He Goes On All Fours

The trees open to a clearing, and Mato lies in wait. Beneath the brightness of the full moon, his pupils constrict as he readies himself.

He waits—he is nothing if not patient—and doesn’t move until the moment is exactly right. A true hunter knows exactly when he’s won.

He pounces.

The rabbit tries to flee, but it never stood a chance.

Food acquired, Mato sets his sights homeward.

The woods come to life around the coydog as he runs, his mouth firmly around the rabbit. All around him, the life within the understory sings. Chipmunks scamper into the delicate ferns, crickets call their loneliness into the darkness. The canopy above him sways with the gentle breeze, backlit by the moon.

Mato moves expertly, veering almost automatically to his home. To Doli.

The dense wood begins to thin out again, and Mato recognizes the familiar scent of wood burning and lavender drying. The scent of home.

But tonight, he smells something else too.

He can’t quite identify it, but he knows it’s something living. A human. He freezes.

He strains to hear over his own heartbeat. Mato drops the rabbit then breaks into a sprint.

Blood. The smell of blood overtakes the dried lavendar.

A muffled scream.

He tears through the clearing, and the cabin enters his vision.

The door is open.

Mato sees two men, both strangers. Then, at their feet, he sees Doli. Her hands are bound, and one of the men holds her roughly by her long hair.

“Other witches,” he hisses into her ear. “Tell us.”

Doli sobs an unintelligible response.

Mato bursts through the doorway, teeth bared.

He makes it halfway to Doli before a gunshot shakes the cabin.

Mato yelps, searing pain shooting through his shoulder. He doesn’t care.

He lunges at the taller of the two men. The man holding Doli.

Mato’s teeth pierce skin, and he tears through it with everything he has–

Another gunshot.

This time, Mato stays down. He breathes raggedly, desperately willing his body to listen. Blood pools around him. Someone deals a hard kick to his ribs.

“Damn dog!” the older man shouts, shoving Doli’s face roughly to the ground. Pain flares in Mato’s abdomen. Doli. He needs to get to Doli.

“Father! Are you alright?” the other man asks. Not man. Child. His hands shake as he sets his gun aside.

“I’ll be fine,” he hisses. “We need to go.” Mato’s vision begins to blur.

The young man’s voice trembles as he asks, “What do we do with her?”

He gestures at Doli. Mato desperately tries to growl, to snarl, to do anything to protect her. The room begins to fade to black.

The old man spits at the ground.

“Kill the witch.”

When Mato next opens his eyes, it is too late.

His body has begun to heal itself, slowly forcing the bullets to superficial layers of skin and his broken ribs back together as his human form takes shape. He wishes it would stop.

For all of the times he has clawed his way back from the brink of death, he wishes this one would stick. As hard as his body is fighting for his survival, he wishes those men had been able to finish the job.

Mato couldn’t say how long he stayed like that, body curled on the floor as it slowly replaced the coydog’s features with human ones.

He unwillingly watches as everything slowly comes back into focus.

The violence of the scene is absolute. Almost animalistic. He can’t bring himself to look at her.

Eventually he stands.

As if drawn there, Mato reaches for the small bundle of yarn by Doli’s armchair: a pair of baby-sized socks. She must have finished the project while he was hunting. For all of his self-healing abilities, Mato feels like he could stop breathing at any moment.

Still, he pulls himself together. He inhales as deeply as he can. Holds it even after a sharp pain shoots through his lungs. He pockets one of the tiny knitted socks.

Then, before he can let himself lose his resolve, he does what his kind have always done: he buries the dead.

When the story hits the papers, the headlines celebrate another successful witch hunt.

…

Mato tracks the men for weeks, then months, then years. Time means little to a thing like himself.

The years pass in solitude. Anyone he comes across would see a human with bags beneath his eyes and a mouth that seems to snarl rather than smile. “World weary,” he’d heard himself described.

Sometimes, he seeks out others of his kind. Many of them have lost someone, too. They all say the same thing; they remind him about safety in numbers, that hunted things should protect each other. He tried that once. Sometimes, they get brave enough to ask about Doli. They never ask twice.

On even rarer occasions, he passes time in the company of witches. They, too, often try to offer far more friendship than Mato is interested in. He never stays in one place too long.

When news makes its way to him of witch hunts, he tries not to pay attention to any names. He tries even harder not to allow himself to think of that witch hunt so many years ago. He often fails.

On these days, he disappears. He disappears into the woods, taking only himself and his grief and a single baby sock. No one sees him for many days.

If sometimes his absences correspond with a missing witchhunter or two, no one takes notice. It hardly matters, anyway; none of them are the men who killed Doli.

…

When he finally finds them, he lets himself see the world through the eyes of a coydog for the first time in years. As he transforms, he hazily thinks he will never feel this human again.

Although he has forgotten many parts of himself, he has not forgotten the art of the hunt. He waits.

He waits until it is safe: the gun stowed, the boy in bed.

They plead, say something about a mother killed at a witch’s hands, about a family tradition of hunting. They tell him they were just trying to keep their people safe.

A true hunter knows exactly when he’s won. He does not respond.

Instead, he says her name out loud for the first time in years.

“Doli.”

He says it as if it might explain everything, as if it might absolve it.

It does not.

The papers attribute the deaths to a small piece of knitted fabric left at the scene of the crime. A hexbag, they claim. Soon, a hunt will start to find the witch responsible for such brutality.