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Derek the werewolf lived with his werewolf sister in a sprawling white house on the edge of the Beacon Hills Preserve. He was lying on the front porch, staring into space, forepaws lapped over the edge of the top wooden step. Laura's truck was coming from far off down the dirt road. Derek gave a little wag of the tip of his tail.
Laura was usually in human form. She regularly drove into town and bought the groceries and, occasionally, something richer and tastier. When she pulled up and opened the cab door, Derek smelled fatty fast food sandwiches and fries. Laura pulled out a waxed-paper-wrapped sandwich for herself, and dropped the paper sack from the restaurant on the boards as she came up the steps. She knew Derek's order: three roast beef sandwiches with horseradish (which always made Derek sneeze, but he required it on his roast beef sandwiches), and a large container of curly fries. Derek smiled at her with a tongue loll and a wide sweep of his tail.
He decided to eat in the woods. He trotted down the porch steps, down a short slope beside the house, and across prairie meadow filled with half-flattened grasses and last season's flower seed pods. The meadow declined gradually to the edge of the woods, and Derek wove among trees until he met the public hiking path. It had been smoothed by hikers for so long that the top layer was fine dust, soft and cool on Derek's paw pads. He smelled the fries and horseradish, intense through the bag he carried in his mouth. In his periphery were the scents he was used to, of pine needles and oak leaves, both green-growing and fallen.
Derek didn't know when the excellent new smell first entered his space. It was a little too early for flowers, and it didn't smell like any animal or insect he knew. He thought the smell might come from a delicious new fungus. He could track it down after lunch.
The path wound among the massive root bases of a stand of old oaks. In a hollow made by the earth wearing away between huge tree roots, Derek lay down to eat his sandwiches and curly fries. He soon had to take a break to sneeze because of the horseradish. He snorted the last of the horseradish attack out of his nostrils, and the nice, new, strange scent was much stronger than before. It suggested freshly turned earth warmed by the sun, with notes of salt and apples. Derek noticed a strand of some sort of goo spread across the dirt several feet in front of him. He had to have hopped right over it on his way into the little hollow. The strand seemed to go in a single, connected puddle all the way back around the big tree. Derek couldn't see where it ended. How had he missed such a large patch of fungus so near his picnic spot?
He shrugged and turned back to his lunch, keeping the wrapper from folding back over his sandwich with one paw. He gulped the rest of his second sandwich, placed the bag upright between his forepaws, and nosed it open to get at the container of fries. The bag toppled and a few fries slid out. Derek stretched his neck to capture the strays with his muzzle, but he couldn't reach that far without getting up, so he lazily extended a forepaw.
His toes nudged one escaped fry, and he saw that the strand of goo had lengthened part of itself toward the fries, just the way Derek had reached his paw out. The elongation of goo got closer, and a fry disappeared underneath it. Derek dragged one fry to himself with his curled toes and nipped it up. Across from him, the goo withdrew, and the fry it had covered up with itself was gone.
Derek squinted and sniffed the air. All the little bits and debris of the forest floor were still right where they had been when the goo approached, but the curly fry was gone. If the goo sucked things into itself that fast, all the time, there would be no leaves, stones, tiny twigs, or little rolls of dirt surrounding it. The goo had slid across the ground to Derek's lunch and made off with a curly fry. That goo deliberately stole Derek's curly fry.
Derek scrabbled, claws tightly curled, to pull the other dusty stray fries to himself, and ate them. He wadded up his sandwich wrappers and put them in at the top of the paper bag, crumpled the top of the bag again so the rest of the fries stayed safely inside, and rose to go. The goo was a bad lunchtime neighbor.
The strand that stole his curly fry had broadened while Derek packed up his leftovers. By the time he noticed the change, the goo had made a wide moat all around Derek's favorite oak tree.
Derek stood, flawless in his imperiousness except for the rumpled fast-food bag crammed in his mouth. He waited for the goo to let him pass. The hiking trail was for everyone to use. Derek should not have to leap over some rude goo in order to be on his way. A drop of drool formed at the corner of Derek's lips, because it was difficult to swallow around the fast food bag.
Small holes appeared in the goo moat. They grew until they outlined a paw print the size and shape of Derek's forepaws, showing each toe and claw. It was so exact a match that Derek could not place his paw in it to walk across, without sticking the hairs between his pads into the goo. He waited, unimpressed.
The lines which differentiated the toes melted back into the puddle, and the pawprint widened.
Derek sighed, making a rustling noise around the paper bag, and crossed the goo using the paw-shaped clearing. Why couldn't the goo just smell delectable without having an attitude?
He looked back at it. The goo was still making a moat around his tree, but the paw pad clearing was gone, and a few strands of goo had extended from the main pool and eased toward Derek. He imagined a wistful approach in their creepy flowing.
Derek dropped the lunch bag and licked his chops, relaxed and stretched his jaws. He tucked a claw in at the end of the bag, tugged out the sandwich wrappers, and sifted a curly fry out. It smelled good; he was still hungry. Derek nudged the fry with his toe until it was an inch away from one of the outreachings of goo.
