still didn’t know what kind of witches they were. The Seal of Arielis suggested a Kabbalistic background, but it had also been used by priests of Voodoo and Obeah and teenage girls who had found the damn thing on the Internet. Whatever they were, they were clever enough to adapt the Seal to their own purposes, and their purposes were not benign.

“We can’t let him break the circle,” Pinky said, stepping toward me with her arms groping the air, and then she switched to speaking Russian, no doubt thinking I wouldn’t understand it. It would have been a good assumption if they were dealing with a young American guy, but they were dealing with a truly ancient Irish guy who spoke forty-two languages, some long dead. “Nam nuzhno ostanovit ego,” she said. We need to stop him. Coffee and Coppertone formed up on either side, searching with their hands for the source of my disembodied voice.

Coppertone continued in the same language, “We should cast a speed spell.” Smart girl. If they couldn’t target me with their magic, they could target themselves and search for me more quickly. They switched languages again, to one I thought I recognized, but didn’t understand: It sounded like Romany. They spoke in concert and moved their right arms in a synchronized gesture, and afterward their movements blurred with speed.

Creeeeeepy. And evidence that they were much more accomplished than I had originally thought. They were probably much older than they looked too: These were witches of the Old World come here to take on the power of the New.

They advanced quickly, and if they got hold of me they’d probably do some damage. I didn’t want to find out how powerful they were by experimentation: If they could bind Kaibab, they could probably bind me too. There were several things I could do to bind them, but all of them would take more time than they would allow, and speaking the words at this point would draw them closer to my position. If I tried to run around them, they’d spot the movement and hear my footfalls, and I’d be dealing with Romany curses flung at my feet. The only solution was to knock them down and hope I had time to break Kaibab out of the circle.

I let them get close and then I sucker punched them, and I’m not ashamed of it. People who try to fight fair with witches tend to die unfairly. Coffee and Pinky each took a fist in the nose, and as they were reeling backward, Coppertone swung a fist at the mirage of my camouflaged head. She was superfast, but not a trained martial artist. I had already dropped to the ground so that I could sweep her legs, and as she tumbled awkwardly to the forest floor I chopped down hard just below her ribs, driving all the air out of her lungs. She gasped and clutched at her midsection. She wouldn’t be casting any spells—or chasing me—until she got her breath back.

Now that I’d established clearly in their minds that I had fists and knew how to use them, I changed my shape to make a break for the circle. I bound myself to the form of a sea otter—which I almost never take on land—and scampered directly toward Coffee and Pinky, who were trying to find me. They heard me coming, and they saw something moving near the forest floor as my camouflage tried to compensate for the changing surroundings, so they aimed a curse in my direction and let fly about three feet above my head, assuming that they’d hit me in the torso if I was in human form. I heard tree bark splintering behind me and was glad they had missed. I darted right between Pinky’s legs, proud of myself for not looking up, and leapt for the stone circle that bound Kaibab.

The breath whuffed out of me as I crashed into an invisible barrier like a bird into a sliding glass door. Damn witches were much better than I had originally thought. As I thrashed myself back onto my short legs and looked for a likely place to retreat and hold still, Coffee and Pinky realized I’d gotten behind them and charged the circle. They saw the shadows of my movement near the ground, and this time they just tried to tackle me. Pinky missed me entirely, but Coffee got a lucky hand wrapped around my tail. I whipped around and bit her with my sharp otter teeth, and she let go.

“Ow! What the—? He’s not human anymore!” she exclaimed as I scurried away.

“What is he then?” Pinky asked. She expressed no disbelief; she just coldly wanted to assess the new threat.

“I don’t know,” Coffee said as the two of them regained their feet and I ducked behind a ponderosa to the south of the circle. “Something with fur and sharp teeth. I think I grabbed his tail.”

“All right, keep your eyes on the ground and aim low,” she said.

The physical approach hadn’t worked, so it was time for me to try something else. I switched back to my human form and dug my toes into the ground. I concentrated on the soil underneath the circle of rocks and felt its substance through my bond to the earth. I heard the witches approaching on my six, but I couldn’t let that distract me. I spoke in Irish, the language used centuries ago in the ritual that bound me to the earth, and thus the language I use to work my magic on it: “Tabhair uaidh,” I breathed, sending the command down through my tattoos, and upon my word the soil caved in, spilling the rocks in all directions as the earth shifted, breaking the circle.

A loud whump and a shock wave of compressed air announced the escape of Kaibab from the circle. The witches cursed in Russian and asked one another what happened. They looked back at the squirrel, and it appeared to be nothing but a normal, frightened rodent now.

“No!” Coffee cried. “It got away!” While they were distracted, I moved slowly out from behind the tree so that I could see them well. Coppertone had recovered and joined them near the tumbled ring of stones.

Pinky stamped her foot and balled her hands into fists. “How’d he break the circle?”

