Free Normal by Graeme Cameron

no more than two hundred feet before they give way to tightly packed elm, their branches low and intertwining, trunks enveloped in thigh-high nettles and prickly gorse. No place for the bare-legged.
    Initially, tracking Kerry was an uncomplicated affair. There was a clear path of least resistance which, in a state of blind panic, a fleeing quarry could be relied upon to follow. And as the underbrush thickens, so the passage of animals becomes quite conspicuous. There were numerous flattened paths through the gorse, but in only one were the thistles still visibly unfolding. If a deer had bounded through here, it had been hot on the hooker’s heels.
    I paused momentarily to take in the sweet, fresh aroma of damp bracken; the air was thick and cosseting, like a cold woolen blanket. The swishing and crackling of Kerry’s flight had trailed off, leaving nothing but silence. The distant motorway roar was inaudible here.
    I pressed on, and at fifty paces I passed a half-dozen strands of dark brown hair, snagged on a splintered outcrop.
    At seventy five the first drops of blood appeared on the thorns.
    At a hundred, I snatched up a torn strip of black fleece, complete with washing instructions, claimed from the lining of her jacket.
    And at a hundred and ten, amid the thistles and the dew and the dappled sunlight, I discovered the most heartening thing of all: the sudden, complete, dead end of the trail. Kerry was playing the game, and she was playing smarter than I’d expected.
            
    Logic suggested I turn around and retrace my steps. Instinct, however, dictated otherwise. I used my arrow to part the nettles in front of me and, sure enough, she was bluffing. She’d taken a running dive and, not six feet in, had sprawled headlong into the weeds before regaining her feet and scything ahead. I had to admit, the girl had guts.
    She was fast, too. I reached the far side of the thicket at full pelt, and she was nowhere in sight. The trees spread out and grew taller, the ground between them carpeted in dead leaves and fallen branches. The canopy was thicker, the light patchy; I had, however, a two-hundred-yard line of sight through a hundred and eighty degrees and not a creature was stirring. I stopped dead, crouched down close to the ground to listen. The silence was heavy, unnatural. Deceitful. She was there all right; I could taste her blood, sweat and tears in the air. She was rigid, holding her breath, skin pressed tight against bark. The deer, the squirrels, the crows could all smell her fear, and they mocked her silently, knowing as well as she did that sooner or later, she’d have to breathe. And it was deathly cold out here.
    I scanned the shadows. “Give yourself a chance, Kerry,” I called. “It’s hard to keep still in this cold when you’re only half-dressed. You’ve got strong legs, I’ll give you that, but as soon as they start to shiver, you’ll give yourself away. You’re weak-willed, your stamina’s all physical. Use it while you can—it’s still fifty-fifty that you’ll outrun me.” I stopped still, cocked my head theatrically at an imagined sound. “Oh, wait.” I smiled. “Too late. I’ve seen you.”
    The lie had the desired effect. Amid a raucous crackling of twigs, she obligingly bolted from the shadow of a twisted elm not fifty feet in front of me. Head down, bloodied arms pumping, she exploded across the forest floor like a wounded bear, charging directly across my path before I’d so much as unslung the bow. She was headed for a spray of daylight, a glittering oasis some five hundred feet distant. I made a break for the same target, my diagonal path through the wood more of a gentle loping slalom than the obstacle course facing my quarry. She hurdled fallen branches, stumbled through patches of nettle and fern, skittered over loose bracken and leaf mulch. Even at thirty feet and in spite of the resounding racket, I could hear the rasping, heaving panic in her breath. Bearing