Onehundred Ninetyone

She had been searching for about one mile but still hadn't picked up any sort of trail. Dense as the jungle may be, Lhuna was the best tracker of her tribe, the Porachae. Lhuna was trying to track down her brother's killer, and for two hours she thought she was hot on his trail but then his tracks seemed to disappear. It wasn't as though Lhuna wasn't able to see his tracks, it was more like they had just stopped. She back tracked the mile she just came, watching for anything she might have missed or over looked.

She noticed the black wasps weren't out looking for prey and this was usually their time of day. It was certainly hot enough for them... Lhuna paused to listen. What happened to all the insect life? She realised that there wasn't even the faint hum of the purple lotus fly. There was the call of the red-beaked warbler, and she could hear the white-throated howler monkeys, the yellow-tailed northern hawk gave out a cry, as well as many other creatures that could normally be heard, but she could not seem to hear any of the insects.

When she got back to the last place she had seen his tracks, she bent to examine them further. The grass and moss had been firmly pressed down, more so than a few of his other steps that lead up to this one last step. Why was that? At first Lhuna thought it had been because he had somehow got up into the trees, but none of the surrounded trees had branches that were low enough, even if he had jumped. And if he had jumped, his tracks would show that he had sped up rather than slowed down. His footprints would be further apart rather than closer together.

As Lhuna examined the tracks she thought maybe he had gone left, where the jungle began to thin out a little but there was no indication in his tracks to support that thought. And there certainly was no evidence showing that he went right, where the jungle only became more and more dense with foliage. If only Lhuna had been able to make her brother's killer bleed, blood was a lot easier to track than nothing and sometimes told more than what footprints had to offer. She decided that she might as well go left and see what there was, if anything, to see. Lhuna really didn't want to let this man get away with the murder of her brother, but what could she do when the trail ceased to exist? Can a man really disappear into thin air?