He didn't see the goo move, but in a second the curly fry was half-sunk in it, then pulled down like an insect by a fish. A dimple remained in the goo for only a moment.
Derek took the rest of his fries home and finished them on the front porch. He wadded up the paper bag and wrappings and dropped them into the kitchen trash can. Then he got Laura's garden plot ready for the season.
She had it all marked out for him with stakes and tape, and Derek dug. He got tired when he was only about one-third done; he felt that meant he was doing his best, and digging it deeply enough. He didn't just scratch the surface, he really turned that earth over. He flipped over clods and the undersides still smelled like the last of winter. He rolled in them to rest his muscles before going inside.
"It's looking good, Derek, thank you," said Laura.
They ate potato and parsley soup with bacon for supper and watched Once Upon a Time. Laura sat on the couch with a bottle of hard cider and Derek lay on his side on the rug, rolling one eye to look at the show occasionally. He fell asleep on the rug when the show was over.
*******
Derek didn't go looking for the goo on purpose. Its scent attracted him to a stand of thin pines that had grown among some oaks. The oaks shaded the ground and the pines grew needles only at their tops, in the sun. They dropped needles past black, spindly lower branches. Beams of light, textured as if filtered through cheesecloth, crossed just above a dish-shaped hollow. In the dim light a large swarm of flies danced and droned. Beneath them, the goo huddled under a meager covering of old, fraying oak leaves.
Flies were all over the goo, swirling up in clouds with one buzz, crawling over its surface and pressing their mouths on it, making individual bzzt noises when they flapped and stilled their wings. Some of them were crawling underneath the oak leaves. If the goo had wanted to eat the flies, it could have sucked them in, as it had done with Derek's curly fry. The goo didn't want flies in itself, and it couldn't get them to go away. They kept sucking it up in tiny bites, and there were hundreds of flies.
Derek was skilled at catching flies, though he rarely had use for the talent. He could take care of this little problem for his good-smelling neighbor.
Derek used his super werewolf speed and accuracy, snapped at the flies, and swallowed them. He slipped on pine needles, but he was used to that, and as soon as one paw got away on him, he swerved the other way. The flies clouded up when Derek rushed them, but some of them landed on the goo every time he turned his head. It took a long time to get the most stubborn of the flies to give up.
Slowly the goo peeked out from under its covering of forest litter. Derek backed up the side of the dish-shaped hollow, and the goo expanded until it resembled a round pond in the depression in the ground, with scattered fallen leaves floating on its surface. The last flies hiding underneath the leaves zig-zagged up, and Derek stretched his neck and clomped them with his jaws.
The pale light made crescent reflections on the goo. Derek treated himself to a long whiff of the goo's scent. Then he went home and finished digging up Laura's garden plot.
*******
The countryside was greening up. Warm, dry breezes wreathed Derek's ears and nose, and he felt moisture when he pressed his paws into the ground. The local birds were getting louder. Day by day there were more of them, migratory songbirds joining those who overwintered. Some of their songs made cheerful or plain background chatter, others were piercing to werewolf ears, and a few were sweet enough to stop and listen to.
Derek and Laura, both in wolf form, loped across the wide backyard and climbed a dry slope covered in short grasses, to their favorite wild strawberry patch. They dug up tree seedlings to make sure the strawberries would get just enough sun to grow fruit.
Laura and Derek had lunch on the porch. Then Derek started out on his favorite run. Laura turned human and called after him, "Be safe and don't stay out too late!"
Derek took the dirt hiking path. Beyond his favorite oak hollow lunch spot, the main trail continued straight through the thick woods. He turned onto a narrower, lesser used trail which curved through sunny clearings with big rocks and young trees, to where two or three old homesteads used to be.
He trotted by the weathered end of an old stone wall that had long ago been part of a fence. Oaks stood along the wall and reached crooked branches over it. Derek turned off the narrow path and onto his own secret trail, which seemed to be only a line of shadow through pasture grown wild and thick as matted fur. In the cool shade made by old grass, new grass was sprouting.
The stone fence was intact at one corner, forming an L shape. Derek's path came up to one leg of the wall and met a squeeze stile, made of two stone pillars set less than a foot apart at their bases. Derek couldn't push through at the bottom. Halfway up, above his head, the pillars narrowed, widening the gap. Derek could barely squish himself through at that point if he tried, and sometimes he did it for fun. Today he jumped the tops of the pillars.
Straw-like strands of last season's cucumber vines draped between the heads of the pillars, covered in small, spiny, bleached cucumber skeletons. By late summer, the squeeze stile would be invisible under a massive quilt of mature cucumber. Tough, curling tendrils would attach to the stone wall, to each other, and to trees they would swing and creep across the meadow to reach. A fine web of new cucumber was already criss-crossing the gap between the pillars at half a dozen points.
