[ IP ] Hunter [ x-post from /r/Art ]

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 SHE 
 
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 She ran, ran with the men of her tribe because there were not enough men to pick up spears and do it. 
 
 She ran, ran like the men of her tribe. Bare-chested, with leather-clad feet pumping up dust and a smooth wooden spear in hand. 
 
 The beasts ran like beasts, so the men and She, ran like beasts. 
 
 But this was not the beginning. 
 
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 He lay dying. The old man lay dying in the great sewn tent of skins and hide, atop a bed of pillowed grasses and stacked furs. More of those lay over him, as he shivered in the middle of hot summer. 
 
 This place brought bounty *and* danger in equal measure. 
 
 She watched him. She was to be his fifth wife, as was custom for the spirit guide. She had never been wed, never taken a man to her furs. 
 
 And She would not do so with this dying old man. 
 
 He shivered again and coughed, before raising his quivering arm and trembling finger, pointing to her. 
 
 His lips did not move, but the hunters understood. They had lost so many hunters moving the tribe north into the lowlands. From sickness after drinking the cursed water, and from bad hunts. 
 
 She had watched them from the bluff, where the trees thinned out and cleared, giving way to a vast grassland. So many animals, so much to hunt. 
 
 Deceptive. 
 
 Too many animals, for their small tribe. 
 
 There were fewer tribes this far north too, and many avoided their tribe because of the starkness of their skin. Most other tribes were darker, from where they had come. 
 
 Her eyes flashed back to the old man. His chest rattled and wheezed, and he was gone. 
 
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 The hunters reluctantly took her to the task of how to handle a spear, the first one had thrust the polished shaft of the spear into her hands and pointed at a hole in the tree. 
 
 Throw, he had made the motions. Throw, he gestured again. 
 
 She threw the spear. 
 
 Many times, She threw the spear and missed. 
 
 But She learned to aim, learned to balance herself. 
 
 Soon She was as good as their best, and her body was no longer soft but hard beneath the surface of her ivory skin. Her light eyes gleamed sharply as She honed her craft, a craft the other women of the tribe disdained. 
 
 She fit in with neither group, was of neither group of her tribe. 
 
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 She was running. Her thighs, muscular and lean, flexed with each leap of her body through the air, gliding along the air somewhere between ground and sky. 
 
 She was a hunter. 
 
 She was *the* hunter, here. Now. This was her hunt. 
 
 The men lagged behind, their bodies honed for quick hunts and great strength. Her body was honed for stamina, for speed. 
 
 She ran on the outside of the herd of creatures, in that great expanse of grasses. To her left, Big-Manes and Curl-Horns and Long-Legs, all ran together. 
 
 She ran with them. 
 
 Beast with beast. 
 
 Her fingers curled against the polished wood of the spear. The Big-Mane running next to her eye'd her wildly, eyes gleaming like hers, nose panting out great gusts of air like her, mane and expanse of hair whipping in the wind, like her. Her small breasts heaved with the exertion, and the Big-Mane's did too. 
 
 The Big-Mane and She ran as one, until she plunged the spear around her, in front of her, and into it. 
 
 Together they collapsed, tumbled, and fell as one. Dust from a thousand feet of animal and hunter blew past them, until a quiet settled in. 
 

