Wild Gourmet: Chapter 27

After another two hours, he found where the snake had bedded down the night before. It was a shallow depression in the shadow of a large shelf of rock, a place that should have been just a little more sheltered against the cold than the open terrain around it.

It slept here. That means it stops. That means I might just have a chance of catching up.

He pressed on. The trail after the bedding site was fresher and easier to follow, and he covered ground just that much faster as a result. One more tracking level came to him over the course of the next stretch. The skill was paying dividends in ways Brand hadn’t expected, too. He was now noticing potential fights long before the monsters noticed him, and had been able to successfully skirt around several on his long walk. It was wasted experience in some senses, but it seemed like a better idea to keep himself fresh for the big fight to come, if he could manage it.

The sun was dropping toward the horizon when the quality of the tracks changed. The trail in the dirt was suddenly crisp, entirely undegraded by the wind or dew. His tracking skill became much more noticeable at that point, probably as a result of finally dealing with tracks it considered to be fresh.

It took another half hour before he found the snake itself.

He saw it from behind a boulder, having dropped to a crouch the moment his tracking skill screamed at him to stop moving. The skill didn’t use words, but the message was at least clear. He had found his prey.

It was somehow much bigger than he had imagined it to be. The body was as thick around as he was tall, and five of him laid out end to end might match it in length. The scales were a dull mix of brown and green colors that blended with the ground well enough that he might have walked right by it if he hadn’t been paying close attention.

It was also moving slowly. He wondered why, until he followed the line of its gaze across the open ground and saw the ursine.

The bear was digging at the base of a dead tree, pulling apart rotten wood and soil in search of some kind of edible matter. It wasn’t as big as the one Brand had fought near Shemi’s stand of trees, but it was close enough. If it had any idea it was being watched, it didn’t show it.

Don’t kill my prey, bear. Not yet.

The snake struck. One moment, it was motionless. The next it had moved across fifteen feet of open ground, holding its mouth wide open as it struck. The bite hit the bear in the shoulder and was gone almost before the bear could react.

The ursine roared and spun, clawing at the air where the snake no longer was. It charged after the retreating reptile, covering three steps at a full sprint before its gait went wrong. It staggered sideways like a drunk man and caught itself, then tried to charge again. It didn’t get far before it collapsed onto its side. It didn’t get up.

The snake waited. It watched the bear from twenty feet away as the massive animal’s breathing slowed and its limbs stopped twitching. When it was sure, it moved forward and began to feed.

It’s an ambusher. One hit and you’re done. Just like a hunter is supposed to be. Which one of us will be better at it?

The snake didn’t rush, though it did move with clear anticipation. It circled the fallen bear twice, flicking its tongue in and out. Each pass brought it a little closer to actual contact. Brand watched from behind the boulder and kept himself as unnoticeable as he could.

On the third pass, the snake nudged the bear’s shoulder with its snout. The bear didn’t move. The snake opened its mouth wide and began the slow process of taking in its new meal.

Brand had heard about this, but he had never seen it happen. The snake’s jaw came apart, the lower half dropping away from the skull in a way that made the entire head look dislocated. The prospect of swallowing a whole bear had seemed impossible even for the largest snake Brand had ever seen a moment ago, but now it seemed inevitable.

It started at the bear’s head. Once that was in, the snake worked its way forward and used its body to push and compress the prey as it went. The scales along its throat stretched, but didn’t distort as much as Brand expected. The bear was enormous but the snake was simply bigger enough to take it in with minimal change in shape.

Brand’s stomach turned as the bear finally began to slide down the snake’s throat in earnest. He did his best to ignore the unsettled feeling, pressed down lower against the boulder, and kept watching.

The bear was disappearing quickly now, and if Brand stumbled upon the process now he wasn’t sure he could have figured out what the snake was even eating. One final flex of the jaw and the bear was gone entirely, visible only as a small bulge in the snake’s midsection.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

That could be me if I don’t watch myself.

He stayed behind the boulder and waited. If there was any mercy to be found in this situation, it would come from the snake’s digestion. Big meals were supposed to slow big monsters down. Brand had heard enough hunters talk to know it was almost a universal law, and had listened in on tales of taking down invincible monsters easily when they found themselves unable to move after a gorge.