The Foragers

by Katherine Nader

  I paused for a moment. “A friend told me.” I ran into the forest, over the downed logs and across the bushes until it was dark enough for nobody to spot us.

  Chapter Three

  Maya

  A red ribbon rose from the rocks at the bottom of the Anmon River. I looked into the river’s silver surface, watching the unfamiliar green eyes that stared back at me. The tattoo on my neck itched. I peered over the stream into the distance where burned twigs lay in a pit on the other end of the river. The current of the water quickened when dawn broke. I traced the shape of a spider on the hilt in the water and recognized it as a kunai from the Mori Clan. I tugged at the thick wire around my ponytail. My hair fell onto my shoulders. I flung away fallen hair strands and promised to never dye my hair again.

  I tied the end of the wire through the hole in the hilt, and loosened a kunai from the bunch that dangled in a chain around my belt. One of my blades had a blunt end. Usually, I sharpened the ends like spears, but this one was stubborn. It looked like the kunai my village used for rice planting.

  Many branches of beech trees hung over the water and the bridge of rocks bordered the edge of the Anmon Falls. The rocks became slippery when the current rose, making the fall more dangerous. I tied the end of the wire to the hole in my hilt, identified the spider etched into it like the one in the water, stretched the wire to the lowest tree branch that hung over and stabbed the kunai into the bark. The wire swayed with the tree branch five feet above.

  I snapped a long twig from the branch and knocked away the lighter rocks on the top. The water carried them down the Anmon falls. The tide rose.

  Come on…Come on!

  I waited for the rocks at the bottom to budge. The wind blew in my direction. The water rose higher and higher and higher.

  “Yes!” I jumped up to catch the flying blade. I released my kunai from the branch and untied the wire that joined them. They clanked together as I attached them to my belt. The black blade dangled alongside five other silver ones that glimmered from the rising sun’s rays.

  “He’s going to come back, I’m telling you.” A girl and a Japanese man approached the pit of burned wood across the river. “He needs his weapon, how else will he survive in this forest?”

  I hid behind a tree.

  “He saves my life and then steals my badge—”

  The Japanese man gestured for the girl to halt.

  “What is it, Juro?” she asked him.

  Juro lifted the binoculars around his neck to his eyes.

  The girl crossed the bridge of rocks and checked the spot where I snatched the blade. “It’s gone!”

  I lunged over the arched roots of trees, ran, grabbed a branch and swayed over the broken logs—but my sweaty palms slipped. I landed on both feet and leaned against a wide beech tree. My heart throbbed, my face burned and my breath broke out in short gasps. I lost track of my predators and no longer heard them in the distance.

  The ground shook. The leaves vibrated. A shadow split from the shade of the trees as a black bird soared over the branches and disappeared south of the river. I glanced around the tree. A pack of grey and white serows charged down. The ground shook as a group of them thundered past and disappeared to my right. I exhaled and peered back to the left. The girl and her guard hid six rows of trees behind.

  “We know you’re out there!” the girl shouted. “We just want what you took from us.” She fumbled for her camera, adjusting its lens.

  Something was wrong. I smelled decay. The ground shook more intensely than when the serows had come. Something big was coming.

  “Konaide!” I yelled in Japanese. “Stay back!”

  “Oh ho, the girl speaks.” The girl and the Japanese man moved closer towards my tree. “Just wait till I show this to my viewers. I’m going to be the next Sharon.”

  “I’m warning you…” I wrapped the wire around my hair several times, tied a knot and rolled up my leather gloves. My exposed fingers loosened all blades from my belt. I gripped three in each hand, each blade clutched between two fingers.

  HOOF!

  The girl and the Japanese man stepped back. Our heads turned to the left. Bushes and leaves flew from side to side, twigs and wooden chips cracked, more calls from feathered creatures echoed in the sky and the vibrations on the ground quickened with each step. A big black head emerged from the bushes, and with the might of a thousand pounds, the claws of the animal crunched a log.

  “Bear!” I shouted. All three of us ran down the serows’ tracks. The ground quaked as the black bear chased us.

