“Here comes,” he called down to his hunting partner, his attention suddenly snapped back by the sudden approach of the creature. It had been audible the whole while, but from his vantage point he could now see the boar as it crashed through the foliage and slalomed around the root structures. Even from high up and at a distance he could see the manic gleam of fear in the beast’s eyes.
Kami and Jules, the hunt leader, had arrived at the opposite side of the outcrop. Shaped roughly like an oval, it came to a point where they had met. Each pair had skirted the outside to cover the possibility of the boar taking an early exit from the undergrowth, but the odds had always been weighted in favor of it making the distance in an attempt to lose what it believed to be its pursuers—the four men who waited now for it to emerge. Kami hunkered at the base of a tree, covered like Moses, while Jules scaled a neighboring tree so that he overhung the narrow path made by the confluence of tree roots that the creature was sure to take. As he edged along the branch to gain the optimum position, he was within touching distance of Jak, and the albino studied the man who led all the hunting expeditions. He was tall and rangy, with a heavily etched face. Streaks of gray ran through his close-cropped head. His hairline was bisected by the weal of an old and badly healed scar, which ran back across his skull to a point beyond the crown. His eyes were watery and bloodshot, and there was tension written in them as they met Jak’s.
“Ready, son?” he asked. Jak nodded.
Both men were armed with short hunting spears, the light shafts made of whittled balsa that were only just heavy enough to carry the finely honed and razor-sharp heads. Double-edged, the heads were barbed so that they would go in easily but resist any attempts by their prey to be removed and, in fact, would cause more damage as the attempts to remove them tore into the flesh. There was a window of a fraction of a second. The beast, squealing with fear, moved beneath them. For the briefest moment its back would be directly under their aim. In that moment, they would strike.
There was no word of command. There was no necessity. Both hunters knew by instinct sharpened by experience the optimum moment to strike. As one, they plunged their spears downward. The balsa shafts were light, but the heads of the spears were of a heavy pig-iron metal; and the weight used the light balsa as a flight.
One spear struck the boar where the skull joined the spine, the needle-sharp point of the head slicing through the thick layers of muscle that rippled on the creature’s massive neck and shoulders. Simultaneously the second spear arrived at an angle, cutting into the animal’s flanks, a throw designed to slice through the layers of flesh, fat and muscle to rip into internal organs, causing massive hemorrhaging.
The boar simultaneously reared and twisted, the twin points of agony searing into its brain, confusion adding to the pain as it tried to work out where its enemy was and how best it could defend itself. It almost doubled over, flipping around to face the direction it had run, squeals of agony and fear increasing. While it was facing away from Kanu and Moses, the two hunters made their move.
Darting from their hiding places, the men moved in on the creature, pulling back their arms to strike. They needed lightning reflexes at this stage, as the creature was erratic and unpredictable. It thrashed wildly, its awareness now clouded with a red mist of pain as blood flooded its guts and the barbed spearhead in the neck began to work its way down into the spinal cord each time it moved, cutting off motor neurone action.
Moses struck first. The creature turned wildly so that its head was toward him. The eyes were glittering and sightless, lost in some private hell of pain. Knowing it could still smell him and strike on reflex, Moses wasted no time in chucking his spear. It shot straight and true, taking the creature through one eye, the heavy metal head of the weapon driving forward to rip into the soft tissue of the boar’s brain.