Derek extended his leap by pushing against the pillar tops with his rear toes, and came down on a worn patch where nothing grew because he landed there so often. The grass on this side of the stone wall was thin. Derek had felted some of it down with his paws, in a trail that ran across open meadow and through a line of tall, young tulip trees. The trail disappeared at a ditch that he always leapt. Beyond the ditch, Derek took the humans' main hiking path again.
On the pasture side of the wide dirt track there was a kissing gate. It let hikers go through a cattle pasture and pick up the trail on the far side, in woods composed almost entirely of tall, dark pines. One end of the kissing gate was made in a V shape, with sturdy, unmoveable posts. The fence continued, and attached to the next post was a freely swinging panel. A cow coming to the gate would push the panel all the way into the V's outermost post and be stopped; a human could hold the swinging panel steady, and pass through the narrow space between the end of the panel and the point of the V.
Derek's usual run was to the gate, where he would stop to smell the breeze coming across the cow pasture, then decide which way to go: across the pasture if the cows weren't in it, or up or down the humans' hiking trail. Today he smelled the goo under a stand of close-grown crabapples.
Something under those trees was making scrabbling sounds. Derek perked his ears and trotted forward, then slowed his steps, stalking with his head low, to see what was what. The strong, gratifying scent of the goo wound together with the smell of rabbit. Derek hunkered behind a tangle of raspberry bushes at the edge of the sunlight.
The goo made a meandering puddle in the deep shade. A bunch of brush rabbit kits sat nearby, grooming themselves. Brush rabbits were little and dumpy, with rounded-off ears. The goo raised a broad tendril of itself, and one rabbit broke off from the bunch and rotated its ears toward the tendril. A pause, a twitch of ears, then the rabbit bounced and flailed and sailed over the tendril, and landed on the opposite side of the puddle. It hopped for a few steps, turned and went back around the goo, to the loose huddle of rabbit kits. The goo raised the tendril higher, and another bunny launched himself over it.
A third bunny missed his jump, and touched the goo tendril with a hind foot. The bunny landed, and the tendril followed it down, not letting go of the leg. Derek pricked his ears. So the goo was sticky to rabbits? The bunny scrabbled with its front claws, flattened its short ears, and kicked out with its hind legs. Derek set his rear feet more solidly under him. Suddenly the goo slipped off, when the bunny wasn't even struggling. Its agouti fur was clean of goo. It darted, stopped, gave itself a floppy shake, and hopped back into line with the others. So, those seemed to be the rules of the game. If a bunny didn't make the jump, it got caught—but then the goo let it go. Derek relaxed out of his ready crouch.
The goo made a series of obstacles out of itself; it eventually split into graduated hurdles for multiple challenging hops. Two bunnies seemed to achieve a tie in the hurdles race, for the goo portioned itself into wider, higher hurdles, and the two competitors jumped side by side until one got a rear foot caught in the goo and was disqualified.
Derek lay on his elbows with his head up, watching through the thin, thorny arcs of raspberry bushes. He held his peace even when the hurdles winner skipped and shadow-boxed, just begging to be pounced on. If Derek let the rabbits know he was there, they would scatter and the game would be over.
*******
Derek spent the early morning weeding for Laura, curling his lips back and nipping the weeds off, or pulling them with his teeth. Then Laura added mulch to keep the young plants from getting too hot.
Derek jogged into the shady woods after lunch, intending to stay there until cool evening. He took his usual path, heading to the cow pasture to get a whiff of low-growing flowers and manure mingling in the humidity.
Derek anticipated he might find the puddle of goo under the crabapples, but before he got that far, he saw it. The goo had flowed up one post of the V of the kissing gate, where Derek couldn't miss it on his usual run. Derek wagged his tail and extended his neck to take a delicate greeting sniff. The goo did not seem to be occupied with any activity, other than coating the post with itself, but Derek admitted that he did not know how to tell whether the goo was privately engaged in great deeds or not.
Derek lay next to the kissing gate and spent an hour breathing in the banquet of smells in the heat. Redstem filaree, pasture, and goo went well together. The goo gradually flowed back to the ground and puddled up near Derek.
The air cooled and the pasture got buggy, and gnats tickled Derek's ears. He stood and shook himself, scratched an ear by rubbing his dewclaw over it, and thought about doing some more exploring. He took a step away, turned back and wagged goodbye to the goo.
At that moment, the goo began to pull itself along the shallow ditch by the pasture, in the direction of the crabapples. Derek drew back his lips in a grin. He couldn't help it; he felt that meeting the goo was not an accident; that it had come here on purpose to spend time with him, and was leaving only because Derek was leaving. He told himself not to get too silly about it. But when he trotted away, his tail showed how silly he was.
*******
Laura went on a run with Derek one full moon night, but she balked at the edge of the overgrown meadow. She went around the stone wall, raced far out, and cut Derek off with a leap and a nip near the kissing gate. The cows had gone home, so Derek and Laura showed off for each other, balancing on the top rail of the wooden fence.
Laura led a long way back to the house, past worn-down sandstone cliffs. In the brush at the foot of a cliff, they scared up a couple of rabbits and gave only a short chase before letting the bunnies off.
