Story Time

Ok, I've had a couple days to sort through things. Timt to put down the whole story.

Douglas Sharper, Nick White, and I were out in the jungles, hiking around, maybe a mile and half or so from the Pod. Something caught Sharper's eye, and he got all excited and called us over. It was a dead animal carcass, looked pretty fresh. "The freshest we've seen yet" Nick says. My guess was it was less than an hour old.

I've seen dead animals before, but this was unbelievable. Worse than I had expected. It was a gorilla-like animal, bigger than me, and weighing several hundred pounds while alive. What the D'ni named a "reepah". It had been violently killed, almost purposefully violent. Shredded. Pieces were in the trees and scattered all over the ground. It wasn't just a prey animal taken down by a predator - something wanted to make a spectacle of it's kill.

Sharper got really rattled and said he'd never seen anything like it, not even close. Nick lost his lunch, poor guy, and I couldn't blame him. Doug had his gun out and was scanning the jungle, scanning the trees, on alert. I swallowed the bile in my mouth and stepped up to examine the carcass.

To be honest, I don't even know how to describe it, it was a mess. The chest cavity has been ripped open and the internal organs messily thrown around. We found most of them, eventually, at least as far as we could tell. Many were unidentifiable. The neck was broken, but not cleanly; the reepah had been thrashed around. Limbs were twisted, broken, and missing; we found one arm hanging from a tree, and strips of the legs and chest nearby. The reepah has a tail sort of like a scorpion, and that was in about three pieces, crushed and torn. The more we looked around, the more of the body we found. Nothing had been eaten, just mangled.

The forest was very quiet, without the usual bird and monkey calls that you hear at the Pod. All in all it was a very chilling sight. And to make it worse, there was no evidence of the attacker.

We tracked around for a bit, but all we found on the ground were the reepah tracks. Though reepahs are partly arboreal, this one had been on the ground when he was attacked. We followed his sign back a ways, but there was nothing unusual about it. At the attack site there were some scuff marks in the nearby trees, however. Claw marks, I would guess, but nothing clear enough to identify the source. Something had been in the tree, but whether it leapt to another tree or flew away we couldn't tell.

I took a few tissue samples for analysis, but Sharper was getting antsy. He didn't like the situation, and was urging us to hurry along. We left the body, and after finding what we could, we got out of there. No telling if the predator would be back, and we didn't want the jokes about us being "bait" to come true.

Sharper headed off to find the DRC, they were expecting a report. Nick and I each Reltoed out, we needed time to pull ourselves together. Later I went back to let people know what happened. Sil_oh_wet was holding a "hope you get back safe" party/vigil in her Bevin, so I dropped in to share the story.

Talking with Doug further, sounds like his chat with Lexie went ok, better than he expected. She'll leave access to Negilahn open, since to date there has been no predator activity in the immediate vicinity of the Pod (which is weird, and worth thinking about). I don't know what the rest of the Council wants to do though. Doug has a few things he wanted to follow up on, and was talking about setting out some remote cameras and things. If this keeps up, we might even have to take a longer trip in the near future.

Just to follow up, the DNA samples were inconclusive. I didn't think they'd be much help, and it turns out I was right. I couldn't get any consistent results, which basically tells me that the reepah DNA isn't anything like ours. Their coding structure must be different, and without a basis of comparison, further testing seems futile.