Thursday, October 10, 2013

Connor: The Thrill of The Hunt

It was the year 2013 CE.  The human race was entirely hunter-gatherer, hunting animals and gathering plants.  We kept moving no matter what.  Sometimes we would split up, half of us would hunt and the other would gather.  I was almost always in the hunting group, my name was Walter Vladson.  I had taken my best spear to kill a mammoth, a really hairy, ugly elephant.  Our diet consisted of berries and fruits for days now and we needed meat.  I managed to sneak up on one when I found it.  A fossil, millions of years old and not belonging to any dinosaur we knew of.  It wasn't just a bone, but an entire skeleton perfectly preserved in the middle of nowhere.  We named our locations only after we'd passed through them.  Some we named after the people who found them.  The big ones were Greg Valley, Williams Forest, and Lake Vlad.  The land bridges that never seemed to vanish for more than one season of the year were not named.  In hindsight it would probably have been better to not name the locations after people.  Unfortunately we also went about naming dinosaurs after the surroundings.  That resulted in names like Tangerinesaurus Rex and Applesaurus.  I decided to name it the Waltersaurus, although I refused to let anyone know about it.  I walked away from it and immediately attacked the mammoth.  I lodged the spear right in the leg, but due to the design the mammoth would bleed to death in an hour.  The other hunters helped me to carry the mammoth meat back to camp.  We ate well for about a week or two before we had to hunt again.  I spotted another mammoth and ran up to kill it, but behind me was a saber-tooth.  All the other hunters noticed it fast enough to run away, but I was too slow.  I had killed the mammoth, only to turn around and see the creature that would bring about my demise.  The saber-tooth grinned maliciously at me and growled, then it lunged toward me.  My last sight was the massive jaws and claws as it tore into my flesh.