The next afternoon, Derek went to see the goo at the kissing gate. He went again the day after that, and the next, and the next. He told himself each time not to imagine the goo was there on purpose to meet him, even though it probably wasn't hanging on the kissing gate all day in the heat, and it frequently left when Derek did.
One late afternoon, Derek arrived at the kissing gate and there was no goo. He turned to trot to the crabapple trees, to see if the goo was playing with rabbits. Then he saw the goo, spreading and pulling its way down the path toward him. Derek sat stiffly, forcing himself to be dignified—at least, to show dignity on his exterior. The goo was coming directly toward him, but it might still be a coincidence. The goo kept on gliding; Derek became sure of its trajectory, and lay down with his muzzle on his forelegs as if he were waiting in boredom.
The goo scooched up, flowing from its back end into its front end in a slide toward the kissing gate, but stopped and puddled up when it was even with Derek's nose. A wave of the goo flapped something out onto the path at Derek's toes; the goo smoothed itself and continued past him. Derek cocked his head and took a long whiff. An aroma of fishiness emanated from the offered thing, but it was not a fish. It had the tangy rottenness of dead mammal, and was possessed of a long, intermittently furry tail, suggestive of a squirrel's. Puzzling, therefore, was the apparent crow's feather that stuck out haphazardly from the stiff folds of darkened pelt.
That fishy and tangy odor floated above an elusive trace of mustelid that made Derek curious as to whether the squirrely tail could have belonged instead to a pine marten. The crow's wing feather was unexplained. Perhaps the goo had found a pile of mixed carrion (and, if it had been so lucky, Derek wanted to know where it had found such a thing). Or, perhaps, in whatever magical hollow the goo hailed from, pine marten squirrel fish crow creatures lived and died as naturally as any squirrels or rabbits in the Preserve.
Some mild, fruity, decayed herb or spice wove among the animal traces. Derek drew long breaths, trying to think where he'd smelled this nuance before. He felt that he must be able to put a name to it, as if he'd enjoyed it sometime in the past, at some friendly, forgotten family gathering. At last he treated it as he would any familiar, yet unidentifiable flavoring in a delicious dish. He gave up and enjoyed it. His hips gave a small wiggle, the beginning of a wag that he didn't finish; he threw himself sideways onto the decaying creature and pushed his shoulder well into it. He stopped, smelled it again, lay in it and scrabbled on his side, dragging his ribs over the carrion. The pungency of rot exquisitely permeated his undercoat.
The goo wound around a post of the kissing gate. Derek, well-perfumed, sat in a small green depression next to it, and they watched the sun go down in yellow and blue.
Derek took the unidentified carrion home with him to share with Laura. If she were to smell it on him and didn't get any, she would be jealous, and make him take a bath.
*******
"Derek, when you went out last night, did you go to the stiles spot by yourself again?" Laura called the area between the squeeze stile and the kissing gate "the stiles spot", even though one of them technically wasn't a stile, but a gate. "You shouldn't always go to the same places like that. Someone might notice. What if hunters see your trail? And don't you chase those cows, remember."
Derek huffed. He wouldn't bother the cows.
The next time he went into the woods, Derek took part of Laura's advice. He trotted on the humans' hiking path, then watched, listened, and sniffed carefully for hunters before entering the old meadow on his own game trail. Derek leaped the wall at the stile as usual, and went on in his own comfortable, well-worn path, on which he’d pushed through the brush so much that it barely swept his shoulders. He cut across the tree line to the broad dirt hiking path, and arrived at the kissing gate.
The goo was climbing one of the kissing gate's posts, on the hiking trail side of the V. Derek wagged and smiled in greeting, then dropped, and took a good roll in the dust of the path. He shook off his bath in clouds, snorted, and when he could see again, sniffed up and down the pasture fence. He found a frog and several crickets, and brought one of the crickets to the goo. The cricket was necessarily dampened during the trip.
The goo made an igloo shape out of part of itself over the top of the fence post, keeping the cricket from escaping; the upturned cup shape included ventilation holes. After it had time to dry out in the shade of the goo, the cricket chirped. Derek lay down and rested his cheek on his paws.
A half-grown calf trotted clumsily up to the fence and stretched her neck through the rails at the solid point of the V, loudly inhaling the goo's sweet scent. The goo was on the outermost end of the V. It let the cricket go, drew itself to the outside of the post, farther from the calf, and began to ooze down. The calf trotted around the pasture side of the V and pushed the swinging panel into the post the goo was on. She stuck out her long tongue, curling it as far as she could around the post. Derek growled and rose slowly to his feet. The calf snorted at him, made a few senseless, up and down and back and forth bucks, and galloped off. The goo inched back up the post.
Evening fell, the flying insects came out, and so did the violet-green swallows. The swallows were only violet and green on top; their immaculate white cheeks and undersides stood out in the dimming light. Derek watched them swooping and darting. The goo collected itself at the top of the post and stayed perfectly still until dark.
