Wyvern by Wen Spencer

 
     
    Kate wasn’t sure what pissed her off most. Was it being jerked off her first trip back to the states in years, to be shoved into an alternate dimension filled with undocumented zoology, real magic and snotty elves? Or was it that her smattering of ten human languages and knowledge of dozens of Earth’s more obscure cultures weren’t worth a damn with the Elfhome natives? Or was it that this time around, her native guide managed to always make her look frumpy?
    Stormsong came up the mountainside with all the fluid grace of a big cat, annoyingly beautiful in the muggy August heat. The nimble elfin bitch didn’t even pant.  She paused at the edge of the kuesi’s blood, and murmured, "I told you that your ‘tracer’ would not work," and continued up the rock face in bounds that would impress mountain goats.
    "I found this much!" Kate shouted after Stormsong.
    "What an idiot couldn’t see of the blood trail" --the elf’s voice came from somewhere above-- "a blind man could smell."
    Kate picked her way through the swimming pool’s worth of viscera to rescue her tracer off of the massive kuesi skull. When she’d heard that the railway project manager for the elfin crew was a female, Kate expected to skip all the normal macho butthead stuff.
    Stormsong waited on the summit beside Godzilla-sized footprints. The feet of their kuesi -snatcher mimicked the structure of birds: three digits pointed forward, one backwards. The talons had gouged the granite as deep as eight inches in places. Old, weathered scratches indicated that the stone outcropping was a common perch site.
    "Dragon?" Kate had checked her zoology reports last night, but they varied wildly from gigabytes of data on wargs – frost breathing cousins of wolves – to three words on phoenixes: still believed mythical. The dragon section was nearly as scant, it stated "While apparently dragons vary in size, they are reported to be very large, fire breathing, and dangerous. Approach with caution." Doh.
    Stormsong shook her head. "Too small. Wyvern."
    Kate tucked into an overhang and scanned the nearby mountain peaks with her binoculars. In the broad valley below them, the railroad right of way cut its straight raw path through the primal forest of the elfin world. Out in the vicinity of Pittsburgh – which fate chose as the human portal into this dimension -- they had bulldozers, dump trucks and earthmovers working their way east. The low-tech elves, though, working from the sparsely settled coast, only had hand tools and the kuesi . Until a connecting road was complete, trading between the two races was at an impasse. Construction had been going smoothly until the wyvern decided that the work crew was a moveable feast.
    Speaking of which, Stormsong had poised herself on a rock projection like a piece of bait.
    "Get down." Kate pointed to the protected ledge beside her. That only earned her a cold stare. Damn elves. "Move over here."
    "I see better from here."
    "The wyvern could take you from there."
    The elf made a noise of understanding. "The wyvern. It sleeps. It hunts at night like a whou ."
    " Whou ?"
    Stormsong sighed at Kate’s ignorance. "A night bird! It flies very quietly, and calls whou , whou , whou ."
    Kate caught herself gritting her teeth and worked her jaw to ease the tension. What was it about Stormsong that pissed her off so much? Kate wasn’t sure if actually was the elf girl herself, or just the irritation with the general situation finding focus on the only breathing target.
    Kate returned to her scanning. "These wyverns. Do they den alone or in mated pairs?"
    "Mated pair. Like falcons, females are larger. The nest will be on a peak, high up, on bare rocks with dead branches and such to keep the young in. One mate will stay on the nest and the other will hunt while there are eggs in the nest. Once the eggs are hatched, both will hunt to keep the young fed."
    So they were either dealing with a solitary creature, perhaps a youngster, or