"Eye of the Hunter"
I’ve been playing around again, just trying to satisfy those literary urges. Rett’s question on first/third person preferences set the old cogs turning again, and I thought I’d have a go at the first person style… I’ve started to draw this one as well, so… maybe I’ll post it, if I get enough done. And forgive the shoddy title, I never do titles very well… Hmm.
At the moment I haven’t even the first idea of a storyline, so… bleh. Hopefully one will evolve itself after a while…
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I sit, and I wait. I’m patient, usually I could wait for hours – I’m a hunter, it’s what I do – but I was already tired, my arms aching from sitting still for so long, and a dull, four-day-old hunger gnawed at my stomach like an angry paramite.
Pickings were getting thinner, I mused, sadly. Parts of the forest were dying, poisoned by pollution, and some parts were being cut down, shipped away to other countries, other continents. And though we tried our hardest to eat meat sparingly, to conserve what few animals were left in our part of the wild, what few hadn’t been killed for luxury foodstuffs in the richer countries, our ancestors were carnivores, and it’s hard to ignore your instincts. The lazy days of past times were just that – past. Our children were getting weaker every hatching – and we have next to nothing with which to feed them…
And trade was just about nonexistent, too. After all, Skillya had all the rest of the forest tribes wiped out – we only escaped by chance, our queen was very young, and we were a small tribe even then, living deep, deep in the forest – and the mudokons didn’t trust us any more. Only one of their villages was prepared to do trade with us, but they were wary, understandably so, and they made strict rules about meetings; only the females were permitted to approach the village, and only then if they were unarmed. We males would all wait in the treeline, nerves on edge, just in case the… the untoward… should happen; we always worried about those meetings. All females were rare, and very precious, even if most were sterile…
…And the mudokons knew it; they made sure we knew they knew, too. They used to threaten to go to the industrial peoples, tell them where we live, sometimes threatening to kill us themselves. They seemed to see all sligs as the same, as some kind of monsters, just waiting to strike… Skillya has a lot to answer for.
It was getting dark. I looked toward the canopy – the sky was deepening, the first stars beginning to show through. And once again I had nothing to take home but an empty stomach. Maybe I’d sleep out here tonight; although dangerous, it was better than braving the sad, hungry eyes of my friends, my family, when I get home, and learn another brood has starved to death…
As I stood, and thought, the inkling of an idea began to set root in my tired brain. Maybe I should brave the plains, a place almost as dangerous as the mudokon warriors that patrolled them, and go and try to plead with them, try to beg a little of their supposed ‘generosity’… A hunter should not humiliate himself like that, and they will be more likely to kill me on sight than talk to me, but what choice do I have? What choice do any of us have, any more? If we don’t adapt, we’ll be extinct by the end of next winter.
The decision very nearly made itself; I had to go, I had to go and try my luck with the mudokons. Perhaps I would be lucky, perhaps they would see me for who and not what I was, perhaps they would ignore my species and treat me as-… I sighed; deluding myself again. I would probably never even see one of them before a spear through my skull decided matters. But I had to try. With one last glance back, back toward my home in the canopy, and a faint sigh, I set off toward the plains, to go and resolutely face death in the eye, and hope for a miracle.
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Ah well, that was… fun? I dunno. Opinions?
[ May 27, 2001: Message edited by: Teal ]
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) I may post a picture of Xarr, even though the caption on the pic is wrong… 
