'Big Chest and the Lion' [Prelude to After Eve II: Big Chest]

By Dennis L. Siluk

The Man-eaters, as they were known, otherwise called the lions, jaguars, tigers of the ancient days, were not much different than, the new breed, so named by Short-legs as "The Stone-Builder's,"? the reason being, they had no second thoughts about killing the members of the Horde, nor the Branch-People; rather they seemed to harbor thoughts and acts as if they were summoned to do so, a duty that had to be announced; thus, all the inhabitants in these two areas were beastly trophies to them. The Folk in the Horde, along with several others of the Branch-People were terrified in a way of the new invaders of the land, the new neighbors, and their fathomless predator style of hunting. They were a threat more serious than the famine or the plague that had vanquished the land in the past.

I had seen one time Big-chest walk into a campsite of theirs, the Stone-Builders that is, I tried to tell this story to my brother Stern-toes, once, but I never could explain it right, but I think he got the jest of it, if not the seriousness, we did both laugh at the Stone-builders for hours on end, afterwards. As I was about to say, Short-legs and Little-eyes witnessed this whole happening from a distance of course. The Stone-Builders were full of what they called 'wone, or wine,"? something along that order, some sounds take me back a bit, they had new sounds all the time, ones never heard of before their arrival on the scene. Well, Big-chest, noticed in the evening, they had killed a man-either; there were four of them at a campfire, just laughing, and drinking, and being playful like a group of little cubs. Actually they did get a little over physical with one another, like the wild boars after one of us, wanting to eat us for dinner, and then settled down again. It was winter so there was a chill in the air, and not much leafy trees to hide us, but we remained in the distant woods nonetheless, with a pile of leaves at our knees in case we needed to camouflage ourselves more.

As always, Big-chest was confident of his abilities, he stood in the woods, no shadow, just a big blob of muscle, fuzzy hair and sharp beady small squinty eyes, pinned on the four individuals, and their lion. He was actually blocking our vision a bit, but I think he did that because he wanted to show his audience, who was the king. Then unsuspected, he walked into the camp, among the four, he had seen their weapons by the fire, where the lion was. He was swaying his body like huge trees in a storm. Closer and closer he came to the fire, no one noticed, can't figure it out, could they not hear him, for I could, way back in the woods. His fingers almost touching the ground, he had long thick arms, fingers, and perturbing muscles. Then all of a sudden two of the four turned their necks to see what was in back of them, and almost went into shock, the other two stood up, all four were some fifteen feet from their weapons. The two who were squatting, were closest to the fire, the other two where a little farther away, standing, I think one was releasing himself, he made a puddle and was trying to cover it up, we just went, wherever, and whenever we had to.

Big-chest took his right hand, hit the head of one of the squatters as he was about to stand, and his head flopped like a dead fish out of water; flopping back and forth, as if to jump back into the creek. The other one tried to get to his weapon, but Big-chest picked him up by one leg, his penis showing, they all liked covering them up for some reason, and Big-chest just laughed, and tossed him into the fire, after twisting him about for a few seconds, breaking the leg in several places I expect. Then one of the two standing routed himself through the woods yelling something like, "hhhh eel pppp...!!"? Not sure what that meant. The last one, I call him the brave one, pulled out a sharp object, about the length of his hand, and stood in front of Big-chest as if he was going to fight him. He looked similar to a banana compared to him. I asked myself, 'is he crazy, run! And run fast, while you can.' Big-chest just looked dumfounded at the figure in front of him, and picked him up, picked up the seven food lionesses, and put her over his shoulder, the crazy Stone-Builder charged at him during this event and Big-chest with a quick turn, knocked the man on the ground with the man-eater still well balanced over his shoulder. Then like a dead fish, he kicked him in the mid section, sweeping him into the fire. He could not move.

Early winter

We had no way of knowing which winter would be good to us or bad for us, and winter this one year had come early, and therefore our food supply was depleted rather quickly. When Little-eyes and I returned back to the cave that evening we had told in our symbolic way, at the Banana Cave, the entire horde how Big-chest killed the Eve people. And you could hear the laughing for miles around. I think Big-chest had taken his trophy to a cave in our area, and was having dinner at the time. We liked anyone who could out smart the Stone-people, they were smug and we were helpless compared to them, most of the time. And so it felt good if anything. But our surprise would come in the morning.

Morning

In the morning when several of us looked out our cave, in the center of the canyon style area, we seen half a lion torn open, in the center, it was a treasure, and all of us quickly ran to eat what meat Big-chest had left for us. Big-chest was not always so generous, but for some odd reason, he knew we were starving for some protean, and our bodies where starting to show our ribs. Aimless to say, this never happened again, but we all gave Big-chest a smile as we walked proudly out of our cave-canyon.