Horizon

Chapter 7

I winced, as I heard a small crunching sound. Immediately freezing, I prayed that I had blended enough into the surrounding foliage. I looked down, and noticed that my shoe had crushed a falling leaf. It was a quiet sound, but it was enough get the attention of something close by.

            A few days had passed since I transformed for the first time. Thomas's training plan for me was pretty rigorous, and had me sore in almost every part of my body. After hours of punching at different objects, and strengthening different muscle groups, he threw a bow at me.

            "Go get us some food," Thomas said, while handing me a quiver with about five sharpened arrows. "Remember...two deer. If you run into any trouble remember to whistle as loud as you can. I'll be able to hear it."

            Thomas pushed me out the door, and pointed me in the direction of the nearby forest. After struggling to find anything, I finally got close to something I could kill.

            Looking back up, I noticed that the doe I had been stalking was on edge. It brought its head up, and looked in every direction. Its ears flicked back in forth, listening for another one of my mistakes. One thing that I thought was weird was how it brought its head forward. It was trying to smell.

            I quickly moved my eyes toward the leaves of the tree I was hugging, noticing that wind was moving towards the deer. The wind was moving my scent right into the deer's nose.

            The doe turned its head in my direction, almost looking directly at me. After a few seconds of staring, she bolted away. My food...was bolting away. Within a couple of seconds, her movements were inaudible.

            "Dammit!" I grunted, and threw my bow onto the ground.

            The temptation to transform into an anthro was starting to fester within me. I felt like I could easily have brought back food, in that form. Hunting as a human was difficult, and not as rewarding as I thought it was.

            With a few deep breaths, I sat down on a fallen tree. I glared at the bow I had thrown, and groaned tiredly. I knew that I had to regain my composure, and continue stalking the deer. The soreness in my muscles, and weakness of my mind, was begging me not to, however.

            "Alright, Hank," I grumbled. "How are you going to get that deer?"

            I thought about ways I could sneak up on the animal without making my position known. The thing that gave me away was my scent, so if I could have gotten around the deer, then she wouldn't have smelled me so easily. I had also neglected to fully camouflage myself, declining to blend my face and neck into my surroundings. I guess I wasn't willing to completely conceal myself.

I got up from the fallen tree, and picked up my bow. With a quick scan around the surrounding area, I began looking for wet spots in the ground. Dirt wasn't going to just stick to my face. It needed to be mud.

Glancing to my right, I could see something peculiar. It definitely wasn't a wet spot, either. I knelt down, and glanced at the large divots in dirt. They were tracks...bear tracks, I assumed. The tracks were big, and it was easy to tell that the creature had claws. They looked to be going further into the forest, which was good, because I needed to find more deer.

"Bears have more meat," I muttered.

I stood back up, and started to slowly follow the tracks. They looked like they were made pretty recently, so the bear could have been close by. Judging by how many broken branches there were in the area, started to guess that it was really close.