Hounded

Or maybe their trip was nothing more than what it appeared to be, three college girls taking a trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
    I took Highway 67 for a short stretch south of Highway 89, then cut west on Forest Service Road 461 toward Jacob Lake. At that point I finally lost my tail: I took FSR 282 south, skirting Jacob Lake and continuing down a sinuous dirt track for several miles, while Coffee Witch & co. continued on 461, presumably to visit the inn above the lake. I relaxed and pushed them out of my mind; they were doubtless going there for a slice of the famous pie before they drove down to the North Rim.
    I pulled off to the side of the road and parked once we got to a densely forested area. I sucked in a lungful of early-autumn air and admired the trees before me. Mostly old-growth ponderosa with a few mixed conifers here and there; pockets of aspen were scattered about, the thin white fingers of their trunks waving hello in the wind.
    After I let Oberon out, I kicked off my sandals and sent a greeting to the earth through my knotted tattoos, which were much more than personal decoration: They were the visual evidence of my magical bond to the earth. The indigo knotwork began—if Celtic knots can be said to begin anywhere—on the back of my right hand, then the threads of it traveled up my arm, circled beneath my shoulder, and continued down my right side all the way to the sole of my foot. While in contact with the earth, I had all its power on tap if I needed it, for as I am bound to the earth, it is bound to me.
    Talking to the earth is tricky, because it doesn’t follow the syntax of human language and it works in geological time. If I want to commune directly with what people call Gaia, it takes a deep trance and about a week to say hello. What I do instead is speak to her proxies, the elementals who dwell in a defined ecosystem. It’s akin to talking to a worker bee instead of the queen, since the queen is rarely available and the bee in this case can speak for her.
    The speaking itself is not speaking at all. It’s more like pheromone emissions containing my emotions bundled into nouns and verbs—though that explanation doesn’t really cover it, and it leaches away a good deal of the fun. It’s simpler to just call it Druidry, the magic of binding the natural world. It’s tough to render such communication into mere words, but here’s an approximation of what I sent to the local elemental: //Druid greets Kaibab / Health / Harmony / Query:: Hunt?//
    The response thrummed quickly through my tattoos. //Kaibab greets Druid / Welcome / Rest / Hunt / Nourish self / Harmony//
    You don’t know what warm fuzzies are until you get personally welcomed to a forest by its avatar. //Gratitude / Contentment / Harmony// I replied.
    › Come on, Atticus, ‹ Oberon said, his tail wagging as he spun in excited circles. › Run with me through the trees. ‹
    He didn’t have to ask me twice. I shucked off my clothes and put them in the trunk, then I hid the car keys inside the front tire well. Going onto all fours, I triggered the transformation into a wolfhound and sneezed, because the abrupt ability to smell fifty times better can do that to a fella. I can bind myself to four different animal shapes, but when I’m a hound I have a thick red coat with dark markings on my right side where my tattoos are. We lit out into the woods with gusto, a red dog and a gray dog, friends in the forest padding across a carpet of needles and drinking in the crisp scent of pine.
    We caught the scent of the Kaibab deer herd after about a half hour, and we split up. I drove a three-point buck south to Oberon, and he pounced on him successfully and brought him down. I’m not a huge fan of raw venison, even in hound form, so I let Oberon go to it and found a nice spot in a meadow to sun myself some distance away.
    I was rolling around on my back, enjoying the smell and tickle of the grass, the sound of my own playful thrashing, when terror and loathing seized me.
    //Kaibab needs Druid / Jacob Lake / Help / Discord//
    The air rushed out of my lungs and all sound stopped, as if there were a temporary vacuum. The chirp of birds and hum of insects, the wind whispering in the trees—all of it was gone. The sounds came back tentatively after a few seconds, but a deeper silence remained.
    //Query:: Kaibab?// I got no answer, not even to repeated calls.
    Worry clenched at my heart. Had I become unbound from the earth,