Page 217 of Hunters and Prey

Black still couldn’t make heads or tails of their language, but he got only friendliness off their light. Friendliness, curiosity, playfulness, interest.

They didn’t know him. He was new.

He was new and they wondered about him, but he was friendly and he played with them, so they liked him, he was good.

The simplicity of their acceptance didn’t come off as a simplicity of their minds, at least not to him, but he found it strangely a relief.

They liked him. Waves good, water good, sun good… Black good.

Black was good with them, too.

In the end though, hunger drove him back to shore.

He walked along the sand towards the cliffs, gazing up at where Land’s End lived in the San Francisco he knew, along with the Cliff House Restaurant, and the Sutro Baths.

Here, he saw only those absurdly tall trees, and more of those dragon creatures perched in their canopies, at least when they weren’t circling overhead.

Black climbed up the hill, heading for the cliffs, wondering if he might be able to find some fruit, or something else that wouldn’t kill him.

Of course, he had no idea what might be okay to eat here.

He had no idea if anything here would be safe for him to eat at all.

He wasn’t even sure if “eating” would be eating here.

He hadn’t yet made up his mind how real any of this was.

The lack of sound was disorienting. On the beach, the chattering otter-dogs, the crashing of the waves, the water in his ears, even his own laughter––it all made everything seem somehow more real, even apart from how clear and perfect the water was, how good the sun felt on his face, those cold noses and furred bodies pressing against his skin.

Now that he was away from the sound of the crashing surf, back in the woods, that silence was back, making him again feel like he wandered through a dream.

Still the fact of his hunger, the faint smell of salt and sweat on his skin, the occasional sharp rock under his feet, the smell of the plants, the feel of the breeze on his wet hair, making him shiver slightly in the shade under the trees––it all made him wonder.

He’d heard there were construct-building masters who could do such things, replicate life down to the most nuanced of physical details.

It could be a dream.

How would he know, if he never remembered his dreams?

Anyway, Miri wasn’t here.

If it was real, Miri would be here.

Miri should be here.

The thought brought a curl of pain to his gut, making him hard.

He did his best to ignore it, but the hunger he had for food seemed to make the pain for her worse, not better.

By the time he got to the top of the cliffs, he was sweating again.

He was about to enter another field at the top of the hill, not far from the sandy edges of the dirt, where the cliff faces began, when he saw movement up ahead.

Slowing, he dropped to a crouch, moving up quietly on whatever it was.

He heard… snorting.

He saw them snuffling and snorting, and his mind went to pigs, some kind of wild boar. When he got near enough to get a good look at them, they didn’t really look like pigs, though, any more than his other animal friends here looked like anything he could correlate with animal species at home.

---