Nate — The Ridgeline

Frost held in the shade of the firs past nine. On the open slope it had already gone, leaving the ground dark and the needles damp enough to take a print without sound. Nate moved on the damp. He kept the wind on his left cheek, northwest still, the same steady push that had laid the cabin chimney flat that morning. His scent went down-ridge behind him. Ahead of him the air was clean of anything human.

The track was a doe, hundred and ten pounds or so, no fawn with her. Left hind had a nick on the outer wall that showed in every fourth or fifth set. He had picked her up at the seep an hour back where she had stood to drink and left the mud cut sharp. Since then the edges had started to soften. Not collapsed — the frost had gone out of the topsoil and the rims were rounding under their own weight. Forty minutes, maybe fifty. Not dangerous. Not yet. Just the clock on how far she had gotten.

Browse along the huckleberry was torn, not nipped. Deer tear when they are moving. Nipped means they stopped. She was traveling, not feeding hard. He checked the height of the broken stems against his knee and filed it: adult, unhurried, alone. The droppings at the base of the second fir were still dark inside when he split one with his thumb. Warmth gone. Moisture not. Same window.

He did not hurry. Hurrying put weight on the wrong foot and weight made noise and noise ended the whole problem before he got a look at it. He counted paces between stops without deciding to — twelve, hold, listen, twelve. The habit came up under pressure the way it always had. On a production floor it had been racks and latency. Up here it was just the interval that kept him from walking into his own mistake.

A varied thrush called once below him and went quiet. Then a second bird, farther east, the sharp double-note of a Steller’s jay. Something had moved through the lower timber and the birds were handing it off. Not him. He was still upslope of both of them and the wind was wrong for his scent to have reached that line. He waited through twenty breaths. No third call. Whatever it was had either stopped or gone out the bottom of the draw.

He angled right to keep the rise between himself and the last place he had seen the doe’s track bend. The light at this elevation was thin and even, no direct sun yet through the upper canopy, the kind of light that flattened depth and made distance hard to trust. Cold sat in the sleeves of his jacket where sweat had dried. He could smell his own wool and the iron of the rifle oil and nothing else. Good. That was the line holding.

At the edge of the huckleberry the track changed. She had stopped. The front prints deepened and the hind came in tight — head up, listening. Then a half-turn toward the open side of the slope and a longer gap between sets. She had heard something and chosen the clearing over the timber. He would have made the same choice with a coyote behind him. With a person she would have gone into cover. So not a person. Not him.

He brought the rifle up off the sling and moved to the rise in a crouch. Thirty yards of open ground below the crest, then the far brush. He could see the pale flash of her rump already, broadside, head turned away from him toward the timber on the far side. Settling weight on his back foot. Cheek to stock. Breath out halfway and hold. The shot was there.

She bolted.

No sound from him. No shift of wind. She went from standing to full flight in one push, hard left, crashing through the low stuff with her flag up, and was gone into the firs before he had the safety off. He held the half-breath another two seconds, then let it out through his teeth and came up.

Something had spooked her that was not him. He was still thirty, maybe forty yards out and downwind. He moved forward to the crest to see what.

The clearing dropped away in a shallow bowl of beargrass and scattered stone. On the far slope, already still, already oriented uphill toward the rise he had just topped, stood a quadruped machine. Dog-sized at the shoulder, longer in the body than a dog, proportions wrong in the length of the limb versus the trunk. Matte surface, non-reflective, the color of dry basalt. Articulated legs planted with the weight distributed forward. Where a head would be, a sensor cluster — two apertures, one adjusting in a small mechanical iris motion as he watched, a faint tick of metal seating on metal. Folded along each flank, running from the shoulder assembly back toward the hip, a pair of long curved appendages, blade-like, the inner edges catching no light. Talon-scythe limbs. Not obviously anything until the second look.

It was not moving. He was not moving. The wind came across the bowl between them and did not care which one of them it touched first.