They come for us.
In the dead of night. Under the sun. As rains fall. It does not matter. I woke up this morning, and my cousin was gone. A week before that, it was my aunt. They are coming for us and here are we are, like sitting ducks.
On second thought… no.
We are more helpless than that.
We tried. We have tried everything to keep these predators at bay. Spiked armor… Moving as fast as we possibly can… Seeking higher ground… The elders always spoke of reaching an elevation the beasts would not dare traverse. And so we have climbed.
And climbed.
And climbed.
Higher and higher. But we are not there yet. And I am afraid that we never will reach such a height.
They still come for us.
There are warnings. The hollow laughter. The chants. The charged air twitching with a nervous, jittery energy that even the youngest members of our tribe can sense. Sometimes there are wails, shrieks. Every one of us looks at each other and wonders quietly, afraid to speak it into existence,
“Who will be next?”
The great Elder Tacoyeh decided one day that there was no use in fighting anymore. His body had grown heavy, unable to follow the tribe any higher. He feared he was slowing all of us down.
“I can no longer do this,” he whispered in his aged tone. “My journey ends here.”
“Elder,” we pleaded. “you are not a burden. Please, do not give up. There is hope yet.”
When Elder Tacoyeh did not respond, we assumed our begging had calmed his spirit to a degree. And so we continued our slow ascent.
The next morning, we found him far below, lying motionless on the ground.
In the dead of night, the Elder had separated himself from us. Perhaps he was indeed too tired to go on, burdened with the load of an older body, but I believe it was the resignation to this fate that weighed upon his spirit more:
They are coming for us.
As Elder Tacoyeh lay there pitifully, we had no choice but to press on upwards. A number of us noticed that the beasts ignored him. And so perhaps in his death, the Elder revealed that we had a choice, after all. To die in wretched sorrow just as he had—or to persevere in blind faith, only to be snatched away by predators without warning.
Is it really still a choice if there are no real options?
I cannot begin to fathom how this all began. How did we become the prey? As I came into this world, I knew nothing else as truth. Even the oldest of the Elders did not know otherwise. No one knew what these beasts truly wanted from us. All we knew was that we were the hunted, and they were the hunters.
And they come for us.
One night, beneath the gleaming moonlight, the tribe—or what was left of it—sat in quiet reflection upon the vibrant summer day that preceded this twilight. The perils and the challenges of our climb became an afterthought, if only for a moment. The possibility of reaching the peak, wherever it may have been, seemed within reach.
When I opened my eyes the next morning, more than half my brethren were gone.
They had come for us.
I wept. For the truths of our existence. For our circumstance. For the inevitability of what was to come. And for the question that remain unanswered.
“Why?”
The sun had just set when they came for me.
Beautiful shades of indigo and orange stretched across the sky.
I offered no resistance. I knew my time had come. My body could not climb as high or as quickly as it used to. Like Elder Tacoyeh before me, I too had grown heavy. Perhaps from time, and perhaps from grief.
As I felt a force grab hold of my being from behind and separate me from all I knew, my consciousness began to falter and fade.
But not before I finally understood what drove these beasts to hunt us.
As I lay upon a wooden block, feeling the shining blade slowly pressed into me, I heard the bubbling waters of a chicken stew where the rest of my brethren had been cast into.
Perhaps in a different life, we will all be reborn as something else.
No longer as sayotes.
No more.
Copyright © 2019 Cousin from Baguio