Up

I woke at seventy-five percent and lay still for a while, listening. The birds were singing, the insects were buzzing, and the forest sounded normal. Whatever had torn up that tree yesterday wasn't close. I let myself relax a little, but only a little.

Hunger Clock: 75%

Those grooves had made me notice something I didn't like. Almost everything I'd killed so far, I'd killed on the ground or in the shallows. On flat footing, I was good. But most of this forest wasn't flat. It was trunks and branches and vines, and half the things living in it lived up there, where I'd only ever climbed to sleep. If something big came for me, up would be the obvious place to go. I wanted to be able to fight there too.

So today I went up.

I picked a tall, rough-barked tree near the stream, well away from the one with the grooves, and started climbing. Climbing itself was easy now. My feet found the cracks on their own, and my scythes stayed folded, out of the way. The problem started when I tried to strike. The moment I swung a scythe, its weight pulled my front end away from the trunk, my whole body tipped back, and I had to slap the scythe flat against the bark to keep from falling.

I hung there, halfway up, thinking. On the ground, my back legs planted and my front end did the work. Up here, my back legs had to do all of the holding. I tested it. I dug all four back feet in hard, as hard as I could, and then let my front end come away from the bark. I tipped, but I didn't fall. My back feet held. I swung a scythe at nothing, and it worked, sort of. It was slow and wobbly and nothing like a real strike.

I spent the morning on that trunk. Up, down, sideways around it. Grip, release, strike, grab. By the time the sun was high, my back legs ached in a new way, and I could swing both scythes off the bark without wobbling. Not fast yet, but steady.

That was when I saw the gecko.

It was on the next tree over, flattened against a patch of sunlit bark, almost the same gray-brown color as the trunk. It was about as long as I was, with wide, sticky toes and a long, thick tail. It hadn't seen me. It had no eyelids, like me before my molt, but its eyes had gone narrow and dull, and it was soaking up the warmth.

[Sense]
Target: Bark Gecko ~ Lv.4
Threat: Moderate

I climbed down, crossed over, and started up its tree from the shady side, keeping the trunk between us. It took a long time. I went slowly and kept my feet quiet in the bark. When I came around the trunk just below it, the gecko was still sunning itself, with that long tail hanging right in front of me.

I went for the tail. It was the closest thing, and it was right there. My hook caught it perfectly, and I pulled.

The tail came off.

It just came off, clean, at a joint near the base. The gecko shot straight up the trunk and was gone into the leaves before I understood what had happened, and I was left hanging on the bark with a twitching tail in my hook. It kept wriggling, as if it were still alive, as if it wanted me to keep watching it.

I watched it for a second. Then I realized that was the point. The tail was the thing it wanted me to look at while the rest of it got away. "Okay," I thought. "That's clever."

I ate the tail anyway. It wasn't much, but it was something, and I wasn't going to waste food just because my pride hurt. Then I climbed up to a fork in the branches above the sunny patch and settled in to wait. A gecko that liked that patch of sun this much would come back to it. I would have.

[Stillness] active

It took most of the afternoon. The light moved across the trunk, and I moved with it, a little at a time, so I was always in shade. My back legs were sore from the morning, and holding still up a tree was harder than holding still on the ground, but I held.

Finally it came back down. It moved in short bursts, stopping every few steps to look around, and the stump where its tail had been was already starting to heal. It found the warm bark and flattened itself against it again. Its eyes went narrow.

This time I didn't look at the tail, or at where the tail had been. I looked at the body.

I dropped from the fork, caught the bark with my back feet just above it, and struck down with both scythes at once. My right hook pinned it behind the head, and my left came across its middle and held. The gecko threw itself sideways, and its sticky feet tore loose from the bark, and suddenly its whole weight was hanging off my scythes. My back feet slipped. For a second I was falling with it.

I didn't let go of the gecko. I kicked my back legs out instead, and they caught a ridge of bark, and I swung. I ended up hanging upside down from the trunk, the gecko still pinned in my hooks, both of us swaying over the long drop to the ground. I'd hung like this for hours during my molt. My body knew this position better than I did.

I bit behind its head and finished it, hanging there.

[Kill] Bark Gecko ~ Lv.4
XP gained.

Then I just hung there for a little while, upside down, with the forest swinging gently around me, and I clicked. I couldn't help it. That had been a mess. It had also been fun, maybe even more fun than the spider.

I climbed back up to the fork, slowly, with the gecko in my hooks, and ate it there in the last of the sun. It had a lot more meat on it than its tail had promised.

Hunger Clock: 87%

Back on my ledge, I went over the day the way I used to go over a bad meeting. The tail trick. The slip. The swing. I would never have thought of hanging if my body hadn't done it for me. I was starting to trust that, the way it knew things before I did. A week ago that would have scared me.

Now it just felt like having a partner who was very good at their job.