Page 216 of Hunters and Prey

It wasn’t until he could no longer see them that it occurred to him how large they must be, for him to be able to see them from where he stood.

He looked back down the hill, looking at the peninsula where San Francisco should live. Seeing the stretches of fields around hills covered in white-skinned trees with high canopies, all he could feel was the quiet.

It wasn’t like how he usually thought of quiet.

This quiet teemed with life.

It teemed with light, with a kind of held breath of potential.

He could die here, he thought.

This was a place he could die.

Staring out over the water, looking back over the ocean, he saw more animals, diving and leaping in the waves. He saw winged creatures then, moving like a dense cloud over the trees on those cliffs nearer to the water. He couldn’t tell if they were birds. The energy they held was different somehow. Their wings were wider, and looked more webbed than covered in feathers, like his strange little friend who bit his hand.

They were iridescent too, but more green than blue. He caught glimpses of other colors––crimson and orange, gold and white.

They looked almost like dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs… but with more color, and without the giant beaks, or the gaping maws filled with razor-sharp teeth. Rather, the creatures he saw had small heads, elongated bodies, long legs that trailed behind them, long tails.

He watched them fly, and decided they weren’t dinosaurs at all.

They were dragons.

He watched them dive into the water, coming up with giant fish flopping from their claws, and sometimes their mouths.

He watched them spin and bank, darting in and among one another in concentric circles, their mouths open as they called to one another silently, or maybe in a pitch out of reach of his ears, a pitch that didn’t pierce the unbelievable quiet.

Black didn’t know how long he stood there.

At one point though, his stomach grumbled.

Sighing a bit, he decided he’d better move on.

HE WAS SWEATING a little now.

He’d walked to the ocean, and gone for a swim.

It struck him as a bit foolhardy… in retrospect, at least.

At the time, going swimming seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

How could he look at all of that perfect, clear, pale blue water, and not go in? He’d watched waves curl towards the white sand beach, forming perfect tubes, the teeming fish so visible inside the water, it was like looking at them through the glass walls of an aquarium.

He’d waded in, cautiously at first, telling himself he was only going to wash off the sweat and grime of the past few days, and cool off from the past hour or so spent under the sun.

He ended up playing in the surf for at least an hour.

Creatures that weren’t seals, weren’t dolphins… weren’t really fish… swam with him, swimming right up to him and looking at him, seemingly wanting to play. They coaxed him without much prodding into body surfing with them, riding those glass-like waves into shore, again and again.

They looked almost like really big otters, he decided, but instead of an otter’s flat tail and back feet, they had one thicker, longer tail, with strands of iridescent skin coming off the end on each side, almost like the train of a wedding dress.

That, and they were closer to the size of a big dog.

They chattered at him, swimming right up to him after he’d surfed a few waves with them, butting up against him with their black noses, rubbing against him with their gray and white fur. The sounds they made were so much like talking, so much like language, he found himself straining to try and understand them.

He used his light, and, unlike the little blue thing that bit his hand, they swam even closer to him, chattering louder, like they were trying to be heard.

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