To catch a catbird

"It's poop," Serene thought to herself as she smelled her palm. Wonderful. The black smear of what she had thought was dirt, gave off the familiar ammonia mixed with earthy, rotten and sweet stench known universally as poop.

It hadn't smelled at all before she had put her hand down on that spot and smashed into her skin. The aroma now was quite strong and the black and brown substance covered her palm and even went between her fingers.

She resisted the urge to wipe it on her pants and looked around helplessly for a place to get it off.

"Why am I such an idiot?" she whispered to the forest around her.

Getting no answer, she wiped her hands on the ground on some leaves and continued crawling toward the animal she was spying. The planet Idyll had an incredible array of animals, bizarre and beautiful, but this one was her favorite.

People were calling them "catbirds" and she didn't love the name, but she had failed to come up with a better one. It's body was almost a meter long and it had a long furry tail. It had a pointed face that ended in a pink nose and long whiskers and indeed, it looked like a house cat. Except that its long, thin forelegs had thin skin underneath attaching to its body, allowing to glide between trees.

No one from the small colony at the far edge of explored space where she lived had seen one for hundreds of years until her brother had come across one a few months earlier in a trek he had made to help save the colony. Her twin had returned with vital equipment from an abandoned station and had become something of a celebrity. His journey, an epic in itself, had stretched the tenuous boundaries of their society and given the stranded colony some hope for the future.

To Serene, however, he was just her silly brother, an over-shy dummy who got lucky. She smiled thinking of him. He was a dummy, but he was also her favorite person.

The catbird turned its head toward her. Perhaps it smelled the poop. Maybe it belonged to him or her? It's liquid brown eyes took her in. It wasn't scared. She didn't move, fearing that she would startle the animal.

It chirped and cooed and Serene wanted to believe it was trying to communicate with her, before scaling the massive mushroom it was sitting near.

"Do you recognize me?" She asked. It was the third visit in three days she had made to this spot to find the animal, five kilometers from the outpost where she was living.

The catbird stopped briefly when she spoke to look at her and then continued to climb the four-meter-tall mushroom. Serene sighed.

"We will be friends," she said as it disappeared to top of the mushroom cap.

Serene looked down at her hand, smeared in poop. Beyond the revolting smell, every colonist knew that foreign substances like this could be poisonous to humans. Even after hundreds of years, the planet used its natural defenses to expel its unwanted guests.

With the catbird gone, Serene moved away through the fungus forest towards a stream she knew was nearby. The terrain here was flat and marshy as she got closer to the large lake where the colonists had set up over 500 years ago.

She washed her hand as well as she could in the slow-moving water that would soon merge with the lake. Serene was wary of the small sucker fish that could attach themselves to your skin in these boggy areas and inject a toxin that would cause you to fall asleep.

She started to head back to the encampment when she heard a sound behind her, a shuffling mixed with chittering and subtle scraping sounds. She froze and looked for a tree to climb. That sound was quite distinct.

Serene saw a large tree ahead with branch low enough that she could reach it with a leap and she began sprinting towards it, weaving between undergrowth and smaller trees as the sound behind went from scraping to crashing.

She chanced a look behind her, though she already knew what she would see. Two gray nightmarish forms pursued her. They had six arachnid legs, but the front two were bigger and ended in clamp-like pincers that carried spears. Their backs were covered in hard carapaces, but the head and belly were a lighter colored gray and free of the shell. Four eyes, two forward and two to the side, peered out of the head and their mouths were full of pointed teeth. People called them centaurs because when they reared up to throw spears, they vaguely looked like the Greek legendary half-man, half-horse.

Like the centaurs of mythology, these wild beasts were destructive and deadly, but unlike the myths, these were real, and the bane of the tiny collection of humans stranded on the planet 125 light years from Earth.

Serene leapt for the low branch and caught it with one hand, quickly grabbing the other and pulling herself up to the branch. She rapidly climbed the limbs until she was 10 meters above the ground.

The centaurs surrounded the tree, one of them flinging a spear up toward her into the branches. It got caught in the tangle of branches before it got to Serene, though, she thought it came closer than she would have thought possible.

