The Panther Girl: 55th Hunger Games

Chapter 1

There is beauty in complete silence. It is bliss to have only your thoughts to hear and the quiet of your surroundings. The silence of the forest around me is almost tangible, so tangible that you can feel the beauty up close. It is understandable to savor such a peace, to enjoy it, even.

But not for me.

This peace is only beautiful if you need it.

I definitely do not need it.

You certainly don't need quiet when you're hunting. Only hunters seem to not be able to afford the silence, after all.

Because too quiet means an inconvenient lack of life. No prey, no food for your family, maybe even starvation.

And when it comes full-circle, starvation means stress.

This is a day where I need for there to be an absolute absence of stress. A hunt is meant to be an activity to take some of the strain out of life for me, even if the Capitol does not allow it.

My father says that though the Capitol bans hunting for food, there are and always have been people who spend their free hours outside of the mines or the plantations or the factories hunting to feed their families.

So that is what I do in my free time.

I hunt.

I hunt for food only, but sometimes there's also the benefit of, yes- warding off anxiety and tension.

Today this plan has failed miserably. Frustrated, I rub off the pine needle and mud concoction on my skin that kept me disguised in the pine tree I have been sitting in all morning, and sling my hunting bow under my arm, preparing to go back home.

I swing down noiselessly from my post in the pine tree. Before I leave, I turn and whistle a loud bird call. A long low note, followed by a short high note and a long middle note.

Two seconds later, I hear the light sound of boots on pine needles, and then I see my brother appear from behind a young pine shrub.

"Did you catch anything?" I whisper when he catches up to me.

"Ah, sadly, no." Eli shakes his head. He holds up a couple of small homemade traps for emphasis. There is no trace of blood or fur caught on them.

I sigh. No breakfast.

"We need to get back, anyway," Eli says. "We're gonna be late for the Reaping if we don't go home soon." He rests his leather grip-clad hand on my shoulder and smiles grimly.

I smile grimly back.

Neither of us wants to go to the Reaping.

No one does.

But we have to anyway. It was a tradition established by the Capitol, and we will probably be shot if we don't go.

Every year, as punishment for the rebellion against the Capitol that cost the twelve districts their freedom and destroyed the thirteenth, each district has to send a boy and a girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to fight to the death in an arena on live TV.

Every year, we go to the Reaping to see which ones of the community will be reaped and chosen.

But every year, without fail, the districts enter their children's names on tiny slips of paper for tessera grain, and waited for someone else's children to get reaped that year. So their children will be spared.