Chapter 1, Part 2: Memories

        My first memories are with my tribe and learning how to survive. My many mothers and sisters all did what they could to feed and protect the tribe and the tribe’s most valuable asset, our one and only tod. Thin as a stick, he ate everything brought to him and was never allowed out of sight of our encampment. Sleeping most of the day, every night he Flew with one or another of my mothers, sometimes more than one if their need was upon them. Next to him, I and my few sisters meant little, yet meant everything to the tribe. Without us the tribe could not survive; without him, the tribe would die. Even as a kit I learned this most of all.
        Everything was a game to us as we were growing up. I was the youngest of four kits in the tribe and cared for as no other. Of course, this made my older sisters jealous as they grew into their wings and began to fly with their mothers to gather fruits and berries from the forest or herd the tribe’s birds with the aid of our trained raptors. As a result they teased me mercilessly and worked to make my life miserable. I showed them!
        The vixen I called my “true mother”, a vixen with pale golden fur and sandy-colored wings who looked different from the entire rest of the tribe and fed me with her own milk when food was scarce, gave me a doll she had crafted with grasses from the plains and bits of discarded leather and rawhide. The doll’s wings were made from her own feathers painfully plucked and glued into the doll’s shoulders. I loved this doll and played with her whenever my sisters were away from camp with their own mothers. I should say, “with the tribe’s adults,” since the only mothers they really knew were the adults able to Fly. Soon enough that time would come upon them, but until then all the tribe was our mother and the oldest mothers were the tribe’s Elders.
        Not long after I was given the doll, my two youngest sisters, one only a year older than myself and the other almost three years older telekinetically yanked the doll from my hands and started tossing it back and forth between them as they sat up in the branches of the tree above me. Their yipping giggles and cruel thoughts incensed me because they knew I couldn’t take it away from them; the younger having only been flying for about a season and my own feathers barely developed. I became so enraged that I squalled out my anger and launched myself into the air, snatching back my doll and crashing into an even higher branch before they even knew I’d moved. Had my true mother not flown up to catch me, I’d have probably fallen to the ground and broken a wing or something. As it was, the shock and surprise of crashing into the branch had me yelping all the way back to the ground oblivious of the fact that I’d rescued my doll.
        My mother spent the rest of that day with me, broadcasting her anger at my sisters for teasing me and demanding that some one of her own sisters find something for those two to do away from camp for a while. It wasn’t until nearly dark that the rest of the tribe realized I had flown almost a full year younger than anyone else, ever. While I didn’t know it, this was only the beginning of the things that would set me apart from my tribe and eventually send me here to Earth. The Elders only nodded and closed their minds away. The next day I was given to our tribe’s Elder Priestess for training.
        Many times over the next ten years I saw my mother Fly with the tod, himself approaching Elder status and becoming less capable of Flying the vixens any more. Never did she bear another kit. In fact, since my birth, only one other kit was born and accepted by the tribe, two others being mercifully killed for their deformities and left for the scavengers to find many, many spans away from the encampment. It wasn’t until I became old enough to Fly myself that I was taught the reason for our plight; but I was forbidden from Flying even our Elder. When it came time for the Gathering, a meeting of representatives of all the remaining tribes, one hand of our hunters was sent with orders to negotiate either for a young tod or for the merging of our tribe with another possessing a viable tod. Again, I was not permitted to go, only the four hunters—one of them the elder sister of the two who had teased me as kits—leaving while the rest of the tribe concentrated on surviving and preparing for a move to more fertile hunting grounds when they returned.
        Every two hands of seasons, roughly every two years, the tribe moved to keep from over hunting the region. Near the end of the cold season we would pack up everything we owned into leather and woven-grass sacks, bundling several together to weigh just under twice the owner’s weight. This was normally the limit which any one sister could carry and still be able to fly herself. Anything over that weight either had to be discarded or given to another who might not have as much to carry. The only things that weren’t even considered for discard were the few metal objects the tribe owned, a few short daggers and one heavy cooking pot. Everything else was hand made from available resources or stolen from the Pardu by a daring hunter whenever possible.
        Before you get me wrong, the Sauk and the Pardu were ever at war with each other. Always in my short life I was warned to watch out for the ground-bound four-armed creatures. They were somehow invisible to our telepathic senses and would kill a Sauk on sight if given a chance. We lost two hunters to raiding Pardu during my time with the tribe. Fortunately for us, in both cases the raiders were found and killed before they could return to their own clans and betray our presence. Both times, our tribe immediately moved away from the mountains the Pardu clans call home.
        What? Why would the tribe knowingly move so close to the mountains where we knew the Pardu to live? Simple. Food. Ever since that catastrophic incident that started our peoples on their way to extinction, the Sauk have chosen to live in the forests while the Pardu have lived in the craggy stone hideouts that protected them from the weather and from overhead bombardment. They built their homes on overhung ledges and cut into the face of cliffs to hollow out their homes while farming the plateaus and hunting the vales and nearby plains. Rarely would they come into the forests for food, knowing that at any time they could run into a Sauk hunting party unless their own need for food was dire. The tribe would move away as much for its own protection as to allow the Pardu its chance for food to survive.
        Of course, the Sauk were hardly any better when it came to warfare. Our hunters would as readily kill a lone Pardu as they killed us. Whenever we did move close to the mountains a bold hunter would seek out their villages and attempt to steal some item of value to the tribe or some trinket that catches her eye and leave a discarded feather as coup. Since almost all Sauk are virtually identical, the feather would hardly identify its owner unless she put her mark on it either by scent or painting it. Only my mother and I looked different from anyone else in the tribe. I only learned much later, before I came to Earth, that my mother only barely escaped being killed as defective when she was born. I also learned that she never bore a kit of her own that lived.