*******
The day had been warm, but the air was cooling for early twilight around Derek's ears and paws as he went to meet the goo at the kissing gate. The countryside had gained a haze of ochre. The sweet smell of clover was cooled and low to the ground, and the aroma of cows moved from the pasture and out over the path. The scent of the goo told Derek that it was somewhere near the fence.
Several cows gathered around something on the ground, inside the pasture. The cattle noticed Derek arriving. One stamped her foot, but they were more interested in their grazing than in the werewolf, as long as he was safely outside their fence. The goo's scent was strong, and Derek looked expectantly to the grass on his side of the fence, well out of range of the cows' tongues. The goo was not there.
The cows made wet, swiping noises as they licked something from the ground. The goo's scent mingled with crushed clover, and Derek's stomach turned. He cringed and made himself look into the pasture, to see what the cows were licking.
The goo was surrounded by cattle. It was making spaces in itself, but when it slid away from one cow, others dipped their heads and shoved their tongues into it, and the first cow followed it with her muzzle. The goo trickled down in between the blades of grass, but the cows pawed at the grass. The progress of all the goo's spread tendrils toward the kissing gate would be too slow to save its life. What had possessed the goo to put itself in danger like this?
Derek roared and leaped the fence. Two of the cows turned to flee, and one bumped into another cow, who stood her ground against Derek. Derek came face to face with the bold cow, and the other cow gave him a sound kick in the ribs. She shouldered herself free of the skirmish and ran off, while the cow facing Derek lowered her forehead and butted him under the chin. Tines of pain ran down either side of his jaw and into his shoulders. He reeled back, his chin tingling, and some other cow butted him in his ass. She set him up for the cow who'd knocked him on the chin. Derek saw her swing her rear toward him, and he dropped and dodged the kick. He lay wheezing on the ground. His side was in sharp pain from the kick in the ribs, and his chin and shoulders were buzzing.
The cows kept hanging around. Derek raised his head, and one of the cows rushed him. He snarled at her; she rocked her head side to side, wheeled and kicked. The air over Derek's nose spun around her hoof, but she didn't get him. She ran back to the herd, backed into them, and from this safe vantage she jerked her muzzle and rolled her eyes at Derek.
The other cows kept their heads down, staring at him and sloppily licking their noses, and sometimes stamping their feet. Derek hauled himself off the ground and limped to the kissing gate, moving sideways so his back was never to the cows, hackles full to make himself look bigger. The goo was at the kissing gate ahead of him. It would not crawl all the way out of the pasture, not even when Derek growled at it. Maybe it was too weak from being eaten by cows, or maybe it was staying with Derek out of some misguided sense of goo loyalty.
The goo weakly raised a strand barely thicker than a blade of grass, and bent it to point past the herd, out to open pasture. Just above the grazed green surface, Derek could make out the rounded tips of the short, erect ears of a baby brush rabbit. Ridiculous. Did the goo expect rabbits to stay out of a field of grass and clover?
Motion from the sky in his peripheral, a brown shape and a sound of wings attracted Derek's notice. A red-tailed hawk landed casually on a fence post several yards away. This was what the goo was afraid of. Derek's one-sided brawl with the cattle must have disturbed the hawk, but now it was settled again, and watching the pasture for little prey.
Derek wasn't sure whether it had seen the bunny. He could imagine how well things would go if he caught the baby rabbit in his mouth to rescue it, or tried to chase it out of the field. He determined to bother the hawk, instead.
The cows stayed where they were, and the wounded goo ventured out into the field again. It lifted a tendril out of the grass, and the bunny turned its ears attentively toward it. The finger of goo lowered, and the bunny hopped over it. Hop by hop, the goo guided the bunny back toward the fence line.
The hawk lowered its head, stretched its neck, and and weaved from one foot to the other. It had seen the bunny. It lifted its wings and rose easily from its perch, and Derek roared and rushed it, giving himself a gasping pain in his ribs. The cattle snorted and jumbled off across the pasture. The bunny darted even farther into the open as Derek lunged past it. The hawk changed direction and sailed away, not nearly as expressively startled as Derek would have liked; he wanted that bird to be scared. Derek watched, and the hawk's russet tail blinked out of sight over the far pines; it was not landing again at the cow pasture any time soon. Good. Derek stumbled, and his snarls thinned into a whine.
He stayed long enough to see that the goo was once again outside the pasture. His rib hurt every time he breathed. The goo took a long time in its weakened state, especially given its insistence on coaxing the rabbit along with it. Derek started to lie down, but realized how hard it would be to get himself back up again. When the goo and the bunny were done crawling and hopping out of the pasture, the goo wanly waved a translucent tentacle in Derek's direction. Derek began his limp for home without wagging goodbye.
Out of habit, Derek headed for the squeeze stile. He stared sadly at it, and sighed. He had to go along the old stone wall, around the end, and push through the unbroken grass until he could pick up his own path on the other side. He felt sorry for his poor ribs, having to take an especially long hike to get home. In his backyard, where Laura couldn't hear him if he was quiet, he allowed himself one whine.
