Outpost#3

A rustle in the tall Banyan quickens the heart amidst the distant echo of giant trees. Haunched in the shadows, new perceptions open to faint percussive sounds along the jungle floor.

In an instant she is there. She is a young creature less than a year old, her scent exotic pheromones, a prelude to heated battle, beyond sensual. Her nakedness didn't matter to the jungle. Blood in the shadows were primal to her survival against any intruder of territory. Claws razor sharp, and white teeth the only discernible signals, if a signal at all. Her athletic musculature contorts, eyes embroiling for attack. A noble beast imbedded with nature's most direct order. Tonight she carries the sound of the hunter-silence.

Deliberate in keeping her teeth shown and her claws erect, the final solution of survival,directed by gene expression, arrives.

No time exists now. Instinctive hormonal rage, this meeting at an inevitable crossroad of the evolutionary trail. She is art in motion. Fine tuned by eons of genetic connections, and intrinsic balance between available oxygen and gravitational detriment. She had nothing to learn. Her skills were all there. The same genes offered by the very trees that hid her and--the ones given her by someone, or something else.

Her eyes shift now, looking for a passionate kill. There would be no division of urge by this ancient directive in pure focus. Tonight it would be kill or be killed.