  “How did you know it was coming?” the girl panted as she caught up with me, her camera pointing at her back.

  I looked down at the woman’s leather boots with two inch flat heels. “That heel’s going to break,” I snorted. Her left heel broke off and she swayed to one side. I grabbed her arm, pulled her towards me and we both tumbled down the slope of a hill. I pushed the girl off me and rolled over to catch sight of the serows ahead.

  “My camera,” the girl whined. It had slipped out of her hand and was nowhere to be found.

  “You go straight there and you…” I gestured to the Japanese man at the top of the hill. “Go left.” I split from the serows’ tracks and headed to the stream.

  “W-Wait!” the girl called after me and then turned to follow after the serows’ tracks. The black bear sniffed the air and slowed down.

  “Over here!” I clanked the blades against each other.

  The bear’s ears pricked.

  I ran to the Anmon Falls and clanked my blades again. The bear charged towards me and I scratched his black fur as he plunged into the water. Blood dripped from my lip. I licked it.

  The bear’s head erupted from the water and shook as he paddled towards me.

  I threw my arms over the tree branch above the river and landed on the line of rocks that bordered the Anmon Falls.

  The bear attempted to mount the rocks, but the strength of the current carried his weight closer to the edge of the fall. His forepaws dug into the rocks, causing them to crack. He pulled himself forward as I crossed to the other end of the river. More rocks loosened under the bear’s weight. He made a sound like a yelp, before slipping over the edge and dropping down the two-story high waterfall. I peered over the edge. The bear moaned. He paddled away from the waterfall and limped to shore.

  “Is it dead?” The girl climbed over the border of rocks behind me.

  I pointed my blades at her, like claws.

  “Whoa!” The girl raised her hands. “You have so many of them. Are you a Mori?”

  I took a step back when she came closer.

  “I don’t think you want to kill me,” the girl said with a smirk. “You just saved us from a bear.”

  “Drop it.” Something touched my back.

  “That’s Juro. He works for me.” The girl pointed to the Japanese man behind me. A silver bracelet glimmered around her wrist. “Isn’t it nice to have someone obey your every word? This man will kill you if I tell him to.”

  “You got ten men keeping you and your pretty clothes from being scathed?” I snickered. “Juro means the tenth man, doesn’t it, Lady Aya Hidek—”

  “You will address her as Ojosama.” Juro’s weapon pushed into my back again and I felt its width.

  “You recognize me?” Aya chuckled. “Of course, who wouldn’t know the Hideki Group if it wasn’t for the Kan—”

  I cut the silver bracelet loose from around Aya’s wrist, twisted her arm behind her back and raised the bracelet to my teeth. “Hard. The next time I won’t go gentle on you.” I grinned, pushed her forward and dodged the blow from Juro’s stick.

  I scratched his chest with my claws. He scampered back in pain.

  “Calm down, little girl. We just want to ask you a question.” Aya nursed her hand. “Who’s your employer?”

  I looked down the waterfall at the bear. He growled at my predators from the shore, and tried to climb up the slope. “He’s scared of the trick I
just pulled on him,” I told them. “He might not like it if you get to me first.”

  Aya backed away from the edge and held on to Juro’s shoulder.

  “Celio took your badges, I presume?”

  Aya and Juro nodded.

  “Did you tell your father?”

  “If I told him that the last surviving members of the Italian family attacked me,” Aya explained, “he might just pay the Kan to orchestrate another fire, even if it were to break out in this forest.”

  “So, why didn’t you?”

  “Because that’s not how I want to win.” She smiled.

  “So, just start afresh. Go after your predator.” I stepped back onto the soil again. “This bear ran after serows until it found something sweeter. Don’t you think?”

  “It sounds a lot like something you did to the Kan.”

  I snapped a twig under my foot and tightened my fingers around the kunai. “I’m not a snake!” I spat. “Not anymore.”

  “See? We have a lot to talk about.”

  ***

  Slash. Slash. I scraped the wood. I let them get to me again. Slash. Slash. I marked three lines with my kunai on the bark of each tree.