Derek nosed through the back screen door. Laura was taking streusel muffins from the oven. "What happened to you?"
Derek shook himself, from ears only down to shoulders, stopping before he moved his ribs, and went to lie by the fire and knit himself back together. The only reply his sister got was a slow huff. Hopefully she'd bring him his share of muffins by the fire. Stupid goo.
*******
As soon as Derek's ribs knitted, he went looking for the goo. He didn't have far to go; it was huddled by his favorite lunchtime oak. It was smaller than before, and sticks and dried grass stuck out of it. The cows' attack had weakened it, and it looked like it wasn't getting well on its own.
Laura had grilled burgers and sandwich steaks the night before, and there were still some in the fridge. Derek loped home and collected a pile of steaks and burgers, plus a bottle of mustard, in case the goo liked condiments. He snatched leftover buns off the counter, dropped all of the things into a plastic grocery bag, and trotted back out to the oak tree.
Derek dumped the contents of the bag in the dust. The goo swept itself in the direction of the food. An extension of itself split a bun, another stacked a burger and a steak on the bun, and applied mustard with an undulating motion. In a few minutes, all of the things had disappeared, except for the bottle of mustard and the bag.
The goo sprawled into a glossy pool. It plucked the dried grasses, sticks and twigs out of itself and tossed them aside.
Derek thought the goo still looked a little peaked, so he ran back home for a box of vanilla sandwich cookies and a can of lemonade.
The goo sucked in the cookies, slowly. When the box was almost empty, the goo popped the top on the lemonade. The box of cookies floated across the puddle to Derek, and tipped so the remaining cookies fell at Derek's feet. He ate them and licked his chops.
He went home carrying the box and left it on the table, so Laura would know she had to add cookies to the shopping list. There was one cookie still inside; that was for Laura.
*******
The next day, Derek found the goo under the crabapples. It was healthy enough to play with those rabbits again.
The raspberries were leafed out, fruiting, and Derek could wiggle in closer to the action than he had before, without being noticed by the rabbits. Raspberries had a way of slapping back when pushed aside, and were covered in nasty, sharp prickles. Derek closed his eyes, flattened his ears, and let the raspberry canes drag over him until he felt no more prickles; then he knew he was in a clear space and could open his eyes.
A bunny kicked and spun in mid-air. The goo had raised a wall of itself, and the bunny had evidently leaped it, and was trying desperately not to come down in more of the goo on the other side. The rabbit's trajectory wasn't right for landing in the one ample cleared space in the puddle. It looked as though its fuzzy rear end was going to sink in the goo. With an heroic stretch the rabbit reached both rear legs far to one side, gripped the cleared ground with its claws, leaned hard with its shoulders and pulled itself by the hips to keep its body out of the goo.
Derek thought that if the goo were giving points in this game, this rabbit had to score something for strength and presence of bunny mind. It waggled its ears and jumped out and away. The goo kept the wall raised and changed the open place. This game seemed to be about not knowing where the cleared space would appear.
The next bunny in line took off recklessly, nearly turned over backwards in mid-air when it saw it had overshot the free space, and touched down on its forepaws, rear legs nearly straight up. It twisted and flopped to the ground, looking dazed; one back foot was covered in goo. The goo pulled itself off cleanly. For some reason, the goo was giving the rabbit a pass, even though it had missed its jump.
The clearing in the goo took on the shape of a large heart. More hearts appeared, each smaller than the last, in a curve ending near Derek's hiding place. The bunny hopped out and all the hearts filled in again.
Derek backed out from his hiding place and walked away. The goo didn't need to know that, before he saw it playing with them, Derek used to eat brush rabbits.
*******
Derek jogged on his usual path, hoping to meet the goo.
The squeeze stile was covered in a thick snarl of vines loaded with plum-sized, pale, prickly wild cucumbers. Derek reared and jumped; he pushed off from the tops of the pillars with his toes to extend his leap. Up to him came the sweet scent of the goo. Was it somewhere nearer than the kissing gate? Derek landed in his scuffed patch, and the scent of the goo was behind him. He'd overshot it.
Derek bent his elbows and ducked his hips, to wheel around and look for the goo. He didn't get a chance to turn. There came a vigorous noise, as if a bird whirred over his hips at high speed. Derek twitched his ears and angled his shoulders back. The second arrow struck him.
Derek yelped. He threw himself forward, skidded in the dirt on his chin, and flopped onto his side. The pain from the arrow bloomed and resolved down to a point on his pelvic bone. An ominous tingling fanned out around it. If he hurried, he could get home before the poison crippled him. He couldn't jump up and take off running—he would limp, and he'd be sure to be hit again. He tried to yank the arrow out, but his teeth slipped and the shaft broke. No point in digging for the arrowhead now. It would take too long.
Derek had dropped into a hidden groove in the meadow. All season long, young shrubs had been leafing and branching out in scrubby veils alongside his usual path, and his shoulder brushing by had trained them to grow beside and over his trail. If he crawled in this row, the hunters wouldn't get another clear shot.
