Fiksu

Fiksu paused her hunt, ruined as it had been by the brownish tanned man who’d just collapsed in the mud after climbing out of the river. She held her arrow’s fletching near the corner of her mouth, staring down the shaft at the man kneeling before her. His pitifully small size posed her no threat, and he didn’t even have his outer teeth yet. He huddled on the ground anyway, mewling about a missing child.

“What do I care about your child?” she asked, rage evident in the tone of her voice. “Speak! You’ve scared my prey.” That look of pity she’d spared receded into a scowl.

“Please!” he shouted, “Please! I didn’t mean to offend. I’ve lost my daugh...Miranda’s been taken from me. We were sleeping, and something came into our house. I was only away for a moment, and now she’s gone, and I don’t know where I am, and I’m scared!” His rambling grated on her nerves. The smell of urine accented his fear. Still, something about him piqued her interest.

“Will you please help me?” he continued. “I-I-I I’m lost too. I was in my room, see? And Miranda, she’d been running a fever, right? I got up to get her some medicine but I needed to piss. So I went to take care of business, but I’d been seeing these crazy lights? And shadows, the shadows were weird…”

“Get to the point, ape,” she prodded, losing interest fast.

“Okay, okay. When I came back, there was this weird orb thing where she’d been, and when I touched it, I fell off that,” he looked back upstream, to the roaring waterfall that still was too close for his comfort. “And then I was here.”

Da smell o’ da woods always tellin secrets, her father had once told her. She often reflected on his words during her hunts. He’d never been the most intelligent Tai, but then “brighter than most Tai” could be an accurate description. It didn’t account for her, though.

Dey all tryin to lie to us. They movin quiet. Diggin down into da ground. Changin color like da leaves, some of them. But dey all smell. Can’t hide no smell. Especially this man who’d clearly let loose a trickle of his own. But he didn’t mark his territory. Perhaps he did speak the truth. Her manner softened, and she relaxed the bow. A little. If he did conceal a lie, she didn’t sense one.

“What are you?” she asked, wariness tinging her words.

“I’m just a father,” he pleaded, “A father trying to find his daughter. I’ve already lost my wife, I can’t lose her too.”

Staring at this pitiful male before her, she thought of her own father. She hadn’t meant to, and certainly didn’t want to, despite his platitudes guiding her still. But she did.

“Come, John,” she said, the name feeling odd in her mouth. “Stay quiet, I may still be able to finish my hunt.”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you were hunting, I…” John stepped, snapping a twig, and a cracking sound rang loudly behind her. The noise faded quickly in the vegetation, but didn’t hide the secondary wet splitting pop that came almost simultaneous with the first.

Her nose detected the subtle musk of tree sap to which John remained oblivious. To her it grew overwhelming, musk becoming a sticky fresh sweetness as the aroma mixed with the scents of nearby pollen. Shifting her sight, Fiksu focused her eyes up to one of the lower hanging branches of the closest Makeapuu tree. There, a Pienkhu bit into a smaller offshoot of a branch, slurping up the sap as it oozed from the break.

Gesturing to John, he nodded and held still, not quite sure what she’d seen but understanding enough to know that any sudden movement could frighten it. Or cause him to become something else’s next meal. She knew it held no danger to them.

Fiksu drew back the bow once more, the man distracting her aim while she steadied herself. He certainly seemed as useless as her father, who couldn’t even prevent her exile. Not that she cared. Tai life never suited her. Exile did not serve her as a punishment, but as a liberation, fulfilling her desire to escape those brutish men and servile women of her village. Hunting in their absence, while necessary for her own survival, had become almost pleasant.

John tilted his head, a motion that startled the Pienkhu as Fiksu released the arrow. Her well-aimed shot struck where her target had been, thudding uselessly into the tree as her prey fled up the trunk.

“Paka!” she snarled, turning in rage to her companion. “You’ve cost us our dinner!” she yelled as she threw the bow to the ground, nearly breaking it in her anger. Fiksu shut her eyes and focused on her breathing. Her temper never suited the Tai either, her attitude had quite a bit to do with her exile. But she tried to keep it in check. “Let us find a place to camp for the night,” she offered once she calmed down.

John

John poked idly at the fire Fiksu had managed to coax from some deadwood and sap. As the flames began to die down, she returned more successful this time from an abbreviated hunt. She’d had to range far afield to find something in the dark, away from the flames that frightened away her prey.

“You seem to eat well, where you’re from,” she said as she skinned the two Pienkhu she’d managed to kill “You are royalty, yes? From the Queensland? It is the only thing I can think of.” John felt uncomfortable as she eyed him, knowing now she judged his flabby paunch that Michelle had called pleasantly plump. Somehow he felt that his dad bod would be a bit detrimental here.

“I’m not, actually. And well, um…” John averted his eyes, wincing as he tried to get his stomach under control while Fiksu slit the bellies of the two creatures and pulled out their innards. He’d managed to watch the skinning alright but the stench...He hurried to the edge of their small clearing and vomited. “Well, at least there’s more room?” He apologized.

