sobeille left chani's company early morning, her belly full yet nerves abuzz. in the thicket a chorus of rowdy fox sparrow scolded her passing, their many-winged congregation taking flight with a hiss of feathers.
a wolf spider shrank from sobeille’s heavy tread, sensing the giant’s approach by the thrumming of trichobothria along her slender limbs. she pulled a sodden oak leaf over her body, all eight eyes on the shadow as it thundered past.
the wind played in the trees and stirred the hackles along sobeille's back. ahead two shivering ponderosa pines bent their boughs towards one another -- sobeille's eye instinctively caught the fleeing shadow of an abert's squirrel as it fled the approach of a predator.
somewhere in the evergreen a dusky grouse hen chirruped. sobeille listened to this woodland orchestra as she walked among it, a stranger unwelcome in the halls of this ancient forest.
she did not think at all as she struck. in a flutter, the hen was seized between her teeth. she set it squawking between her claws and stared. black eyes, dull plumage. did this creature have culture? a soul? or was it just fodder in her own personal simulation?
sobeille placed a paw on the hen's flapping wings. each percussive flap of the hen’s wings stirred pinestraw in a panic beneath her. with one forceful push from the hunter, her wing snapped.
the bird floundered in a half-circle. sobeille released the hen in a flurry of feathers, watching as its gangly limbs carried it away with one wing dragging.
a dozen bronze feathers fluttered in the air, at last coming to rest on a bed of copper pine straw.
the hen did not make it far before sobeille batted it back like a cat, targeting the limp wing. around her the orchestra turned into a screaming chorus -- every animal in the vicinity unsettled by a predator among them.
she silenced the hen by seizing its skull between her teeth. several seconds passed as the hen struggled in the dirt, raptorial limbs running in a timeless percussion driven by instinct that had nowhere to go.
at last the talons stilled, curling back among themselves in the earliest genetic memory this bird owned.
sobeille propped the ruffled thing on her paws and stared back at its flopping head, now hardly more than gristly pulp. the lighting around its svelte body seemed lacklustre. squinting up, sobeille’s eyes adjusted to the new darkness that descended the forest.
but it's not night yet, sobeille frowned. the clouds were burgeoned with a sepia-grey. the world was half-lit, but everything about it was wrong. the shadows along the forest floor were peculiar, as if an artist took a brush-stroke and therein forgot her purpose. sobeille hissed, pushing the grouse back and rising.
an oppressive cold sank through sobeille’s raised fur. eerie silence settled over the forest in an uncomfortable film.
there was no industrial scuttling of bugs.
no incessant chatter of thousands of birds.
even the trees were silent, their stiff boughs pointed skyward. not even the leaves spoke, and the wind that passed through them was listless.
sobeille looked to the dimming sky. the sun, always a constant in her life, was snared by shadow. a small gasp left her mouth to see that the rim of the sun was still visible, a livid flare outlined in a perfect circle around a shape so black it may have been a shark’s eye for all its darkness.
the grouse forgotten, sobeille stared at the darkening skies and wondered if this mighty fang that blotted out the sun might blot out her inconsequential life too.
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