Bearly Fiction: Bearly Fiction, #1

By Frances Pauli

Eleven animal stories from author Frances Pauli. From dogs to dinosaurs, from the courtroom to the coral reef, follow these critter characters through a wild variety of adventures across genres. 

Meet a lion struggling to adapt to a high-paced city lifestyle, a pair of velociraptors looking to put the spark back into their marriage, a remora who is always in the right place at the wrong time, and a hellhound who longs for something far more ordinary. Follow a boxing champion through his last days in the ring, and two soldiers on opposite sides of humanity's last stand.

Whatever species you prefer, Bearly Fiction invites you to step outside of yourself and into the world of fur and feathers, myth and magic, struggles and survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frances Pauli
• Release date: May 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386021964

Frances Pauli

Frances Pauli is a hybrid author of over twenty novels. She favors speculative fiction, romance, and anthropomorphic fiction and is not a fan of genre boxes. Frances lives in Washington state with her family, four dogs, two cats and a variety of tarantulas.

Book preview

Introduction

Ihave a theory that the animal tale is the oldest of all stories. Certainly, it was there at the beginning, scratched into cave walls and told in reverent whispers around the fire. It permeates human mythology, and it lingers in the stories we tell our children. We grow up understanding fox, bear, badger, without any need for conscious interference.

So when we expose ourselves to anthropomorphic or furry fiction, we find something universal there, something perhaps we've brought along with us. It speaks to an ancestral memory, a primal instinct. Or maybe it only reminds us of our childhood, an idealized dream, a magical perspective that we've let idle as our years progressed.

Still, we recognize it. We know it as surely as we know that bear will do anything for his honey, that fox is often up to something, and that we won't see old badger until he decides it's time to come out. In the meantime we wait, clutching our nostalgia like a warm blanket, to greet him when he finally emerges.

The stories in Bearly Fiction: Volume One are reprints, tales that have appeared elsewhere and are now ready to come together here. All feature at least one anthropomorphic animal character. Most are entirely populated by them. It is my hope that you will find them both new and familiar and that you might enjoy the reunion, as I have, with the animal tale.

~Mamma Bear

Bad Dog

The hellhounds were born in the witching hour under the dark of the moon. Nothing indicated that the litter would be unusual. The bitch whelped easily and in absolute silence at the exact stroke of midnight.

Three pups escaped the womb, slick and wriggling, before the minute hand shifted. Three perfect pups, black as ink and as hairless as a stone. Their mother sniffed each in turn and knew them in that instant. She turned her muzzle to the sky, to the round shadow of the empty moon, and opened her lips to howl.

Pain shivered through her again. Her nose dropped, stunned, to her trembling abdomen. The clock had shifted, and yet, she felt the unmistakable pressure that was birth one last time.

Thirty-five seconds after the witching hour, one fat, smoke grey pup slid into the world with a grunt. Though near-black and as hairless as its kin, its difference glared up at her. Pale and glassy, the white lozenge between the tardy pup’s ears shone like a light.

The pup whimpered, but she ignored it, too hypnotized by the horror of his white spot. He grunted and shivered and started to whine before, at last, her nose fell close and she claimed him with a sniff and, when his tail wagged fiercely, a quick cuff of her paw.

Hellhounds do not whine, she said. But then, hellhounds are always born on the stroke of twelve...

HATACH STOOD OVER THE hare’s carcass and snarled. The pack’s lead female, Javani, and her young cronies slunk back into the shadow, eyes glowing and still fixed on his dinner. He didn’t want it, and would eventually relinquish it to their snapping jaws. What mattered was the timing.

If they ate his food, it had to be because he’d grown tired of it, because it displeased him. His status and his life depended on that. Still, Javani tossed off a final growl before she backed away. That one coveted more than his meal.

Hatach stared her down. He put the force of his dominance into the look, and when she averted her gaze, he lay pointedly across the dead hare. It stunk. His sensitive nose found death offensive. Javani knew that. She sensed his difference, and she fully meant to exploit it.

His size had spared him an early death. Hatach had fought for the milk his mother might have denied him. He’d fought his littermates, and he fought his pack mates as well, proper hellhounds who saw their chance in the single white spot on his brow, who mistook it for weakness.

Before the upstarts could make another bid, the heavy scent of brimstone reached the pack. The Master approached his dark kennel. He drifted across the black stones as only a Demon Lord could and came to a fluid halt in front of Hatach, pack leader, head hound. The Master spared no words for the rest of the pack. He paid them no notice, but he nodded to their leader and smiled, Well done, Hatach.

It was this moment for which Hatach lived, though he ground his teeth against the urge to wiggle, to make some noise that might indicate his pleasure, his eagerness to serve. It was enough that the Master noted and approved. He had a fat hare as his proof. What more could any hellhound crave?

Hatach stifled the old feeling that something was missing. They’d done well, his pack, and he swallowed that other urge and bit into the hare he didn’t want.

HE SMELLED THE INTRUDER before he heard her. The pack slept, and Hatach, restless and unwanted amongst them, patrolled the Master’s grounds. The thief was good. She hadn’t made a sound at all when the wind shifted and he caught her scent.

His lip curled. He crouched and drifted toward the kitchens. His charcoal skin blended with the shadows and his nose twitched at the familiar odor: human. Humans had no place here.

