They withdrew from the hollow in the same careful order they had approached it—one at a time, slow steps placed with full attention, the screen of broad leaves restored behind the last person through. Nobody spoke until the ground rose enough that the hollow was fully out of earshot, and even then voices stayed low.
Sera found a flat-topped boulder and spread her hands on it as if it were a table. The group gathered around it with the instinct of people who recognized a planning surface.
"We have one significant advantage," she said, keeping her voice at the level of conversation rather than briefing. "We know exactly where it is, and it doesn't know we're here."
"For now," Donn said.
"For now," Sera agreed. "That window closes the moment the wind shifts or the cub picks up a scent it doesn't like. So we work quickly and we work quietly."
Wren leaned on the boulder with both forearms. "The hide is the problem. Direct strikes lose force. Even at full cultivation output, getting through Grade 2 elemental reinforcement with a blade requires either a perfect angle or significantly more power than most of us are carrying."
"The joints," Calla said, which were the same two words Harvis had used the previous day and carried the same weight now.
"The joints," Sera confirmed. "Foreleg-to-chest junction. The hide runs thin there. If we can keep it turning—keep it reactive—someone gets a clean approach to the joint on the rotation."
"That's a lot of keeping," Wren said.
"Yes."
"That bear is very large."
"Yes, Wren."
"I'm not complaining, I'm contextualizing."
"You're complaining," Donn said.
"I'm complaining with context," Wren said. "There's a difference."
Alex looked at Sera. "What's the plan for getting it out of the hollow? Fighting it in there puts us at a disadvantage. The depression limits movement, the root systems on the rim are uneven, and the adult will be between us and the only clean exit."
Sera looked at him with the brief recalibration she had been doing since the previous evening—the small adjustment of expectation that happened every time one of the younger members of Harvis's group said something that did not match their apparent age.
"Correct," she said. "We need it on open ground. Flat, clear, no terrain features it can use to corner anyone."
"There was a clearing about eighty meters northeast," Liz said. "We passed the edge of it this morning. Large enough, soil firm enough that the footing would be reliable."
Donn nodded. "I saw it. Good sight lines too. Nothing to use as cover if something goes wrong."
"Nothing for the bear to use either," Calla said.
"Right."
Harvis had been standing slightly apart from the boulder, hands in his pockets, head at the angle that meant he was listening to the forest rather than the conversation—or both simultaneously, which was Alex's working theory. He spoke without changing his posture.
"A pit," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"In the clearing. Dug deep enough that a fall from full momentum carries the animal down and prevents immediate recovery. Lined with stakes at the base." He paused. "It commits the bear to a fixed point. Removes the mobility advantage. The joint approach becomes significantly cleaner."
A silence, the kind that followed an idea that was obviously correct and which everyone was privately annoyed they hadn't said first.
Sera looked at the clearing's direction, working through the geometry. "The soil in that area—soft enough to dig fast?"
"Dark soil," Liz said. "Moisture-retaining. Manageable."
"How deep?" Donn asked.
"Two meters," Harvis said. "Minimum. The beast weighs somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand kilograms with the elemental reinforcement. The momentum of a full charge at two meters depth will drive it down far enough that recovery takes four to six seconds."
Wren stared at him. "How do you know how much it weighs?"
"Stride pattern of the tracks," Harvis said. "Depth of impression relative to soil density."
Wren opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Donn.
Donn spread his hands in a gesture that had become, over the past day, his standard response to Harvis-related phenomena.
"Width?" Sera asked, moving past it with professional efficiency.
"Three meters across. Enough that the animal can't clear it on approach once committed to the charge."
Sera nodded slowly. "Stakes at the base. Wood, or—"
"Sharpened hardwood will hold," Harvis said. "There's ironwood growth along the northern edge of the hollow's rim. Dense enough. Six or seven stakes, driven at an angle to catch the chest cavity on impact."
"That's a lot of digging," Wren said.
"Yes," Harvis said.
"For eight people."
"Seven," Harvis said. "I'll do something else."
Wren looked at the blindfold. Looked at the forest. Looked back at the blindfold. "Right," he said, for the third time in two days, in the tone of a man building a collection of polite responses to impossible situations.
