is not an exhibit so much as a tiny preserve, where the sheep are left largely to themselves and undisturbed-that is, until Oberon and I started terrorizing them.
When I hunted with Oberon, I took the form of a wolfhound with a red coat shot through with streaks of white, slightly taller in the shoulder than Oberon and with dark markings on the right side reminiscent of my tattoos. If I had gone out there with a bow and let Oberon flush them for me, it would have been far simpler but far less satisfying for both of us. Oberon wanted to bring them down in the “old way,” never mind that wolfhounds were bred to chase down wolves in the forest and take out charioteers on the battle plain, not leap around rocky hills after nimble-footed rams.
The reason the sheep were so hard to bring down was that the terrain was steep, unkind to our paws, and a tumble from the rocks would probably land us in a cactus-and anyone who’s ever tried to tangle with a teddy bear cholla knows there’s a whole lot more bear than teddy to it. The conditions would simply not let us open up full bore and catch up to them.
When we got to the park, Oberon was ready to kill just about anything that moved. He’d been trying to intimidate Flidais’s stags and found that they were not scared of him in the least, and it was practically making him rabid. I had overheard snatches of their conversation as we rode along in Flidais’s chariot:
‹If you were not under the goddess’s protection, I would have you for supper,› he told them.
‹Maybe if you had two score friends or so,› they taunted him. ‹A single puppy would never trouble us.› Oh ho!
‹You would not be so bold if the goddess were not here.›
‹Is that so? She leaves us alone for long periods of time, staked to a small area. Try to take us then and see what happens, runt.›
Oberon growled at them and bared his teeth, and I told him to hush, doing my best to hide my amusement. Oh, was he ever mad. Calling a giant like him a runt? They really knew how to push a dog’s buttons.
Flidais asked me where she should park her chariot, and I suggested she leave it by Hunt’s Tomb, a small white pyramid incongruously erected on one of the hills as the final resting place of Arizona’s first governor. It was fenced off from the rest of the park, but the stags simply leapt over it, jerking the chariot abruptly behind but landing gracefully on the other side through some of Flidais’s magic.
‹Can you jump like that, little doggie?› one of the stags teased.
Oberon simply growled in response, far past the point of vocalizing. We got out of the chariot, and he barked at them once before I brought him to heel.
“We are after sheep tonight,” I reminded him.
‹Let’s go, then,› he replied as the stags snorted their laughter.
“Get yourself ready, Druid,” Flidais said as she slung her quiver over her head.
And so I cleared my head and summoned power through the tattoo that tied me to the earth, drawing strength up from the desert. I fell down on all fours as I bound myself to the shape of a hound.
A Druid’s therianthrophy is nothing like the change of a werewolf, save in the sense that both are magical. One major difference is that I can change shape (or not) at will, regardless of the time of day or the phase of the moon; another is that it’s fairly painless, unlike lycanthropy; yet another is that I can transform into different animals, albeit a limited few.
In practice, I do not stay for long periods in animal form, for psychological reasons. While I can eat anything the animal would eat and not suffer physically from it, mentally I have difficulty choking down whole mice when I’m an owl or eating raw venison as a hound. (We had taken down a doe in the Kaibab Forest a couple of weeks ago, and once she was down, I had walked off and waited until Oberon had had his fill.) So these hunts were for Oberon more than for me: I just enjoyed the chase and that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you know you’re making someone happy.
But something was different this time when I changed to hound form. My mind felt befuddled, and I was more than a little bloodthirsty. I smelled the sheep scent on the night air, and the nearness of the stags, but instead of accepting this input coolly, I became ravenous and started drooling a bit. It was wrong, and I should have changed back right then.
Flidais strode to the fence and ripped a section of it from the ground with a single hand, whistling once and gesturing for us to run through. We scampered underneath the links and headed for the hills we had hunted before, keeping silent so as not to alert the sheep too early that we were coming for them. There was another fence to negotiate to get into the preserve portion of the park, and Flidais obliged us there as well.