Something rattled inside the back entrance. Hatach crouched low outside the door, just beyond the sliver of light. It spilled from a doorway that should have been barred at this late hour. He heard muttering inside and crept forward. His smooth belly pressed against the flagstones and his muscles bunched, ready to spring in an instant.

The door sat open enough to allow his narrow frame access, but as he slipped around the obstacle, his body froze mid-step. He could see the thief squatting beside the Master’s huge stone oven. Her back faced him, completely vulnerable to attack. One lunge and he could take her down, serve his lord and secure his place at the head of the pack.

Something in the air stopped him. His nostrils flared and itched for it. Meaty. It smelled of smoke and grease and something sweet. He salivated. His tongue rolled inside his mouth. Something thumped behind him.

The woman spun around to lock eyes with him. Her gaze held steady, but he read the hint of fear behind it.

Well, her voice purred softly. The sweet smell came from one of the many bags she carried. Aren’t you a pretty thing?

His lips curled, exposing his deadly teeth, but the thumping resumed from the doorway. He risked a look and stared at his own tail. It thumped again and again, as if proud of the little rebellion. Hatach considered biting it.

Hey boy, the woman’s voice called his attention forward again, but before he could bite her, she tossed something at his head. He ducked and let it smack to the floor beside his paws. The smoky scent wafted from it in ripples. Hatach refused to look.

Don’t you want it?

His lips curled. He should have growled, but his tongue had started rolling again. He feared opening his mouth would release it completely.

The woman smiled. Go ahead. She turned her back on him, ignored the threat he posed and reached one, greedy hand into the Master’s silver drawer.

Her audacity infuriated, but the scent of the sweet meat boiled in his head as if she’d cast some spell to immobilize him. He had only one option. His muzzle lifted to the ceiling and he let out a long howl.

The thief swore and stood up. Before he could tear himself from the bacon’s hold, she waved one finger in front of his nose.

Bad dog! she said and bolted past him into the night.

BAD DOG. SHAME FLOODED his senses. He ran through black trees, his pack at his heels and his foe in full flight before him, but the words pounded in his ears. Bad dog!

His breathing came harshly, each chanted bad dog stabbing somewhere deep in his chest. He’d left her treat to the dust and the mice, but somehow her words had managed to poison him. Bad dog.

Javani ran at his hip. Her shorter legs churned to keep even, to prove her worth as his second, or perhaps, his replacement. The pack heaved forward as one, black and deadly and silent but for the correction screaming inside its leader’s head.

The forest thinned as they approached the stream. The woman’s scent swirled here, thickened where she’d paused to catch her breath, to plan her hopeless escape. Hatach sang to the sky, and his pack answered. Their howls would warn her, remind her that she’d never live to see the dawn. Bad dog.

He snarled and the hounds surged forward. They milled along the bank, nose down, hunting for the key to their quarry’s movements. Javani splashed ahead. She leapt the deep section and took position on the far shore, tracking, sniffing her way along the mud.

It was too direct, too obvious. His thief was better than that. Hatach knew as much, but when Javani’s nose pointed skyward and she howled her success, he kept his little secret to himself. Bad dog.

She’d be nearby, high up, perhaps, waiting for them to take the false trail, waiting to slip away behind them. Hatach drove the pack across the water in Javani’s wake. He nipped at heels and growled encouragement to follow the lead bitch, take the scent, all forward! He even ran a pace or two amongst them before turning and dropping to his belly in the weeds.

His eyes fixed on the stream. His nostrils opened and his breathing stilled to near nothing. Hatach melted into the night and waited.

She dropped from a tree, landing on the ground not four steps from where the pack had crowded moments before. The water separated them, and the human’s nose was no match for his. Her eyes could never find him in the darkness. Still, Hatach imagined that she stared right at him. He heard her voice say, bad dog. He smelled the bacon in her pocket.

His tail moved. The grass rustled, and the woman leapt away. Hatach stared at his rump. His tail fluttered. Hellfire! He’d chew the damned thing off if it did that again.

He crossed the stream and tracked her back through the trees. She followed the length of water upstream toward the cliffs and the cataract that marked his Master’s border.

She was good. He’d known it right off. Beyond the cliffs, the Demon Lords held no sway. If she made it to the top, the hellhound pack would never follow. Hatach ran. He shadowed her steps and kept his breathing and his tail silent. He could take her before she climbed the falls.

HIS THIEF WAITED FOR him at the base of the cliff. She sat on a rock and watched him emerge from beneath the forest’s shade.

Ah. She sighed. It’s you again. She put her lips together and made a high-pitched noise. She slapped her thigh a few times and then shrugged.

Hatach took a step forward. His lip curled.

What I can’t decide, The woman stood and glanced up at the wall of stone. The water roared out over the river, but Hatach followed her eye and saw the path she wanted. Is whether you’re so intent on getting your jaws around me or this. She flicked her hand and a lump of bacon sailed away to the right.

His eyes didn’t flinch from her. He didn’t even twitch.

Ah, she said. I was hoping it was the bacon. Her voice held displeasure. Her words dripped with disappointment.

Hatach lowered his head a touch. He advanced another step. Over the crash of water he heard a distant howl. Another followed, nearer, louder. The woman’s head snapped in that direction. Hatach whined. His tail, perhaps at last awed into obedience, tucked tightly under his belly.

It’s all right.