My eyes saw some larger bones. Instinctively I sniffed. A rabbit? A wild dog? I could not tell.
“They are mostly very small,” said Elizabeth decisively.
I gave a low growl as one of the bones twitched-and I had a terrible image of the entire pile assembling itself into some monstrous specter that would consume us. But almost at once I could see several small animals moving among the bones, feeding on the last of their meat and marrow.
Elizabeth chuckled softly, looking up into the glowering sky.
“Birds,” she said. “ They have made this heap. Don’t you remember your father telling us about the lammergeier? How it drops its prey onto rocks to break the bones so it can more easily get at the marrow?”
“I must have missed that lesson,” said Henry. “What is a lammergeier?”
“Bearded vulture,” I murmured. “The locals call them tree griffins. They’re quite large.”
“Ah, excellent,” said Henry. “This adventure grows more enjoyable by the second.”
“Which way now?” Elizabeth asked me. A heat came off her that I found strangely distracting.
I pulled out my map. “From here there is a trail that should take us right to the tree.”
She was already walking with a hunched intensity. I followed.
“Wait for me, please,” said Henry. “This does not look like a path!”
“It’s just overgrown,” I said gruffly. With my wolf’s eyes I could see it like a silvery river running deeper into the forest.
I loped behind Elizabeth, scarcely aware of the steep climb.
“You’re going too quickly,” I heard Henry say. “I’ll lose you in the darkness!”
Reluctantly I slowed down. The smells of the forest were keener somehow, and I caught myself swinging my head from side to side, tasting the air, peering among the trees. My earlier feeling of being followed was more intense and There. A distant pair of eyes met my own as we kept pace through the Sturmwald. Perhaps it was a wolf. I was not afraid. Somehow I felt we were kin right now, prowling in the night.
Elizabeth found the tree. On the immense trunk the X mark was still faintly visible. I looked up. The first branches were very high, maybe more than fifty feet up. We set down our gear at the base. I took the light rope, which I had weighted at one end as a hurling line.
Standing back from the trunk, I heaved toward the branches. The line paid out perfectly from its coil, but then fell back. Again I threw, with all my might. I squinted, trying to follow its ascent, but not even my wolf eyes could penetrate the high gloom of the tree.
My line was still paying out.
“I think you’ve done it!” said Elizabeth.
“There is the weighted end!” Henry cried.
Exactly as I’d hoped, it had looped over a branch and was pulling the rope up even as it fell earthward. It hit the ground at our feet.
We tied the light line to a stouter climbing rope, and we fed it up and over the branch and back to earth.
“It’s a good sixty feet,” said Henry as we tied the rope’s end securely around the trunk. I gave it a good tug and then jumped up onto it. It held firm.
“Henry, will you climb?” I asked him.
“I would, normally, yes, if it weren’t for my intense fear of heights.”
“I never knew you had a fear of heights.”
Queasily he looked up into the tree. “Oh, yes.”
“It will inspire you! Think of the poetry you will write!”
“Ah. That is what imagination is for,” he said. “So I do not have to have unpleasant experiences.”
I glanced at Elizabeth. She smiled at me in a most self-satisfied way.
“Henry,” I said. “I am disappointed.”
“Victor, do not force him,” said Elizabeth. “It’s just as well to have someone on the ground in case something happens to us in the tree.”
“I will watch over you. From here,” said Henry.
“Excellent plan,” I said. “There may be bone-crunching predators to fend off. I’ll go first.”
I removed my cloak. Despite the wind, I was too hot, as though my own body were clad in fur. I began my climb, the knots in the rope giving good purchase for my hands and feet. I felt an unusual energy in my limbs, and before I knew it, I was at the branch-and a good thick one it was-and hauling myself onto it. I shuffled over toward the trunk to wait for Elizabeth.
Watching her climb, I was filled with admiration. She showed no sign of hesitation or fear and was scarcely out of breath as I helped her up onto the branch. As she panted softly, I felt a most powerful and savage pounding through my veins, and wondered if she too felt the same strange keening. I wanted to grab her by the hand and disappear into the forest. I was a wolf and she was my she-wolf, and the night belonged to us.
I tore my eyes from her and began to climb for the summit. Among the big limbs grew smaller ones that got in our way, and stabbed at my flesh. My hands were soon sticky with sap, my hair matted with needles and insects.
“How much higher?” Elizabeth asked, just below me.
“I feel the breeze,” I said. “We must be close.”
Then I spied, not far above my head, a thick wall of sticks and dried grasses, built out from the trunk. I pointed it out to Elizabeth.
“A nest,” she whispered.
It was a marvel of engineering: a huge cone shape, three feet deep, and at least six feet across at its top. I’d once seen a grand eagle’s nest on a sheer rock face of the Saleve Mountain. This nest was bigger-and it blocked our way to the tree’s summit.
“Perhaps it’s abandoned,” I said, thinking we might climb right through it. But my answer came on a gust of wind-the rancid odor of fresh bird droppings and regurgitated meat, making me nearly gag.
From the ground Henry suddenly bellowed, “How are you? Have you reached the top?”
“Shush!” I called back to him.
Inside the nest something rustled.
“We can climb around. There, look,” Elizabeth said.
“Tricky,” I said. It would take us closer than I liked to the nest, and the branches were shorter and skinnier there. The wind had picked up, and it seemed to me the sky’s blackness had intensified, if that was possible. I saw the faraway lights of Geneva, and then they were blotted out as great sooty strands of cloud blew across-toward us.
“A storm’s coming,” Elizabeth said.
I nodded. “We’ve got to be quick.”
Hastily we climbed around the nest, giving it as wide a berth as possible. We were some distance from the trunk, and I missed its security. Out here on the skinnier branches there was much less to grip if we slipped. Below: a drop of a hundred feet.
A smattering of icy rain hit my face.
“Are you all right?” I whispered to Elizabeth. “Do you wish to go down?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Hurry now!”
We were level with the nest, and as we climbed past it, an unearthly squawk made me freeze. I looked down and saw a head emerging over the rim.
What I saw was not an eagle.
I thought: Griffin.
A large, angry eye flashed, and a long, fierce beak opened. Bristling from the creature’s lower jaw was some kind of dark crest. Its neck and shoulders were thick and gave the impression of immense strength. There was no color at night, and a wolf did not see in color anyway, not like humans. But I had the impression of bright, flaming orange fur cloaked with black feathers.
“The lammergeier,” I said.
Its wings opened and seemed to take forever to reach their full span. Eight feet, ten, I could not be sure. In the strengthening wind they billowed like feathered sails, then furled once more against the beast’s body. A blow from those wings could knock us from the tree.
With false confidence I said, “It cannot see in the dark, surely.”
