Be Very Very Quiet. (Training)

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Though an expert hunter, there are still those wild land creatures that give even a proficient predator a bit of trouble in acquisition. Among them is the hare, a fluffy mammal one might think of more as adorable, than tasty. While they are certainly cute, their meat is highly sought after by predators of land and air alike, which has pushed the species to develop methods of survival which thwart the desires of meat eaters the world round. Among them is the rabbit’s great speed, able to burst from a fluffy mound of mostly motionless fur and flesh to a blinding fast blur of kicking legs and flopping ears. While their speed is a great tool for escape, their most favored technique for remaining uneaten, is simply to remain unseen.

With hides varying between the stark white of snow to the mottled brown of forest undergrowth a rabbit can be next to impossible to track down for all but the most aware and alert of hunters. With a belly full of freshly cooked rabbit, Isha lounges about on the lower branches of the trees and reminisces back on just where and how she picked up the skills necessary to track down this, most wily of prey. It was long ago, when she was still growing up with her family. Her parents and her cousins all took numerous trips weekly outside of the village, seeking out the wild places to reap nature’s harvest of muscle and fat. Isha was still young, still without her canine companion but still she was eager to learn the methods her family used to catch their daily meals.

They were in the midst of a deep forest, old growth oak and pine towering over her and her kin and casting them in a dense and dark shade. Bushes and shrubs lined trunks beneath and a thick blanket of fallen leaves coated every step one could take along the ground. With the maze of hedges and ferns all around and the branches above, it seemed to Isha like the number of possible hiding places for even the largest bit of prey was nearly without end, but her parents knew better. They’d tasked her with finding lunch for the night, and even gone so far as to assign her one of the more difficult to catch bits of meal. She had, of course, used her primary tool for the hunt to get her this far, her keen nose tracking the scent of a rabbit to this portion of the forest.

Now she was crouched in a patch of long grass, the notion to nap in her mind but her empty stomach was nagging her more powerfully. The scent of the rabbit was simply everywhere, and she’d even spotted a few more bold ones hopping about lazily from plant to plant. They nibbled the tender ends of leaves and the petals of flowers without worry, well aware of Isha but seemingly dismissive of her natural predatory prowess. There was good reason for this, being so young Isha was still not up to speed, and when she simply tried to speed them down and catch them, they escaped time and again. Indeed, as her family had told her, capture of a rabbit required either cunning, or a trap. Lacking a good snare, Isha would have to rely on cunning, instead.

She was given hints, told of the rabbit’s habits. Look for their trails, her mother had told her. Watch where they run, watch where they feed. The best rabbit to catch is the one that doesn’t run. The tips were vague; the last bit of something she considered useless, as she’d never found a rabbit that didn’t run when she approached. Still, there she was watching and waiting.

A rabbits trail is a subtle thing to find, but they are there. Like many such rodents, rabbits used their same paths over and over, bolting among them when predators appeared to rush back to their warrens. Locating these oft trodden paths through the underbrush was no simple task, until one knew what to look for. Observation, it seemed, was key. There’d be no trampled leaves from such a small creature, no broken branches of empty trails one might see along larger game trails. There would certainly be no blazes, no swathes of color marking a hiking trail as leisure seeking humans might make. Instead, there was just a subtle line, a half tunnel which ran between bushes and beneath hedges.

It was by simply waiting and watching in silence that Isha got her first clue, the soft rustle of a leaf catching her ear. The sound repeated as Isha waited, carefully rolling over to peer in the direction of sound. It was feint, barely detectable over the flow of wind through the leaves, but it had been enough. She didn’t spy what made the sound, however the sound seemed to repeat itself over and again. It was a rabbit; she simply knew it had to be. This place, as mentioned, was thick with their smell and was the likely stomping grounds of a dozen or so such lunches. The rustle of the rabbit sounded again, and in an instant her attention snapped over towards the culprit.

It was a rabbit indeed, a lone forager seeking out its own small meal of chewed grasses and leaves. It was paying Isha no mind, if it even saw her, and for good reason. Even knowing where it was, the fur of brown and splotched black was ideal for blending perfectly into the shade strew leaf litter well beneath the great trees branches. Tiny hops moved it forward and only when it moved was Isha able to really pick out the outline of creature so well hidden among the brush. Her muscles all tensed as she spied it move, but she forced some uncharacteristic patience to the surface to deal with this hunt. She knew it would run if she showed herself, and her parents had told her to find the rabbit that wouldn’t run. So she waited.