"How do we get it out of the hollow?" Lily asked.
She had been quiet through most of the planning, sitting on a root with her knees pulled up, listening in the way she did when she was processing rather than waiting for her turn to speak. Now everyone looked at her.
"The bear," she said. "It's resting. Comfortable. We dig the pit, we set the stakes, and then we need it to come to us across eighty meters of forest." She paused. "It won't do that unless something pulls it."
Another silence, this one slightly longer.
"The cub," Calla said.
"The cub," Lily agreed.
Sera looked at her. "You're suggesting we use the cub as bait."
"Not harm it," Lily said quickly, and there was something in her voice that was not quite a line but was adjacent to one. "Just—make it call out. If it's distressed, the adult comes. That's what cubs do. That's what mothers do."
She said the last four words without particular emphasis, but Alex heard the particular weight in them and did not comment.
"How do we make it call out without harming it," Donn said. It was a genuine question, not a challenge.
"Honey," Harvis said.
Everyone looked at him again. He appeared entirely comfortable with this.
"Bait it away from the hollow with honey. Cubs are susceptible to strong food scents—the olfactory draw overrides proximity instinct temporarily. It follows the honey to the clearing. When the honey runs out, it's away from the mother, in unfamiliar ground. It calls."
"And the mother comes," Sera said.
"Across the eighty meters," Wren said slowly, working through it, "to the clearing, where we've dug a two-meter pit lined with ironwood stakes, which it falls into on the charge."
"Yes," Harvis said.
Wren looked at the group. "That is either a very good plan or a plan that sounds very good and has a fatal flaw we haven't found yet."
"All plans are one of those two things," Donn said.
"That's not comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be."
Liz had already opened her supply pack. She produced a small ceramic jar, sealed with wax, and held it up. "I have honey. Approximately half a jar. Wild tree sap supplement from three days ago."
Alex stared at it. "You've been carrying honey this whole time."
"I've been carrying a cultivation supplement that happens to be honey-adjacent," Liz said, with the precision of someone who found the distinction important.
"Liz," Alex said. "Our porridge this morning was unsweetened."
"We're rationing."
"You have honey."
"We are rationing the honey."
Harvis made a sound that in a less composed person would have been a laugh.
Liz looked at him. "Don't."
Harvis said nothing, but the corner of his mouth held its position.
"It's enough?" Sera asked, redirecting with the practiced ease of a person who managed a group professionally.
Liz assessed the jar. "For a trail from the hollow to the clearing. Enough to hold attention."
"Then we have everything," Sera said. She looked around the group. "Diggers—Donn, Wren, Alex, Calla. Liz manages the stakes and directs placement. Lily—"
"I help dig," Lily said.
Sera looked at her.
"I'm not sitting somewhere waiting," Lily said. The tone was pleasant and entirely immovable.
Sera looked at her for a moment longer, then nodded once. "You help dig. I manage the perimeter while we work. Harvis—" she turned, but Harvis was already moving, angling back toward the ironwood growth along the hollow's rim. "—does whatever Harvis does," she finished.
"That's what I put in my reports too," Wren said.
The digging was real work.
The soil was as Liz had assessed—dark, moisture-retaining, manageable—but manageable was not easy, and two meters of depth in forest soil required moving a significant amount of earth with tools that were not designed for excavation. They used camp blades, a folding trenching tool from Donn's pack, hardwood branches stripped and sharpened into makeshift shovels, and in Lily's case her hands when the angle got tight.
Wren established early that his preferred contribution to any physical labor was commentary.
"Two meters," he said, dropping a load of soil over the edge. "Two meters. Do you know what I could do with the time it's taking to dig two meters?"
"Dig one meter?" Donn offered, not looking up.
"I could be doing anything else. I could be in Varennis. I could be having breakfast. I had a very good breakfast yesterday and I would like another one."
"We all had the same breakfast," Alex said.
"Yours was probably better. You're younger, everything tastes better when you're young."
Lily, working at the far end of the pit with focused efficiency, said without looking up, "My back hurts."
"Your back hurts," Wren said. "You're nine."
"I've been digging for an hour."
"You shouldn't even have a back yet."
Lily paused, looked at him, decided this wasn't worth the effort of a response, and resumed digging.
