Field Note B1S.

Category. Human Remains. Description. Rib fragment, notched by teeth marks.
The beast was close. A trail of pads and fat toes betrayed its path up the mountain. Pawfoot limped after its tracks, uncovering the hidden path to its cave. Instinct bade the boy turn tail, but his grumbling stomach lured him underground. Pawfoot followed the beast back home.

The boy shimmied inside, landed on cold slush, and spat a mouthful of mud. He struggled upright and explored the sprawling cavern around him. Hundreds of handprints glowed on the walls and beckoned him to a smoking cooking pit. Pawfoot caught a whiff of mustard seeds, tubers, and garlic but found a dead boy gripping an axe instead of a feast. The meat was well-braised and cooked to a pale pink. Bones, nails, and hairy back aside, it looked delicious.

Mother hunched over the pit, humming one of her lullabies for the corpse alone. Her pelts bristled and came alive–needles, beads, and talismans rattled from the shag. Pawfoot’s brothers knelt by her feet, snickering at his limp as usual. Nubtail wore a stitchwork of boar hides, while Fangtooth donned the skin of a she-wolf. From snout to tail, furs fitted them like a second skin.

The boy sunk into his raggedy coat with shame. He’d braided it from moss, resin, and odd twigs–a sign of weakness and boyhood. Unlike his brothers, he had no blood on his hands.

“Remember, nobody can cook a boy like a beast.” Mother baited her sons to the pit. “But they still keep coming. Boys from across the highlands brave into this cave to test their manhood and find the Tiger Witch.” She tore a slab off the corpse. “It’s your turn now. Will you prove yourselves men tonight or wild animals? Will you claim this dead boy’s blade or pick his meat?”

Pawfoot studied the handprints around him, figuring they were a warning from the dead. The boy didn’t like his chances against a tiger. His right foot, squat and clumsy, couldn’t outrun a sickly cub. The boy understood why Mother had little choice but to name him after his ugly paw.

He turned to meet Fangtooth and Nubtail’s unforgiving gaze. The three brothers sized each other up across the pit and girded closer to the axehead–an oily blade flinted from black stone. The boys dove into the cooking pit at the first twitch of movement. Nails slashed, skin sizzled, and the stink of burned hair thickened the air. Pawfoot’s fingers hovered over the axehead’s edge, but one heady whiff of meat was all it took for him to snatch a pliant rib instead.

The boy scuttled to a corner, gnawed on the rib, and swallowed without a chew. Fat dripped from his lips. He tried to gorge his guts to bursting, but they wouldn’t stop churning. The more Pawfoot ate, the more he wanted. Mother was right. Nobody could cook a boy like a beast.

His older brothers laughed at him. Grousing, the boy pulled away from his meal. He watched Nubtail nurse a swollen hand while Fangtooth preened with the axehead in his grip.

“We found the beast.” Nubtail’s rump wagged; a vestigial tail lay hidden under his furs.

“Look at it.” Fangtooth bared a sharp, jutting canine. “What kind of man has a paw?”

“I’m no beast.” Pawfoot took a bite off the rib but spat it out when he felt her approach.

Mother narrowed her amber eyes on the boy, making him thump against the walls. The woman smelled old, stinking of an unearthed burial mound, but her body’s bulk reminded Pawfoot she remained dangerous. Mother pointed to a shadowy trail of pads and fat toes sneaking away from the pit. “A tiger’s watching you,” she croaked, “chew on its favorite bone.”

*     *     *
Field Note P4W.

Category. Fossil. Description. Pugmark, preserved in limestone.
Divining tracks was her secret alone. Mother lowered a torch to the ground, measuring the space between each pugmark to predict the beast’s sex, speed, and primal desires. The boy watched the woman work, trying to unravel the art of worming into a tiger’s mind. But he only managed to steal her knowledge in bits and pieces. She refused to teach an unblooded son.

Pawfoot studied the tracks, trying to prove himself a hunter just like her, a boy worthy of her many secrets. He figured long toes meant the beast was female, while wide steps gave away its breakneck pace. The boy tried to keep his mind on the tiger, but his brothers’ hollering obliged him to look over his shoulder. Fangtooth and Nubtail ran along a breach that divided the chamber in half. They played a game of chase and pretended to devour each other. Pawfoot smiled, eager to join them, but one limping step cautioned him they would never let him play.

