scrubjayspeaks

The rifle hung forgotten in his hand. Creeping between the tangled mounds of wild blackberry had put him in a trance. Each step, chosen for minimal disturbance, at once occupied all his thoughts and none at all. The movement of the sun registered only in terms of how the light in the forest angled and shaded.

When Charles had taken the challenge, sitting in the sumptuous surroundings of the Greenwood Gentlemen's Club, he had thought nothing of it. A lark, he had imagined. Take the challenge, win a bit of money off Ashby, have a good laugh with the lads afterward. Hardly enough of a challenge to qualify as adventure.

Still, not so dull as to make him refuse.

In the forest, he found his feet sinking into the marshy footing on the banks of a pond. It made him pause and broke him out of the deep reverie he had been in. He sidestepped a particularly wet patch and found higher ground on a raft of grasses. When he finally looked away from the muddy wreck of his boots and trousers, he saw it. Poised on the far bank, it seemed on the verge of disappearing like a sunbeam about to slide behind cloud.

He had argued the unfairness of making him find evidence of absence for such a thing. The argument had been lazy, brandy-infused. Still, Ashby had agreed easily. If Charles simply failed to confirm the existence of the creature in one year's time, Charles could claim victory. All he had to do was make a good faith effort to follow the clues Ashby had thus far assembled. The challenge hinged on his honor, of course, but that was never in question.

Now those clues had led him here: a stone's throw from a creature spun of glass and silver and mercury. Nothing in the forest moved. The pearl of its horn caught the light and sent beams of it dancing around the clearing.

With an intensity Charles had never felt before, he wanted it. To touch it, to possess it, to be near to it always. He thought of the love poems and the paintings and the lurid novels no one admitted to owning, let alone reading. For the first time, he thought he understood some strange cousin of what they tried to convey. He wanted.

It sprang away, not unlike a deer, into the dark stillness of the woods, startled by nothing Charles could sense. By the time he thought to lift the rifle, the unicorn had long since disappeared. The lads at the club would never let him live this down.

---

Ashby's stockpile of breadcrumbs ran out somewhere around Constantinople. By then, Charles had trails of his own to follow. He traveled east, beyond deserts, across snowy mountains, and into bamboo forests.

The forests of the East frightened him. These places had little enough in common with the English glades he grew up in. He spared no expense there, shoring up his courage with gear and guides. The guides carried bows and muskets, but he was forbidden from arming himself. Nonetheless, he smuggled in a small pistol, the sort a lady might carry.

The bearded and scaled creature he encountered looked nothing like the unicorn he saw back home. He feared it like he feared the forest. The pistol tucked inside his coat offered no reassurance. Even so, the desire remained. To touch its shaggy mane would, he knew, fill him with satisfaction, no matter the trembling such thoughts inspired.

He doubled back, still searching, still longing.

In the far West, he stopped over in frontier towns where they spoke of jackalopes and ax-handle dogs. Once he would have argued the absurdity with them. Those days seemed far off and best forgotten. There was only the hunt, and the absolute faith he had in his own desire. It seemed the only real thing left.

The letter from his solicitors informed him his estate had been exhausted by this challenge gone sideways. He should be obliged to take up a trade soon, or he would make his way as a day laborer. His mind admitted no trace of shame. The challenge had become a mission, a passion.

His next expedition, he chose an extra week's worth of rations over ammunition. The practical choice, given his financial limitations, he told himself. He took his rifle, no more than a club, out of habit. The unicorn of the West had something of the antelope about it, the horn darker, the nose strangely angled. He spent many days out on the range, tracking it through amber sun and diamond starlight. He had never been allowed to follow one for so long. The rifle never left his saddle.

The mounted jackalope head, at least, had made an amusing souvenir to ship back to the lads. He had nothing else to offer them: neither hair, nor horn, nor head on a plaque. The letters he exchanged with them were few; often, he moved on before the replies had time to arrive. He wondered if, one day, someone else would hunt him in turn, tracking him by the trail of unclaimed letters.

---

Old age snuck up on Charles. He looked up one day, sudden as he had looked up on the banks of a pond as a young man, and noticed all that had passed him by. The performance of marriage and family, of manor house or even trade--he had forgotten to bother with them. He searched his heart and was both pleased and unsurprised to find it free of regret.

He had enough to buy passage back to England, the home he went on holiday from for half a decade. Fittingly, it was Ashby who provided him with a spare room for his final days. Oh, the lads assured him he had many years left in him, chided him for doomsaying. Charles had no desire to cling to life; all these years, he desired only one thing.

The forest offered no kindness to old men. It tripped his feet and scraped his hands at every opportunity. He paid it no mind. It did not know he had seen the corners of the world and felt its rough treatment many times. Nothing had deterred him yet.

Reaching the pond took longer, perhaps, but he felt lighter than he had that first day as a young man. He had not weighed himself down with packs and provisions. No pistol, no rifle, no blade. The final hunt would not be burdened by mere symbols.

The unicorn he found--and he wondered if it could be the same one, wondered at the lifespan that had run parallel to his--glowed in dusky sunlight. Memory had not done it justice, he thought. How had he forgotten the subtle cascade of colors in the horn? Why had he not lost nights of sleep to contemplation of the silken mane, so light it floated in the still air? He found himself weeping, silently, from the beauty and the longing.

When it approached, when it reached him, he could only open his arms in welcome. Like a bridegroom who has waited half a century to touch his beloved, he neither felt nor saw nor cared for anything else. As he touched the arching neck and dampened fur with tears, the weariness of a lifetime left him.

It had been such a long hunt. In the end, he found he had but one regret after all. If he had only laid down his weapons sooner, it could have caught him years ago.