Calla, who worked in focused silence and had produced more excavated earth than anyone else in the group, paused to wipe sweat from her forehead. She looked at the pit's progress with the assessing eye of someone who had an internal measuring system. "Another forty minutes," she said.
Wren looked at the sky. "Forty minutes."
"Less if you dig instead of talking," Donn said.
"I dig and talk. It's called multitasking."
"It's called less digging than everyone else."
"It's called keeping morale up," Wren said, and dropped another load of earth with exaggerated commitment.
Harvis returned from the ironwood growth with seven stakes over his shoulder, each one sharpened to a clean point, the cuts precise in the way that suggested a very sharp blade and a practiced hand. He set them at the pit's edge without comment and crouched to examine the depth.
"Good," he said. "Drive them at thirty degrees from vertical. Angled toward the entry approach. Impact geometry."
Liz was already positioning the first stake, using a heavy stone as a driver. The sound was flat and dense in the soft soil.
Sera watched the hollow's direction from the clearing's northern edge, her attention steady and systematic. Nothing moved in the trees. The wind was holding from the east—carrying their scent away from the hollow. The window was still open.
When the last stake was in and the pit covered with a lattice of thin branches and a layer of leaf litter that matched the surrounding ground, the eight of them stood back and looked at it.
It was, Alex thought, very convincing. He would not have known it was there.
"Good," Sera said. It was the same word as Harvis had used, carrying the same flat satisfaction of a professional assessment.
She looked at Liz and the honey jar.
Liz looked at Harvis. "You said the honey trail leads from the hollow to here. How close to the hollow does it start?"
"Close enough that the scent reaches the cub's position," Harvis said. "Twenty meters from the hollow entrance. The cub will pick it up and follow. Keep the trail irregular—stop and start. It maintains interest longer than a continuous line."
Liz nodded and opened the jar. The smell of it moved through the clearing air immediately, rich and uncomplicated, the kind of scent that required no interpretation.
Wren inhaled. "That smells incredible."
"Don't," Liz said.
"I wasn't going to—"
"Don't."
Wren looked at the jar with genuine feeling. "All that porridge," he said quietly, to no one in particular. "All that unsweetened porridge."
Alex caught Lily's eye. She pressed her lips together firmly and looked at the trees.
Liz walked the trail with careful, measured steps—a drop here, a smear on a root there, a larger deposit on a flat stone at the midpoint. She worked back toward the clearing, leaving enough to sustain attention without exhausting the supply before the cub reached the open ground.
She returned to the group and stoppered the jar.
"Done," she said.
Sera looked at everyone, taking a final inventory of positions and readiness. Weapons checked, stances settled, the clearing's geometry internalized. She had placed each of them before the digging started—two on the pit's far side, two flanking, one high position in a broad-branched tree on the left, herself at the right.
Harvis stood at the clearing's center, hands in his pockets.
"You're standing on the pit," Wren said.
"I know where the pit is," Harvis said.
He stepped two paces to the left without looking down. The group watched him do this.
Donn and Wren exchanged the look that had become their primary mode of communication regarding Harvis, and took their positions.
The forest settled around them. Eight people distributed through a clearing, still and ready, the pit covered and waiting in the center, the honey trail laid through the trees toward the hollow eighty meters south.
The wind held from the east.
They waited.
A minute passed. Then another.
Then, from the direction of the hollow, so faint it was almost forest noise—the small, concentrated sound of an animal moving through undergrowth with its nose down, following something with absolute single-minded conviction.
Getting closer.
Closer.
The broad leaves at the clearing's southern edge shifted.
A small dark shape pushed through them and into the open ground, nose working furiously at the flat stone where Liz had left the largest deposit, the cub's entire body oriented around the smell with the focused urgency of something that had discovered the best thing that had ever happened to it.
It found the stone. It licked it. It looked up, searching for the source of something this good, and found only the clearing and the trees and eight humans who were not breathing.
The honey was gone.
The cub sat back on its haunches. Its ears rotated. Its nose worked the air and found nothing more.
It made a sound.
Small. High. Carrying.
The sound of a young animal in unfamiliar ground, away from its mother, asking the forest to send her back.