Raven's Choice by Harper Swan

with quick blows and took out a small quartz blade to clean them.
    But before she could begin, a strong feeling came over her that she should go immediately to the pen and check on the captive. She could clean the hamsters later or, if he was released sometime during the day, he could clean them himself after he left. She decided to gift him with the blade. He would at least have something ready-made to take with him.
    Yet she lingered at the burrows, kneeling in the grass, rubbing small ripples on one side of the knife, left from its crafting. She rarely used the blade for anything. It had been her father’s.
    The reddish color was unusual for quartz. It looked as if it had been dyed with red ochre or as if blood had soaked into the stone. He’d handed it to her from his death pallet, saying, “You were born with well-sharpened edges, but no matter how much I struck you, I was never able to shape your core. You’re made up of something that’s too hard in some ways and too soft in others.”
    She placed the blade in her smallest bag and attached it to the bound hamsters using the bag’s drawstring. The captive would know what to do with her gift.
    When Raven got to the pen, the hamsters hidden in her herbal pouch, the guards were dismantling it. “When did he leave?” she asked, trying not to sound frantic.
    “Right after the trackers arrived,” one of the guards said. He grasped a post and with a groan pulled it out of the ground.
    “And when was that?”
    “The sun had only just topped the lake trees,” he said.
    Raven stepped back as the post thudded onto the ground.
    “We followed him until he passed the boulders, then we came back.”
    She looked at the sun, barely over the trees. He hadn’t been gone long, and she remembered an area with large boulders from when she’d first come down the valley. If she hurried, she could catch up and give him the hamsters.
    Raven nodded her head. “Very well, I’ll leave you to your work.” She swatted lazily at a beetle trying to land on her tumble of hair, which she hadn’t taken time to braid that morning, and then she sauntered away as if what he’d said was of little importance.
    At the camp’s edge, her fingers quickly secured the pouch’s leather straps so it rested tightly on her back. She began running and soon spotted the large boulders a short way up the valley.
    His large footprints, with their splayed toes, were easily found. She tracked them, running when she could, all her senses focused on her surroundings. The spring day was clear. The morning hummed with bees enticed down powdery throats of newly opened flowers, and butterflies flitted about as she sprinted along.
    In the distance, buzzards flew. Raven could barely keep her eyes on the ground for watching them. Ever since her failed attempt to rescue the baby, their arrival filled her with foreboding. She momentarily slowed her pace and shaded her eyes, looking upward. They had probably scented an old animal carcass, or… they had spotted something freshly dead.
    But she quickly realized the buzzards were only searching, their spiraling dance across the sky moving toward her, the innermost buzzard becoming briefly the outermost as they glided closer. She forced herself to stop watching them and continued on.
    The trees and foliage became thinner. Raven was some distance from the camp and felt anxious. She looked up from tracking often, eyes darting everywhere. Large predators and their prey mostly stayed away from camps, avoiding the frequent food searches and constantly burning fires. The tribe depended heavily on fire for safety, hence the Fire Cloud tribal name. Clouds of smoke could be seen hovering over a Fire Cloud camp from far away. However, Raven had come a good ways from the camp’s smoky protection. All she saw, though, was a fox ambling along.
    Raven followed the footprints up a path that parted heavy grass. It looked like the path she’d returned on while carrying Fern’s baby.