Unicorn Tracks Read Free Page A

up the mess with a white sweat towel, but only succeeding in pushing the stain deeper into the fabric. Her cheeks went pink with embarrassment, and she bit her lip.
    I sighed; those were my last clean pair.
    I moved away from her, trying not to grimace at the feeling of the wet fabric against my thighs. Schooling my face into a reluctant smile, I said, “It’s fine. I’ll change. Meet me at the stable block.”

 
     
    IN TWO hours of scouring the red earth for tracks, I’d managed to locate a lone, undersized bull elephant. I searched the riverbanks for hogfish and crocodiles, the tree lines for leopards and mngwas and prodded the bushes as we rode along with the end of my rifle, hoping to draw out the malaxas and jackals. For once, even the phoenixes stayed hidden. As we turned back to take the path home, I felt sticky with defeat, sweat, and tree sap.
    The Harvings praised the beauty and diversity of the flowers, the tremendousness of our vast, open spaces. Both were good riders, and rather than ignore me and chat to each other, they actively scanned the horizon with their binoculars. Their cheerfulness annoyed me. I almost wished they had spent the afternoon whining or trying to throw things at the elephant while it cooled itself in the mud, grasping leaves from above with its dexterous trunk. Then I could have resented them, instead of my own failure.
    We rounded a corner in the path, passing alongside the riverbank. The water was high from the spring rains, brown with silt. A twitch in the bushes across the water drew my attention, and I squinted toward it.
    “Look, look!” Kara said, standing in her stirrups and pointing. “A crocodile, there’s a crocodile on the bank!”
    I followed the line of her finger to a moss-covered log, bobbing in the current along the shore. I snorted. “That’s a log, Miss Harving.”
    Kara flushed, twisting the dials on her binoculars. “No… it’s moving….”
    I reached over and plucked the instrument from her grasp, adjusting it myself. When I passed the binoculars back to her, and she peered through the focused lens, her blush deepened. If it was possible, the redness of her cheeks made her eyes even brighter.
    “I just got these,” she muttered.
    Suddenly, Mr. Harving’s horse let out a squeal and bolted. Tail held high, the horse put its head down and ran, long strides eating up the ground. My mare reared on her hind legs and fought to free her head from my iron grip. Even Kara’s mount, a swaybacked, elderly gelding, pawed at the ground and grunted nervously.
    As soon as Elikia’s feet were on the path again, I saw what had set them off. An enormous griffin paced toward us, beak snapping open and shut. The animal’s yellow, catlike eyes had narrowed into slits. Sunlight glinted off her silver feathers, making her appear covered by chain mail. Her tail twitched and her hind legs bunched beneath her body as she stalked us.
    I looked to Kara, expecting her to be shaking with terror or crying. In my time as a guide, I’d seen my share of sobbing tourists. Instead, her rifle was cocked, and she stared at the creature down the barrel.
    “Hold, don’t shoot it. Not yet,” I said, looking the griffin in the eye. One of the first things I’d been taught by Tumelo when I started guiding tours was that prey run. Alpha predators always stood their ground. To a griffin or a lion, humans who ran were no different than the impala and buffalo they hunted. Standing to fight could earn the hunters’ respect.
    The griffin made a warbling sound deep in her throat, like a disgruntled farm goose. She looked away from us, gazing into the brush behind her. The bushes rattled, and a flurry of tiny griffin babies swamped their mother’s legs, winding in and out of her feathers and playing with the tuft at the end of her catlike tail.
    Kara chuckled and put her gun up. We started laughing, and I felt the tension in my body gradually flood out. The griffin fluffed her gray feathers