As the beast advanced toward my fate, we reached an unshakable stare. The trees towered like fortresses narrowing my path of escape. Nature taunted me with sounds of erratic cracks and footsteps; we stood under an ominous slice of daylight, still susceptible to the storm above.

I frightfully propelled my body through the forest. As I darted past the trees, the sound of its breath pushed me to move faster. The beast kept its distance short and we finally broke through the edge of the tree line.

The hunt continued. Though my mind proved stable after a series of quick jumps and sharp turns, the luck which lulled me into a false hope began to dwindle. Suddenly, I began to stumble over myself. I staggered over tree roots and branches until my body collapsed into a deathbed of leaves and twigs.

It reminded me of the hour-long nature documentary I watched with my dad. We watched a wolf hunting a fawn—gore and all. Up until the end, she had an exuberance about her, as if she were playing a game of tag. She kept running and running, unaware of the future. But, “in nature, death looms forever” the narrator explained. Our sympathy for the fawn increased because neither of us could imagine obtaining the same fate. In the end, she lost her balance, becoming a meal; a hopeless assortment of bones and muscle.

I rolled over wet grass and something tore into my skin. Excruciating pain flooded into my leg. Between the leaves and twigs, lay a thick, spiked wire—a trap. This meant there were other people. I had to get back to the others and tell them, but how could I? The wolf was only a couple yards away from me now. I attempted to yank it from my leg but with every attempt, the wire gouged even further into the muscle. The leaked blood, now a definite puddle, continued to sicken me. Pulling and pulling, I could not untangle myself quickly enough to escape. And in the clench of my teeth, I pulled once more. The wire hit my bone. “Just an assortment of bones and muscle,” I thought to myself.
I finally broke free from the wire and found myself crawling desperately through a bed of flowers, just short of a stream. I dragged my leg with the rest of my body until I could no longer crawl. The petals encountered bloodstains, which seemed to conceal their moonlit beauty--one after another, blanketed under the darkness.

Only a couple feet from me, the wolf brought his head to the wire that had severed my leg. The blood continued to drip from the wound, luring the wolf closer. Our eyes met once again and the wolf circled my body with a torturous obsession.

Suddenly, the wolf leapt, and landed on the grass, emerald in the night and radiating with potential. Forcing its teeth into my skin, the wolf jarred into my leg muscle. I pulled and pulled, losing a game of tug-o-war. Its jaw clenched stiff and inflexible, crushing my bone into pieces. Pain pierced my thigh. There laid my lifeless leg upon the wolf’s jawbone, detached and dangling like a shattered piece of glass. The blood crimsoned its jaw, gleaming in the moonlight--my t-shirt, drenched in a sea of vomit. The wolf flung my limp leg into the distance and jumped onto my ribs, preparing itself to feast on my remains. Its paws held me down. The teeth gnawed into my side, causing a constant flow of blood.

Footsteps whispered among the trees. In the last moment of my life, I squinted into the distance and noticed two overlapping shadows. One of the figures raised a bow and shot an arrow toward the beast. Within seconds, he fell to the ground beside me. The two shadows scuttled away like vermin, while I lay there, ripped open, beside the whimpering wolf.

Only death was capable of appreciating the end, and it was he who could fathom the rest. Humanity continued its future through the persistence of a wind, and the grass upon which I lay, broke still under the realm of a beauteous imagination. The moon shone among the clouds, glistening over a world of complexity.