Tak

Childhood's End - Part 5

     The next time he awoke Derro was directly overhead, casting an eerie, crimson glow across the forest. That meant that dawn was not far away, and a few songbirds were already in voice, heralding the approach of a new day. The last day his parents would ever see. Tak was ravenously hungry, but he didn't need to be told how lucky he would be to see any food that day. A few windfall nuts and brambleberries, maybe, but nothing more than that, and they might be hiding here for a long time.

     They were all stiff and cramped, and after taking a few minutes to make sure there were no shologs nearby his father allowed them to leave the hollow to stretch their limbs. "That was no sholog we saw last night," he said, speaking for whoever might be listening, but Tak's ears pricked up immediately. "I've no idea what it was. I've never seen anything like it. It may have been a beast man, I've heard they run with shologs sometimes."

     "Are they worse than shologs?" asked his wife anxiously, a protective arm wrapped tightly around each of her children.

     "Well, it's not good," he replied soberly. "The good news is that they have even less patience than shologs, if what I've heard is right. If they don't find us in a day or two they're likely to just wander off and the shologs will be under pressure to go with them."

     Even at that young age, Tak could see how his father was trying to keep his fears from showing on his face. The other good news, Tak learned many years later, was that beast men tended to kill their victims quickly, whereas shologs could keep them alive for days. The bad news was that beast men had an insatiable lust for human women, particularly girls. Older Tak remembered younger Tak seeing his father fingering the knife he wore on his belt. Younger Tak hadn't understood the significance of that motion, but older Tak did. If all hope was gone and capture seemed imminent, it might be kinder to put an end to his family's suffering before it could begin.

     After some thought, Tak's father decided that they had to leave the hollow. It had been a good emergency bolthole and a place to spend the night, but in the full light of day it was too obviously a hiding place. It was sure to be searched before long. If this forest was like others he'd seen, there were bound to be places where the trees were thinner and the undergrowth formed dense, impenetrable tangles hundreds of yards across. Such a place was still an obvious place to hide, but there would be a much greater area to hide in and their enemies would have to come to within a few yards of them to see them. The question was, how to find such a place? He stared into the forest, searching for some clue that would lead him in the right direction, but all he saw were trees, the same everywhere. He couldn't even remember which direction they'd come from. They were well and truly lost.

     He explained the situation to the rest of his family and they nodded numbly. Then, after a last look around, he led them in the direction he thought was probably west. The shologs might not expect them to double back the way they'd come.

     They were a sorry sight as they trudged along in single file. Grimy and scratched. Their clothes torn and stiff with mud. Their heads bowed in misery. They spoke not a word as they filed through the increasingly oppressive woodlands, and none of them noticed that the trees they were walking under were much larger than those they'd spent the night under, that it was growing increasingly dark even though, above them, the yellow sun had to be riding higher in the sky.

     It was only when they paused to rest that it occurred to him that all traces of undergrowth had disappeared. No plant could survive in the darkness of the dense, impenetrable canopy. Consequently, vision was unobstructed for hundreds of yards in every direction. Tak's father felt as though he'd been walking in his sleep and was only now coming back to his senses with a jolt of horror. What in the name of the Gods had he been thinking of?