The best cover was under the line of tulip trees, in the scrub by the ditch. But the way home was back at the wall. Derek's protected path ended before then, because he landed out away from the stile every time he leapt it. He smelled the goo again, in the direction of the wall; the scent was veiled by his shallow breaths.
A curtain of cucumber advanced into the field before Derek's eyes. Stirred in with the scents of grass, dust, and his own blood, the goo's smell intensified. It was coming toward him. It was nearly invisible, its webby strands stretched over the tangle of cucumber.
Derek dove for the cover of the vines and pushed to squirm inside the tangle. He couldn't help making a lot of noise and shaking the entire knot of cucumber. The hunters would be able to tell where he was trying to hide himself. Tension from expecting another arrow slowed his progress. He had no idea what he was going to do when he got to the wall. With his wounded back leg, he could not jump and force himself through the wider opening halfway up the squeeze stile. The best chance he had was to crawl along the wall, get around it and head for home, but he was moving the vines so much that the hunters would be able to see which way he went.
An arrow sang toward him. Derek flattened his ears and pressed himself to the ground, but the arrow never hit. It went plick, weakly, on the old stone wall.
Derek bumped stone, and crawled for the end of the wall. A joint of cucumber vine thrust up one of his nostrils and stopped him. A woven mat of cucumber encompassed his head, prickling the corners of his eyes and the top of his nose. Vines grabbed his hocks and pulled him backward. The arrow wound sent out jabs of pain from his pelvic bone. His elbows and rear toes dragged, and then he wasn't touching the ground at all. A sling of cucumber vines lifted Derek, wheeled him awkwardly and swung him at the wall. Derek expected a blow on the face, but all he hit was more vine, indented by his muzzle into the halfway-up gap. Derek flung out his forepaws and snagged each pillar with his claws. Vines pulled him by the jaw and elbows, and shoved his rear end. Cucumber spines poked under his tail. Derek swallowed a yelp when his hips were shoved through the gap.
He dangled on the other side of the stile, cucumber coiled around his belly. The cucumber unwound from around him, and he dropped. He flopped and flailed, and got onto his chest, legs splayed. The vines covering the squeeze stile rustled as the goo tightly sewed up the whole thicket.
Derek could hear the hunters cross the meadow and hack at the brush and vines along the opposite side of the wall. They didn't go immediately for the squeeze stile, which meant they didn't know it was there. They must have only begun tracking Derek after the cucumber had grown enough to make the stile invisible. Soon the hunters would cut the vines, find the squeeze stile, and know how Derek had escaped. He waited until they were making enough noise to cover him. Then he ran.
His eyesight blurred, turning trees and rocks into dizzying streaks. Where sun dappled the ground, it struck his eyes with flashes instead of gentle light. His tongue burned; he could taste the poison in his blood. The leg with the arrow wound blazed with pain and gave out, so he ran on three legs.
Derek staggered into the yard at home and cried out once for Laura. She came running and dropped to her knees beside him, calling his name. Her fingers found the broken-off shaft. The arrowhead scraped bone. Laura picked Derek up, carried him to the truck at a run, and tossed him in. He passed out while Laura was calling Dr. Deaton to tell him they were on their way.
*******
Derek sat on the back stoop and howled. Laura came outside and sat next to him on the stoop. "Who are you calling?"
Derek pricked his ears toward the woods; he did not look at Laura.
Laura bumped her shoulder against him in sympathy. "Whoever they are, they're not answering. You better be quiet, huh? In case those hunters can hear you up here."
Laura was right. Derek gave one last, low cry in the direction of the woods. Then he was quiet.
Derek had been in no shape to stay and protect the goo. The hunters hadn't been looking for it, and the goo was smart; it could have snuck out of the cucumber and into crevices in the stone wall. But what if the hunters had found it anyway? They could have smelled that delicious smell, and known it couldn't be plain old cucumber.
There was no way for the goo to answer Derek's howls, even if it was safe, and Derek couldn't expect to run freely in his usual areas for many months. Hunters didn't lose interest easily. They stalked. They lay in wait.
Laura grilled beer brats with mustard for supper. They smelled amazing. Derek only licked his.
"What's wrong? Do I need to call the doctor? Are you sure you're really over that poisoning?"
Derek finished a whole brat to make Laura feel better. Then he had another, because the first one gave him an appetite. And he had some potato salad, because Laura was still worried.
Late the next day, he made up his mind.
He hooked the refrigerator door open with his claws and snagged a leftover brat. He jogged down the long driveway with the brat in his mouth, turned onto the dirt shoulder of the road, and ran to the nearest head of the humans’ hiking path. He never went this way, and the widest, most well-used path would be of the least interest to hunters, and obscure Derek's tracks.
He heard the voices and scuffing tread of hikers coming toward him, and slunk off the trail into the brush. Normally he would hide and watch them, and sometimes rustle the undergrowth on purpose to hear them speculate as to what kind of large animal he might be. This time he didn't even wait for them to pass his hiding spot. He stayed just out of sight in the underbrush, slinking and weaving so he wouldn't rustle. He cut back to the path when he was sure the hikers wouldn't see him if they turned around and looked back the way they had come. Then he hurried to the kissing gate.
