Haarn stood again, his ears cocked for the sounds coming from the forest ahead of him. He sniffed the air, smelling the stronger scent of blood nearby. Small carnivores gathered in the forest, drifting in from the shadows.

Another fifty paces farther on, he crossed a stream where the victim had tried to elude her pursuers. Haarn knew the victim was a female now; he could scent her pheromones in the air.

He also scented the female among the hunters.

The waning twilight giving over to full night turned the blood on the grass ahead almost ebony. Still it was fresh enough to gleam.

Haarn ran his fingers across the blades of grass. The victim had run hard and well, but she hadn't been able to elude her pursuers. He crouched in the tall grass beneath the swaying bows of an old oak tree. His practiced eye read the story with ease.

The victim had hidden in the tall grass off the well-worn game path that wound through the trees to the north. Forest creatures used the game path to trek down to the artesian well that created a spring only a quarter mile away.

She had waited, Haarn knew, and hoped that her pursuers would follow the game path and miss her. She was canny, and Haarn regretted that she was too soon taken from the world before she could contribute to the balance. He had no doubt she was dead.

Despite her craftiness, she'd been found. The hunters had followed her blood spoor from the earlier wound and stayed on track. Judging from the amount of blood that had littered the forest, Haarn doubted she would have lived anyway. The blood had misted across the grass blades in places, almost too fine for even Haarn's keen eyesight to detect, but it had indicated that at least one of the hunters' arrows had taken her through a lung.

It had only been a matter of time till she'd drowned in her own blood.