1
Raja
A pig changed my life.
No, wait, that doesn’t sound right, scratch that - a wild boar changed my life. That sounds more dramatic.
The summer heat and sweltering humidity bore deep into my skin as I lounged in my hammock, my forearm draped over my eyes. The hammock swung gently from the tree as the warm breeze trickled through the thick rainforest. Only underneath the dense canopy was the temperature a bit cooler. I’d stripped down to my shorts and was attempting to doze through the midday heat when familiar chatter coming from below roused me from my lazy nap.
“It’s a big one. Biggest one in the whole rainforest, I swear it.”
“Don’t believe him, he’s just making it up.”
“This is just like the time he said he saw that rhinoceros but it was just a big rock…”
A now indignant voice replied, “It isnota lie! I swear on my mother!”
A serious threat. The other voices fell hushed. Intrigued now, I peered over the edge of the hammock. I already recognized the voices as my cousin Koto - who was the one swearing on his mother - and my friends from the clan, Bodi and Zumi.
Zumi made an exaggerated display of rolling her eyes that I could see even from up in the canopy. “We know you’re up there eavesdropping, Raja, so you might as well just come down.”
With a dramatic sigh, I shifted easily into my animal form - a black panther - and slunk down the tree trunk. With my sharp claws and powerful muscles, I leapt down gracefully to the earthy ground below. When I landed, I shifted back and tossed my windswept black hair over my shoulder.
“Hey,” I announced. “So, Koto, you saw the biggestwhatin the rainforest? Respond fast before I make an inappropriate joke.”
Koto shoved me. “A wild boar.”
“Damn, I was hoping you’d say a rooster.”
Nobody laughed at my crude joke.
“It was the biggest boar I’d seen in my life,” Koto continued, ignoring me. “It could feed our entire clan for weeks.”
“And are yousureit’s not just a boar shifter from the Skrofa clan?” Zumi asked.
We all knew we weren’t the only shifters in the rainforest. The chiefs of each village all knew each other, and we had a pact not to hunt or disrupt the lives of other shifters. We rarely ran into others like us simply because our territories were fairly distanced, but other chiefs could visit neighboring clans for big events and the like. Our own people, Pardus clan, lived deep inside the rainforest for our own protection. As leopard shifters, we needed to protect ourselves from human poachers hunting for a pretty and expensive pelt.
“I’m definitely sure,” Koto said seriously. “It didn’t have the gait or intelligence of a shifter - it was just walking around stupidly and snorting in the dirt. It smelled like a regular boar, too. Besides, Skrofa clan territory is practically on the other side of the island! If we did attack a shifter, he could just shift back to normal, and then we’d yell at him for being on our territory.”
Bodi and Zumi exchanged glances. It was clear now that Koto wasn’t lying, and the boar was safe to hunt, but that meant they had another problem - taking down the boar itself. Hunting an adult male boar was already nothing to sneeze at, but if it truly was as monstrous as Koto claimed, it was possible somebody could get injured during the hunt.
The meat would be a huge boon. As a small clan shunned and feared by the nearest humans, we had nobody to trade with or purchase from. Everything we ate came from our own hunting efforts. But lately, the rainforest was lacking any game bigger than a small deer, and that wouldn’t feed an entire clan, so we were stuck eating fruit and leaves in our human forms.
And frankly, as a carnivore, I was getting sick of it.
“I’m in,” Zumi said, instantly convinced. “When do we go?”
“I’m going to let the chief know first, and get his blessing,” Koto explained with a glance in my direction. The chief was my father, Eka.
“Let’s go now,” Bodi suggested. “I want to go as soon as possible!”
Without another word, they all shifted into their leopard forms and made a beeline for the chief’s hut among the canopy. They were all normal leopards - a deep gold with black rosettes, great for camouflaging underneath the dappled rainforest light.
Unlike me.
I grunted to myself in frustration as I watched them go. Of course they wouldn’t invite me. Why would they?
Who would invite someone who wasn’t allowed to leave the village?