He caught the edge of the goo's scent and darted forward. The goo was no smaller than the last time he had seen it. Derek gave a wriggle from his chest down to the tip of his tail.
The goo was making a creek-like shape of itself in the grass, barely out of reach of the cows loafing nearby. It smelled all right, delicious as always, but it wasn't moving, and it wasn't climbing anything, the way it did when it wanted to enjoy a view.
Derek was afraid that the cows had licked the goo. It lay so low that grass poked up through it here and there. Derek thrust his nose forward. Had the hunters done something to the goo after all? He dropped the brat in the dirt near the trickle of goo. Food had helped it to recover previously.
The goo ignored the brat. It raised a tendril, which hung before Derek's nose for a heartbeat... then another beat... then in a blink the goo pulled itself into a substantial puddle form. It surged to the tips of Derek's claws, and a horseshoe curve opened up before Derek's toes. He cocked his head at the empty space. A long moment passed. The goo closed the curved space. Derek sat to watch what the goo would do next. Some fiddling and flowing occured at the other end of the puddle. Finally, the neat, curved opening reappeared by Derek's toes. A tiny bit of carrion was revealed, identifiable by shape and smell as an erstwhile leopard frog. Its flattened, browning body—what used to be iridescent was now matte—had a cow-pasture sauce; it seemed perhaps cattle had even stepped on it. Derek's heart swelled at the sweetness of the gesture.
His instinct was to roll in the carrion, which would have been delightful, but he didn't. He threw himself past the frog and rolled in the goo.
It had been waiting for him, missing him, worrying about him. It had waited by the kissing gate every afternoon, wishing he'd come back. It had brought him a present.
Derek wasn't leaving the goo alone in the woods again, not with hunters around, not when he missed it so much at home. But the goo loved the woods. Maybe it wouldn't want to come home with him. That would have to be left up to the goo to decide.
Derek dropped one foreleg; his cheek and shoulder landed in the goo, and one ear got stuck in it. Its wonderful smell surrounded him. He rolled onto his back, shimmied his shoulders and hips into the goo, and turned his head side to side to rub his cheeks in it. When he had rolled for a long time, he stood up and sniffed and pawed at the ground, making sure he hadn't missed any of the goo.
He had seen how easily the goo could slide off of brush rabbit fur. He waited, panting, to see if the goo was going to drop right back into being a puddle in the dirt. But it stuck to him. The only move it made was to extend an arm of itself to the dirt and suck up the brat.
Derek jogged all the way home with the goo pulling and pinching the hairs around his armpits and thighs, and hugging him around his barrel.
"Derek! What in the world did you roll in? It smells like a high school gym locker room. You need a bath. Go wait for me by the stock tank."
Derek didn't argue with Laura; there was no point. He wouldn't risk licking or biting the goo out of his fur, in case he accidentally swallowed some. He had seen how that could hurt it. Being eaten—by flies, by cows—seemed to really scare it. But when it played with the rabbits, it sometimes didn't even have a connecting tendril from one part of its puddle to another. Laura pulling it out of his coat in chunks—if she could manage it—did not worry him.
Derek went to the dry stock tank behind the house and tipped it upright with his muzzle. He waited, tongue lolling. Laura brought two five-gallon buckets of warm water from the house. She set one bucket in the last beam of evening sun to keep warm. Derek leapt into the tank at a snap of Laura's fingers. She added a few drops of soap to the water, poured it over his back, and commenced scrubbing. She tried using her fingers first, and got some big gobs of goo off, but there was a lot still stuck in Derek's fur. Laura switched to using her claws, then a brush. The brush pulled some goo out of Derek's coarse fur, along with quite a bit of his soft undercoat. Gradually Laura created a soapy, wet, wolf-hairy ball of goo on the ground.
Derek noticed, though Laura did not seem to, that the ball of goo moved closer to the stock tank. Every time Laura added to the ball of removed goo, it was a little closer, until it rested right up against the side of the stock tank, and there it stayed. Once, Laura soaped up her hands, lifted the blob and set it back where it had been originally. Derek took note of a pebble nearby, between him and the goo. While he watched, even though he could not see the goo move, the pebble was no longer between him and the goo, but beyond it. The goo wasn't making tendrils nor spreading itself out, but it was definitely coming toward the tank again.
Laura was rolling up bits of goo into a small ball in one hand, to add to the larger clump on the ground. Derek didn't mind how long the bath was taking. Dinner wouldn't be late. He could smell from the backyard that Laura had a pot of venison simmering on the stove. She would throw some potatoes in when it was almost time to eat. Derek wondered if the goo liked venison.
The ball of goo nestled up to the stock tank for the third time. Laura held up one of Derek's wet feet and picked at goo stuck to the hairs between his paw pads. "Ugh," she said. "Whatever this stuff is, it sure does like you."
The end