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“Oh, he’s a good kid,” I said and left them to talk to Merine as Luke buttered up the boy for them, and the parents grinned ear to ear, happy to have raised such a good kid.
Merine was talking to a younger werewolf when I got to him, and he quickly sent the wolf away, telling him they’ll talk later.
“Yes?” he asked me with his unwavering smile. “I take it you have an objection with something. It is all over your eyes.”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “Do we have to do this? The hunt. Shouldn’t we just do the ritual we need to get the stone and leave? I feel like we are wasting time here.”
Merine kept his smile, but I could see he was offended that I called the hunt a waste of time.
“I am sorry,” I apologized.
“It’s okay, and I understand your worry. But you can’t just get to the ritual, Hayley. Consider this hunt a training, a preparation. You will need it, and have fun too,” he said and then walked away.
His advice was simple. Go and do what I've been told. I scoffed exasperatedly.
“It’s a hunt, Hayley,” Luke said behind me and moved closer until he touched my hand. I could smell him just by breathing the air around him, and it was comforting. “Why don’t we just go enjoy that? We will have much more time to worry about the stone.”
“You don’t think we are wasting time here?”
“No, I don’t think we are. Come on,” he said and held my hand, pulling me towards Pam and Hirshey. “Pam and Hirshey say they have something to show us. A technique to hunt.
“Alright,” I said and followed them into the woods.
There were others in front of us already, making their way deeper and spreading around, marking territories and looking out for game.
“Do you ever hunt in the city?” Pam asked as they walked past a group that stopped to examine the prints on the ground of the bear they were tracking.
“No,” I said. “But I’ve been hunted a lot these past days.”
“We heard about that. It must have been scary.”
“Not so much,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. I was pretty confident that I would survive even when it looked like I wouldn’t. We walked past another group and went even deeper. “Luke is more of a hunter than I am. A werewolf hunter. He was trained to be that.”
“Who trained you?” Hirshey asked.
“I doubt you know him,” Luke said. “His name was Kevin. He was my best friend’s father and a great hunter too.”
“Oh, but I bet he didn’t know what we are about to teach you.”
“I doubt it. Do you know what we’ll do in the ritual to get the stone?”
“No idea. Only the leaders know such information, and they are usually passed down through word of mouth. Stop,” Hirshey said and raised his hands up. We all stopped, and I looked around, looking to see why he had asked us to stop. He pointed at something in front of him. It was the dung of an animal.
He walked up to it and picked it up, taking a sniff from it. “It was here just recently, and no one has marked it. We have our target. Take a sniff,” he said and stretched his hand to me.
“What?” I said. There was no way I was smelling that. Pam walked closer and sniffed it.
“Do you know how dogs track humans with their pheromones?” Hirshey asked and stepped towards Luke and me. I watched him intently, looking to see what he was up to. “They take a sniff and get hooked on it. It’s like they become a crack addict and want nothing but to get a bigger sniff from the source, so they start to track it. Running and hunting, but they are dogs and can easily pick up another scent and get distracted. But with us, it is different.”
He stopped in front of us and stretched his hands toward us. “Just focus on not just the smell, but what source it might have come from and let your mind latch on to it.”
Luke stepped forward before I did and moved his nose closer to the dung, closed his eyes, and smelled it. I watched his eyes glow suddenly and could sense his body perking up. He was so alert and ready for a hunt.
“Oh my god,” he said and stepped away from him, looking around the woods and sniffing the air aggressively, trying to catch a scent. Now, I was very curious as to what had just happened, and my curiosity pushed me closer to Hirshey, who still had his smile for me.
“Come on,” he said. “You’ll like this, I assure you.”
I nodded, moved my nose closer to the dung, and did as he directed. I took a sniff and tried to focus on the source ofthe smell. I felt my whole being on fire immediately, and my environment changed. It sharpened, and my focus shifted away from everything and hurriedly tried to align with just one thing. The trees around me didn’t matter much anymore. I could still see and sense them just as I could still see and sense Luke, Pam, and Hirshey, the ground I was stepping on, the air around me, and even the singing bird and the chirping insect, but suddenly they all became peripheral. Secondary to all things. There was only one thing that mattered at that moment, and it was the animal the smell came from.
