THE THRILL OF THE HUNT

         Night was quickly falling on the jungle.  The young hero kept walking, as he had done that entire day.  An unearthly mist still clung to the forest floor, shielding the young man’s eyes from what lay beneath.  The certainty of finding the captured princess, which had been inflamed by his arrival through torrential storms and a violent ocean, was quickly dying down.  He had no way of tracking Berk if he couldn’t see any tracks.

         He sat down, putting his back to a tree as he thought about his next move.  He’d tried everything he knew of.  As much as he had tried shutting them out, he reverted back to Berk’s lectures in his mind.

         “The best way to track an animal or a man is their footprints.  It’s simple and effective.  You can often tell how close what you’re chasin is by how fresh the tracks be.  The freshest tracks are warm, the soil underneath them moist with freshness.”

         “What if you can’t see the tracks,” the swordsman remembered saying?

         “Or what if there aren’t any tracks?  What if we’re chasing something, hunting something, that’s beyond this world,” the swordsman remembered his friend Drake fondly.  Drake always went to the darkest possible outcome when teachers would present them with these types of situations.

         “All right Drake, no need to let your imagination run away with you.  In the case of not finding any tracks, or finding old tracks, the best thing to do is examine your surroundings.  Look for anything left behin that could indicate which direction your quarry has gone in.  Avoid anything that could’ve easily been thrown off in another direction to throw you off the scent.  Keep your eyes sharp for pieces of cloth or drops of blood, things like that.  Think about the situation logically.  Common sense is often your best friend on a hunt.”

         The man was a great practical teacher and everyone he taught had realized how lucky they were to be schooled by him.  He chose who he would teach based on their performance in basic training.  He only taught when the king didn’t need him on an important assignment, which was rare, as he was certainly the most respected knight at court. 

He’d won great renown for putting in what was considered a lifetime of service in only twenty years.  He was only eighteen when he took off into the desert to fight the great desert leopard that had been terrorizing his village.  He left with a water satchel and returned with the head and claws of the great beast.  From that day onward he’d accomplished what became legendary stories told in every tavern across the land.  He would have been hailed the greatest hero of the age, and then he kidnapped the king’s fourteen year old daughter and taken her away to this cursed island.

            Why?  It didn’t make any sense.  Berk was the man who had taught the young knight the definition of knighthood.  Why would he fly in the face of everything he’d seemed to care so much about for half a lifetime?

             The young warrior snapped out of his reverie.  He didn’t have time to think about Berk’s motivations.  He just had to find his teacher as soon as possible.  That was another lesson he took from the man.

             “Always keep focused on the problem at hand.  When you get discouraged, and you will, it’s easy to let your mind wander.  You can’t let it happen.  Remember why you’re on the mission in the first place.  Someone is depending on you to succeed.  Come home victorious or don’t come home at all.”

             The young swordsman stood up and began examining his surroundings.  Luckily, the moon shone bright in the sky and gave him a good amount of light with which to do so.  He searched and searched but he could find no traces of any torn cloth or human debris.  He hadn’t really expected Berk to fall into the same traps that he’d taught them about, but still the young man searched meticulously casting a careful eye in every direction.

             His gaze stopped at a wall of branches and vines.  There seemed to be something about it that stood out to him.  He took a step back and tried to look at the foliage as a whole.  He noticed that some of the branches were bent back and vines that were tangled in unnatural ways.  All the irregularities seemed to form the outline of what looked to be a very large man.  The warrior’s eyes were drawn skyward, and in the distance he saw a single spire high above the jungle.  The structure seemed simple enough, nothing too decadent.  Suddenly it hit him, Berk would need a place to take the princess.  He’d been the first one to conquer this island’s trials and would have had plenty of time to claim that tower for his own.  Plus, from what the young swordsman knew of Berk, this tower fit his personality perfectly.  Berk was a man who prized simplicity.  He didn’t need much to be happy.  The tower was a single spire, perfect for a bird’s eye view of the jungle, and easily defended from any number of enemies.  Common sense.  It wasn’t very much to go on, but it was all the young hero had.  He approached the wall of greenery, looked one more time up at the tower, and then pushed through the foliage.  He smiled to himself.  The thrill of the hunt had returned.