It should have been a mundane day for Okurtook! One hunt and he could provide for a week for his family with modest needs. He had sensed that something was not right in the brilliant co-incidence of a hippo showing up within the first 10 minutes of him starting the endeavor today. It typically took half a day to simply stumble upon a vulnerable oblivious hippo asking to be killed.
As he moved stealthily around the forest to find a hippo-the hippo found him and how! Okurtook was immediately met with the aggression on hippo's part and had responded with his furious arrows. The interjection of an asshole conservationist didn't help either.
The beast however, as beasts are, impartial to both his potential preserver and potential captor had struggled with both men with equal fervor. The hippo had ended up hurting both men in return to the arrows that cut through him in his exaggerated display of the survival instinct.
There they lay, somewhere in the middle of the oldest continent, 2 mean and a beast on the cross-roads of life and death. Fazal Malik, a devout Muslim, an Afghan American, won't be able to take his personally saved hippos tally to 100 it seemed. Worse still , at his own life at risk,this might as well be his last chance.
Unless he could think of cutting open the hippo savagely and thrive on some Hippo meat.
"I would rather be a cannibal"- he thought to himself! That option was taken away from him when at the end of the day, Okurtook's family claimed their bread earner's corpse and decided to subject it to the locally sacred rituals. Okurtook didn't stand the fight even a day. This meat-selling hunter probably preferred dying over thinking off the option the American had in his mind.
The smell of Hippo's rotting away was striking now. Soon it will be recycled back to the nature if the local scavengers didn't get to the hippo first.
"There a thousand stories I can make up as to how I survived this shit. This is anyways not International news headlines open for dissection. Morality is perhaps not the right approach right now."
Very little self-justification in times like these. The conscience gave way to some action now. He moved like a snake on his stomach with the knife in his hand. The knife was going to be more for self-preservation than self defense today.
"Maybe I am dead inside today, but I chose to live on the outside"-the hippo-preserver thought to himself as he widened the cut left by the meat-hunter's arrow.
The meat hopefully will enable him to survive until a fellow men find and save him.