  My eyes landed on a brown nest in a hornbeam. I climbed up and reached inside it. “It’s still here.” Relieved, I pulled my hand back and withdrew an egg to my lips.

  Ka kaw…kaw…kaw, the whistle echoed in the forest.

  The songs of birds quieted. I counted to three and whistled again.

  Ka kaw…kaw…kaw.

  I remembered the time when a woman once asked me if I liked birds. She had long chestnut hair, a rifle slung across her shoulder and a dead bird tied to her waist. We walked down a yellow forest trail that had a line of budded flowers waiting to bloom.

  “Bonjourno,” she said to an old farmer pushing a three-wheeled wooden cart past us.

  “Bonjourno, Signora,” he said, tipping his hat.

  “Signora?” I asked.

  “The people here are too kind,” she said. “Just call me Amelia.”

  I spotted a treehouse ahead and Amelia led me up the ladder. Drawings and dolls decorated the wooden walls. She walked onto the porch and grabbed a chair. “Come.”

  I took her hand.

  “What do you see?”

  I peered into a nest on a branch. “Eggs.”

  “And?”

  “One of them is blue.”

  “Exactly. Now, keep watching.”

  Tiny grey arms sprung out from the blue egg as it cracked open. The nestling’s beak opened and it let out a cry. With webbed feet, it stepped out of its shell and pecked at the eggs around it. It bent its head crookedly as it pushed the eggs out of the nest, one by one. I watched them splatter on the ground.

  “It’s a Cuckoo,” Amelia said, “in a Dunnock’s nest.”

  “What will the mother do when she comes back?”

  “She will raise the Cuckoo as her own. She won’t even know what happened.” Amelia helped me back down again. “I want you to have this.” She handed me an egg-shaped whistle. “I made it for you to always remember who you are and the big future you have ahead of you.”

  Pushing the memory away, I returned the egg-shaped whistle to the nest, landed on my feet and swirled my blades against the bark of the tree to etch a circle, like a bear marking its territory.

  I unrolled a piece of paper from my pocket to reveal a map I had drawn. I pointed at the red mark above where it said Anmon Falls, circled the spot where I found the kunai near the blue line—the Anmon River, drew a spider on the water and turned the paper over. To contestant number one, I read. A list of names written next to badge numbers three, four, five and six marked its corner.

  The Kan will know you survived the fire, Aya’s voice laughed in my ear. Tick-tock. Tick.

  I tightened the wire around my ponytail, lowered my black hood over my head, erased my tracks and made sure no one followed me. I tucked my hands into my pockets and headed towards the maze of the Nihon Canyon. Climbing the orange and grey walls, I skidded down some rocks that collapsed into the river below. They joined the waterfall over the Shadow Gate, a wall that caved in during an earthquake three hundred years ago. My fingers felt for the holes in the black and orange stones as I walked alongside the ridge. It felt cold. I pressed my back against it. At five meters high, I could see the entire forest including the roof of a five-floored pagoda. The white-peaked mountains surrounded us, the maze unfolded beneath the ridge, a part of it barred by the hunters’ fence, and the Mori Mountain spanned the other half of the forest past it. I grasped an opening in the wall behind me and, in the dark I lead myself into the mouth of a cave.

  “The security office lets us bring in weapons, except for matches,” a voice echoed from inside.

  “Jun?” I crouched near the long-haired assassin, took the stone in his hand and scratched my blunt blade against it. The dead weeds caught fire. Jun’s face lightened. His glasses glared.

  “New bracelet? Looks expensive.”

  I rubbed the silver bracelet around my wrist and sneered. “That was fast. Did you catch your—”

  “Prey?” another voice replied. A boy with a magenta mohawk smiled—Masaki. His metallic braces reflected orange. “Funny how your team of screw-ups fell for that American’s tricks.”

  Jun stood up, fists clenched by his sides. “Shima’s the idiot, always flashing around his bag of badges. He was bound to get caught.”

  “And what about you?” Masaki laughed. “You really lost your prey’s badge? I mean, what do you expect, coming from a guy who couldn’t even take down one of the Triplets.”

  Jun grabbed Masaki’s collar and shoved him against the wall.

