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The light came slowly into the forest, filtering first through the high branches and leaving the hollows beneath the trees blue with the last of the night. Rain had passed through before dawn, enough to darken the trunks and lay the dust, and the ground smelled of wet leaves, turned earth, and the sharp green scent of crushed fern. Water still gathered along the branches overhead and fell at intervals into the undergrowth. Tyelkormo had been following the dogs since before there was light enough to see them clearly, guided by their steady bawls and the occasional pale flash of an old muzzle between the trees.
Tyelko hunted alone more often than not, trusting more in what he had trained than the company of other elves. No crowds, just him and his dogs and the woods around them.
Rocco and Brann belonged to his grandfather and had been hunting long before Tyelkormo was old enough to follow them. Both were heavy-headed red hounds with ears that hung nearly to their chests and voices deep enough to carry across miles of wooded country. Age had whitened their faces and made them stiff when they first rose in the mornings, but neither had yet conceded to the passage of time. Once their noses were down, they moved with the steady certainty of dogs that had spent most of their lives sorting one trail from another.
Rána ranged behind. She was Tyelkormo's own, a compact, hard-bodied bitch with one blue eye and one brown, a grey and black speckled hide, a deep chest, and little of the loose skin or long ear of the two hounds. She had never possessed their patience on a cold trail. What she had instead was speed, nerve, and a tendency to regard anything that would not fight back as hardly worth her time. Tyelkormo had raised her from a pup and hunted her long enough to know the difference between her ordinary interest and the peculiar stillness that came over her when she had found something worth pursuing.
He saw it now when she stopped beneath a stand of alder and lifted her head.
Rocco reached the scent first. His nose worked over a patch of wet earth beside the creek, and his tail began to move. Brann crowded in, shouldering his companion aside with all the discourtesy of long familiarity, and a moment later Rocco sat back and opened his great maw.
The first bay rolled through the bottomland like thunder.
Brann answered almost on top of him, and both dogs moved out. Their voices changed as the trail warmed, long bawling notes shortening with excitement while they pushed through fern and briar toward the lower ground. Rána disappeared after them without waiting for Tyelkormo, leaving the brush shaking behind her. He followed at a run.
The country dropped sharply toward the creek. Rain had made the slope treacherous, and twice he caught branches to keep from sliding the last several yards on his backside. Ahead, the hounds swung left and then doubled back. Rocco's voice faded beneath the rush of the water before returning from farther downstream, Brann joining him a few breaths later. They had lost the trail at the crossing and found it again.
Then Rána barked. Unlike the hounds, she wasted little breath announcing herself. One sharp report came from somewhere beyond the reeds, followed by the crash of something much larger moving through them.
Tyelkormo broke from the trees in time to see the boar cross the creek.
It was a large animal, black beneath a coating of mud, its shoulders high and thick and its flanks wet from forcing its way through the reeds. Rána came behind it and darted close enough to snap at a hind leg before springing clear when it wheeled. Rocco and Brann arrived more slowly but knew their work. They spread to either side, baying from just beyond the reach of the tusks, pressing whenever the boar tried to turn back toward the timber.
Tyelkormo waded into the creek after them. The water was cold around his calves and clouded with silt. Gravel shifted beneath his boots. The boar moved upstream, found Brann blocking the easier bank, and turned again. Rána slipped behind it, low and quick, worrying it forward while the old hounds kept up their tremendous racket on either side. For several moments the hunt settled into something familiar, that they had done hundreds of times before.
Then the boar saw him.
It turned so abruptly that Rána overshot it. Its head dropped and it came through the water toward him.
Tyelkormo steadied his spear as he stepped back. His left boot found the edge of the bank; his right found nothing at all. The rain had hollowed the earth beneath the roots. The bank broke under his weight and dropped him backward into the deeper channel.
Cold water closed over his head. His shoulder struck the bottom hard enough to numb his arm, and the current rolled him into the undercut before he could recover. For several seconds he could not tell which way was up. Mud filled his mouth when he tried to breathe, his boots dragged against the current, and when he finally broke the surface it was beneath a tangle of exposed roots with the bank rising almost vertically behind him.
Across the creek the hounds were baying frantically. The boar had followed him into the water.
Tyelkormo reached for the knife at his belt and found the sheath empty. It had gone somewhere beneath the black water when he fell. He tried to rise instead, but the bottom dropped beneath one foot and the current shoved him back against the bank. The boar was close enough now that he could see the mud clotted through the coarse hair of its shoulders and the pale curve of one tusk.
Rocco entered the water first. The old hound plunged from the shallows and tried to come around behind it, with Brann following from the opposite side. Neither could reach Tyelkormo without crossing directly in front of the boar. With mud in his mouth and cold water in his lungs, the boar advancing, Tyelko thought for a moment that he was done.
Rána did not hesitate and came down the low bank at speed and hit it from the side. The force of the collision drove the boar half around in the water. Rána caught high behind its shoulder and held while it thrashed, her body swinging with the animal as her feet lost the creek bed. Still, she did not let go. Rocco and Brann closed in at once, their voices nearly lost beneath the splashing and the boar's furious screaming. For a few seconds the whole creek seemed to churn around them.