Mercifully, the giant insectoids could not climb trees. Unlike their tiny bug cousins that seemed to crawl over every surface on this planet, the centaurs were simply too heavy to pull themselves up the tree on their spindly legs. They could move quickly, however, at least twice as fast as any man.

"Pffftttllllpppppp," Serene splurted, sticking her thumbs in her ears and waggling her fingers as she stuck out her tongue. "Go away or I will rub my poopy hand on you!"

Serene smiled to herself. She was very likely a dead woman, but there was no need to lose her sense of humor. She was five kilometers from home - more than an hour away - and it was unlikely anyone would be coming to look for her for a day. Still, if her brother could escape situations like this one, then so could she.

The centaurs tried several times to climb the tree, even dragging a log to the trunk to try to create a ramp. Thankfully, it didn't work. Still, the concept could work if they kept trying, and Serene got the feeling that the centaurs understood that as well. As horrifying as they were in their monstrous

Serene carried a sling with her and had a dozen good stones, but from the tree it would be almost impossible to use it. She was stuck. One of the centaurs scuttled away while the other remained below, dragging more small logs to the base of the tree, attempting to build a bridge that could be used to scale the trunk. Once it was in the first set of branches, it might be able to either spear her, or climb high enough to get her.

She assumed its partner was going to get more centaurs. She needed to get out of there somehow. Maybe if she let it climb up, she could get down fast and start running. It would almost certainly catch her, but if she stayed, it was certain.

The pile of logs was getting bigger below and she knew she didn't have much more time to think about it. She had an idea of what she was going to do, but the idea filled her with dread.

She scrambled down toward the centaur, it was now making its way up the pile of logs and while it climbed, it couldn't use its spear. It jerked its head up as she got closer. She threw a broken branch at its head, which it wacked away easily. As it was temporarily distracted, she climbed out on branch was getting small fast. It was going to break, but that was part of the plan.

She was five or six meters above the mushy ground and the fall was going to hurt, but oh well. The branch actually bent significantly and she hung off the edge of it before letting go. She banged off a tangle of branches and splatted on the earth, all the breath wooshed out of her and pain lanced up her back, but she knew she was ok.

A glance to the tree showed the confused centaur trying to decide how best to get down.

"Just jump, dummy," she said, glad for its confusion and stupidity and took off back towards the fungus forest.

She heard the crash of the centaur racing behind her and knew she only had a short head start. The giant mushrooms came into view and saw a small one she could climb. After leaping on it, she jumped to another taller one and finally up to one of the biggest, tall enough to prevent her pursuer from getting to her.

Now what was she going to do? She looked around and thought she might be able to leap to another mushroom, but eventually she would be where she started, only with a better view of the ground below.

She pulled out her sling and started swinging it. The centaur came into view, but it's head and upper torso were slunk near the ground, making it impossible for her to get a shot into the soft parts of its body.

Then a black shaped appeared from one of the mushrooms and glided toward the centaur. It was the catbird, its arms wide in a glide and rear legs hunched to attack with long claws. It landed on the centaur and took two heavy swipes at its soft underbelly. The centaur reared and chittered, trying to dislodge the catbird from its back.

Serene fired her sling and a bullet of smooth stone struck the centaur in the chest, sinking in and smashing whatever alien organs lay beneath. It wasn't dead, but the injury was significant. The catbird used its long finger talons to slash across the centaur's abdomen and black ichor came pouring out. It seemed to be a killing strike. The centaur slumped to the ground.

Relief flooded Serene and she thought she might pass out as the tension left her body.

She climbed down and approached the centaur, grabbed its spear and stuck it through its head, ending the drama of whether it would pop back up and get her. The catbird didn't move. It just looked at her with its big dark eyes.

"I think I will call you Shadow," Serene said, reaching a hand out like she would to a dog to sniff.

The catbird smelled her hand and jerked back a bit. "Dammit, the poop," Serene thought. Still the animal didn't leave right away. Then its head jerked up and it scrambled up a mushroom.

Serene took that as a hint. The other centaur would be coming. She grabbed the spear and pelted toward home as fast as she could. The adrenaline carried her away and she soon reached territory where the centaurs were unlikely to bother her.

She stared down at her poop-smeared hand, the familiar but disgusting aroma still present.

"Maybe it's good luck."