Winter was early, but that was no excuse: I was weeks behind, no matter what the lunar cycles said. Mother would worry; Father would smirk. In my defense, my distraction came from a good place: My mind was constantly seeking, searching; I simply got sidetracked.

No sense in worrying now, I thought. Time to catch up.

First thing to do was to build a shelter. Materials were normally plentiful, but that was before the fires. This year I was competing with the others for much less. And they already had their cozy, warm wiigiwaams while I was still sleeping on a pile of ferns.

The fires were devastating. Miles of burned woodlands. There were moments when I wondered if we’d die from smoke, long before the flames got to us. Luckily, though, we survived, staying just along the edges of the impacted area.

It was the fires themselves that I wanted to study. Why did they happen? Why did they seem to happen more frequently then they used to?

How could we stop them?

These questions were on my mind as I searched for useable timber. I didn’t need much, it was only me. I had yet to take a mate, to “bring new life into the forest.” Again, my friends had already started. (Some of them were up to three younglings!)

They were doing what was expected, moving into their adult lives, making fun of me for my questions, my quest. “Fires are fires; They just happen;” they would say. Father agreed with them, not me.

So, there I was, on the edge of the burn-line, looking for lodgepole timber I could use to survive the cold, my foot already crunching in the few inches of early snow.

That’s when I saw it.

A print.

It was shaped like a foot, but different. It wasn’t a hoof or a paw, I was certain of that. It was definitely a foot, with an arch and a heel. The weird part, though, was that, instead of five toes, it appeared to have one. One massive toe. The other oddity was that it’s skin, or pad, or whatever, wasn’t… normal. It was ridged and seemed to be molded into a sort of crisscross pattern.

I thought about it for a moment and deduced that it made sense: An animal with only one massive toe would need to have evolved some kind of improved traction to make up for the loss of dexterity…right?

There was another!

My heart raced. I had a direction of travel, so I followed it. Even though the voice in my head—or, more accurately, the voices of my disappointed father and mocking friends—were telling me to stay on task, I didn’t pause for even a moment. I was on the hunt. Something about it, something told me the answer to the fires was out there, to be found wherever these prints led.

Fortunately, it had stopped snowing, so the prints would stay visible. Unfortunately, as it was still early in the season, it was still warm. The prints would start to melt soon; I had to hurry.

I raced along, the snow crunch-crunching as I hurdled over stumps and pushed branches out of my way. As fast as I ran, my brain was going even faster. What kind of creature was this? How did it ambulate? Its prints were small—smaller than mine, at least—its stride shorter. But it was agile, at least enough to climb over obstacles. I could tell when I found missing snow where a hand would have been placed, scrapes where a leg would have draped over.

For a moment, I wondered if it might be dangerous. Technically, me and those like me were top of the food chain, but there were predators that could cause issues: Wolves; Mountain Lion; Badgers. What if this cryptic creature posed a threat?

Maybe, but I kept going.

It took me half a day. I was tired and hungry, and the sun was maybe a hand to a hand-and-a-half above the horizon. I thought about making shelter for the evening, but something told me to continue just a little further.

The tracks led up a small berm, down a draw, and into a clearing.

Not a natural clearing.

The trees, they’d been… severed. A foot or two from the ground. Fire didn’t do this. The cuts were too smooth, too symmetrical. Many trees were stacked, one on the other, into triangular piles.

I walked toward them. The sun was going down, it was getting colder. I really needed to prepare a shelter, to gather vegetation for warmth, but I was drawn in. I had to know what did this.

That’s when I found the other tracks. The massive tracks.

On instinct, I looked around, ensuring that whatever creature could leave a track that large wasn’t around. I felt exposed, vulnerable, and slunk back into the relative protection of the woodline.

The tracks were huge. As wide as two of my feet were long, and they weren’t distinct, but continual like a massive snake. Could a snake even get that large? But at least I understood snake tracks. They were smooth, uniform. These were different. They had a similar look to the smaller tracks I was following, with the same kinds of indents and ridges, but were much, much larger.

There were two.

They traveled as a pair?

I no longer wanted to stick around and make a shelter. I wanted to flee. Whatever made those tracks had to be massive. And massive things needed massive amounts of food.

I was looking back up the mountain toward home when the flashes came.

