He remembers the dread that had overtaken his body in that moment, a painfully stilling feeling. At the moment, for the first time in his short life, he was perfectly still.
He hadn't known fear like that before, the sense of something just being wrong. He would come to learn it in the centuries after, but in that moment he was certain that he would perish. He could feel his heart skip a beat and hear the anxious white noise fill his ears. His mother had told him that those instincts help you to survive but they felt more like symptoms in that moment.
The sea at the bottom of the cliff seemed to churn like a boiling pot of water, like it had been filled with an intense burning hatred. Those three canoes at the edge of the water towered like he had never seen, and although he didn't know, he would soon know those ships brought doom.
When the adrenaline hit him he realized he was holding his breath, staring unblinkingly out at the horizon. Immediately he took off, flying into the forest at top running speed. He cried his mother's name, but was met with nothing but echoes of the word over and over.
Sleep never came to him that night, instead he was awake, constantly trying to keep his senses strong for the feeling of new people entering his land. Strangely the feeling never came and as the sun came up he ran to the nearest tribe he could, breathing still constricted with paranoia.
He didn't calm when he saw them alive, instead he felt tears prick at the edge of his vision. An older woman quickly took notice, of that he was glad. Telling the eldest woman was the smartest and quickest ways to get important information that the children knew the adults needed, and this woman's eyes were filled with knowledge.
"What's wrong child?" She asked in her tribes tongue, one he knew instinctively.
"Yesterday, I felt that something wrong was going to happen. The feeling is still there and it won't leave my chest. I think the tribe needs to go to somewhere else, to somewhere where the wrong feeling won't follow," he explains tearfully. He watches the woman's eyes intently, waiting for an answer to his childish explanation.
"Have you told your mother?" She asked seriously, holding his hand comfortingly and brushing his dark hair from his face with the other.
"I called her name in the forest where she was and I couldn't find her, did she go to another land without telling me?" He asked, tears still dripping down his face.
"I'm sorry, I don't know my child. I'm sure she is okay, you will find her with time. For now I will tell the tribe the news that we should move." She rubs his back comfortingly and soon walks off with a determined gate in her step.
Later that afternoon he explains to the woman that he feels a calling to the southern tip of the land, that the feeling in his chest is like an arrow directing him there, like an uncontrollable force. She helps him to pack food and water, knowing the journey is dangerous for someone his size.
So he sets off across his mother's lands, across his land's, to meet that wrong feeling in the south. To meet what ever those canoes on the edge of the water hold.