Theren and the others left at noon on the second day.
I can't blame them. I paid them for a journey to Dire Maul and back, not for chasing a wild animal through the southern forests of Feralas while their employer muttered about bears with too much intelligence. They took their coin, packed their gear, and walked north without looking back.
I stayed.
The bear had left tracks, not obvious ones, but I've learned to read the forest well enough. Broken twigs at a certain height. Claw marks on bark that looked deliberate rather than accidental. A pattern of movement that circled back on itself, as if the bear was patrolling a territory rather than wandering.
I followed for the rest of that day and most of the next. I saw it twice, once at dusk, a dark shape moving between the trunks, and once at dawn, standing on a ridge above me, silhouetted against the pale sky. Each time it let me see it for a moment before disappearing. Each time I felt like it was testing me. Seeing if I would keep coming.
I did.
By the evening of the second day, I'd lost the trail completely. I was standing in a small clearing, turning in a slow circle, trying to find any sign of where it had gone, when I realized I wasn't alone.
The bear was behind me. Close. Much closer than I'd expected.
I turned slowly. It stood there, massive and still, not ten paces away. Close enough that I could hear it breathing. Close enough that I could see the light in its eyes, and it was the right word: light. Intelligence. Awareness. Something looking out at me from behind that animal face.
I didn't run. I didn't reach for a weapon.
I just stood there and looked back.
The bear took a step toward me. Then another. I held my ground. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat, but I didn't move. There was something in the way it moved, purposeful, deliberate, that told me this wasn't an attack.
It stopped a pace away. So close I could have reached out and touched its shoulder. It looked at me for a long, silent moment.
Then it shifted.
Not like a disguise falling away. Like a held breath finally released. The form rippled and changed, fur giving way to hide, mass rearranging itself into something else, something tall and broad and horned. A tauren stood before me where the bear had been, his eyes unchanged. The same dark, patient intelligence, now set in a face that could speak.
Neither of us moved.
The wind moved through the clearing. Somewhere a bird called.
I opened my mouth, closed it, and tried again.
"That's... not something you see every day."
The tauren regarded me for another long moment. Then, slowly, the corners of his mouth moved in something that wasn't quite a smile.
"No," he said. His voice was low and rumbling, like stones shifting in a river. "I don't suppose it is."
We stood there in the fading light, two strangers in the middle of a Feralas forest, neither of us entirely sure what to do with the other.