This is the original prologue to Hunting Season. I’ve cut it from the final draft because of flow reasons, but just to give you a taste of what’s coming…

The forest is a different world at night. The chatter of small animals and the twittering of birds slow and quiet as the sun goes down. Insects let loose a cacophonous riot in the dusk, then go silent as darkness creeps in. The night belongs to the hunters.

The king of these night-time predators sits in the hollow of an ancient hickory tree, perched above his kingdom. Bright yellow eyes and his trademark tufted feather horns are all that is visible until he claws to the edge of the front door of his cozy little home. Massive talons dig into the wood, slicing off bits of the bark to go tumbling forty feet to land on the leaf covered ground below. The owl turns his head side to side in one smooth motion, surveying everything around him, his sharp eyes searching for any tiny movement that would betray the location of something that could be dinner. The rain has stopped for now. Food has been scarce in his domain these last few months. If he doesn’t start finding more regular meals, he will be forced to widen his hunting grounds. He may even have to look for a new section of the forest to call home. The great horned raptor is resistant to change. For seven years he has lived with his mate in the same hickory tree. He would have continued his existence in this forest, content, if she hadn’t disappeared on a hunt several nights ago. He looks for her every night, calling out, hunting for any sign of her as he hunted for prey. He doesn’t want to move on from their nest and her memory, but survival is the strongest animalistic urge, and so he must go where the food is.

There is a rustle in the leaves several yards to the left of the hickory. The owl’s head swivels in that direction, his ever open eyes pinpointing the movement. An unlucky vole, caught in the earlier afternoon rain away from her burrow, is hustling back home, ducking under the leaves as much as possible to avoid detection. The massive gray striped wings flap and the hunter is off, veering left and soaring toward his target like an arrow to the bullseye. As he reaches his prey, he slows with his wings outstretched like a parachute, reaching forward with his deadly sharp claws to rip into the terrified rodent. Too late, he hears the thuds behind him, heavy footfalls of a bigger predator in the leaves. Pointed tips of bone slam into the owl’s body, piercing into his side and tossing him like a mangled kite into a nearby tree trunk. Disoriented, the bird attempts to right himself and take wing to escape, but the creature is already on him. Sharp teeth, smelling of rotten meat and something dark and evil, rip into the soft downy feathers covering the owl’s body. In retaliation and a last ditch effort at survival, the great horned owl slashes out with his knife-like talons, catching the thing’s face. A monstrous scream fills the night air, sending every critter in the nearby vicinity into hiding. The vole is so terrified that its tiny heart stops, and it falls dead onto the leaves. The owl feels a moment of hope, and attempts to beat its wings in the face of its hunter, but that hope is short lived. The monster’s pointed teeth snap out and catch a wing, then jerk down hard, ripping through the skin and muscle that allow flight, breaking the hollow bones. The bird’s screeches of pain join the screams of victory coming from the beast. The last thing the king of the forest sees is the wisps of black smoke rising from the crown of bone on his killer’s head and its black, soulless eyes as the bloody teeth close over his skull and bite down, snapping his spine and snuffing out his life.