Fortunately, he finds a population of fat, flightless birds that make easy prey.
After what felt like an hour of baking in the sun, his desire for shade won out against his self-pity. He put on his shoes and socks, wet and gritty though they were, and trudged inland.
The island’s interior was unlike any other forest he had seen. He had walked through forests in parks and countryside backyards, but all of those forests had been tamed in some fashion, whether by landscapers or sheer volume of foot traffic. This forest, however, isolated from humanity, was truly wild. It offered neither footpaths nor clearings. The undergrowth resented his intrusion, blocking his passage with dense shrubs and curtains of vines and stalks. The trees looked down at their guest with indifference and stretched sunward as this foreign primate clambered over their roots and around their mighty trunks. He tripped over rotting logs and spiny bushes and swatted away insects and spiderwebs. Glancing backward, he saw the scant sum of his labored steps was only a dozen feet at best.
A high pitched, descending noise rang out from in front of him. It was close by, and in short order it repeated itself. More of the voices joined the first, and soon a shrill chorus erupted somewhere ahead. He pulled up his legs in high strides and thrust them toward the source of the cacophony. As he rounded a particularly wide bramble, he spotted them.
There were several dozen birds pacing about the forest floor. Each was a foot or so in height, strutting around on two skinny, leathery legs ending in three long toes splayed out in front and a short one facing back. Their bodies stood at an angle to their legs, brown-feathered footballs angling upward and forward to their short necks. The feathers on their stunted wings were a mahogany brown, surrounded by a tan color that ended at their dusty, greyish-white faces. Their large, brown eyes bulged slightly from the sides of their tiny heads, and their long, finger-sized bills led the way as they meandered from one place to the next, intermittently pecking at the ground.
None of them paid him any attention, even as he walked into the throng of yapping birds. The most distraction they would allow themselves from the businesses of calling, preening, pecking, and wandering in circles was to peck at his shoestrings and pant cuffs, as if checking them for anything edible.
His stomach rumbled, empty and unappeased.
He tiptoed back to the edge of the crowd and scanned his surroundings for something heavy. He pried a fist-sized rock up from the dirt and hefted it between his hands. Gingerly, he knelt down and raised the stone high. One of the oblivious bundles of feathers stopped in front of him to probe its beak into a nearby shrub.
An instant later, he smashed the rock into its head, and it went limp.
