Heading Home
It was going to be nightfall soon, David noticed the shift in colors over the past few hours. It was difficult to see how dark it was, he and his sister were in a particularly dense part of the wetland. Today hadn't been a very lucky day, the overwhelming humidity had made for scarce prey. Just as David started to make way through the condense brush to look for his sister, Kimberley, she appeared around a small tree.
"Any luck? I think I heard some raccoons, but I didn't see any". She finished the sentence excitedly, hoping for good news from David. He loved how she was so optimistic about nearly everything, to the point he worried if she could survive on her own.
"No, but-"
"Well then surely mother and father have got somethin'." She cut him off readily, she knew what David was about to say.
"Yes, but Kimberly, I know you don't like it, but there are no raccoons here." He didn't want to break those dancing eyes, but he had to make sure she understood how their livelihood worked, one mistake could lead to the inevitable. Perhaps David was being negative, but he remembered the daunting stories of what had happened to his mother's sibling when they strayed to far from reality.
Kimberly scowled at him.
"Surely there are some raccoons out there, ya can't deny that."
David smiled softly and turned away to begin their way home. He wished he could be obsessed with something like that, anything. He didn't care if it was some foreign animal or even a silly object, just something to take his mind away from the scares of the inevitable.
On their way to their den, as they liked to call it, Kimberly would scout ahead of him to look at things off of the side of the dwindling trail home. David took these times to admire her, her undenying ability to be amazed by every spec of dirt in the world. She was a bright twelve year-old and would grow to be a brave young women. He would miss her when he would have to move out and start his own life, every year seemed to draw closer.
David himself was a scared fifteen year-old nearly hitting six feet and two inches, he had dark black-brown hair, cut short to about an inch or two off his head. His sister on the other hand was about five foot three, he figured she wouldn't reach the height that he had, but from what he had heard from his father they were a particularly unusually tall pair of children.
Many minutes passed and over time the undergrowth began to dwindle and open up to patches of short grass. The sky was dark, a few streaks of rose pink and orange coated string of clouds, some of the brightest stars peeking out of the vast blue. Finally the trees have way to a small open area of stubby grass. A small shadowed hut stood in the middle.
Home.
