We increased our pace but a hundred-year-old woman can only go so fast, even if she was part undine and part witch. The fat, bristly beavers scurried along the ground with surprising speed, gnashing their teeth and chattering back and forth to each other. Lura was chattering to herself as well. I was afraid she’d come unhinged, but who could blame her? The chattering noise alone was enough to make one mad, let alone the sight of those sharp teeth and long claws. I was already terrified when a huge pine tree crashed to the ground inches in front of us.

“Go over it!” Lura screamed, grabbing my arm and scrambling over the huge tree. “They want us to run into the woods.”

Or they wanted us to get tangled in the pine branches. The sleeve of my rain jacket snagged on a branch. I turned to free it and found myself nose to nose with one of the sharp-toothed predators. It snapped at me, its fangs missing my face by a centimeter as I pulled backwards, peeling myself out of my jacket and landing on the ground. I scrambled to my feet and found myself next to Lura, trapped in a small square hemmed in by downed trees. Teeth-gnashing beavers surrounded us.

Lura knelt and picked up two thick branches that had fallen off the trees and handed me one. She muttered a string of indecipherable words and the ends of both sticks burst into flames. She thrust the burning stick into the beavers’ faces. They fell back chittering. I swept my stick in a wide arc, singeing the whiskers off two of them. Lura muttered another series of strange words and a forked tongue of lightning split the sky and hit one of the beavers. When they saw their fallen comrade, the rest of the beavers scampered into the woods. Lura muttered a few more words and a sudden downpour extinguished our pine torches. “That should be the end of them for a while. They hate fire.”

I helped Lura climb over a tree. She seemed suddenly frail and worn out, as if using magic had drained her. I offered to carry the bag of eggs, but she refused. “They’re my sisters,” she said.