Wait and See

After some pondering she has decided that the best she could do is... Nothing at all. All she has as evidence of someone observing her is a hunch, like a voice in the back of her head warning of something, if it is of dangerous or anything else, she can´t say, but now that she is aware of this, she could no longer be taken off guard, so long she is able to keep track of it but, the thing is, she the best at multitasking, she needs to take this slowly. First, she needs to find food, a hunt on an empty stomach pretty much guarantees failures, as her late mother used to say while she dreamt of being a Huntress herself. But she can´t take her attention off this feeling she has just been reminded of, so she does a short meditation routing, a simple breathing exercise her mother had taught her, inhaling slowly, her chest puffing out, her stomach retracting; and then exhaling, relaxing. After a few times, she has cleared her mind of all unnecessary distractions and, freshly focused, she can take on the task at hand: finding food.

Luckily, for her, she finds a nice old apple tree, the apple are so ripe she might be able to catch it just by waiting it to fall, but she has another idea. She takes a stone off the ground, a small, round one and then, with a marksman´s accuracy, throws it on the apple at a moderate speed, making the apple fall to the tree, now it is just a simple task of catching it in midair and done, now she had a perfectly edible apple, rinse and repeat on a few other trees, and she got a pack full of nutritious fruits and even some nuts, to sustain her through the day. The whole gathering took her an hour, but even then, that same feeling of being observed never left her head, if this wasn´t real, she thought, she must be developing a serious case of paranoia, but she couldn´t let this take all of her minds pace, now was the hard part: hunting.

He stomach now calmed, after she ate a few of the fruits, she could go on. By the position of the sun and the color of the sky, she figured that she must have left the village about 2 hours ago, at least now she was ready to take on the Deer. Today she is confident, she knows this forest by heart now and she has figured, more or less, the area the Deer use to feed himself (or herself, she couldn´t figure that out either) during the day, although she couldn´t find his hiding place at night, she is confident that she knows where he will be, by now, but that was only half the battle of tracking him, this is because the damned beast was also smart, he has been known to act unpredictably while being hunted, one of her hunting colleagues, Amelia, had told her that when her own father tried to hunt it, the beast just changed his daily routine and he even walked backwards to confuse his tracks, there was one time, Amelia said, that her father had fallen into a trap... Made by himself, although Amelia had made her promise not to tell anyone. All in all, most hunters would agree, this was an exceedingly hard prey and most don´t even attempt it after years of trying, most Hunters, when encountering the distinctive marks of this known beast, would just back away and get something else, even if it meant he wouldn´t get anything that day. Even then, even after pretty much everyone else telling her this was a fool´s errand (and even because of this), she had decided to mark it as her prey before everyone else could possibly set his sights on it, specially that imbecile Karl. She was determined to do this, not only her own sense of glory, but to honor her mother´s name, Maya: even if she was known as a traitor, she could ease this by proving that her lineage was still a strong one. The challenge called to Lina and she couldn´t back away.

The strange thing is, the Deer haven´t changed his routine, at all, as if he is mocking her, calling her a failure and this sh couldn´t let pass. Even if that voice was still distracted (or warning her), she couldn´t let herself fail because of this.