The hoot of an owl wouldn’t have been such a strange thing to hear in the pitch dark of the woods at the beginning hours of a new day if they hadn’t all been caught, killed, or scared off. We hadn’t heard owls in these woods for the last several months. Crickets, sure. Cicadas, occasionally. But not owls, not anymore. Which meant that whatever was out there was not the local wildlife.
Whatever was out there was a stranger to my woods, and therefore a threat.
I fell easily into my hunting stance, freeing my buoy knife from the sheath on my thigh. She sang a cold and dangerous song into the silent night as she cut through the frigid air. She promised protection. She promised a fight. She promised death.
We slinked around and under the flora, my knife and I, listening for another call. Another abnormal sound in the chilled night air to lead us to our prey. She whispered to me as we lurked invisibly through the blackness. She implored me to move quicker. She begged me to quench her thirst.
Another hollow call lifted over the trees from my left, and we were off. She vibrated in my hand excitedly, eager for the taste of her favorite cocktail. We wove through the trees like a shadow in the dark; noiseless and nonexistent. We saw him before he saw us. Before he could press past his shock at seeing a thirteen year old girl with a knife bigger than her forearm, we were on him.
He fought and flailed, but she was already biting and clawing at his face and neck. I held on as he floundered, letting her have her way. Letting her do what needed to be done. Letting her drink her fill, until he was still and silent on the ground beneath the starry sky.
But he was only the diversion. The sacrificial lamb. As I was busy in the fight, feeling brave and superior for protecting my family with my life, the others swarmed my house.
I have no family now. Just me and my knife and a dead man who made bird calls.
This actually came from a prompt from a writer’s conference some years ago. The only thing we were given was “write something centered around the call of a bird”.
