The cold season was no more. It was time.

The village boys stood stoically in front of the sleeping guardian. The sun shone high. Drums were beaten, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Lights blazed from fires, smoke rising into the sky and stinging every eye. Family members from every family were present, murmurs abating as the grandpas and grandmas arrived. Silent, still, it was as if the whole village held its breath, waiting, hoping, dreading.

There were fourteen boys in a line. Each would return as a man or not return at all. Blood painted their brows, a triangle mixed with sweat, symbolizing the mountain, forest, and sky. Some brows were creased. Others were muddled by tears. Garbed in fur wraps across their groins, bare-chested, the boys awaited the words of the elders. They stood still, like the crowd, staring straight ahead.

Grandpa Dang stepped forward. His hair was washed out white, and his eyes murky green. In his left hand, he held a long, gnarly staff. Nothing was special about it, yet all eyes turned to the old man carrying it when it fell upon the earth with a loud thud.

"Today, we have come to send boys on the journey all boys must take." His voice reverberated throughout the village, loud, clear. "In five days, we will welcome these boys not as boys but as men. Should they return with naught but air and empty words, they shall be cast out, never to return to the valley nor this village. If they do, they will be hunted down."

"The spirits ordain, man follow." murmured the crowd.

"At last," Teng looked around the gathering, spotting his father and mother in the crowd. His mother had tears in her eyes, fists clenched at her side. Teng was surprised as there was a shine to his father's eyes, too, like two ponds in the moonlight. It seemed improbable, yet he could not refute what was evident. The man, who never once tousled his hair, smiled, or touched him tenderly, raised his fighting stick toward the sky as they shared a deep glance.

Teng spotted Kai, Jirki, Toff and Pratt as he looked around. Each seemed ready, determined, and deadly, fighting sticks held vertically, bone tips glimmering in the sunlight.

"Go, boys of the village, our sons, brothers, may you prove your worth and return anew. Remember, your first kill must be brought to the village with its heart. Survive by the forest's blessings, eat a little flesh if you don't have a choice, but the heart must be intact, lest you dishonor the spirits."

The boys scattered after Grandpa Dang's final declaration. None spoke to one another, and none would help if a predator's teeth sank inside a friend. The journey of boys to become men was sacred. It was a path of solitude that had broken many hearts. To go against this was to incur the wrath of the spirits.

Darting through the thick forest, Teng moved his essence. Everything became more precise and defined. The forest was alive, and so was he.

A soft, blue feather from the blue bird lay under his fur wrap, tucked against his inner thigh, and around his neck hung the sharp tooth of a tiger, made by Delia and given to him yesterday. The feather and the necklace were good luck charms for what would come. He would treasure both.

He remembered Bai's lesson. When you are alone and without food in the forest, your first goal is to find a source of water. Without water, you will die quickly, your strength will deteriorate, your limbs will weaken, and your spirit will falter.

Teng closed his eyes and breathed calmly, focusing on the forest itself, the little details.

Fresh, earthy, and crisp air. Hints of wet pine. Soft decay. Tender flower buds. Damp soil. Bright green shoots. Bitter bark. Rustling leaves. Patches of mud. Slick moss. Smooth roots. Soft drips. Slippery stones. Gushing water. There.

Teng started to move. He came to the stream sometime later, perhaps a hundred breaths. Tall pines rose on each side as in a procession. Teng moved to the stream, crouched, and drank with overlapping palms. It was sweet, fresh from the mountains, maybe interwoven with yesterday's melted snow. The boy stared up at the mountains to the east of him, a slope wound upward. It was the color of fresh, golden resin, bubbling over fire as it caught the sun's rays. Teng moved his gaze from the honeyed horizon back to the forest.

He found a bush of blueberries across the stream between two pines. They glistened like teardrops, and he wolfed down as many as he could. Satiated, and with his thirst abated, the boy moved onward, through the pines, into the valley's heart.

The towering tree stood as a lone monument, eclipsing its brethren as the sun did the villagers. The boy walked up to it, felt its rough bark, laughed as he thought about how he'd tried to climb it as a little child, then kept going.

It was getting dark when he found a suitable resting spot. It was up into a white pine with a thick crown. The branches were relatively thin but handled his weight as he climbed. Once inside the crown, he tucked himself between the branches. He thought about what kill to bring back to the village. His promise to Bai tugged at his mind, "Become the best."

Would a deer suffice? A boar? Teng shook his head. He would have to set his sights loftier.

The night came and went, and no creature disturbed him. Only a few creatures could scale this kind of tree—a bear and a leopard, for example, but those were few in between.

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The next day, he scouted out the surrounding area around his pine. He was somewhere left of the forest spirit's tree, not far from the tail end of the mountain range, where the ground started to elevate ever so slightly. He saw traces of beasts, even footprints. Most likely, they were from one of the boys who also underwent the journey to become a man.

He suddenly stopped and furrowed his brows. Paw prints in the mud. Four indentations, sharper at the end of each. The prints of the pads, a triangular shape, were slightly lobed. The two middle indentations were straight, but the other two were not. All four arced around the pad.

"I have not seen such tracks before…" Teng became even more curious. He moved his essence and focused on the prints. The wind brought him more information. Rich, wild, with a faint smell of blood, old meat, and bones. A predator. Musky, very musky. There were many tracks, not the same scent, and slight differences between each, yet the same. A pack.

