Free Frostfire by Lynn Viehl Page B

seemed to sense us, and left offerings of burnt meat under the trees. Kind as it was, we never touched the food, and as lonely as we were, we did not leave our hiding places. Like the dark-hair, they were two-leg, not like us.
    If we had come to know them, and to let them know of us, we might have somehow warned them about the Strange One. He looked as they did, but we knew from the first time he sullied our air with his scent that he was only wearing their pale skin. Inside he was the beast, mindless and crazed, voracious with hunger although he never ate or drank.
    Our elders feared him, and said he was pestilence made two-leg, and for that reason his burden and fate had to be shouldered by the moon-skins, not us. Our scouts watched, and at first he seemed to do nothing more than take refuge among them to wait out the long winter months until the snows melted and he could travel on. Then the scouts saw the moon-skins carrying out dead ones and bury them under snow and stone.
    The elders feared more sickness, and drove us from our watching places to retreat into the mountain, into the very deepest caves where it could not reach us. There we stayed until the last snow, when scouts were sent out to see how the two-leg had fared. They returned to say that nearly all the moon-skins had perished, and the last two females had gone down into the valley with the Strange One. But the scouts thought that the last would also soon die, for the Strange One drank of their blood and desecrated their bodies each night.
    One of the females had been particularly dear to us. Bright of hair and fair of face, she had always left some offering of meat for us under the trees. Worse, when the Strange One had come, she had been heavy with child.
    Ashamed of our cowardice, we came down through the darkness, following the Strange One’s unnatural scent until we found him preparing to ride out. The last of the moon-skin females lay dead and discarded by him, the pregnant bright-hair’s belly ripped open. When the Strange One saw us closing in, he laughed and taunted us, hoping perhaps to frighten us away. When he saw that he could not, he tried to flee.
    We brought down the monster and gutted him and his mount, but even with his entrails spilling across the ground and the crushing weight of the dead horse atop him, he would not die.
    The elders told us what had to be done. So we gathered one last time, first dragging away the corpse of the horse, and then each of us in turn striking and tearing and devouring the Strange One, rending his flesh and guts and bones until there was no more of him. When it was finished, and every part of him lay in our bellies, we licked his blood from the ground and returned to the caves. There we fell one by one into the deep sleep, assured that we had brought justice for the moon-skins.
    But it was not the sleep of weariness; it was the sleep of our becoming. And when we awoke, the Fury first came over us, and we were no longer the Chahanat.
    For this reason it can be said that, in truth, it was the Strange One who took his vengeance on us.
    SEARCH CANCELED; LOCAL RESIDENT CHARGED

    10/03/99
    SCARVAVILLE, OR—The Curry County Sheriff’s Office has called off the search for an unknown victim of a cougar attack, and officials have charged local resident Reginald Boyce with public drunkenness and filing a false police report.
    Boyce, an unemployed construction worker, phoned the sheriff’s office from a roadside emergency call box yesterday and reported witnessing a cougar dragging the body of an unidentified person into the Siskiyou National Forest. Boyce told deputies that he saw the incident from the road while driving to his brother-in-law’s home, and stopped to shoot at the animal several times before calling in the report.
    A National Guard helicopter circled the area for several hours while forest rangers, deputies, and county S&R conducted a ground search. No evidence of the attack, the cougar, or the alleged