bengladeshibeastofburden

The tall dark grass… interspersed with stripes…

…was unusually still.


The dark man in the lead with the sickle slashed the undergrowth like he was whipping it the same way he and his ancestors for many generations back had been whipped all their lives…

indifferently, thoughts someplace else.

Their skin was slick and brown; their massive black eyes rolled in their sockets at every sound until their eyes too seemed to be perspiring.

The world resonated with the crazed yawps of the gibbons – louder; louder – merely echoing the voices in the men’s skulls. But they were used to the devilish cries of the jungle.

Hack slash hack.
The sickle chopped the undergrowth harder.

It was never good when they didn’t find one near or in the water.

Fowl cawed crickets hissed… Claws out… tails swished.

A rumble so deep-seated it rolled from the stomach.

The leader came to a halt, where the other nine men’s eyes grew to the size of white fists and immediately uncovered their arms.

So… the devil is… the flying… orange-coated, black-striped… spirit… of a feline,

was the last thought of one of the men, called Raffa, as he stupidly stared up into the air at his fate.

Most of the men scurried to a safer distance – the leader, his son and whoever else was left tried to hack at the dragonlike feline with their long, thick blades; the leader’s son quickly tried to shoot him with the old rust-colored shotgun, but accidentally shot the canopy instead.

But the war-painted animal had seen these small, emaciated primates and their firearms before and knew that with them, it was a different sort of fight. He’d landed with his mouth on Raffa’s head, and, with an orange trunk-sized forearm, he enveloped him, pulling Raffa’s body and himself away from the other men.