Unfortunately, this attracts the attention of Haast’s eagle, which descends upon our hero.
Someone had told him once that fishing operated on subtlety and a calm mindset. As he impaled his third fish and hefted it from the water, he decided that someone was full of shit.
Fishing was about stabbing, thrashing, and lots of blood. The rock face oozed with fish guts, already emitting a slimy aroma only mostly blotted out by the salty air. He breathed deep; to him, the odor announced his triumph. At last, he had a food source he was confident would neither maim nor poison him. All he had to do wave them over a fire a few times, and he could gorge himself on a long-overdue meal. No, not a meal, a feast.
But a feast would have to include more than three measly fish; he would need quite a few more to fill his aching belly. He stared down at the water, still swarming with bait and gullible prey. He leaned down, knife extended, and waited for a mark to approach.
For a time, none did. Underneath the rolling waves, finned pieces of meat pointed themselves in arbitrary directions, wiggled forward for an inch or two, reoriented themselves in other, equally arbitrary directions, and repeated the process. Occasionally, one would dart forward as one came too close to the other. The bait, a fleck of demon bird flesh, bobbed idly above them, but they ignored the invitation. Perhaps they were waiting for their friends to return with glowing endorsements before trying for the bird meat themselves.
Eventually, one of them drifted too high for his dwindling patience to ignore. He lunged down with his arm, submerging his arm nearly to the shoulder as he thrust the knife in the fish’s general direction. His target put half a foot between his blade and itself with a single swish of its tail and swam off to other section of shoreline, where it no doubt had some important aimless wandering to do.
He pushed himself back into an upright kneel and stretched his arms skyward. His back had begun to ache from his constant crouch, and head throbbed as blood rushed back into his lower body. One thing he could say in favor of angling: it was definitely more comfortable.
But then, he thought, there was no reason he had to choose between a fishing rod he didn’t have and the knife that he did. He had a spear for just these kinds of situations. He wasn’t sure it was sharp enough for spearfishing, but he could always whittle the point again. And he still wanted to try making a bone spearhead, though admittedly not until after breakfast. He closed his knife, lifted himself to his feet, and turned to fetch his current favorite stick.
A figure in the sky stopped him in his tracks. Out of the clear blue, he spotted something large and brown flying in his direction. Or rather, diving in his direction. His initial hopes of a rescue plane died quickly as his eyes made out a pair of wings, wider than the span of his arms, covered in wood-brown feathers mottled with white at their tips. An enormous fan of a tail jutted out below the creature, and, ahead of that, an array of talons splayed out like butcher’s hooks. At the front of the charge, a curved yellow beak and a pair of yellow eyes fixed on him.
