The instinct

Long before the evening’s work was finished, Baagh’s paws ached from carrying her body up this cliff.  The struggle of one’s existence.   The smallest rocks tumbled beneath her weight, crushing down on the purple blooms of the mountain barleria and burying their petals into the dirt.   Pebbles scattered down the hillside, sliding into branches and roots, finding resting places in new locations on the forest floor.  Her feet yearned to be rested under her side, but this was no time for such laziness.  This spot would not normally be suitable for a rest, but Baagh needed the view it provided.  The misty air had dissipated slightly with this altitude; now, the sightlines opened through the forest’s heights and she was able to focus on the distance.

Baagh looked out, longingly, for home.   She peered across the clouded jungle below, her sight unwavering from the ravine some distance away where her cubs lay embarrassingly beholden to the pending evening’s potential.   A monkey’s screech from some far off branch broke the stillness of dusk’s arrival and brought with it the urgency of her return.  The villains of the jungle would soon be hunting, and here Baagh stood, without prey, languishing before the hike.  There was one goal that remained this evening: bring home food.  Well, really, it was two goals.  Getting home was no worry, even through the quickly descending night.  Food, however, was a different story.

Baagh had encountered this before. The last cubs felt the pinch of hunger in their tiny rib cages many a time.  The jungle was lush, full of life, amply decorated with potential kills.  But something about Baagh had changed.  Her instincts — natural, organic, raw, motherly — were fading.  Her ability to feed — to murder for food — was weaning out of her with each passing day.  Why?  Why would such a creature, destiny ingrained, care to give, food to forage and feed to her young, find such difficulty in the basic notion of survival?

Of course, they had survived.  She found glimpses of her natural calling every few days. But her victims were the easy targets.  The limp birds, settling down into the foliage’s floor, hiding and shivering and protecting themselves with the permeable coverage of poor camouflage.  The sick, the dying, the innocently young: all the pathetic easy wins of an otherwise deadly hunter, now a victim of the animal being carved out of her.  The cubs fed, and moved on; they prospered in their own territory far into the distance.  The new cubs came, and fed, too; but Baagh’s condition weakened.  Her paws had begun to show the wear of too little food; her coat, once so shiny and full, now left puffs of fur on the edges of pointed branches or in the nooks between rocks.  Her face, once the visage of a natural born killer, now looked tame and limp.  Survival became redefined: to live means to get through tomorrow, rather than the season.

Baagh descended down the cliff.  Her movement had slowed; her pace had lapsed into a crawl.  She knew this trek well, for her mother had bestowed it upon her in those formative years, long before They captured her.   Long before she was left to her own survival techniques, Baagh knew the best spots for tracking a meal was from the heights.  In this valley, the myriad of hills and treetops created a lush canopy of distraction.  From this height, however, the wisps of sound, the scents of a quick meal, the sights of a fluttering wing could be gathered.  And tracked.  And chased.  And targeted for a kill.  And so, Baagh ventured here, hoping to rekindle that conviction, the one implanted from birth.  The one that draws the blood out and smears the flesh with wounds so deep there is no escape from rigor mortis in a victim.

It rarely came, these moments, these ventures into the truth of her being.  Instead, Baagh often found herself distracted, aghast at the passing hours — the ripe, plentiful time meant for foraging given up in exchange for a dalliance by the pool, a waterfall’s cascading arch, a romp through the orchids swallowing up the hillside.  This life, with all of its important details, still allowed her to become grossly disinterested in the necessary tasks of the day.  Today, like many before, was an exercise in futility, no victims captured.

Baagh’s body ruffled the edges of the leaves with little movement as she descended.  The crawl through the foliage was unnoticeable save for the orange streak bobbing behind her, steadying her growingly unstable walk in a horizontal balancing act.  Her passage through these trails was common for the surrounding animals who had learned their scurrying away needn’t be so hasty when she was around.

And then a sound.  Like a boulder smashing into the water, except all at once: a pierce through the air, whirling past with great speed, blowing the silence apart and missing Baagh’s belly with a centimetre of far too little comfort.  The explosion was so foreign to her ears; unnatural, unprovoked, jarring and potentially jeopardizing.  And at once, within the moment, her heart bounded upwards, filling her chest with swelling blood, draining out the muscles of her body of adrenalin and charging her forward.  Rather than flee, nature took its course.  Baagh fought.

They had come, it seemed. With this little light, the nerve! The sheer despiration of their failed, but almost succeeded, unprovoked attack!  Baagh grabbed hold of one of Them.  With a mighty roar, her paws tore through their unnatural coverings and ripped at the flesh.  Her teeth sunk deep into the exposed veins of his neck, piercing the lines of blood and gushing it outwards.  Dripping with his warmth, Baagh bit deeply, innately.  The scream that followed sounded strangely like that of the monkey, earlier.  Perhaps a connection.  The other one ran, feet flinging the dirt behind his boots as quickly as gravity would allow them to leave the soil.  He pressed on into the fallen darkness, anxiously tearing at the leaves and branches in front of him, hoping to create some distance, a blockaid, anything.  All for naught.  Baagh had dropped his mate who no longer screamed onto the jungle floor and had started pursuit.  One, two, three seconds.  A leap, pushed upwards from the earth with that mighty balancing rod of a tail, and her paws pulled downwards until she was on top, all her depressed weight saddling against his resistance as she chewed at his neck with a vengeful ruthlessness.  One, two, three seconds later, the second one stopped screaming as well.  The jungle had no need for these sounds.

Baagh looked up, her  face saturated with the crimson red of accomplishment, as stars crept out of the darkening blue sky and filled the air with a blanket of twinkling lights.  Two victims of the night laid still in the trail with their discarded long, branchlike objects  tossed to their side.  On top of one,  a tiger perched.  What had been disappointment and a struggle only moments before had become a rekindling of a great  disparity: those who wish to hunt and those who actually succeed.  It is what is in the blood that counts, rather than any immediate convictions or lack therefore, it seemed.

The long evening home would be hobbled only by the slow dragging of the bodies up to the den, rather than by the plotting of a kill.  The instinct, a visceral reaction, still remained.  And for tonight, dinner for the family would be fresh, tasty and ethnic.