Challenge

The night enveloped all. The heat smothered everything. It was the wild, the home of nature itself, in full. It was the jungle. If ever a place gave the feeling of what it was to experience hunting and being hunted, it was this place. No other in the world could give it. Why? Because this was not the African Savanna with its open plains and chases. This was not the frozen Tundra or ice of the Arctic with its numbing chill and endless sea of white. This was not the ocean with its turbulent currents and depths, nor was it the sky with its vast openness and instability.

This was where life moved at various paces and ways. Everything was close together here, and all existence hinged upon your every move, this all creatures knew beyond doubt inside the core of themselves. All manner of sizes, forms, and ways of sustenance battled here. The plants fought with each other for space and climbed relentlessly towards the sun. The insects were ever moving and diverse in the air and vegetation. The reptiles were at their most dangerous and exploded from stillness into sudden and violent action.

The unwary and colorful fell easy victim to the relentless and eternally-roaming carnivores, who did not trust that their kills might be targeted, and so quickly would move them out of the reach of others. Virtually everything here in this environment was a killer even if it consumed vegetation.

"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Conell in 1924. What other book could so easily capture the heart and soul of a hunter? For those who read it, then they would know that the most dangerous game, according to the characters, was a man himself. Why was that? Because nothing was the same as that. For a Russian Aristocrat in the story, the hunting of anything has grown wearisome because there is no challenge in it, so he purchases an island and proceeds to make a trap out of it for ships that pass. The survivors then become challenged to a game of wits with him and must survive three days straight. And he never failed once until he met a certain man who ultimately killed him rather take any chances.

Perhaps tonight, this very night, was like that very tale. The time was when the sun was absent, but the moon was out. The sounds were those of insects, but visible movement was hidden from the eyes, as it always was in the jungle. However, the thick atmosphere was disturbed by a presence moving within it, the kind that had two legs and a calculating mind.

The scowl on the face spoke of concentration and his appearance spoke of a rather dangerous life. He had symbolic tattoos of dark ink on his left arm, and he also kept a nine-inch knife close. The ground was knelt upon and brushed with expert fingers. It was brought up to the nose and the tongue. There was a trail here. A bit faint but it had not been properly covered and it was a little bit out in the open. Hmmm. The scent in the air drew his attention from the earth towards a sanguine stream of liquid that was flowing in strings down on nearby leaves. He tasted the blood. Fresh.

He stood up slowly and found the silhouette. His leopard skin-covered right hand brandished the knife, fingers tightening. The teeth that formed the necklace about his neck would shortly be adorned with new trophies. His blood thrummed with increased vigor in his veins. The moments before the kill… when life sang at its loudest.

"You grow slow in old age, Sergei." He thrust forward and was rewarded with the noise of the blade striking true. With too little resistance, however. It couldn't be, he thought, as his heart sank deep into the depths. His senses helped it fold into reality as he desperately pulled with knife, and free hand, the truth towards himself: an empty garment.

"A fate indeed you will not share." Instantly the predator within him spun with his teeth bared… in futility. He never got to do anything except lunge backward and spin around and find himself caught by the bare hands of his hardened and dangerous adversary. Tendons bulged and became visible as he strained, but even with adrenaline strengthening him, it was like trying to push a mountain. Nothing.

He was held off the ground without strain, his knife hand imprisoned by the left hand of his so-called "prey", and the right hand simply held him by the throat. The knife clattered away as his hand spasmed with pain that forced the fingers to open. The worst part was the eyes of he who had asked of him the ultimate test of mettle. He saw nothing but an anger he could not name, frustration, complete detachment, and lack of anything that visibly revealed mercy.

He knew it didn't exist in this man, but now all he could do is find himself wanting it more than anything. The hunt was not to be like this. "All night," breathed the figure who wore a lion skin. "I was your shadow in every way, for hours, and you did not even begin to have the ability to know that I was there. How disappointing can you possibly be?"

An intensifying of pressure about his throat, and then, somehow, he was falling, and the light was shrinking – fading away like closing camera shutter – and fuzzily he could only believe that his neck must have been broken. The lack of any explosive sensations only told the last neurons in his brain this before he fell upon the earth.

The hunt was ended. For someone at least it was ended.

. . . . .

The bushes rustled but the lion-skin wearing man only bitterly sighed as those who followed came to him. "I ask for a challenge, an equal," he said sadly to the ones who loyally were ever with him and helped be hands and feet and eyes for him. "And yet this is all you can achieve? Is everything gone from me so soon?"

"Perhaps," stated a burly, armored African, coming forward with a tablet, "it is time for new grounds. There is a place… one of certain interest of late…"

His face was illuminated by the green light of the image. It showed him… everything. Not one, not two, but many, so very many. Trophies, rarest and most unique of prizes; and a jungle just waiting for games to begin.

"Light the fires," the hunter said, a note of vigor in his voice. His face in the light was of a being renewed. "The Great Hunt… begins," he stated as he turned for the jungle.

Not in the jungle of nature this most fantastic of events, no, but in the Jungle… of Man. Of that which Man had built.