Beasts Like Us

Chapter 1-4

Dazi tilted his head up and sniffed the air. The other skin-walker was in this room, although there were so many smells overlapping one another he couldn’t pinpoint who it was. He wished he had his whiskers so he could better know which puff of air carried the scent and from which direction it came. It looked too suspicious to keep turning his head one way then the other, trying to determine where the scent was strongest.

Kesi tapped his arm and gave him a subtle scowl. In Shoshoni, she quietly said, “You’re acting like a prairie dog fresh out of his burrow.”

“I am, aren’t I?” Dazi replied, keeping his own voice low and hoping no one else here knew Shoshoni. “We’ve never been somewhere like this, not without our parents watching out for us.” He inhaled deeply. “Tell me you smell that,” he said. “I know I smell something…different, out of place, but…like us.”

Rolling her eyes, Kesi took a deep breath through her nose as well. She pondered for a moment, then frowned. The tip of her nose waggled back and forth, as it did when she was a coyote. “At first I thought that was you, but you’re right. It smells…foreign.”

Dazi nodded. “He’s definitely male, whoever he is, and he’s in this room. I don’t think he’s one of the ones in a full suit, but I could be wrong.”

“What are you two whispering about?” Kuhma asked, having the sense to also be quiet and speak in Shoshoni.

“I think I smell another skin-walker,” Dazi said.

Kuhma furrowed his brow. His eyes darted around the room. “Where?”

“That’s just it, we don’t know.” The more Dazi thought about it, the less likely it seemed this other skin-walker would be in a full suit. If he was anything like Dazi and his friends, he wouldn’t deign to hide behind a cartoonish animal mask, not when he could be one truly. That narrowed it down, but not enough. Dazi spotted a set of fake rounded cat ears on someone in a black T-shirt towards the front of the room and off to the side. “Although maybe I do know…” He had first caught this scent when someone all in black passed him, and this person was the only one he could see that matched that description.

The panel began with warm greetings and introductions. Assistants handed out loose sheets of drawing paper, artist’s pencils, and large erasers. No one on stage nor any of their helpers wore costumes, although two or three had fake tails hanging off the backs of their pants. For the next hour, the three artists on stage demonstrated how to draw characters in various active poses. Aside from a whiteboard off to the side, one artist had a webcam pointed at his paper with the video projected on a screen so everyone could watch what he was doing.

Dazi wasn’t the artistic type. He could weave nets and baskets, but he could draw back a bowstring better than he could draw a stick figure. He was one of the best bowmen in their tribe, and he could climb trees faster and track prey farther than most of them, too. It was his practical talents he favored, but regardless, he admired the way the artists here could turn lines and circles into dog-men catching Frisbees and cows in dresses dancing on their hind legs.

At the end of the hour, Dazi had drawn a humanoid cougar climbing a tree, several doodles of fish, and an attempt at copying the picture of a dog-man they had demonstrated on the whiteboard. Kuhma had covered an entire sheet of paper in a complex geometric pattern that made Dazi dizzy, whereas Kesi and Tommo had used their papers to pass notes in an obscure pictographic script they had come up with as children. Dazi craned his neck, but he couldn’t see what the man in black with the rounded cat ears had drawn.

The four of them remained in their seats at the back of the room as everyone else filed out. Kuhma and Tommo wanted to find food, but Dazi wanted only to find the other skin-walker. The man in black walked past, and the scent Dazi had been following was stronger than ever. His target was sighted, and his hunting instincts were kicking in.

They planned to split up and get something to eat, but Dazi didn’t want to lose the man in black. He nudged Kesi and pointed at him as he blended in among the fake-skins.

“That’s the one,” Dazi whispered. “I’m sure of it.”

Kesi narrowed her eyes. “Okay,” she whispered back. “You follow him. Text me if you need help, otherwise we’ll wait for you in the artists’ hall. Remember, gather what information you can, then come straight back.”

Silently, Dazi slipped into the crowd. It was like prowling through the forest, except the trees moved around him. The man in black walked alone, as unassuming as the rest, but Dazi had caught his scent. Though he always stayed roughly fifteen feet from his target, the smell of a skin-walker never grew weaker or stronger. He knew without a doubt he was following the right person. No matter what it took, he was going to get to the bottom of this.