The boy hated his paw. It was big, clumsy, and ended with a row of fat toes. He flattened it on the ground and tried to unwind the arch to look like a regular foot. The boy swallowed the pain, watching his foot straighten, almost fooling himself he was somebody else, one of them. But the more he looked like his brothers, the less he felt like playing. The boy just wanted to eat.

Pawfoot hugged his belly. The wicked thought of taking a bite of them rattled inside his head. One taste of the tiger’s cooking awakened him to new flavors and strange urges. Meat ran scarce during winter, and stranger things than brothers looked edible. He spotted an opening to bite into Fangtooth’s thigh or Nubtail’s rear, but his guts gave him away before he could pounce.

“What’s it doing?” Nubtail caught his nub to stop it from shaking. “Is it going to eat us?”

Fangtooth pressed his axehead to Pawfoot’s throat. “I wouldn’t turn my back on a beast.”

“I’m not hungry,” the boy lied and ran away.

Tears dribbled down his cheeks. Their jibes stung, and he hated himself for showing it. He glared back at them, eyes red with salt. Fangtooth and Nubtail were growing near manhood and had collected the hides to prove it. Pawfoot wanted to pick their pretty coats apart to steal the choicest bits for himself. But a pelt was earned through blood alone. Only killing made a hunter.

The fools could keep their mangy furs. Pawfoot vowed to toss his mossy rags and claim his first pelt–ruddy, striped, and decked with a snarling head. He combed the ground for more pugmarks and chased them to a slab of rock bridging the rift and an unseen river churning below.

Mother’s lullaby, a blend of harmonies and lamentations, stopped him cold. The boy followed her voice across the slab. She had silently skulked to the other side of the divide. Shifting in and out from the torchlight, Mother warped from a crone to a maiden to a stranger.

“I’ve brought you into the mountain,” she croaked, “to find a hunter who can make it out of the winter alive. But to prove your manhood and meet the Tiger Witch, you must cross the bridge to the beast’s den. Will you do it standing on two legs, all fours like an animal, or fall?”

Pawfoot shook his head. The boy figured he’d topple over the bridge before he took one step. Luckily, Fangtooth and Nubtail elbowed past him to the slab. At first, his brothers breezed against the wind currents, but they began to slow down when the bridge thinned like a piercing blade. For a moment, the boy hoped to see them drop. But his brothers always disappointed him. Fangtooth caught Nubtail by his pelt, jumped into the air, and landed in a pile on the other side.

The boy tried to sneak out, but Mother called him from across the rift. Pawfoot gulped but obeyed. There was no denying her. He climbed the bridge. Gale roped around his throat in a noose. The boy balanced on the slab, trying to keep grounded, but his squat foot almost slipped. A pang of fear turned his stomach. Retching between his legs, he noticed more tracks on the slab.

A gust of wind hurtled the boy face-first to the bridge. Blood trickled to feed the hungry river below. Pawfoot landed on top of the tiger’s tracks. Its footfalls scuttled across the bridge, unbothered by the storming gale. The boy realized this cave was a beast’s world–not meant for men to tread. Pawfoot knew what he had to do. He got on his hands and knees and started to crawl. On all fours, he found balance. The burden of his deformity lifted. He grew faster than he’d ever been on two legs. The boy picked up his pace and crossed the breach to Mother’s side.

“Do you like it?” Her amber eyes burned. “Crawling with your belly to the ground?”

The boy shook his head, unable to meet her gaze, and hid his ugly paw. No matter how hard Pawfoot tried, he would never become the hunter Mother wanted. But when the boy noticed blood trickling off the walls, he realized she wasn’t the only creature to fear in this beast’s world.

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Field Note H0L

Category. Weapon. Description. Obsidian Axehead.
Blood-spatter painted the cavern’s walls red–the pop and spurt of a severed jugular. The Tiger Witch had made another kill. Breathless, Pawfoot spotted drag marks on the ground. Streaks of gore, offal, and scuffed earth wormed deeper into the cavern’s core. The beast had turned careless about killing, leaving a path back to itself. Almost as if it wanted to get found.