He gleaned an image of a gray tuft of fur caught in a shrubbery. Teng paled and backed away, eyes scanning the trees. The impressions of the wind said nothing of incoming danger yet, but his heartbeat rose.

Only one creature had these types of claws, would smell musky and of blood, and was a pack animal—wolves. A pack of them. They had been here not long ago; their tracks were still not hardened in the mud. Teng ran back to his tree, moving essence. He found faint traces of lupine forms passing through. Then, the wind alerted him of danger, but he had no time to run. A sudden howl to his left made him freeze and then turn.

Three wolves edged into view, looping between trees. Prominent, slender forms, gray as granite and ash. Much bigger than he thought. Far smaller than a tiger, even smaller than a bear, but significant.

He had never seen wolves; they were rare in the valley. Bai had told him they migrated across valleys and were seldomly in theirs. He presumed the cold season had made them come here, though they would probably move on now that it had passed.

Another howl, and another. Four more wolves. Teng's heart sank even further. One of the wolves was blacker in fur and much bigger than the others. An effect of having consumed much essence over many years? Few creatures in their valley were this changed by essence.

The wolves growled and tapped the ground beneath with thick, clawed paws, digging deep furrows. Teng could smell them; the scent was more pungent now: musk, decaying meat, damp soil, and wet fur. He sensed yet more. The wolves were hungry and desperate. The cold season must have been hard this year. Maybe that is why they came here—to search for more prey?

The boys had been told what to do in the face of predators: Don't back down. Don't show fear. Teng advanced slightly, spear held vertically toward the wolves. He moved it side to side, roaring and trying to make himself large and intimidating. The wolves edged closer, growling more. They were not afraid at all and would not let him go.

When one of the wolves lunged, Teng sidestepped. Just as he was about to thrust his spear into the wolf, the wind alerted him to another. He threw himself to the ground, dodged, and came up against his tree. Every part of him buzzed as if on fire, his heart pounding like a drum in his ears.

The two wolves retreated, and three others attacked. They lunged from different directions. Teng ducked under the first one and sidestepped the second but got caught by the third in the side of his abdomen. Four sharp lines of pain burned like acid and fire as he rolled and got to his feet, jumping back and to the right.

The big one moved – a blur of black against the green and brown backdrop of the foliage and the thick trunks of the white pines.

Teng thrust his spear out. It was a glancing blow. His bone tip caught in the fur and jousted out from his hands. The wolf collided with him, and they rolled. Teng used his whole body to spring up, and the wolf tumbled away due to the speed of its lunge.

Teng sprinted toward the tree, grabbed the branches, and started climbing. He almost fell then, his left hand unable to grip the tree and slipping. He shifted his lower body, but it was too late. Teeth sank into his thigh, and he roared, punching out with his left hand that had slipped, landing a hard hit on the wolf's muzzle which made it release him.

He climbed the tree amidst growls and jaws snapping over empty air as they tried to reach him. When he was up against his spot, high up in the crown, he stopped moving, slumping down in the exhilaration of being alive.

Pain coursed through him like no other. He had deep wounds across the side of his abdomen and on his thigh. His pinky finger and most of his ring finger were missing; the big wolf must have bitten them off as they tumbled. This would also explain why he slipped when scaling the tree. Blood and the loss of two fingers would do that to a grip.

But he was still alive.

He began to feel lightheadedness. Still panting, he tried to rip off his fur wrap. It didn't work. He pressed his bleeding hand against his chest to try and stem the blood. Removing the wrap was arduous, but somehow, he got it off with one hand.

Teng had no fighting stick or bone shiv, so he ripped off the tiger tooth hanging around his neck and began to saw into the skin. He held the wrap between his knees and tore away a strip, which he bound around his thigh, and repeated the action for his abdomen.

The second part took time, and he almost slipped from the blood, having to use the trunk to get it around him. He grimaced as he did this, using both hands to fasten the strips straight and in place. Pain seared across his wounds as he navigated the tree and chipped away moss from the bark, then crawled across a branch to grab as many pine needles as he could, almost falling down as he did.

He crushed the pine needles by rolling them between his fingers and palms, releasing some pine juice. This juice would help keep the wounds clean. He then stuck them to his wounds, screaming each time the pointy ends bit into his flesh. What hurt most was doing it to his bleeding stumps where his fingers had been.

Teng packed moss over the three injuries before tying everything together with strips from the fur wrap and settling himself inside the crown again. He remembered how Grandma Prana had explained long ago how to treat such injuries. To relieve pressure and let blood flow into his limbs, the boy would have to relinquish the strips of the fur wrap every so often. Not doing so could lead to the flesh dying.

"The best hunter… ha." Teng smiled bitterly to himself, hearing the wolves below. They were hunters, persistent hunters. He would die before they left. Looking up to the sunlight filtering through the pine's crown, he laughed, then screamed. Taking a deep breath, he pulled out the blue feather and gazed into the layers of deep blue. He would need to become the hunter, not the hunted, to survive this. Was it possible with his injuries? Fight against a pack of wolves, of which was a beast changed by essence?

There was only one way to find out.