Winter Wonderland

Inescapable

Naiche 

Returning home before the snows truly hit, Naiche had walked through grass crisp with frost, sensing something was off. It took a couple circles through the woods around his home to find the scent, several days old, of the human woman. As far as he could tell, she had come within sight of his small cabin, then turned around and walked off.

Tracking her back through the woods, things got a little more interesting. Her scent roamed through the forests around the lakes, layering in a nearly daily occurrence, with no consistent direction or path. If she had been searching for something, she was the least skilled hunter he had ever come across, with no rhyme or reason to the pattern of her paths. He spent a good portion of a day and night tracking her back and forth and only finding one consistency.

Other than the path to his house, she would walk in a direction and come to a stop at some spot. There she would remain, usually sitting on a fallen log or a boulder, looking out over a valley, stream or the lake.

The woman never made a mess, left little behind, but it was clear that she had been there. Her boot tracks scuffed the ground beneath the leaves, a thread of fabric from her clothing, a spot where she had spilled coffee and once there was an elastic band, with a few strands of her dark hair wrapped around it.

Then her trail would turn back on itself, though never precisely, and return to her home. He had no accurate way of estimating her pace, but he could estimate that these treks took most of the day. The woman appeared to be spending all of her time wandering aimlessly around the woods.

Naiche frowned as he paused to watch her home for a moment, then turned back to return to his place. He didn't know why he cared, but he sincerely hoped that she didn't continue the habit in the winter. He wasn't sure how she was finding her way back home, as some of her paths seemed as if she had been lost in the woods, but he remembered enough of his distant mortal life to know that a human would not last very long wandering in the dead of winter.

Naiche was just stepping around a tree when he caught another scent layered amongst the forest. He couldn't quite identify it, though it appeared to be as aged as the woman's path to his place. It wasn't an animal, though it was faint enough that he could not immediately decide what it was.

Human, perhaps.

Another human, wandering through his woods at the same time as the woman?

Naiche's ears suddenly picked up the sound of gravel scattering in the distance, and every one of his senses narrowed in on the direction it came from. He smelled sweat and adrenaline, heard the fast pace of prey running and the heavy breathing of something exerting itself. Before he knew what he was doing, Naiche's body took up the chase, slipping through the early morning shadows of the forest as he sprinted toward the road.

A flash of bright colour brought him back to his senses and Naiche managed to hold himself back, catching sight of the woman jogging along the gravel road toward his place. She was wearing skin-tight pants and a looser long-sleeved shirt, with gloves covering her hands. There was some kind of headset in her ears, though these had no cords or plastic attached to them. Not that he knew how far headsets had advanced since his last brief encounter with them a few dozen years ago.

Her clothing was a riot of colours, bright yellows and pinks, with splashes of black in places, her cheeks red from the cold, or from exertion, though she did not appear scared.

He followed along easily with her, realizing she was using a pace that would allow her to cover a long distance. Naiche smirked, following her from the shadows, watching her reach the end of the road. She paused for a moment, glancing at his gate, which was locked and looked almost rusted shut, before turning and starting back the way she came.