//Kaibab thanks Druid / Freedom sweet / Binding unjust / Unbound now / Rage / Vengeance//

“Make peace with your gods now,” I warned the witches as pine needles began to stir and whirl around them clockwise. “I don’t think Kaibab is going to give you a trial of your peers.”

“Now, wait,” Coffee protested in my direction as she eyed the shifting ground, “we didn’t think it would go this far! We never expected to succeed!”

“But you hoped you would,” I said, not buying her plea of innocence for a second. “You tried to bind a force of nature and take its power for yourselves.”

Pinky turned back in my direction and snarled past a rising whorl of pine needles, “Spare us. If you’re a real Druid, then all you do is bind nature and use its power.”

“No, that’s only part of what I do. As the earth is bound to me, so I am bound to it, and I must answer when it calls. Normally I’d sentence and punish you, too, because elementals aren’t supposed to touch humans, but there’s a self-defense clause in the rules of engagement, and I’m afraid you’ve triggered it. Kaibab can do whatever it wants to you now.”

Pinky was so focused on me, she seemed unaware that she was standing in the center of a very strange vortex. She looked like she was going to hurl a choice curse or two my way, targeting my voice to see if the curse would stick, but at that moment the earth opened up beneath her feet and swallowed her whole, a swirling curtain of pine needles following her down before the crust collapsed shut, choking off her screams with finality.

The other two witches’ eyes bugged and they took that as their cue to run, crying out for mercy as they fled the forest, heading for the meadow surrounding the lake—believing, perhaps, that it would be safer than staying underneath the trees.

Coppertone never made it out. Branches from the surrounding ponderosas swung down, whipping and tearing at her bare skin, and she fought back with Romany curses, exploding branches and shattering trunks of trees. It only enraged Kaibab further, though, and eventually the tip of a well-aimed branch pierced Coppertone through one eye, silencing her curses forever.

Coffee did make it out to the meadow, bloodied but in one piece. She quickly discovered, however, that she wasn’t any safer in open space. Kaibab sent the animals of the forest after her as she hurriedly tried to draw a circle of protection for herself near the lake.

In those animated movies for kids, the beautiful heroine starts singing in the forest and the animals gradually gather around her and sing along until they’ve practically created a utopia with the power of their golden-throated warbling. This was sort of like watching what would happen if Edgar Allan Poe were in charge of those sequences. Birds got there first, pouring out of the surrounding forest from all directions: bluebirds, nuthatches, robins, crows, woodpeckers, even hummingbirds and a golden eagle. All of them harried her and pecked at her head, preventing her from completing her circle and giving the larger animals time to arrive and do some real damage. She destroyed a number of them, but there were too many to deal with and she got no respite. A coyote hurried into the meadow from the north, and a bobcat sprinted in from the east, apparently the only predators nearby. They nipped at her heels and legs and bloodied her, but she managed to kill them both before they could take her down. I was dismayed by that and took a few steps in her direction to help out, but then I saw it would be unnecessary. Their harassment, combined with the cacophony of the birds, had masked the charge of a magnificent bull elk from the south, who now rammed full speed into her back and sent her flying a good twenty feet or so. The herd of wild horses I’d seen grazing by the lake earlier followed up from the same direction. They mercilessly finished her off, trampling her to death in a mess of blood and mud on their hooves.

//Druid help / Release small one / Gratitude// Kaibab said through my tattoos, and I picked my way past the tumbled stone circle to retrieve the metal cage. I carried the Kaibab squirrel to the nearest unscarred pine tree and opened the cage door near its base. The creature scampered out and straight up the tree’s trunk, no worse off than it had been when it woke that morning, though it would probably have nightmares when it hibernated.

//Gratitude / Justice / Harmony// Kaibab said. The forest animals were gathered at the edge of the meadow, looking at me in silence. Once I’d turned to face them, they bobbed their heads at me once before Kaibab released them to fly or gallop away in whatever direction they chose.

//Relief / Welcome// I replied. I set down the cage and tied myself to a hound’s form once more, then spent some time snuffling around the area where the witches had bound Kaibab. I found their velour tracksuits folded neatly nearby, and I dug up a hole and buried them in it, but didn’t try too hard to conceal it. Some bags of herbs were there, too, but I carried them off much farther and did a better job of burying them, along with the Seal of Arielis that had rested underneath the squirrel’s cage. Before I left for good, I lifted my leg on the seal carved into the ponderosa, ruining the smeared knotweed and dissolving for good any remnants of magical power it held.

The police, when they eventually came, would have a merry old time trying to reconstruct this crime scene.

My work finished, I extended my legs into the ground-eating lope for which wolfhounds are celebrated, across the bloody meadow to the forest road, where I headed south. I met Oberon several minutes later trotting up to find me. he asked.

Had to help out a trapped squirrel is all, I said.

Well, that’s the short version, but yeah.

Well, we can take our time heading back to the car. Everything’s fine now.