Felis (Hiatus)

Chapter 1

TEN YEARS LATER

I eyed the next branch, considering it, then I bunched up my legs and sprang, landing neatly on the branch. I looked down at my target- tonight's dinner. The deer stood below me, oblivious to my arrow pointed at it. I pulled the string back to the corner of my mouth, my eyes narrowing in. I took a breath, relaxed and shot. Hitting my mark, the deer immediately fell to the forest floor. I jumped down from the branch, landing neatly on my feet. I grabbed the short, hollow reed hanging on a cord around my neck, and blew into it. It emitted a high pitched whistle, which was to let the others in my hunting party know that I had a catch. I heard two other responses, signaling that Sakura had caught something, but Mai hadn't.

I headed towards Mai with my deer slung over my shoulder. She was about a mile away from me, through the branches of trees that could have been hundreds of years old. I leaped from branch to branch as the birds twittered all around me, and the insects kept up their eternal droning. I looked down to the forest floor, which hardly any light reached because of the thick canopy. A few deer wandered by. I kept going until I felt a small twig fall on my back. My head snapped up, and I saw Mai with a warning finger to her lips, and then I looked where she was pointing.

It was banteng. (A banteng is a species of cattle that lives wild in the jungles of southeast Asia). I watched as Mai swiftly and silently pulled an arrow from her quiver, notched it in the bowstring, and pulled the string back until the feathers touched the corner of her mouth. She let the string go with a barely audible twang. It slapped against her arm guard a split second later, as the banteng bull sunk to the ground. Just then, Sakura leaped onto a branch near us, almost scaring me out of the tree.

"What'd ya get?" she asked excitedly, her prey, a deer, slung on her back.

"Look for yourself, Sakura," Mai replied, just as excited about such a great catch.

"Wow, nice one! We're going to have to have some others come around and grab that thing later," Sakura said, her voice full of happiness for the day's luck. We hauled the banteng up the tree, before tying a rope to the tree and trailing it behind us on our way back home.

We walked through the huge arch of delicately interlaced branches that led to the main clearing. We passed several guards, standing erect and emotionless, their naginatas in their dominant hand, and their bows slung over their backs. I recognized them all. But I didn't talk to them, as it was disrespectful to their position, which required full concentration. However, I had no idea why there were so many of them, more than usual. The camp was unusually busy, the residents all on edge, hurrying from one place to another. That's when I realized the feel in the air. There was a bad storm coming, and with storms sometimes came humans.

Sakura, Mai, and I hurried towards the kill pile, where we dropped off our deer to be cooked.

"Well, see y'all later, I guess," Sakura said, her cheerful attitude gone, replaced by a more serious one that she hardly ever displayed. Mai left as well and hurried towards my house, where I saw my mother, my adoptive mother, really, motioning for me to come in. I ducked under the branches that made the arched entrance, before tugging the piece of deer hide in place over the door. I was just in time, too. The first drops of rain started to fall, and soon it was pouring.

Our house consisted of six rooms: the kitchen/dining room, which was the main room, my room, two other rooms for my brothers, a room for my parents, and a storage room. They were all small archways branching off of the main room.

"Hey, mom! How's Eiji doing?" I asked. Eiji was my seven-year-old younger brother, and he was quarantined to his room with a fever.

"He's getting better. Now go help your brother make sure that there are no leaks. I glanced over to where my other brother, Hitoshi was weaving large leaves through the branches that made up the house, to make sure that no rain got through. His thick jaguar tail twitching as it bumped the kitchen table. He was three years older than me, seventeen. I grabbed a few leaves from the pile on the table and worked through the house. Usually, this is done on Saturdays, but since there was a huge storm coming in, we did it today.