The Laugh of the Snow-White Goat — Part Two (Final)

 If you haven't read Part One yet, start there — this picks up on the very night the children vanished from their beds.

Failed Trails

By first light, half the village had gathered outside Abu Rashid's house. The men fanned out across the hills the way they always did when something went missing — reading the ground, checking for broken branches, looking for the print of a sandal or a bare foot pressed into the dirt.

They found nothing.

No footprints leading away from the window. No drag marks, no broken brush, no sign that three children and whatever had taken them had ever crossed that ground at all. It was as if the night itself had swallowed them whole, and the trackers came back to the house with their heads down, admitting for the first time in years that they simply didn't know where to look next.

The Scent Jawfian Knew

It was old Salim, a neighbor two houses down, who finally spoke up. "Send for Jawfian," he said.

Jawfian was a sheepdog, and had been for longer than most folks in the village could remember. Grey around the muzzle now, slower on his feet than he used to be, but there wasn't a soul who'd tended a flock alongside him who didn't swear the old dog could smell a wolf on the wind from two ridges away, or tell a stranger's footstep from a neighbor's before either one came into view.

They brought him to the window where the hoofprint still sat pressed in the dust. Jawfian lowered his head to it and went still — stiller than a dog has any right to go. Then, low in his throat, he began to growl at something none of the villagers could see or smell at all.

He wasn't tracking a goat. Everybody there understood that at once, watching him. He was tracking something wearing a goat's shape, and whatever that something actually was, Jawfian's nose knew it the way it knew wolf, or fox, or fever on a sick lamb — a smell older and wronger than anything that belonged in these hills.

Into the Wild

Jawfian took off at a pace nobody expected from an old dog, nose low, tail stiff and straight behind him. Umm Rashid and Abu Rashid followed close on his heels, along with Salim and three or four of the strongest men in the village, torches in hand though the sun was already climbing.

The trail Jawfian followed made no sense to anyone walking it. It cut straight through bramble no person would choose to cross, doubled back on itself twice for no reason a man could see, and led them higher into the hills than any of the village's flocks had grazed in living memory. More than once the old dog stopped, hackles raised, staring at some empty stretch of rock as though something stood there that the rest of them simply couldn't see — then shook himself and pressed on.

By the time the sun stood high overhead, they had left the last familiar landmark behind them, and Umm Rashid found herself praying under her breath with every step, not daring to hope out loud.

The Cave in the Rocks

They found it wedged into a fold of stone so well hidden that Salim admitted afterward he'd walked this stretch of hill a hundred times and never once noticed the opening — a narrow black mouth in the rock, easy to miss unless you already knew it was there.

Jawfian stopped ten paces short of it and would not go closer.

He stood with his legs braced, ears flat, a low steady growl rolling out of him that none of them had ever heard from the old dog before — not even the night a wolf had circled the flock two winters back. Whatever waited inside that cave, Jawfian wanted every one of them to know it was there before they took another step.

Calling Into the Dark

Umm Rashid didn't wait for the men to go first. She pushed past them to the mouth of the cave and called her children's names into the dark, her voice cracking on the second word. Abu Rashid caught up and called with her, and for a long moment there was nothing back but the sound of their own voices swallowed by stone.

Then, faint and far off, came an answer. A small voice. Then another.

They pushed into the cave with the torches held high, and the passage twisted downward further than any of them expected, the air growing colder with every step, until it opened into a wide hollow — and there, huddled together against the far wall, were the three children. Alive. Pale, and strangely quiet, blinking against the torchlight as though they were waking from a very long, very deep sleep rather than a night and a day of terror. Little Rashid was the last to lift his head, and when he did, his eyes took a moment too long to focus on his mother's face, as if some part of him were still listening to a voice only he could hear.

Of the creature that had carried them there, there was no trace at all. No goat, no shadow with fingers where hooves should be — nothing but cold stone, and somewhere deep in the dark of the cave, a draft of air that some of the men swore, years later, still carried the faintest trace of that same soft, mocking laugh, retreating further into the earth than any torch dared follow.

They carried the children home that evening, wrapped in cloaks against the cold, with Jawfian walking so close at Umm Rashid's heel that he brushed her leg with every step, as if he meant to make sure nothing followed them back down the mountain.

The children never fully explained where they had been, or what had spoken to them in the dark. And no one in the village, from that day on, ever kept a goat they hadn't raised from birth with their own hands.

But they never forgot what they owed the old sheepdog who smelled what no man could see, and followed it all the way to the edge of the world to bring their children home.

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More stories from wildlife and village life to come.-