Detective Erikson stood at the crest of the hill and looked down over the cow pasture, bracing his face against the wind. He held his back straight and his chin up in an effort to exude confidence, despite the fact that this was actually his first case.
The facts were these: his client, young Tess Meier, had a cow named Cow. Cow was her favorite cow. About half an hour ago, Tess had climbed this very hill, looked over her father’s pasture, and discovered a terrible truth. Cow was gone.
“Can you find her?” Tess asked from behind him. She was short for her age, and between her hat and scarf and impossibly tangled blond hair, her eyes were all that could be seen of her face. They were flushed.
Detective Sivert Erikson wrapped the long bit of his scarf around his neck and tucked it in the end. It was red like Leif’s. Mum had made them both from the same yarn. She had picked the color because she said it looked nice against Sivert’s black hair and tawny skin. Leif had a pasty complexion and red hair. Mum said he should wear blue, but he wanted a red scarf so he could match his older brother. Like always, Leif got his way.
Leif himself was crouched a few feet away, methodically examining a pile of rocks and placing the best ones in his pockets. "Of course Sivert can find her," he said, "He's probably coming up with an amazing plan right now."
Detective Sivert Erikson did have the beginnings of a plan, but he was not sure he would describe it as awesome. After all, he was new to detective work. He cleared his throat like Da did when he was about to say something important. “Here’s what we are going to do. I’ll walk along one part of the fence, and Leif will—Leif?”
“Huh?” Leif said, dropping the rocks he had been gathering and jumping to his feet. His coat was so thick that his arms stuck out a little from his sides.
“Focus,” Sivert said, “I’m explaining the plan. You go left. Walk along the fence that goes around the pasture and look for clues—trampled grass, footprints, breaks in the fence—anything unusual that could tell us where Cow went.”
“Got it!” Leif said, and ran off.
“I’ll go the other way and meet you on the other side!” Sivert shouted after him.
Leif did not turn around, but he had probably heard most of it. At any rate, there was no hope of getting him to come back and sit still and listen to the whole plan again.
Sivert turned to begin his trek around the other half of the pasture and nearly tripped over Tess who was standing silently behind him.
“Oh,” Sivert said, “I didn’t see you. Want to come with me?”
The two of them set off through the mud. It had snowed a bit yesterday, but most of it had melted, so the ground was soggy. Their boots left clumpy prints in the path. Sivert scanned the ground closely, but did not find any cow tracks. He looked back up at the pasture fence, but it was perfectly intact. The few strands of grass which had come up early around the poles were unbent. No clues here.
"Are you sure this is the right thing?" Tess asked.
"Of course." He was not. But he could not bear to say that, not while Tess was still about to cry.
Sivert had been there when Cow was born.
It was still dark when Mum shook him awake, held a finger to her lips, and whispered something. Leif was snoring softly from the other end of the loft. While Mum rummaged around in his room, Sivert stumbled down the steps into the foyer. A bowl of porridge was waiting for him at the table. He scarfed it down as fast as he could while half asleep, then pulled his hat and scarf and boots on over his nightclothes and raced out the door. In the dim light he could just make out the black silhouette of the mountains against the sky.
Tess' family lived on the next hill over. Sivert arrived at the barn a few minutes later, barely out of breath. Da took care of all the animals in the villages on the mountain, and on the next couple over too. He was good at it, good at helping things come to life and stay alive and be whole while they lived. Sivert was proud of him for it.
"Do you think maybe someone let her loose on purpose?" Tess said forlornly.
"Not really," Sivert replied, "If someone let Cow loose, they would have to know that she would find her way back eventually. And if someone took Cow and kept her in their pasture, everyone would see her. This town is so small. It would be a silly thing to do. No one wants an enemy of your father."
"But what if it was someone mean?" Tess said.
Sivert shrugged. "I could be wrong. If we meet back up with Leif and find out that there wasn’t a break in the fence, we could try searching in other pastures. At the very least, we can ask the other farmers if they saw Cow go by."
It was a quiet walk—Tess sniffling, Sivert slowing her down every so often so that he could carefully consider the path. He saw footprints—from dogs, sparrows, people, but none of them remotely like a cow. The fence was intact. Even now, he could look up and see the length of it, note the way it was very much not broken. They came uneventfully around to the other side.
Leif was not waiting for them.
"Do you think he found Cow?" Tess asked.
"Maybe," Sivert said. He did not think so. Knowing Leif, he had either gotten distracted, or had run off too fast to catch the whole plan explanation in the first place. What an idiot.
Tess sat down on a large rock, rested her chin on her palms. "Now what?"
Crouching down, Sivert examined the mess of mud. Maybe he could find Leif's footprints and follow him. “The ground is all torn up here,” he muttered, “It’s hard to tell what happened.” This was true. He was also realizing that he did not remember what Leif's boot prints looked like.
“There are footprints over there!” Tess exclaimed, pointing to the path ahead of them.
Sivert stood up, looked behind him towards the path that curved away from town and into the woods. There were footprints trailing down it, small enough to have been Leif's. That was not quite what caught his attention. Beside them were chicken prints—at least, they were shaped sort of like the prints Mum's chickens made. Striding forward, Sivert knelt and held his hand up over one of the tracks. The gouges the claws had made in the mud reached farther than his fingertips, farther than the bottom of his palm. These must have belonged to a very big chicken.
Something touched his neck, and Sivert startled. But it was only Tess, grabbing his shoulder and peering down over it at the spot on the ground. "What is that?"
"It's a very big…" Sivert started, and trailed off. Now that he was trying to say it aloud, it seemed like a stupid theory. "Um, it's not from a kind of creature I know."
"It looks like it came from a big chicken," Tess said.
Sivert stood up, brushing the mud from the spots on his knees. "Think about it Tess. Birds don't get that big. It's probably from— "
"A monster." Tess whispered.
"Well," Sivert said, because he did not want to be the kind of stupid person who went around telling everyone that they had seen a monster. His gut said that this was Leif's fault somehow. But Sivert was a detective, and detectives did not follow their gut. They followed logic. And logic said that this track was not made by a farmyard animal or a young boy.
"Did it eat Cow?" Tess asked.
"We don't know that," Sivert insisted. If anything, he could be confident in his own ignorance. "We don't even know what it is."
The muddy path ahead of them caught the pattern—small boots and monster prints walking together, forward towards the trees and the mountain behind. It did not make sense. He needed more evidence.
There was only one way they were going to get it.
"I'm going to follow these tracks," Sivert announced. "You don't have to come."
In response, Tess stepped forwards and slipped her hand into his.