Mother haunched low, furs bristled, and chased the blood trail further into the cavern. A stinking tunnel, dank like a gullet, loomed at its end. She licked her lips at the scent of decay. “Can you smell it,” her smile turned to bladed ivory, “the piss, blood, and bones of a tiger’s den? Here comes the easy part, my sons. Will you find that beast, or will it go the other way around?”

Pawfoot slipped off his raggedy moss coat, the shameful brand of his boyhood. Only an animal’s hide on his back–thick with fur and sacrificed by his bloody hands–could finally make him a real hunter. The boy had no choice but to follow the beast back home. “I’ll find it,” he said.

“All boys do.” She nudged him towards the den. “One way or another.”

Pawfoot nodded, followed after the tiger’s tracks, and limped inside the tunnel. Its pugmarks loped across a passageway illuminated by a glowing ooze stinking of brine. He stopped to study the prints. The beast’s steps were short and stunted. He figured it was slowing down. Pawfoot’s mouth watered, worming into the animal’s mind to share its taste for live prey.

The tracks vanished at a dead end, an egg-shaped chamber carved from bedrock. Inside, a gaping hole the size of a wildebeest tunneled below ground. Pawfoot found another boy spiced and cooked near its edge. At least the corpse looked like one. The dead boy’s arms and legs appeared the same length, a trait of four-footed beasts. Its hinds ended in paws, just like him.

Pawfoot licked the drool from his lips. A nibble of the tiger’s cooking had corrupted him. Novel appetites revealed themselves, and he feared losing control. Eating your own kind was a habit of low animals. But all alone in the dark, away from prying eyes, who would ever know?

The boy had reached out to snag a bite when heavy breathing tickled the back of his neck. He squealed and almost fell into the hole while his older brothers cackled behind him. Fangtooth and Nubtail crowded the boy against the walls, close enough to gnash, sunder, and devour each other.

Fangtooth regarded him and the carcass with equal suspicion. A she-wolf draped over his body; the coarse hairs appeared to sprout from his skin. “Don’t play innocent. Go ahead, eat it.”

“I couldn’t take another bite.” Pawfoot patted his empty belly.

“Liar!” Nubtail jeered. “That’s just what a beast would say.”

The boy winced as his brothers jumped him. Nubtail stomped his stubby paw while Fangtooth mashed his nose in with a loud crunch of bone. Pawfoot fell to the ground and crawled away, writhing from the pain in his guts. His brothers’ sweat, salted breath, and the meager meat on their bones became a temptation he could no longer resist. The boy wanted to tear their flesh to prove he was the beast they were looking for. Pawfoot clamped his lips before he lost control.

The boy wormed to the hole’s edge and felt a gust of heat wafting from its innards. Hot, tacky air spiced with mustard seeds, tubers, and garlic–the Tiger Witch’s breath–invited him to jump in. Pawfoot peered over the edge but only saw darkness. “Are you in there?” he muttered.

Fangtooth stood over him and snickered. But in Pawfoot’s blurry eyes, he saw a cackling wolf upright on two legs. The axehead in his grip appeared sharp and deadly as the long winter.

“This beast has no claws,” he scoffed.

“What do we do with it?” Nubtail’s rump wagged. “It’s got no fur to skin either.”

“I’ll help it find its way home.” Fangtooth slashed at the boy, casting him over the edge.

Pawfoot screamed, holding on to the corpse’s leg. His grip slipped from its calf to its paw. Warm fat squeezed from the corpse’s skin and dripped on Pawfoot’s palms. The boy slobbered, let go, and licked his hands clean, slurping the hot grease as he dropped into the hole.

*     *     *
Field Note B1T.

Category. Unclassified. Description. Anomalous skull.
Pawfoot hit bottom, raising a cloud of dust he couldn’t see, only sniff, taste, and choke on. The dead body landed on top of him. He hugged it in the darkness, burrowing for warmth into its chest, but the corpse turned cold. Pawfoot struggled to his feet, crunching a pile of bones underfoot. The boy’s jaw dropped at the heaps of disassembled skeletons scattered around him.