  “Oi!” I lit a stick on fire and held it up. It caught Jun and Masaki’s gaze. “I wonder if anyone would ever find two dead bodies here.”

  “Don’t joke arou—hey, hey.” Masaki backed away when I swung the lighted stick at him. Jun and Masaki’s eyes reflected fear.

  “Fire is what will keep us alive.” I threw the stick into the pit. “You have something for me, Masaki?”

  Masaki tossed a pouch at my feet and kicked the rubble. “I hate it when you do that. And take those green contacts off; they remind me of those damn Kan. It wasn’t that long ago that you left them.”

  “I didn’t leave them,” I said. “Mr. Mori saved me from them.” I opened the pouch and dropped four badges on my lap.

  Masaki crouched down and lit a cigarette in the fire. “I stole their badges.”

  “You idiot!” Jun punched Masaki. Masaki’s mohawk got squished by his weight against the wall. “Did any of them follow you? You’re going to lead them all here to our hideout!”

  “If they do we’ll just get rid of them, just like how the owners erased all traces of us. We don’t even exist in the system.” Masaki flicked the ash from his cigarette and exhaled in Jun’s face. “They’re the ones who were too stupid to keep their badges on. Unlike Jun, I’ve got mine hidden somewhere.”

  “And their prey?” I flipped the badges over and placed them on the rocky ground.

  “Shima’s taken care of that.”

  I grabbed the white rock near the fire and scribbled a line through each number on the black wall of the cave. “That makes four down. How many more to go?”

  “Are you serious?” Jun interrupted. “I thought you could recognize them, since you’ve worked with them before.”

  “They’re different each year.” I shrugged. “Except for the Triplets. They never age. Hey, Masaki. Who’s Minoru’s prey?”

  “I don’t know, man.” Masaki scratched his head, keeping the cigarette between his lips. He shivered. “It’s not like he tells me anything. You’ll have to ask him.”

  “What you do with the Kan’s badge number?” I cocked my head at Jun.

  “Same as I do every year. I gave it to Shima to make the exchange with the forager.” Jun returned the paper, cranked the lid of his flask open and I waved away his offer for a drink.


  “If the Kan make it into the next round, it’s going to be hard to track them down,” I said. “Not with the Juniko lakes around.”

  “Well there’s five less Kan to worry about.” Jun downed a shot of his sake. He always lowered his eyes after a drink, too ashamed of his drinking problem. All those years of hunting had worn him out; the things he’d seen had led him to drinking his pain away. I never saw him smile.

  “Five.” Badge number ninety clicked against the pile. The three of us looked up. Enura’s tall figure stooped over us. He had a cloth with a red stain just below a web that marked his sleeveless arm.

  “You okay?” I eyed his wound.

  “I’m fine.” Enura’s low monotone voice echoed in the cave. He held my gaze. “I have some bad news. Shirakawa’s alive.”

  “Shirakawa?” Masaki gulped. “H-how?”

  The flask quivered in Jun’s hand. “Are you sure?”

  “I saw him check in with my own eyes.” Enura pointed to his eyes.

  “You see this.” Masaki lifted the right cover of his jacket to reveal a scar below his shirt. “The guy almost killed me at last year’s competition. If he’s really alive, we’re all screwed.”

  “I’m telling you, I would’ve seen him,” Jun argued.

  “Are you okay?” Enura knelt down beside me.

  I nodded as Jun and Masaki got into another one of their brawls again.

  “I thought you killed him,” Enura said quietly, making sure the rest couldn’t hear.

  “I pushed him into the flames and watched him burn,” I said. “I can still feel the fire.”

  I can feel it…God, and it’s so hot…

  I clenched my fists—remembering what it was like. I was in Italy all over again.

  “The fire is getting out of control,” a Kuma Hunter had informed me. A chandelier crashed behind him, its shards showering us. The Kan had rushed into a hall surrounding a woman holding a whip.

  “You’re here to take me out too?” She said. “This is a rescue mission, not an assassination! Stand down.”

  A gallon rolled into the hall and exploded. We took shelter inside another room, shelves of books burning around us.