“Now go, my hounds,” she said as she ripped up another section of fence, and as she said it I felt as if I was her hound, not a Druid anymore, not even human anymore, but part of a pack. “Flush a ram out of the hills and bring him to my bow.” And then we were off, running faster than we ever had before, dodging cacti in the weak starlight of a city sky, and I was only dimly aware that there was magic at work here that was not my own. The cold iron amulet necklace, now shrunk about my neck like a collar, should protect me from it if it was sinister, so I did not worry.
It didn’t take us long to find the sheep. They were bedded down in a tangle of creosote, but they heard us scrabbling in the gravel of the desert floor and were already leaping up a nearly vertical hillside when we first laid eyes on them. Our legs spasmed as we tried to make that first leap up to the beginnings of a slope; I made it to a narrow precipice, though barely, but Oberon fell short and tumbled backward into the dirt with a whuff of breath.
‹Go around the base and wait,› I said to him. ‹I will chase them over to you.›
‹Very well,› he agreed. ‹Cunning is better than running.›
I kept my eyes on the retreating flanks of the sheep ahead of me and kept pumping my legs up the hill. Incredibly, I seemed to be gaining ground on them, and I felt so triumphant about it that I let loose with a few barks to scare them stupid. But they were built to negotiate those hills with ease, and I was not, and eventually I lost some ground as I had to scramble for footholds and find better places to jump up. When they disappeared over the peak and were headed down the other side, I started barking again to make sure they knew I was close behind and there was no time to stop. I wanted them to head straight for Oberon.
I had no way of knowing precisely where he was waiting, of course, but hopefully my barking would give him an idea of where we were headed.
Going down was much more treacherous than going up. The way the shadows fell, it was difficult to tell if the next step was a foot down or a fathom. But the pale flanks bobbing up and down ahead of me in soft, night-blue streaks gave me a good idea of what to expect. They were headed almost due south, and I heard nothing beyond their hooves clattering amongst the rocks and my own panting and barking. If Oberon and Flidais were waiting ahead, they were being careful not to reveal their positions.
I kept barking, though it was more to drown out any small noises Oberon might make than any enthusiasm I had for closing the gap between us. I fetched up at a precipice and saw that I would have to travel around to the west a bit before I could find a way down, and with every second the sheep got farther away. So I remained where I was and watched, and sure enough, Oberon was hidden behind a creosote bush not far from where the sheep finally came down off the hill. There was a gap of fifty yards or so before the next hill reared up out of the earth, with nothing but sparse desert plants in the way. Oberon cut off their approach to the next hill, and I was barking behind them, so the sheep turned east up the pass between the hills. Once they silhouetted themselves against the sky, an arrow knocked one off its feet and sent it tumbling, bleating to its doom as its fellows fled.
Oberon closed on it to finish it off, but there was no need. Flidais’s arrow had found its heart, and she would doubtless appear momentarily to claim her kill. I began to work my way down the hill, wondering if she would be satisfied. The hunt had not lasted long; we had flushed them too perfectly, owing perhaps to our recent visits and familiarity with the terrain.
But it seemed those recent visits had not gone unnoticed, unfortunately: As I reached the site of the kill, where Flidais was already gutting the animal and Oberon was standing nearby, a park ranger suddenly appeared, holding a flashlight and a gun. He demanded loudly that we freeze as he blinded us with a halogen glare.
We couldn’t have been more startled. He should not have been able to sneak up on any of us, much less all three. But it is not wise to surprise one of the Tuatha De Danann. Flidais whipped her knife out of its sheath and threw it to the left of the flashlight before I had even finished turning my head toward the ranger. She had not aimed, or even looked, so the knife didn’t kill him; it sank into his left shoulder and caused him to cry out and drop his flashlight, which would make it harder for him to aim that gun if he felt like shooting. It turned out he did; a few
