"You'd have a cold trail by tomorrow. The Hog may be badly wounded."
I breathed deeply and peered down the dim tunnel. "You watch the rear," I said, whispering for some reason.
Lightning flickered through the vegetation in nerve-racking patterns. The leaves no longer turned the rain. I told myself I was unhinged to hunt the Hog, when hearing him would be impossible, but I walked slowly forward.
The Hog's tunnel broke into a path marked by his hoofs. The path curved back and forth, for about a kilometer, and led to rocky ground above a tumbling stream. I removed a folded robe from my pack, shook it out, and gave it to Toal. "Put that on," I said. "You'll be soaked if we go out there."
"But what about you?"
"I'm already wet, and very little of it's rain."
The lightning had subsided before the increasing downpour, but, as I walked from the woods, I cringed in a reflex I had acquired after seeing a man struck on a bare plain. Water ran off my sunhat and saturated my oversuit. My non-skid boots slipped on the wet rocks.
A grumbling noise reached me through the rain. I was hoping to dismiss it as thunder, but Toal said, "The Hog."
"Where is he?" I whispered. Toal shook her head. I studied the woods, then turned back to the creek. Old, decayed stumps, piles of rotting brush and limbs, and clumps of young trees spotted the ground across the stream. Gaudy flowering plants grew in broad patches of yellow, red, and orange. Beneath the pelting rain, the warm ground extruded a low, slowly swirling mist.