Hounded

can be viewed—occasionally, if they deign to show themselves—from a part of the zoo called the Arizona Trail. But even then the viewers may be forced to use binoculars to see them well, because it is not an exhibit so much as a tiny preserve, where the sheep are left largely to themselves and undisturbed—that is, until Oberon and I started terrorizing them.
    When I hunted with Oberon, I took the form of a wolfhound with a red coat shot through with streaks of white, slightly taller in the shoulder than Oberon and with dark markings on the right side reminiscent of my tattoos. If I had gone out there with a bow and let Oberon flush them for me, it would have been far simpler but far less satisfying for both of us. Oberon wanted to bring them down in the » old way, « never mind that wolfhounds were bred to chase down wolves in the forest and take out charioteers on the battle plain, not leap around rocky hills after nimble-footed rams.
    The reason the sheep were so hard to bring down was that the terrain was steep, unkind to our paws, and a tumble from the rocks would probably land us in a cactus—and anyone who’s ever tried to tangle with a teddy bear cholla knows there’s a whole lot more bear than teddy to it. The conditions would simply not let us open up full bore and catch up to them.
    When we got to the park, Oberon was ready to kill just about anything that moved. He’d been trying to intimidate Flidais’s stags and found that they were not scared of him in the least, and it was practically making him rabid. I had overheard snatches of their conversation as we rode along in Flidais’s chariot:
    › If you were not under the goddess’s protection, I would have you for supper, ‹ he told them.
    › Maybe if you had two score friends or so, ‹ they taunted him. › A single puppy would never trouble us. ‹ Oh ho!
    › You would not be so bold if the goddess were not here. ‹
    › Is that so? She leaves us alone for long periods of time, staked to a small area. Try to take us then and see what happens, runt. ‹
    Oberon growled at them and bared his teeth, and I told him to hush, doing my best to hide my amusement. Oh, was he ever mad. Calling a giant like him a runt? They really knew how to push a dog’s buttons.
    Flidais asked me where she should park her chariot, and I suggested she leave it by Hunt’s Tomb, a small white pyramid incongruously erected on one of the hills as the final resting place of Arizona’s first governor. It was fenced off from the rest of the park, but the stags simply leapt over it, jerking the chariot abruptly behind but landing gracefully on the other side through some of Flidais’s magic.
    › Can you jump like that, little doggie? ‹ one of the stags teased.
    Oberon simply growled in response, far past the point of vocalizing. We got out of the chariot, and he barked at them once before I brought him to heel.
    » We are after sheep tonight, « I reminded him.
    › Let’s go, then, ‹ he replied as the stags snorted their laughter.
    » Get yourself ready, Druid, « Flidais said as she slung her quiver over her head.
    And so I cleared my head and summoned power through the tattoo that tied me to the earth, drawing strength up from the desert. I fell down on all fours as I bound myself to the shape of a hound.
    A Druid’s therianthrophy is nothing like the change of a werewolf, save in the sense that both are magical. One major difference is that I can change shape (or not) at will, regardless of the time of day or the phase of the moon; another is that it’s fairly painless, unlike lycanthropy; yet another is that I can transform into different animals, albeit a limited few.
    In practice, I do not stay for long periods in animal form, for psychological reasons. While I can eat anything the animal would eat and not suffer physically from it, mentally I have difficulty choking down whole mice when I’m an owl or eating raw venison as a hound. (We had taken down a doe in the Kaibab Forest a couple of weeks ago, and once she was down, I had walked off and waited until Oberon had had his fill.) So these hunts were for Oberon more than for me: I just enjoyed the chase and that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you know you’re making someone happy.
    But something was different this time when I changed to hound form. My mind felt befuddled, and I was more than a little bloodthirsty. I smelled the sheep scent on the night air, and the nearness of the stags, but