WORLDBUILDING CLASS - PROJECT #4 - THE HUNTER HUNTER
Before the Civil War, slave hunters trawled the Northern free states in search of free blacks - men, women, and children - that they could then capture and transport to the South. Until slavery was abolished in all parts of the United States, this unscrupulous (and illegal) trade proved to be especially lucrative. Members of the so-called "Reverse Underground Railroad" often found conspirators in the form of local lawmen seeking to grease their palms.
North of Kentucky, these insidious opportunists easily traipsed over the borderline and into the Indianan wilderness in search of quarry. But as these human hunting brigades stole deeper into the forests, not all of them emerged with prizes in hand. Not all of them came back alive.
As the activities of these outlaws were illegal, they were loath to report the disappearances and assaults to authorities, but surviving slavers described a tall, black woman with wiry hair and wild eyes that lived in the middle of the forest, on a small patch of farmland. When confronted, she turned to them, implacable and indifferent, apparently unmoved by their threats or weaponry; when provoked, her eyes turned pitch dark and the shape of a leaping wolf burst out of her human skin. In her true form, she resembled an enormous wolf monster assuming a human gait, possessing misshapen, clublike claws and buckled over, hunchbacked from the sheer weight of its musculature.
After the first contact with this wolf-woman, eight members of the Collins gang were scattered in pieces on the forest floor. She went back to living alone in her little house on her little farm in the great, dark forest, the birds and the forest beasts feeding on the remnants of the slaver scum. She didn't contemplate relocating.
This was her home, after all. They were trespassing. There was no reason for her to leave.
Three more gangs of white men came after her. This time, the objective was not profit, but to eliminate a dangerous adversary. The werewolf killed them all -- the child-murderers and slavers and thieves, bloodied, butchered, discarded, carrion. The affairs of mortal humans had never concerned her. It was only when the outside world transgressed on her domain that she deigned to interfere. The loathsome white slavers thought that they could victimize her and they paid for it.
After every last man in those three contingents were killed, one by one, the slavers, the blackbirders, and the kidnappers stopped coming to her forest. There were other ways through the Indiana-Kentucky border. We don't go through the forest anymore. You get lost there. You die there.
"America," she scoffs to herself, licking the gristle from between her knuckles. The werewolf stalks back into the forest.
North of Kentucky, these insidious opportunists easily traipsed over the borderline and into the Indianan wilderness in search of quarry. But as these human hunting brigades stole deeper into the forests, not all of them emerged with prizes in hand. Not all of them came back alive.
As the activities of these outlaws were illegal, they were loath to report the disappearances and assaults to authorities, but surviving slavers described a tall, black woman with wiry hair and wild eyes that lived in the middle of the forest, on a small patch of farmland. When confronted, she turned to them, implacable and indifferent, apparently unmoved by their threats or weaponry; when provoked, her eyes turned pitch dark and the shape of a leaping wolf burst out of her human skin. In her true form, she resembled an enormous wolf monster assuming a human gait, possessing misshapen, clublike claws and buckled over, hunchbacked from the sheer weight of its musculature.
After the first contact with this wolf-woman, eight members of the Collins gang were scattered in pieces on the forest floor. She went back to living alone in her little house on her little farm in the great, dark forest, the birds and the forest beasts feeding on the remnants of the slaver scum. She didn't contemplate relocating.
This was her home, after all. They were trespassing. There was no reason for her to leave.
Three more gangs of white men came after her. This time, the objective was not profit, but to eliminate a dangerous adversary. The werewolf killed them all -- the child-murderers and slavers and thieves, bloodied, butchered, discarded, carrion. The affairs of mortal humans had never concerned her. It was only when the outside world transgressed on her domain that she deigned to interfere. The loathsome white slavers thought that they could victimize her and they paid for it.
After every last man in those three contingents were killed, one by one, the slavers, the blackbirders, and the kidnappers stopped coming to her forest. There were other ways through the Indiana-Kentucky border. We don't go through the forest anymore. You get lost there. You die there.
"America," she scoffs to herself, licking the gristle from between her knuckles. The werewolf stalks back into the forest.
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