“Do you not hunt where you’re from?” she pondered quietly, more to herself than to John. “You are nothing but flesh and fat.” Thanks for the reminder, he thought, knowing full well she could snap him like a twig.

“Some people do,” he offered sheepishly, “But I don’t. The...ugh...whole thing kinda grosses me out,” he explained, glancing back at the mess he’d just made. “Not that I don’t appreciate the food, of course!” he added, not to offend her while she still prepared the meal.

“That much is clear,” came her biting retort.

Shame colored his cheeks. “People like me don’t usually hunt. I just pick up groceries from a store. It’s much simpler.”

“Do these ‘stores’ do the hunting then?” Fiksu rammed small sticks through each Pienkhu and began roasting them above the low flames. “Simplicity makes you weak.”

Remembering his plunge over the waterfall and how he struggled to even swim to shore, he looked down and dejectedly agreed. “Yeah, I suppose it does.”

This isn’t a dream. I really am someplace else. How am I gonna find Miranda and get home? Realization he’d been holding back began to sink in, as the enormity of what had happened enveloped him. “I don’t even know what I’m doing traipsing around a forest looking for my daughter, it doesn’t even make sense to me.”

“Perhaps people who can’t keep track of their children don’t deserve them.”

John looked askance at the huntress. “What are you trying to say?”

“People like me don’t search for lost children unless we mean to eat them.” Veiled malice stared back at him for a moment, and John thought he’d made a huge mistake already by trusting the first thing… person… he’d come across. Fiksu’s eyes softened. “But maybe I can make an exception.”

She offered him a Pienkhu stick, and he gingerly bit into it, alternating between disgust and delight. Once he got past the burnt skin, it wasn’t half bad. In fact it was pretty good, and he was starving. Halfway through, he paused.

“Miranda could be hungry too, right now. She’s only six, she has no way of fending for herself,” his worry mounted and tears came to his eyes. “She’s lost in this forest. We should go…”

“Pah!” Fiksu waved her hand dismissively. “You plug that leak, I’ll tell you when we go. Nothing we can do for her now.’

“But…”

“Hsst. You see that glow on the southern horizon?” she pointed. He’d not seen it for the glare of the campfire. A pillar of orange soared into the sky.

“What the hell is that?”

“It is trouble. It started three days ago. It is far, but the forest burns,” she explained.

“But she came through right before me, she has nothing to do with that. She’s got to be nearby. Miranda!” He shouted, wondering even as he did so why he hadn’t already tried. “Miranda!”

“Hush fool, if you know what’s good for…” A roar from the south cut her off, and she hurriedly kicked dirt over the fire and ran off into the trees. John panicked and followed.

Fiksu

Fiksu sprinted from the clearing, dodging fallen logs and prickly shrubbery and placing a large distance between herself and John. Every few trees she passed she smacked with her palm and she kept a low guttural growl up between breaths. Behind her, she heard something massive begin to pick up speed, shattering the smaller trees and tearing after her.

Some tings, dey cannot be fought, her father’s advice spoke. De best ting to do, is to be runnin’ fast and runnin’ far. So she did. Fiksu’s noise, while low compared the trampling of the following best, was just enough to goad it forward after her, and disregard the man following her. The huntress picked up speed, her goal to lure away from the helpless man the dread beast.

She heard a large crash, and for a moment pursuit slowed. A massive tree trunk crashed down several feet to her side, and the beast bellowed again. John best be as slow, she thought as the gap between them grew. Fiksu had seen how winded he’d been after a short swim, and he had no shoes, so his own pursuit would be slow indeed. This was her land; there were few who knew it better.

With quick glimpses at the sky, she kept her bearings, and she charged forward with single minded determination. Zheunku, de lord o’ de trees. It nevah stop once it finds its prey. One of the earliest Tai lessons she’d learned, she’d always thought the Zheunku to be a myth, something her father talked about. Fiksu had never encountered one, but had heard it described often enough. A four-legged beast the size of two large boulders that could run for hours through a forest. Its skull had a bulbous protrusion that swept out above its eyes, protecting its forehead before tapering to a frill above its neck. Two massive tusks jutted out from its lower jaw, and hardened scales covered the rest of its body.

Another bellow sounded, and she risked a peek over her shoulder. It had broken through the vegetation and closed fast on her. Fiksu followed a barely visible path as it wended its way to her destination, keeping track of distance solely through memory and the few landmarks her kind left notched into trees. Her eyes had fallen into night vision, allowing her to run with impunity.

The trail diverged, and without slowing she veered left. Trees slid back behind her, opening into a descending curve around a steep dropoff. She skittered around the turn and ducked her head as the Zheunku barreled forward, too late recognizing its error. Too much forward momentum carried it over the edge, and it roared for just a moment before one final crash, and only silence remained.

When the danger had passed and she caught her breath, her anger renewed itself as she realized how close she’d come to being killed by a Zheunku. All because of John. She started backtracking, her path made easy to follow by the destruction caused by the beast. Within a few minutes she’d returned to the camp. John had vanished, but a trail of blood passed into the underbrush a few hundred feet out.

“Stupid ape,” she cursed.