CREATURE THE CREATURE TOOK FIVE STEPS, NO more, and leaped up into an old oak, the boy now snugged under its arm. Behind it, the dogs were snarling and yelping in equal measure, but they were too late. The creature was already into the tree, scrambling upward with such quickness, it reached the third branching of the tree trunk before the pack had ringed the oak below. All the while the boy kept screaming, a high, horrible sound that he had not known he could make. At each scream, the dogs set up an echoing wail. The creature set the boy down next to its side and put a shaggy finger over his mouth. "Hush ye," it said. And the boy realized all at once that it was not in fact a creature that had rescued him, but a man. An enormous, ugly, hairy, one-eyed man. A wild man, a wodewose. The boy stopped screaming. The two sat across from one another on the thick branch in silence while below, the dogs—now equally silenced—circled and circled. The boy was still hot and cold with fright; the wild man's ugly, ridged, scarred face with its bulbous nose and one blind eye did nothing to reassure him.
