“WHAT’S THE FIRST THING YOU REMEMBER?” The woman asked.

“The woods, a canopy of leaves, a green glow all around me, birds chatting merrily…” Reminisced the young man sitting across from her.

“That’s a bit more eloquent than I expected, especially from a sixteen year old.” The woman sitting across from him laughed.

“I suppose so, but one can hardly lapse back into simplicity when they’ve had so much of an experience in their life,” remarked the young man, reclining in his chair.
“What sort of an experience would that be?” Inquired the woman

“Allow me but an hour, and I’ll recount it to you.”

I always loved the woods, and would often spend hours there, alone with nothing but a pocket knife and a carved walking stick, but one day the woods took on a whole new meaning to me.

It was the day that I turned fifteen, and I was walking through the woods when I made a discovery. On the ground in front of me was a large paw print, similar to that of a cat or dog, and yet altogether different. For one, this print was so extremely large that it seemed to belong to a beast the size of an elephant. For another, there were large triangular impressions at the front of each toe, as if this beast had enormous claws each as long as a carving knife.

This find greatly excited me and I at once set of deeper into the woods searching for this great beast, I did not find it that day, but I knew I would, and that when I did I would not be disappointed.

The young man reclined then, clearly soaking in the glory of a captive audience in the form of the woman sat across from him, hands folded neatly in her lap atop her patchwork skirt. Lydia Pachenko, the town healer, and Ricardo's longtime schoolboy crush, despite the frankly indecent number of years between them. She was, of course, old enough to be his mother, and had served as his school's medicine mistress before retiring to the towns apothecary when she married five years ago. Ricardo had been twelve then.

And here she was, having pulled him out of certain death after an encounter with what was, decidedly not a dragon. It was scarcely large enough to be of beastly origin, maybe an escaped guard dog or feral fox. But he would never let Lydia Pachenko think him a coward.

He continued his story with a smooth, measured grace, pausing only to sip from the cup left on the side for him by Ms Pachenko, 'Ms' because she was recently divorced, and this fact tickled Ricardo greatly. It was a green watery concoction, a painkiller of sorts that made his head woozy and his words come quicker than his thoughts. If he had time to think, he may have said the creature was wolf, or werewolf, or otherwise formidable and mammalian in nature, but no.

He had settled on Draconian.

And he was sticking to it.

"The tracking took three days," Ricardo said, with the appropriate gravity. It had taken approximately forty minutes.

"Three days?" Lydia's eyebrows lifted, and Ricardo felt a warm surge of satisfaction.

"Three days. I subsisted on berries and stream water." He had eaten a packed lunch his mother had prepared, including a small apple cake wrapped in wax paper. "The creature was cunning. Intelligent, even. It doubled back on its own tracks, obscured its trail." The fox had done nothing of the sort. It had simply walked in a straight line toward what turned out to be a rabbit warren.

He paused to sip the green concoction, which was doing wonderful things to his sense of narrative momentum.

"On the third morning, I found its lair."

"A cave?" Lydia asked, leaning forward slightly.

"A cave," he confirmed. It had been a hollow beneath the roots of a fallen oak, barely large enough to serve as a den. "The mouth of it was scorched. The rock around the entrance had been blackened, as if by tremendous heat."

There had been no rock. There had been mud, feathers, maybe a rabbit bone, but nothing that signified all-out terror.

"I drew my knife." He did not mention that this knife was three inches long and had a handle shaped like a fish, a birthday gift from his aunt. "And I went in."

Lydia's hands had unfolded from her lap. Ricardo Voss, he told himself, you absolute genius.

The fox had been asleep. It had opened one amber eye at him, deeply unimpressed, and then closed it again. It was very large, as foxes went. Possibly the largest fox Ricardo had ever seen, which was, he now conceded privately, not a high bar.

He had still screamed, though not for long, and he was almost certain no one had heard.

"The creature rose up," Ricardo said, his voice dropping, "and it was everything the footprint had promised."