Wildwood (Wildwood Chronicles 1)

“This platoon is not fit to serve,” continued the larger one, “if it cannot complete a simple routine scouting drill.” He looked about him at the rest of the group.

Curtis whispered to Prue: “Are they . . . soldiers?”

She nodded slowly, still deeply in shock.

“And look at the filthy condition of your uniforms,” howled the larger coyote, who Prue assumed to be a commander of some sort. His dress was marginally cleaner than that of his soldiers, and his shoulders were ornamented with epaulets. He wore a kind of large feathered hat that Prue thought she recognized from a documentary about Napoleon their world history teacher had shown them. The commander continued, “I should bring you before the Dowager Governess in this state and see how she’d receive you.” He snapped his jaws at another coyote, who was cowering on the ground behind him. “She’d cast you out of Wildwood, is what she’d do, and we’d see how you fared without your pack.” He stiffened and adjusted his sword handle at his side and said, “I have half a mind to do it myself, but I’d rather not soil my hind feet booting you out into the brush.”

The coyote at whom the commander had been yelling finally spoke words between his abashed yelps: “Yes, Commandant. Thank you, Commandant.”

“And where was your confounded guard detail?” the commander barked, pacing the ground. “I walked up without a single soul batting an eyelash. You are an embarrassment to the corps, a stain on the legacy of every soldiering coyote who’s come before you.”

“Yes, Commandant,” was the response from the cowering coyote.

The commander sniffed the air and said, “It’ll be dark soon. Let’s finish this drill and head back to camp. You, and you!” Here he pointed at two of the soldiers who were standing at attention by the campfire. “Get into the brush and start collecting firewood. I’ll get this fire started if I have to throw one of you into the pit for kindling!”

The group burst into activity with this command. Curtis and Prue eased themselves flat to the ground and froze under the fronds of a particularly large stand of ferns. A few coyotes began circling out from the group in search of firewood while others stood in formation in the center of the meadow and continued to be berated by the commander.

&nbs

p; “What do we do if they see us?” hissed Curtis as a few of the coyotes walked closer to them.

“Just keep quiet,” whispered Prue. Her heart was racing in her chest.

Two of the coyotes wandered over to a pile of scrub right below Curtis and Prue’s perch and began collecting branches of deadfall in their spindly arms. They were snapping at each other while they worked, and Prue held her breath as she listened to their canine bickering.

“It’s your fault we’re in this mess, Dmitri,” said one coyote to the other. “My usual detail is never this incompetent. It’s embarrassing.”

The other, bent down among the branches, said, “Oh, shut up, Vlad. You were the one who insisted everyone ‘mark the territory’ everywhere. Never seen so much pee in one place. No wonder the stupid fire wouldn’t start.”

Vlad waved a birch branch in Dmitri’s face, his eyes wide in anger. “That’s—that’s the blasted protocol! Check your field manual. Or can you even read?”

Dmitri dropped his load of firewood and bared his teeth. The coyotes were close enough now that Prue could see his lips snarl back to reveal a frightful set of chipped yellow teeth emerging from his bright red gums. “I’ll show you protocol!” shouted Dmitri. They both stood silent for a moment until Vlad spoke up.

“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Vlad.

Dmitri barked sharply and leapt at his compatriot’s throat, his teeth flashing.

Through the mossy ground cover, Curtis crept his hand along until it met Prue’s, and he squeezed her fingers. She squeezed back, not daring to take her eyes off the battling coyotes. The two soldiers had fallen to the ground and were thrashing about in a desperate whirl of motion, their jaws locked on to each other’s throats. Their pained and angered yips caught the immediate attention of the rest of the platoon, and the commander roared as he ran over to the tangle of the two soldiers. He had drawn his saber from its sheath, and when he arrived at the warring coyotes, he grabbed the first one he could get his hands on—Vlad—and yanked him from the scrum, his blade’s edge at Vlad’s throat.