The sun had disappeared over the mountains and, with no moon at that point in the cycle, it was almost immediately dark. The flashes were intense. I thought maybe I’d imagined them, but there they were, through the trees, like early morning sun; not diffused, direct. And getting bigger, more powerful.

I hunkered down, unsure of what to do next, when the many lights became distinct beams.

Two. A pair.

About as far apart as the serpent tracks!

My heart was pounding so loudly that I thought the fire serpents would hear it. My mind screamed ‘run.’

The serpents were roaring. No… grumbling, like an angry wolverine.

What were these things?

…wait.

No, it wasn’t a pair, it was an it.

It was massive, as tall as me, but nearly three times longer. And it was emitting something noxious. Like a skunk, but the emissions were constant, dark. It had big, silver teeth, and the light seemed to emanate from its eyes. I could hear rocks crunching underneath its weight.

I hunkered down behind one of the severed trees and waited to see what the massive creature would do next.

It stopped.

It felt like my heart did, too.

The low grumble changed in pitch but continued. Suddenly, something moved. It popped out from the creatures side. Was it going to take flight? Could it fly?

No. Worse. It did something else. It… birthed something. Something smaller.

Something that walked on two legs, like me.

The thing that left the other tracks? A youngling? How could it be? Did the younglings… adapt? Lose their legs? Frogs did something like that, but this was the reverse.

The youngling walked in front of massive creature’s fiery eyes and took a few steps toward me before it stopped and pulled something from its, well, I guess its shell?

Something small, no two small things.

It took the larger of the two small things and pulled something smaller out of that, a white stick.

With the other hand it created fire!

The creature could create fire!

It had the power to make fire at will? How? What magic was this? Was this creature the reason the forest had burned? Could it control fire?

I watched as it did something strange. It lit the small white stick.

The smell was nauseating, but the creature seemed to be inhaling it and blowing it back out. When it inhaled, the light from the firestick illuminated its face. It was soft, pink, and only had hair on the lower half. It’s shell, or exoskeleton, was multicolored: arms colored like underbrush, dark legs, bright-bright yellow torso.

Now it was urinating.

I could smell it before I knew what it was, but there was no mistake. The urine smelled of all kinds of toxins. What did this creature live on?

I was wondering about its diet when the massive creature behind it made a sudden yelp, like a massive goose. The sound echoed through the mountainsides. The smaller creature jumped.

Then it made a noise of it’s own. It sounded like… language.

I’ll do my best to recreate it. It sounded like: Dahmet Dayl y doyoo do that sheet.

The goose sound echoed again and I flinched.

That’s all it took to get the smaller creature to notice me. I tried to freeze, to will myself into invisibility, but it saw me. It took something out of it’s exoskeleton that made light, just like the eyes of the massive creature, and flashed it around in my direction.

I scrunched down, as small as I could get.

It spoke again: Dayl get ow heer tharsumtheen in tha woodz.

The other wing opened and another small creature popped out!

They seemed to speak to each other, but in disagreement. Then they looked my direction. The second creature was holding something up, something glowing, like a small, thin box that held light of its own.

The first one said: Poyn da camaruh ova dayr dell.

Time for me to leave.

I stood, looking down at the creatures, still wary of their massive mother.

The second creature said something this time: She-yit erl woodyoo lookaht thuh siza him.

The first youngling went back to the massive creature and grabbed something. A tool. It looked like wood and shine-rock, but it was thin, cylindrical.

It pointed it at me.

It made a flash and the loudest bang I’d ever heard. A branch snapped behind my head.

I ran.

A second and third bang. Wood came off trees around me.

I worried the snow might let them track me, but when I looked it seemed they were staying where they were, shining light into the trees.

They couldn’t see me. That explained the adaptation of the large adult and its light-eyes: They can’t see at night.

I crouched down, well out of their range, and watched.

After a few moments, they climbed back into the massive creature, closed the wings with loud bangs, and started to move away. The mother-creature illuminated the forest as they moved away, her grumble-roar echoing through the valley.

When I was sure the strange creatures were gone, I sat back on my haunches and ran my fingers over the hair covering my face and body to check for blood. I was fine.

An elder-tale flooded my memories. They spoke of small, bipedal creatures—who they called ‘Men’—that would come into our lands to take things: Fish, deer, rock, trees. They would come in, take, and leave. I thought the were just stories, the kind intended to keep younglings in line.

Were they the link to the fires?

My thoughts were interrupted by the three familiar tree-knocks of my father, calling me home.