Gumiho: Our Life Has Just Begun (3)
Chapter 3
As a human child, they tell you never to play with your food--it's messy and disrespectful of the one serving the meal.
As a fox, playing with food is second nature, but it was the human side of me--or what remained of it, that toyed with the mouse I had just caught in the leaves. I held it between my paws, picked it up by the tail with my mouth, and swung it about, squeeling, terrified. I let it try and run away; pounced upon it gracefully and catching it back up, I rolled onto my back and held it up in the air between my paws. I tried to picture it with a human face--tried to picture a man only halfway through his life, finding out his life was about to come to an end by my hand.
It just didn't fit me, no matter how natural it was. I bit down hard on the poor thing and began chewing away at its skin, peeling away fur with my carnassals, and tasting the blood with my tongue. Its life ended in an instant, it was now nothing more than food.
Relishing the meal, I spat out fur and bone, swallowing down the insides, making them part of me. I could not do the same for this man, but I would do my best to see to it that he did not die in vain either. He at least deserved that, even if he was a threat to the family.
Something scuffled in the bushes nearby, and my body sprung to attention at once, hackles raised. Sniffing, I caught scent of one of my own. It peaked through the leaves cautiously, before springing out to confront me.
We both circled, taking whiffs of one another. I knew this one--she was nameless, but I had seen her take human guise before. I didn't know where she lived--dad never let us know each others' locations directly, to help ensure our collective safety from hunters. He mostly told only those like Marcus, who he could intimidate, threaten, silence into secrecy. There was no kidding myself that some of us didn't want to exist. I was almost one of them, myself. Any of us could turn the others locations over to a hunter, given enough self-loathing, and people like Marcus were easy to keep captivated, placated, or simply watched--thanks to their limited human abilities. It wasn't the same with us. Dad was smart like that--it was how he had survived so very long. How we would continue to survive.
She seemed to take a liking to me, because when I dismissed her and walked off, I could hear her following shortly behind. She couldn't know my mission, could she? I thought on it for awhile as I loped on through the woods, weaving between tree trunks, and around gulleys and hills, seeking the tree line, the boundary between her world and that of my victim-to-be. Leaves and branches crunched and cracked beneath my paws, and I felt my humanity lulling into a trance.
I caught a scent of something burning suddenly, and stopped dead. It wasn't such a strange smell for a person, but it was a rare one for an animal, especially here in the woods. I sat on my haunches and searched the sky for a trail of smoke--for signs of a fire. The bows of trees obscured my vision, and my own eyes were poor for the intended purpose. I had sacrificed my colored, detailed human vision for that of a fox--and let me be humble--fox vision is a load of shit. It was fine for guiding me to a moving target like a mouse, but not for viewing the contrast between the sky and smoke, or smoke and clouds, or even smoke and leaves on branches. I'd not the time to try and force a change--putting on any human part without clothing, or a suitable fascimile, was hard enough for me without trying to change one specific part and not another--and I needed to be able to run and blend in.
Instead, I tried to scent the source of the foul odor, as best I could, and tuned my ears for the babbling sound of human voices. It was possible, if not likely, that my quarry was actually out in the woods now, looking for me.
"Unhhh..." a stifled murmur to my rear called. I whipped around. It was her, in human form; what was she doing?! Her body devoid of clothes, breasts hanging unbound, black hair reaching to her waist--a beautiful, asian girl's guise--did she want to reveal us both?!
She crawled to me on hands and knees, sniffed me with her nose as if she did not even realize what she had done, and smiled stupidly; obliviously. This was clearly some youngster, perhaps the result of one of father's recent conquests--but was she this stupid, changing into a naked human in the middle of the woods, where there might be hunters about? She took a hand and stroked me, gurgling like a baby--she had no grasp of language yet, it seemed.
When some of us were made, we held onto a shred of what we used to be--a name, a memory, perhaps even our own face. Then there were others who lost everything--were born again entirely as animals, with no doubt of our identity, and no need for reconciliation. When I was younger, I had envied those sorts; free of the chains of human existence, there was no questioning of one's self--no endless nights spent wondering where one stood between the lines of humanity and animality.
Looking at this vixen though, it was a different story. I took pity on her--dumb as a rock. She may have been a fine fox, but had no grasp of what it was to pretend humanity. She clumsily staggered about, attempting to stand on two legs like a toddler--fell, and pissed herself, then got on all fours and began sniffing the air as if she still had our snout, our senses.
Suddenly, I was broke from my fixation on the fledgeling. I smelled the scent she was searching for. My hair stood up on edge. It was another male.
My teats became firm, and I broke into a lust. Was it that time of year already? I had an estrus, like all foxes, but I hadn't realized I was still so sensitive to nature's call. Time as a human washes away your natural processes, masks them under a human's cycle. I had gotten used to being human, and now my body wanted to go back to the way of a fox.
I stood my ground, but she did not. As if it were nothing but a layer of sand on her coat, she shook off her human form and went trotting ahead into the trees, sniffing eagerly for the scent, and looking to mate.
She was greated instead by a deafening gunshot. I cringed. It wasn't unknown for hunters to use our smell as bait, and it worked so well against our kind. I had the experience of having the trick used on me before--but by father, who had taught me how to resist the inclination to mate for this very reason. Now she had fallen into a trap layed for me, or at least, for our kind. I felt a twinge of guilt, as I crept slowly forward, to examine the scene, doing my best not to attract the aim of a human weapon.
"Another one," a man's voice murmured. "Three already. Looks like he wasn't joking, they're everywhere."
I saw him: a lumberjack's jacket, a hunting cap, the barrel of a rifle held in one hand like a cane as he stood over his quarry. He stooped, setting the gun down, and dragged her body over by a small campfire, where he sat down, and began to skin her--taking a knife, and making cuts in her hide, in preparation to pull the whole thing off.
My stomach churned, watching the process, at once both captivated and horrified. It was like a slasher film, where the jigsaw killer has you cut off an extremity for his pleasure, only I wasn't finding any pleasure in the process. I heaved, wretching up bile and partially digested mouse, as he pealed her skin away from the muscle beneath. The whole process took about eight minutes, and when it was done, the hunter threw her body away in the woods, wrapped up her pelt, and added it to a pile.
Something stirred in me, an alien feeling I'd not experienced before. I watched him as he packed his things, muttering "That's enough for today," and made to follow him as silently as I could.
It wasn't until we both finished the walk out of the woods, and he loaded his things up into the backseat of a pickup and revved the ignition that I understood what this feeling was: pure, unadulterated hatred. I lept into the bed of the truck, curled up against a wheel casing, and waited for him to reach his destination. Heaven help him if he was my quarry--I wasn't just going to kill him anymore. I couldn't explain it, but my thoughts of mercy had been washed away by what I had just seen.
This man was my mouse now, and I was going to defile him.