After all of that, Adelaide still wasn’t ready when she saw one.

She’d seen the first unicorn on the ridge when they arrived, and she’d seen the corpse, but both of those were more like conversation pieces than anything else. They had created issues she’d needed to solve and provided information on how to do so. The idea of the unicorns had dominated the journey, but she’d only seen a live one for about a minute.

Until now.

She’d offered to hunt with Emma as a way of casually checking if there was any lingering resentment over Adelaide’s management of Trish’s objections. And things seemed totally fine on that front. Emma had been chatty as they prepared their gear, helping Adelaide figured out how everything snapped on and asking questions about what Trish and Ray had seen when exploring.

But the other reason had been that Emma really knew how to hunt and would have been fine on her own, while Adelaide knew the best she could hope for was not screwing anything up as she tagged along. And Emma hadn’t disappointed here either.

Adelaide had been relieved when Emma tacitly understood that Adelaide wasn’t actually going to be doing any of the marksmanship here. But she hadn’t understood initially how much went into the preparation process, before they saw an animal. Adelaide had been shown the error of her ways during a few hours baiting traps at Emma’s direction.

Emma had explained the scattershot nature of their attempts as they went. “It’s a weird discipline, hunting unknown species. Figure for most of history, nobody had to discover how to hunt. People inherited that knowledge from their forefathers. That occasionally changed when colonizers or whatever would show up, but even then, they’d often hire someone actually from the area to do all of the hard work. You have to look to very specific, weird examples: arctic explorers who got icelocked and had to eat seal livers to fight scurvy, that kind of thing.

“Anyway, we have an advantage because we know so much more about these things than Triangle hunters normally do. We know it’s a carnivore, we know its size and movement capacity, we even have some guesses about how it finds its prey. Plenty of hunts are done when you don’t even know that anything of note exists! So we’re ahead of the game.

“But it’s still not even close to a thousand years of ancestral knowledge, obviously. So we try a lot of things and see what gets us there.”

Trying a lot of things had included, as a sample, placing one big piece of raw meat (Emma had apparently brought some for this purpose with her from the Strider) on the ground, placing many small pieces over a small patch of ground, leaving one big piece in one bush and small pieces in another bush, placing pieces of different sizes at different heights on trees, spreading the smell of raw meat over a patch of ground without any actual meat there, putting fronds that smelled like raw meat over the ground, and burying pieces of meat at several different depths in the ground. After a few hours of this, Adelaide was confident that nothing could possibly smell more like prey than her own hands, which was actually kind of terrifying.

And then there had been a long period of laying, covered in mud, beneath some fronds, on a slightly elevated bit of rock that gave them as close to a view as they were going to get of the different baited locations. Not that that spot had started off muddy — it had been Adelaide’s job to get a bunch of mud from a riverbank (worrying about eels the whole time) and bring it over so that they could cover themselves in it. Emma insisted that this was a normal and vital way to avoid smell disrupting the entire process, and Adelaide recognized that it made sense, but she couldn’t help feeling like it had been done specifically to make Adelaide uncomfortable.

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And she had sat, muddy, uncomfortable and silent, for hours. Or it felt like hours — Emma had given her a look when she pulled out her phone to check the time.

But that time now seemed relaxing, because there was a unicorn, and he was right there. Maybe two hundred feet, so not like something she could touch, but still. Right there.

She could smell it. Actually, she couldn’t avoid smelling it — even through the mud, it was a really clear odor. Sort of a mix of a citrus that was closer to a lemon than a lime and a sort of wet-dog dead skin smell. It was extremely unpleasant, and Adelaide had a hard time imagining a creature that could smell like that all the time while hunting. She wondered if he was in heat, and then realized she had no idea of the gender. Or if these things even had genders. Although they probably didn’t reproduce asexually.

It was approaching one of the trees where they had left the meat. Adelaide had felt a little bad about drawing attention to a tree in case some lizards lived there, but then she decided this would hopefully spare any of them from being attacked. And the unicorn was walking right to it.

And then it stopped. It turned to look at the chunk of raw meet, first with one eye, then the other. And then it looked from side to side, and Adelaide couldn’t help reading a thought from the expression: it was saying, “What the hell is this doing here? Is anyone else seeing this?”

And for a second, Adelaide was convinced it was intelligent. And she was about to turn and tell Emma to hold on, when two things happened.

First, the unicorn shot its tongue out. The thing extended about a foot out from its mouth hitting the meat and wrapping up a segment. The mouth then met the returning tongue, and teeth began to cut through the meat. It all took less than a second, but it shattered the empathy Trish had felt for the creature. It made sense, given that the thing was used to eating out of trunks, but it deanthropomorphized the creature.

The second thing that happened is that Emma shot it.

Adelaide didn’t really know about guns, and she hadn’t visited an armory back in Bermuda to see the variety of guns and bullets that had now become available. But even she knew how rapidly that industry had grown. It wasn’t surprising in retrospect: even when hunting was purely for sport, people had spent a frankly irrational amount of time thinking of newer and more expensive guns and composite bows and so on. Now that there was an actual economic advantage to killing new things in specific ways, it was like some primal well of innovation that had been leaking out for the last century came through in a flood. But it wasn’t something Adelaide had ever focused on.

So Adelaide didn’t know why Emma cared that the bullet she fired was non-fragmenting or why this specific caliber had been chosen. Emma had tried to explain, but Adelaide had been busy smelling like mud and raw meat. So all she knew was the effect, which was like a little cylinder of the animal had turned to blood, while the rest of the thing seemed unaffected for a moment.

It swung its head, raw meat still in its jaws. But there was no search now — it had heard the shot, and it turned directly towards them. And then it charged.

It didn’t even seem angry. It was just like a rock falling down after it had been thrown up in the air. Except very sharp. And fast. And falling directly at Adelaide. Who discovered that she wasn’t even screaming. She was just looking at that blade and reflecting on how, if the head was lowered, the orientation of the horn-blade still seemed like it would get the job done.

And then Emma shot again, and the sound of the shot matched the sound of the leg breaking, and the creature fell.

Emma nodded. “Got it. Sorry if that freaked you out.”

Adelaide just sort of coughed in response.

Emma went to look over the creature, which was still turning its head back and forth, scraping the horn against the ground. “Tough thing. But we know how to get them now. I’ll finish this now, and then we can go grab something to bring it back with.” And then she pulled out a knife.

Adelaide didn’t watch that part.