Her ears continued to pick up each subtle movement of the rabbit as it foraged and ate, and for what seemed like torturous hours of stalking she remained well hidden in the patch of grass which concealed her. In time, however, she began to note the rabbit’s habits. It was sticking close to a certain path through the forest, never moving too far away from the overhanging fronds of a fern, or the leafy branches of low lying shrubs. The bottoms of those bushes gave her the first hints as to what rabbit trails looked like. They were little more than hollowed out gaps beneath branches, clear space which perfectly fit a rabbit in flight. Leaves and sticks had been pushed out, which gave the trails a small border, a curb which once spotted gave a clear view of exactly where the rabbit was likely to go. Isha smiles with this revelation, however still she remained motionless, and waited.

After each mouthful of grass of leaf the rabbit would poke its head up, it’s small pink nose twitching quickly as it tested the air and listened for signs of anyone hunting it. Isha, however, was no fool. She was still, and downwind, sure to escape detection. An hour passed, and then another, as Isha continued to study the habits of her prey. It scampered and hopped, nibbled and sniffed its way along a bank of greenery, until at last it had its fill. Then, without warning, it was gone. Like an bolt of lightning from the sky it streaked in a zigzagging pattern to it’s escape trail, and disappeared beneath the leaves once more. Isha was, for a short moment, disenchanted with her hunt. It hadn’t seen her, but it fled none the less. Why shouldn’t it, however? It was done, so there was only one thing it could have done.

With a grin Isha creeps forward from her hiding spot, and slinks towards the patch of plants the rabbit had previously been nibbling on. She gave a sniff, and her stomach grumbled. She was growing more and more hungry, but the rabbit must be full. Full of food, she was sure it’d do the same thing she would. It would nap. It would go home, and it would relax until it became time to seek another meal. That is when it dawned on her, the words of her parents. A sleeping rabbit wouldn’t run. A sleeping rabbit would just lie there, until it was too late.

She peers at the small game trail the rabbit had used and presses low to the ground. Even up close it was a subtle path, more signified by what it was lacking than what it actually possessed. No prints, no tracks, just an absence of leaves, and a small empty space which moved beneath the bushes like some small drill had come through to bore a hole for easy passage. Isha follows the trail, sniffing at the rabbits scent with a growing need for food. Each step she was forced to pause, forced to stop and study the ground and the leaves for clues as to which way the path went. This was a real hunt, not a mad dash to take down some slower moving prey, but a methodical and exceedingly careful stalking of unseen prey. It took her a few minutes to realize just where the path would take it. It was leading her right to the rabbit’s borough.

It felt like another hour had passed, but with each tick of her internal clock nature’s clues were becoming more obvious. Overturned leaves, nibbled branches, and that curb of pushed aside forest spoil all came into clear focus for her. Before long it was like following a sidewalk of stone and mortar through the dusty earth beneath the bushes, and her slow movements picked up speed. She was learning, she was growing, it was exactly what her parents had wanted for her. To been a keen hunter, one had to have a keen mind and equally keen senses. Isha had always relied on her nose to follow her prey, but in this situation it did not work. She relied, instead, on her eyes and on her perception. Her mind processed the flood of information presented to her as she stalked and learned to highlight which bits of information were of use, and which were just tertiary information completely unrelated to her hunt.

It was a glorious victory when the trail ended at a dark hole leading down into the tangle of roots beneath a hedge. This was it, the rabbit’s home. Isha smiled quite proudly in those moments, though the task of pulling the rabbit out of its home was still in her way. She’d gotten better since then, better at reaching into a deep hole and grabbing at a pelt of sleeping fur. She had gotten bit several times that first day, but all those lessons stayed with her. Now she knew to simply grab and pull. It didn’t matter if she grabbed ear or leg, so long as she could get the rabbit out quickly, and put an end to it. Those lessons of hunting had always stayed with her, and she thanked her parents for that. For without those skills, even now, she wouldn’t be able to bask in sunlight, with a fresh meal of cooked meat filling her belly.

Like a well fed rabbit she was already falling asleep, a wide smile on her lips and beams of gloriously warm sunlight shining down upon her. Life was good for the young Inuzuka, only because she had been handed down all the talents needed to be one of nature’s foremost hunters. She counted her assists as others might count sheep as they drift off to dreamland.
They were: cunning, patience, speed, determination, willpower and stealth. Above them all, however, was perception.