Tyelkormo got one boot beneath him, then the other, and dragged himself out of the hole beside the bank. He had nearly reached the shallows when the boar twisted hard enough to wrench itself from Rána's grip. She came away with it.
A tusk caught her as the animal turned. Her cry cut through the hounds' voices, brief and terribly unlike any sound she had ever made before. Rocco lunged after the boar when it broke downstream, but went only a few strides before stopping. Brann remained where he was.
Rána had fallen in the shallows.
For a moment Tyelkormo could see very little wrong with her. She lifted her head when he reached her, wet ears flattened back and sides working rapidly beneath her mottled coat. Then she tried to rise; her forelegs pushed against the gravel, but the rest of her body remained where it was, and as Tyelkormo slid his hands beneath her he felt the warmth of blood spreading through water already cold against his skin.
The boar crashed away through the reeds downstream, still screaming. Tyelkormo gathered Rána against his chest and carried her out of the creek.
The climb back through the bottomland was longer than he remembered it being. Wet ground sucked at his boots and Rána grew heavier as his arms tired, her head resting against his shoulder and her breath warm but increasingly shallow against his neck. Rocco and Brann came behind him without being called. For once the old hounds made no sound at all.
By the time the trees thinned above the fortress at Formenos, Tyelkormo’s shoulders were burning. Blood had soaked through the front of his tunic and dried tacky beneath his arms. Rána had ceased trying to lift her head some time before, though one ear still moved when he spoke her name. He had begun to count her breaths without meaning to, measuring the distance between them as carefully as he might once have listened to the hounds working a difficult trail.
Someone saw them from the yard before they were inside the great wooden gates. After that there were people around him. A groom ran for the healer, though what one could do for a dog was uncertain. One of the servants tried to take Rána and retreated when Tyelkormo turned away from him. He carried her himself into the stable yard and lowered her onto an old horse blanket beneath the eaves, where the ground was dry. Rocco immediately lay down nearby. Brann remained standing long enough to nose carefully along Rána’s flank before settling beside his companion.
Finwë came from the house without his cloak fastened.
His gaze went first to his grandson, then to the blood covering him, and finally to the dog on the blanket. He asked what had happened while he crouched beside her, running practiced hands over her head, ribs and belly. Tyelkormo told him in pieces. The bank had broken. He had first dropped his spear and then lost his knife. The boar had come into the creek and Rána had caught it before it reached him.
“The fight went wild in the water,” he explained. “It threw her every way it could, but she stayed locked to it. She would not come undone.” Finwë’s hand stilled against the dog’s side.
The healer arrived soon afterward. He examined Tyelkormo first despite his objections, found the bruised shoulder and several cuts of no consequence, and then knelt beside Rána.
Tyelkormo watched his hands and tried to understand what they were doing. Rána endured the examination without protest. She had never been very tolerant of strangers touching her and ordinarily would have needed Tyelkormo’s hand on her collar, but now she merely breathed against his palm while the healer worked. When he pressed near the wound, her muscles tightened and her eyes closed. At length the healer sat back on his heels.
There were words after that which Tyelkormo understood perfectly well and refused to hear. The tusk had gone deep and there was bleeding inside her that could not be reached. They could make her comfortable. They could keep her warm, but there was nothing they could do that would make her whole again.
Tyelkormo looked at Finwë. His grandfather did not contradict the healer and instead rested his other hand on his grandson’s shoulder. That was when he knew what he had lost.
He stayed with her through the afternoon. The rain clouds broke apart and Laurelin strengthened overhead, laying warm bars of light across the stable yard. His mother brought Tyelkormo dry clothes, which he ignored until Finwë made him change while he sat with Rána in his grandson’s place. One of his brothers brought food. Neither of them ate much of it. Rocco accepted a piece of meat and Brann ate two before lowering his head again between his paws. Rána lapped at a little water from Tyelkormo’s cupped hands.
Toward evening she began to shiver despite the blankets around her. Tyelkormo lay beside her then, one arm beneath her head, his fingers moving through the short hair behind her ears. There was an old scar there from the first boar she had ever tried to catch, when she had been barely more than a pup and like him, had much more courage than good judgment. He remembered carrying her home that day too, although she had squirmed and complained the entire way and had been stealing scraps of meat before nightfall.
He had expected this time to be the same.
That realization had been sitting somewhere inside him all day, waiting until the light began to fade before he could finally name it. Dogs were hurt; dogs healed. They limped for a while, learned which old injuries ached in cold weather, acquired scars and went hunting again. He had never thought that dogs died. Horses broke legs and died. Birds and deer and all the creatures of the forest did, either by his spear or arrows.
He had never understood that someday it would apply to his dog.
Finwë sat on the ground opposite him with his back against the stable wall. Rocco had moved close enough to rest his chin across the King’s boot.
“How old was he when you got him?” Tyelkormo asked, looking for a distraction.