“I’ll have your heads on tree branches!” swore the Commandant. “I’ll see you strung limb from limb, so help me God.” He threw his captive to the ground and swiveled, swinging his sword point so that it was a mere hairbreadth from Dmitri’s muzzle. He spoke more slowly. “And you, you raggedy, snot-snouted, pathetic excuse for a coyote: I’m prepared to end this right here, right now.” Dmitri whimpered at the point of the blade, and the commander brought the sword up to swinging height. From above, Curtis gaped and Prue buried her head in her hands to avoid witnessing the gruesome scene to come.

Suddenly a breeze picked up and whispered down through the trees, traveling over Prue and Curtis’s bodies from their feet to their neck, out over the promontory and down into the meadow below. The violent scene playing out below them froze into stillness as each of the coyotes’ ears flinched and their snouts sniffed the air. The commander huffed, his saber motionless above his head in midswing. Dmitri, his sentence temporarily commuted, let out a rush of breath and looked around him. Prue lifted her head from her hands. Slowly, the Commandant lifted his nose and took a deep, lingering inhalation.

“HUMANS!” the Commandant shouted, breaking the silence and swinging his sword to point at the stand of ferns above them. “IN THE TREES!”

In an eruption of action, several soldiers who had been flanking the Commandant broke away and started clambering up the embankment toward Prue and Curtis.

“RUN!” shouted Curtis, pushing himself up from the ground. Prue scrambled to her feet and dove out of the bushes, away from the embankment. The coyotes were baying frantically behind her as they crested the lip of the plateau and tore through the ferns. She sprinted back through the trees until she arrived at the ravine they’d been following. She took one wild step over the edge, caught a foot on a tangle of briar, and was thrown headlong into the gully.

Curtis had plowed in a different direction, choosing instead to make his way up the hillside in the direction they had been walking. The grade was steep and unrelenting in this densely wooded area, and the birch branches and blackberry vines thrashed at his face and arms, hampering his scrabbling sprint. The coyotes, accustomed to the terrain, raced through the underbrush on all fours, and Curtis had barely made it ten yards from the embankment before the first coyote lunged on his back and brought him to the ground.

“You’re mine!” hissed the coyote, and Curtis’s arms and legs were pulled taut and pinned to the ground as more soldiers arrived at the scene of his capture.

“C-Curtis?” Prue mumbled, gaining her bearings. It was clear she’d been knocked momentarily unconscious; she found herself lying facedown in the bracken of the ravine with a splitting headache and the metallic taste of blood in her mouth. She heard a distant howling and was jolted into her present circumstance. Staying close to the ground, she dragged herself through the underbrush and peeked over the lip of the ravine. Apparently, the soldiers had not seen her headfirst vault into the gully and had chosen to take down Curtis instead. From her vantage, she could see the soldiers hauling Curtis to his feet. She watched the Commandant slowly approach, grab Curtis by the scruff of his coat, and shove his muzzle into either side of Curtis’s throat, sniffing. She could see the fear in Curtis’s eyes. He was surrounded by a group of coyote grunts who were skulking around his feet on all fours, whining and snapping. The Commandant barked a series of orders, and their captive was bound by rope and thrown over the back of one of the larger coyotes, and the party disappeared into the woods.

Prue fought the urge to cry; she could feel the sobs coming from the pit of her stomach, and her eyes started to well with tears. Her fingers clenched around a tussock of grass and squeezed as she willed her mind to quiet. She felt with her tongue the spot on her lip where there was a small bulb of blood and licked it clean. The air was still and the light was flat as the early afternoon sun began to dim. She thought about the note she’d left for her parents that morning. Back later, it had said. Despite the gravity of the situation, she couldn’t help but stifle a laugh. She pulled herself up from the ground and sat on the edge of the ravine, dusting the stain of dirt from the knees of her jeans. A squirrel popped its head from behind a rotted tree stump and looked at her quizzically.

“What do you want, squirrel?” she jeered. She laughed to herself and said, “I suppose I should watch what I say. You probably talk too. Do you?”