Free Passager by Jane Yolen

1. TERRITORY
    THE BOY WAS SNIFFING AT THE ROOT OF A TREE , trying to decide if it was worth eating the mushrooms there, when he heard the first long baying of the pack. It was a sound that made the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

    He turned at the sound and tried to find its source, but this was a dark part of the woods, and tangled. He was still considering when the first dog broke through the underbrush, almost at his heels.
    It was a dun-colored dog, long-snouted, longbodied. He had enough time to see that. He struck at it with the stick he always carried and it scrabbled away from him, whining.
    He did not wait for the rest of the pack to find him, but jumped for the lower branch of the tree and scrambled up.
    Finding its courage, the dun dog leaped for him and its teeth grazed his ankle, but it missed its hold.
    The boy climbed higher, fear lending him quickness, strength. He was already high up in the tree when the rest of the pack found him. They broke through the brambles and bayed at the foot of the tree. There were seven of them, one more than the last time. The boy counted them off on his fingers—one hand’s worth and a thumb had been the number the last time. There was a new one, a large yellow mastiff. He did not like the look of the dog. It was big and had brutal jaws. Clearly it had taken over leadership of the pack from the dun.
    There was nothing the boy could do but wait them out. He had done it before. Patience was his one virtue, his necessity. Any business he had with mushrooms, grass, sky would wait. He settled into the crotch of the tree, making himself a part of it, as stolid, as solid, as silent as a tree limb, and waited.
    After a while, the dun-colored dog wandered off, followed by two grey brachets. The mastiff growled at each desertion but could not hold them past their hunger. Not wanting to challenge them over the boy, now gone beyond their sight and therefore beyond their reckoning, the mastiff growled to the rest of the pack and walked off, stiff-legged.
    They followed.
    Only when another five long, silent minutes were gone did the boy relax. He whistled then, through dry lips. It was not a sound of relief or a boy’s long, piercing come-here whistle, but sounded instead like one of the small finches. He had been many months in the woods, and what speech he still had was interspersed with this kind of birdsong. When frightened, he grunted the warning call of the wild boar. The dogs had surprised but not frightened him. In the forest he was too quick for them and they could not climb trees.
    This was his patch of woodland. He knew every bush and tangle of it, had marked it the way a wolf does, on the jumbled overground roots of the largest trees. Oaks were his favorites, having solid and low climbing limbs, though he did not call them
oak.
He had his own name for them, a short bark of sound.
    By damming up one of the little streams, he caught fish when he needed them, bright silvery things with spotted backs, scarcely a hand’s span long. He ate them raw. He did not eat other meat, but rather spied on little animals for entertainment—baby rabbits and baby squirrels when he could find their hidey-holes, and badgers in their setts. They made him laugh.
    At night he called down owls.
    Once he had scared a mother fox off her kill by growling fiercely and rushing her, but found he could not eat the remains. When he returned to the kill the next morning, the meat was gone; the scent of fox lay heavy on the ground.
    The first time he had been set upon by the wild dogs, he’d been forced off his own meager dinner. They had scattered his small cache of mushrooms and berries, mouthing each piece, then spitting them out again. When he came down from the tree, he found what he could of his food, but it all smelled bad; he choked when he tried to eat it. He went hungry that night.
    It was not the first time.
    He was very thin, with knobs for knees and elbows like