The temperature dropped as the boy limped away from the light. He started missing his raggedy moss coat already. Pawfoot wandered off to explore the rest of the bone-tiled den, leaving a trail of blood. He limped across a gravelly pathway paved with teeth and rounded a massive barrow of bones. The stack of spinal cords, sternums, and ribs almost reached the ceiling. He rummaged through the remains and brought a skull ending in a snout to his eyes. The boy was mesmerized by its black sockets as the great barrow shook and rattled apart behind him.

Pawfoot turned around, his heart thumping against his chest, and spotted it rising from the barrow. An enormous animal woke from its bed of bones. The boy saw tufts of cinnabar and stripes, sharp, hanging teeth, and a pair of amber eyes. Pawfoot ran as fast as his limp would allow, but the beast caught him in a single stride, bit into his neck, and pinned him to the ground.

Slobber pooled all around the boy, and he choked on it. The prick of the animal’s whiskers made Pawfoot go limp, pliant to its will. He played dead as it unrolled a rough tongue and licked him from the top of his scalp to his misshapen toes. Humming a lullaby, the Tiger Witch reared on her hind legs and girded around the boy. Tufts of striped fur sloughed to the ground, uncovering a bloom of moving fingers, a naked breast, and Mother’s burning gaze.

“You will never know,” she croaked, “how many sons I’ve mourned before I found you.”

Pawfoot brought the strange skull to the light. He trembled, remembering his brothers’ teeth and tail. The boy knew he shouldn’t ask, but he did anyway. “Are these also my brothers?”

“They were never going to make it.” Her voice trailed, turning distant. “Every one of them stumbled on two gangly legs and left their hairless bellies exposed; no match for a tiger.”

Pawfoot backed away from her and stumbled to the ground. A spine ending in a snubnosed tail cradled him like a newborn. The boy wanted to hate the tiger for her savagery. But who was he to judge a beast for sharing his same taste for meat? “Are you going to eat me?”

“I want to.” She licked her teeth. “But I’ll teach you to track, maul, and kill instead.”

The boy shook his head and covered himself with shame. He wasn’t the killer she was looking for, only a naked boy shivering in a cave. “I’m no hunter. I haven’t earned my first pelt.”

“I’ve seen you,” she whispered, “pick meat over a blade, walk on four legs instead of two, and devour your own kind. That’s all a boy needs to become a tiger and survive the winter.”

“I’m so hungry,” Pawfoot muttered. A weight lifted as he unburdened his grisly confession. The boy surrendered his boyhood to the Tiger Witch’s spell. “I want more.”

“A tiger can eat anything.” She waved at the bones. “Even if they walk on two legs.”

Pawfoot screamed as a patch of fur sprouted from his skin, tearing open gaps in the flesh. The boy gripped his throbbing paw, and a batch of pearly-white claws ripped free. “Help me!”

The tiger lowered on all fours, peeling a pair of low-hanging canines. “I already did.”

*     *     *
Field Note A8T.

Category. Animal Remains. Description. Smilodon Fatalis, pelt embalmed by permafrost.
His brothers were close. Twin pairs of tracks cast in the mud and scuttled into a tunnel. The hunter sniffed his older brothers’ footfalls, catching a savory whiff of sweat and adrenaline. He could taste their fear on his tongue, but the clever boys kept themselves hidden out of sight.

One paw after the next, the hunter padded in the darkness without a limp, movements fluid, just another shadow devouring the light. His ruddy pelt bristled, stripes spiked like piercing blades at the smell of human flesh. The hunter sniffed his brothers inside a crevice deep in the walls. Their trembling betrayed them through vibrations in the stone. He pictured the boys huddled together, gnatty pelts making them appear like a squealing piglet and a wailing wolf cub.

The hunter’s belly groaned. He was hungry. The mechanics of consumption changed for him. He could gorge on every boy in the highlands and still want more. It was the price of a tiger’s pelt. He had forsaken his boyhood for a manhood of scarcity and hunger. But to survive the long winters, the hunter would feed on secret recipes that seasoned meat with a tang of fear.

Mother was right. Nobody could cook a boy like a beast.