Elf Dog and Owl Head

Chapter One
 
It was Monday, so they were hunting wyrms in the petrified forest. That’s what the Queen Under the Mountain always scheduled for Monday. The pack of elf-hounds bounded past stone trees, barking and howling. They poured through the wood like a tide. Behind them rode dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, servants and sorcerers. Huntsmen blew huge, curling horns.
   They chased a wyrm that was old and clever. She slithered over boulders and under fallen trees of metal, glancing back to see if she had lost the elf-hounds yet. Several times, they paused to catch the scent of her again. They sniffed the cavern air. Then one of the dogs spotted the flick of the wyrm’s tail, barked warning, and plunged after the monster. The whole pack followed.
   The whole pack except for one. She was a young elf-hound, slim and elegant, with bright, sharp eyes. She held back. She watched the other dogs surge forward. Her eye was caught by movement far off to the side, up a hill of marble oak trees with spreading branches. She had seen the wyrm’s children, squiggly baby wyrms: the mother was leading the dog pack away from them on purpose so her children could escape. The elf-hound watched the infant wyrms flee unnoticed.
   The lords and ladies rode up behind the elf-hound. They would reward her if she led the whole Royal Hunt to the fleeing young.
   “What’s wrong with this one?” asked one of the knights. “She’s just standing there.”
   “She’d be one of our best dogs,” said the Master of the Hunt, “if she wasn’t always dreaming of something else.”
   “Well,” said a duke, “force her to get moving! She should join the rest of the pack!”
   “Go, girl!” yelled the Master of the Hunt, and he kicked out at her with his boot to let her know who was boss.
   The elegant elf-hound stared at him coldly. He didn’t deserve to know what she’d seen. Almost smiling, she started after the pack again, barking as loudly as she could, as if she’d never noticed the young wyrm efts scrambling to safety up the hill. As if she’d never figured out the old wyrm’s plan, leading the Hunt away from the precious young.
   She reached the pack, hopping over huge mushrooms and shelves of fungus. Easily, she soared past stragglers.
   The People Under the Mountain kept the petrified forest stocked with wyrms and basilisks and other hungry beasts, just so they could hunt them without having to risk going aboveground. Outside the caves, above the mountain, the woods were deeper and wider, but sometimes haunted by humans.
   Usually, the elf-hounds only got to hunt in these two square miles of cavern, seeking out monsters that had been bred by their masters for sport. But the old blue wyrm was leading the pack out of the familiar tunnels and caves. The dogs could tell. She was leading them upward.
   “Smart old cow,” said one of the dukes. “Should we let her get out of the caves? Shall we follow her? Or shall I order the gates slammed shut? What do we think?”
   “Good day for a hunt,” said a count, squinting after the wyrm through his rune-covered monocle. “Let’s go above-ground. Hunt her up there. It’ll be good for the elf-hounds to have a change of scene. We have the wizards with us. They can hide us from the humans.”
   And so, with great horns blaring behind them, the pack tumbled up the passage that led out of the petrified forest, out of the caverns, and into the bright sunlight of the forest aboveground.
   The old wyrm flung herself along, delighted. She had saved her children. And she herself might escape into this new, bright world. She just had to lead the dogs a little farther. Then she’d give them the slip.
   Outside, it was spring, and the woods were just starting to turn green. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the sun picked out the red riding jackets of the knights and lords and ladies and the gems on their swords and tridents.
   Their wizards rode to either side of the Hunt, cranking magical machines that sputtered out smoke. The People Under the Mountain only lived half in the world of humans, as if they had stepped with one leg into another time or an unseen place. This smoke would make them completely invisible if they stumbled across any humans lost in the woods.
   The dog pack was wild with excitement. They rarely got to visit the world outside the palaces and parks in the caverns under the mountain. Some of them were afraid of the light. Some of them were worried that there were no walls of rock to protect them. They just bounded forward and tried to focus on the retreating wyrm.
   But the young dog with the sharp eyes was fascinated by everything she saw and wanted to see more. She was trained to explore forests and learn their secret ways. She wanted to investigate this sparkling woodland that lay on the top side of the mountain, where she saw colors she had never seen before.
   Greykin, the young dog’s uncle, was close on the wyrm’s tail. He was a prize elf-hound, a leader of the pack. The wyrm reared up and slashed at him. He ducked back.
   The dogs were all around the wyrm then. They did not know that she was trying to protect her young. They only knew that they had been trained to kill beasts like her for the amusement of their masters. They barked furiously.
   Except the young and elegant elf-hound, who had spotted something she had never seen before. It was the back of a gas station. It was made of cement blocks. The woods went right up to it.
   Her uncle Greykin caught her eye. What was she doing? She should start barking, screaming—she should prepare to leap and tear at the scaly monster.
   The wyrm was cornered. Behind her was a road. A highway. Humans drove past in cars, unaware that a few inches from their windows, a great and bloody battle was about to begin.
   The dogs closed in. It looked like several of them were about to die in the fight. The People Under the Mountain did not care. They had plenty of dogs.
   Growling, the pack closed in, step by step. The wyrm swung her front claws. She snapped at them.
   The dogs’ muscles twitched. They were ready to leap.
   The huntsman blew the horn—the signal for the kill.
   And the wyrm threw herself backward and hurtled across the road, swaying her long blue body to eel between speeding cars.
   The dogs just stood there, astonished, their mouths open. A few still remembered to bark.
   They saw the wyrm jump up on top of a van with a loud thump. Then they saw her leap off the other side, into the safety of the woods there.
   The van swerved: the driver must have heard the thump and maybe even caught a glimpse, out of the corner of their eye, of flashing blue scales. There was a lot of honking.
   The dukes and duchesses and knights and ladies all were angry. They had wanted to see a spectacular fight. Now the wyrm had escaped, and the dogs couldn’t reach her over the tide of humans in their vehicles.
   The hunt was over. The duke made a sign to the huntsman, who blew a retreat on his horn. The People Under the Mountain turned their horses around slowly and headed back toward the entrance to the cave, muttering angrily.
   The dogs still barked at the wyrm across the busy highway. A Chihuahua in a truck barked back, furious. But no one else could hear them.
   The hunting horns blew again. From the highway, the car horns honked. The dogs knew it was time to go home. One by one, they turned tail and trotted toward their masters.
   The mystical fog drifted through the trees, growing fainter. Soon, the spring breeze blew it away completely. It was as if the hunt had never happened.