Dog Moon : Chapter 1 Marooned

Tatters and shreds of sweaty shirt flapped behind the boy in a mad rush through the canyon, careening through the course of a gurgling brook. Hurtling soaked shoes clapped over smooth rocks with water slapping and splashing the bleeding scrapes that were pulsing and stinging in the sun and wind. Double-gaited gazelle leaps vaulted him over the big jutting stones as his tawny arms pumped and counterbalanced his lithe body. No looking back, only forward towards the looming dark forest canopy where the water enters into a swampy delta. Snakes’ paradise, Kallas’ haven. It will be a lot of work climbing the ancient stone steps underneath the matted roots, but if he can get to the top, everything he needs to make a set of darts awaits him.

The drone-dogs are good, real good. Laser-olfactory, boosted jumping power, visual memory, limited airlift and stay, solar powered, and an arresting bite that sedates, marks and implants beacons. But they have one old-fashioned shortcoming. Water. There’s not much of it around, and they simply weren’t designed for it.

Kallas finally got to the perimeter and waded into the de facto moat where the winding roots of the forest pushed up like thick whorled branches of inverted trees. He climbed in and up, and got his first chance to look back and survey the canyon behind him. As he rotated his head he glimpsed the hypnotic apparition of a giant moth perched on the bark of the tree in front of him. Grey dusty wings fading into a beige head apparatus contrasted with a radiant orange eclipse like eye pattern formed by the two folded wings. Nature’s way of telling predators “Eye see you.” Transfixed for a moment, his survival instinct broke the spell to let him glance back at the canyon. Nothing but a twenty meters wide ribbon of running water and rocks churring through an age old dried up river bed, once nearly a mile wide, now a desert-scape reaching back to the former cliff banks in the distance.

This was no time to relax and be mesmerized by exotic fauna. He crept back up on to the covered trail of stone steps and climbed up and over the tangles of roots, forcing newts to flee and sending crackling sounds of breaking bark echoing in the thick, humid, leafy breathing air.

It wasn’t too far to the top, only a few hundred meters, but it wasn’t too fast either. This trail hadn’t been blazed for a couple of millennia, and it was remarkable the stone could still be seen. They only could because the roots of the trees left lots of lift space between the trunks and the forest floor, and in the rains, which only formed from condensation on this hilly part of the rough but habitable twin moon, the water would run under them and clean out all the brush and forest debris. Finally he got to the top where there was a flat space, the old altar. Still overgrown but it had some low rock barriers that managed to stick up through the foliage and bottom lattice. They were covered with moss and also had lots of chips and crevices, making a perfect place high up that offered protection, cushioned sitting, and storage space for tools and valuables.

Finally pulling up over the last roots, he climbed onto the dais and sat down half cross-legged, leaning back on the moss of one of the barriers. The hollow sounds of half empty fruits falling from trees in the forest mingled with rushing sounds, drips, crackles and distant birdsong and whooping calls. After resting a minute he reached onto the top of the barrier and slid off one of the coconut shells he had placed there to catch rainwater and grabbed a wad of thick green moss. He wet and cleaned the moss, cleaned out all the scrapes on his legs, and doused them with the rest of the water. They weren’t too bad, just surface wounds that would heal in a week or so. He took a sip of water from one of the other coconuts, and then slid aside a stone covering a deep crevice in the barrier and pulled out a makeshift wooden box.

Inside were three shiny milky-pink marble colored arrowheads, crafted from the shells of crustaceans that lived in the brook. They could have been used as points on shafts for hunting, but not these three. These were specially designed to be blades for carving darts.

The drone-dogs couldn’t handle water very well cause they couldn’t make any landings on it, and their smelling capabilities were incapacitated by it. But Kallas’ would have to conduct raids outside of the forest well into the badlands and he would need to be armed. The dog’s metallic armor would be no match for a normal dart, especially wooden ones. But these darts would not be designed to penetrate matter. They were masterfully crafted to whistle with varying high pitched tones whose disharmonic sounds could jam the dogs’ sonic processors and even cause their entire central processing units to go haywire and cease.

Kallas then pulled out a long piece of bamboo… the heavy artillery. A long time in the making, this would serve as both a blowdart launcher, and also a finely tuned flute-whistle able to play numerous combinations of high-pitched notes that could not only jam the dogs, but command them. The dogs used sonic high pitched sounds to communicate, and using this whistle, Kallas’ could emulate commands. He was The Piper.