Somebody's Baby

My foreleg was stiff when I woke, but it bent, and the dent over the joint had already started to fill in. The night took its thirteen points.

Hunger Clock: 80%

I hunted the far side of the stream that day, partly to give the foreleg an easy day and partly because I'd been curious about it for a while. The trees were farther apart over there, and the floor between them was a mess. Whole patches of it had been torn up and turned over, the leaves flipped, the dark dirt underneath dug into furrows like someone had been working it with a shovel. Roots had been chewed through. Some of the holes were fresh enough that the dirt was still wet.

I didn't know what had done it. It wasn't the big creature. Its prints were wider than my body, and these marks were narrow and close together, made by something that pushed its face along the ground. A lot of somethings, maybe. I spent the morning in the trees above the torn ground, watching, and saw nothing but birds picking at the turned dirt for worms. By midafternoon I'd eaten two beetles and a slug and was still hungry.

Hunger Clock: 76%

I found them late in the day, when the light had gone long and gold between the trunks. Four small animals, rooting in the dirt at the edge of a muddy dip, grunting softly to each other. They were round and low, with stiff bristly coats striped brown and cream, and flat wet snouts they shoved into the ground as they walked. So that was what had been plowing the forest.

[Sense]
Target: Bristle Piglet ~ Lv.4
Threat: Low

Piglet. The System knew, even if I hadn't. And I knew enough to think that where there were piglets, there was usually a mother.

I didn't rush it. The possum had taught me that much. I climbed a tree at the edge of the dip and looked the whole place over carefully. I checked the brush, the shadows between the roots, the far side of the mud. I listened. I saw nothing bigger than the piglets, and nothing smelled like anything but mud and torn roots. Whatever the mother was, I decided, she was off somewhere else.

One piglet drifted away from the others toward my tree, snuffling after something in the leaves. When it passed under me, I dropped.

It was over fast. My hooks caught it behind the head and across the back, and I bit down hard into the soft place at the base of its skull. It squealed once, high and loud, and the sound went out across the dip like an alarm. Then it went limp.

[Kill] Bristle Piglet ~ Lv.4
XP gained.

[LEVEL UP]
Nestling Mantis ~ Lv.6
All stats +3
Skill points: 4

I didn't get to enjoy it. While the notice was still hanging in my vision, the mud stood up.

That's what it looked like. A whole section of the muddy dip lifted up and became an animal, a huge one, caked brown from snout to tail. She'd been lying in the wallow the whole time, covered in mud, so still and so thoroughly the color of the ground that I'd looked right at her. Water poured off her sides. She had small hard eyes, a bristled ridge down her back, and two curved yellow tusks.

[Sense]
Target: Bristle Boar ~ Lv.9
Threat: Extreme

She charged.

I let go of the piglet and ran. There was no other choice. She was faster than anything that big had any right to be, and the ground shook under her. I made it to the nearest tree and was halfway up the trunk when she hit it. The whole tree jerked. One tusk raked the bark just under me and caught my back leg on the way past.

Shell: -5

I clung on and climbed. She hit the tree again, and again, grunting and squealing, tearing bark off in strips. I didn't stop until I was on a branch high above her, and even there I could feel every hit come up through the wood into my legs.

When she finally gave up on the tree, she went back to the piglet. She nosed it and pushed at it and made a low, sad sound I didn't like hearing. The other three piglets crowded behind her legs. Then she planted herself over the body and stood there, watching my tree. She wasn't going anywhere.

I stayed very still and thought about what I'd done wrong. I had checked for a mother. I had looked right at her. I'd been looking for something shaped like a pig, and she'd been shaped like a puddle. The possum had pretended to be dead, and she'd just pretended to be ground. "Everything here hides," I thought. "Even the big ones."

Since I had time, I spent my points. Speed had gotten me to the tree, but my shell had taken a tusk to get me there, and the ache in my back leg told me I needed both.

Nestling Mantis ~ Lv.6 ~ Mantara
Might 21 | Agility 27 | Shell 20
Sense 26 | Will 21 | Insight 24
Skill points: 4

Shell 20 → 22
Agility 27 → 29
Skill points: 0

The sun went down. The sow didn't move. The piglets lay down in the mud behind her. The frogs started up, and the insects, and the forest settled into its usual night noise. I was beginning to think I'd be sleeping in that tree when all of it stopped.

The frogs stopped first, then the insects, then the night birds, one after another, until there was nothing at all. I knew that silence. My body went still on its own before I even told it to.

The sow knew it too. Her head came up and her ears went stiff. She made one short, sharp grunt, and the piglets were up and running, and she was running after them, crashing off through the trees without a single look back at the body she'd been guarding for hours.

Then came the footsteps, slow and heavy, from the north. I smelled wet fur and old blood. Below me, in the dark between the trunks, something huge and hunched moved into the dip. I couldn't see all of it, only pieces, a shoulder, a dark mass of coarse fur, a heavy limb shining with wet mud. It stopped by the piglet. I heard it sniff. Then I heard bones crack, one loud snap, and it picked the piglet up and carried it away north the way it had come, taking its time.

My kill. Gone in one bite.

I didn't move for a long while after the frogs started up again. I lay on my branch and thought about a ladder. That was what the forest looked like to me now. I'd been watching the piglet. The sow had been watching me. And something had been out there in the dark that the sow was afraid of, the way I was afraid of the sow. I'd thought of this place as me and my prey. Really I was standing on one of the lower rungs, looking up.

But I was higher than I'd been two weeks ago. And I'd learned which rungs to watch.

When I was sure, I climbed down and went to the stream in the dark. My night eyes showed me a fish asleep in the slow water by the bank, and I took it with one clean strike and ate it on a rock.

Hunger Clock: 74% → 82%

Then I climbed home on a sore back leg, Level 6, with nothing to show for it but a fish and a lesson. Somehow I didn't mind. The lesson was the bigger meal.