Finwë glanced down at the hound. “Rocco?”
Tyelkormo nodded.
“A few months. Younger than Rána was when she came to you.”
Tyelkormo looked at the white spreading over the old dog’s face. Rocco had simply always existed as far as he was concerned. He could remember being small enough to sit astride the hound’s back before someone hastily removed him, and Rocco had been grown even then.
“He’s going to die too.”
“He will,” Finwë agreed.
“And Brann too.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Tyelkormo’s hand stopped against Rána’s neck. “Why do you keep them then, when you know that they will die and you will not?”
Finwë was quiet for a while.
Rocco shifted in his sleep, pressing his head more firmly over Finwë’s foot. The old hound had spent the morning running a boar through wet country despite joints that would leave him stiff tomorrow. Brann had followed because Rocco had followed, and Rána because Tyelkormo had gone with them. None of them had been asked to consider whether the hunt was worth the cost.
“Because they give us everything they have,” Finwë said eventually. “It seems a poor answer to give them less because what they have is shorter.”
Tyelkormo looked away. Rána’s breathing had changed.
He knew before Finwë moved. Perhaps Finwë knew because he had heard it before. Tyelkormo had not, but he recognized the difference all the same. Each breath came slowly now, with too long a silence afterward.
He bent over her until his forehead rested against hers. Rána opened her eyes. Her tail moved once beneath the blanket. Tyelkormo kept his hand against her chest until he could no longer feel it rise.
For a long while afterward he remained where he was. Finwë did not make him leave her. He stayed nearby, and the old hounds stayed with them, Rocco sleeping across his feet and Brann pressed against Tyelkormo’s back. Night gathered beneath the eaves and the glowing lamps were lit one by one. Eventually Tyelkormo sat up.
“I don’t want another one.”
Finwë looked at him across Rána’s still body.
“No,” he said. “I expect you don’t.”
They buried her beneath an oak at the edge of the forest where the ground rose above the creek bottom. Tyelkormo chose the place because Rána had liked to lie there after a hunt, stretched in the shade with her tongue hanging from the side of her mouth while the hounds drank from the trough. He dug most of the grave himself. His brothers helped when he allowed them, and Finwë came with Rocco and Brann and stood beside him until it was done. When he was finished, Tyelko whispered a prayer to the Huntsman, that Rána might find more boars to push through thorn and reeds and briar, somewhere beyond the veil of their world.
For several weeks Tyelkormo did not hunt. The old hounds did not share in his grieving, restless for a scent, as though trouble rode upon the wind.
Rocco began bawling outside his window before sunrise on the first clear morning after the rain. Brann joined him from somewhere near the kitchens, and soon the two of them were carrying on loudly enough to wake the household. Tyelkormo buried his head beneath his pillow.
They continued until he eventually got up.
The first hunt was miserable. He kept looking for a mottled shape ranging ahead of the hounds and listening for the single sharp bark that ought to follow when they struck something worth pursuing. More than once he turned because he thought he heard her moving through the brush. By the time they returned home, he was empty handed and had decided he would not go again.
Spring passed. Then summer. Rocco grew stiffer but no less enthusiastic. Brann’s muzzle became almost entirely white. Tyelkormo learned to shorten the hunts when they tired and pretended not to notice when Finwë nodded knowingly at him for doing it. Sometimes he went alone. Sometimes he took one of Oromë’s younger hounds when invited to hunt with the Huntsman’s riders. Among them, he did not feel such a sense of hopelessness. Still, he did not take another dog of his own.
It was Oromë who broached the subject.
Tyelkormo had gone to his halls late one summer afternoon to return a bow and remained to watch the Vala longer than he intended. They were crossing the kennels when a commotion arose behind one of the low gates: claws against wood, the rustle of straw and the indignant noise of several young dogs trying to best one another.
Tyelkormo did not look. Oromë opened the gate and a half-grown pup tumbled through before he could close it again.
He was absurdly large already, all feet and ears and heavy bone, with the unfinished look of a young hound whose body had grown faster than the rest of him. He stopped when he saw Tyelkormo.
Tyelkormo continued walking, refusing to look back. The pup followed anyway. At the next doorway Tyelkormo stepped aside to let Oromë pass. The pup hung back and sat beside him.
“No.” It was the only thing Tyelko said.
The pup leaned against Tyelkormo’s leg; Tyelkormo looked down despite himself. There was nothing of Rána in him. No spotted fur, no compact hard body, no familiar wild eyes. He would grow far larger than she ever had, if his feet were any indication. When Tyelkormo pushed him gently away, the pup immediately came back and sat against him again.
He put his hand between the enormous ears.
Months earlier, beside a grave beneath an oak, Tyelkormo had thought that doing this again would somehow diminish what had come before. He understood now what Finwë had known while Rocco slept across his feet: there was no replacing one dog with another. Some dogs simply left more than memories. They gave everything they had, and something of them remained long after they were gone.
When Tyelkormo finally started home, the clumsy white pup went with him.