Haku had achieved a small victory, but he hoped that it could be just the first step towards a safer future rather than the one awaited him by relying only on his mother, consequently he obviously chose to go back to the forest the next day. As soon as his mother was gone and disappeared into the sky, he stormed out of the cave and quickly descended the cliff, doing as fast as possible to avoid detection. His siblings watched him curiously; Darbi seemed for a moment willing to follow him, but in the end he turned and walked back. He probably wasn't yet sure of himself enough to venture outside. After all, even if Haku had returned the day before, he could just have been lucky; so it was best to wait a little longer, to make sure that the outside world was really safe.
First of all, Haku checked that the indrik he had hunted the day before was in its place: he went to the rocks where he had hidden it, which, as he had expected, showed no marks of claws except his own, a sign that no animal had tried to lift them. Indeed, the carcass was still there, but it was beginning to emit a bad smell. Haku didn't know why this was happening, but as he tasted a piece of the indrik's flesh he realized that it tasted more bitter than what he had felt when he bit into its neck.
It was in this way that Haku discovered that food was destined to deteriorate over time. He still didn't know if it was an unique characteristic of the indriks or if it was typical of all other living creatures, but it was likely that the second option was the right one. Therefore, storing food wasn't as easy as he had imagined; he couldn't just hide it, he had to find a way to keep it from deteriorating over time. He decided that when his mother returned he would have asked her how to keep a carcass from decomposing. He should have been careful with the words he used to keep her from getting suspicious, but with the right rhetoric he was sure he could handle it.
However, he certainly wasn't going to sit still and wait. He wasn't going to hunt again, not until he knew how to prevent the decomposition, but he still wanted to learn as much as possible about the forest. After all, he only knew it thanks to his mother's words, but the words certainly couldn't describe that set of smells, sounds and sensations that every creature and plant emitted. The strenuous hunt of the day before had shown him how difficult it was to catch a prey, so it was imperative to spy on his future victims and identify any weak points that he could use against them.
Haku had already memorized the smell of pigs and indriks, and thanks to this his powerful nose was able to track down such prey from miles away. Therefore he wanted to find other animals and memorize their smell. If he would have been able to learn the scent trail of most forest creatures, he could have quickly tracked down the easiest prey and avoided the most dangerous ones. However, in order to learn scent trails, he first had to find new animals. Unfortunately this was not something he could do using his nose: the forest emitted too many smells and he was too inexperienced, he still wasn't able to distinguish the right smell among all the others. However, he had other ways to locate his prey: sounds. The sounds couldn't be hidden: even if Haku had heard few of them during his life, it was impossible to confuse the sound of an animal with the sound emitted by a plant or by the wind.
This time he didn't throw himself blindly into the forest, but he waited for a while, listening carefully to all the sounds that came from within. And when he finally heard a noise that broke away from the others, a deep trumpeting, he walked towards the source of that sound.
Haku was quickly learning the techniques of hunting. He could understand better and better how to track his prey and get close without being detected. His paws moved quickly and with extreme precision, making the slightest sound possible, and his body moved fluidly among the trees like that of a snake. Hidden in the vegetation, he finally managed to reach the source of the sound. And what he saw surprised him a lot.
The source of the mysterious sound was a huge beast with an extremely massive head, heavily muscled neck, and a broad and stocky body. It had a single large horn on its head and a long, tapering tail ending in six sharp spines. It was so big that Haku looked small in comparison; if the young dragon had known the metric system, he could have said that the animal was at least four meters high and about ten meters long.
It was a karkadann. Haku remembered that his mother had told him about it: it was one of the largest animals in the valley, one of the best prey a dragon could come across, granting a lot of food in one fell swoop.
Before the supernova and the great mass extinction, dragons' prey were dracomorphs weighing several hundred tons. Just one of those kills could feed a family of dragons for weeks. But in the new world the animals were much smaller: the karkadann, while it wasn't one of the largest animals on the planet, was already considered a large beast. Only a few other animals, especially the few remaining dracomorphs, exceeded fifteen meters in length. There were also some very large sea monsters, but on land the karkadann could already be called a giant.
That was the reason why adult dragons were so territorial: their prey was far too small. Their gigantic bodies had evolved in an era where they had large quantities of food, but that era was over now. To be able to feed themselves they needed dozens of prey every day, which is why they had such large territories and did not allow anyone to enter them. A karkadann could weigh as much as ten tons, but for a dragon long one hundred meters or even more, that was a meal that could have been eaten in a day. A dragon as large as Neytiri would have completely devoured a karkadann in just two bites, and in a very short time she would have needed more food to support her enormous bulk.
However, if a karkadann was a meager meal for an adult dragon, it wasn't the same for a young one: for Haku, who measured just five meters, a karkadann would have guaranteed food for weeks. But Haku didn't intend to fight against such a big and massive animal: that was still a prey too far from his possibilities. In a fight with the karkadann Haku would most likely have been seriously injured, if not killed: that animal's enormous horn was more than enough to impale him. Try to attack such a large and armored prey wasn't different to court death.
For Haku it was unthinkable that any predator of small dimensions would have dared to approach the karkadann, but he soon had to change his mind when he realized why the animal seemed so nervous and kept looking around in fear, flaring its nostrils and moving its ears as if it was trying to to find something. For a moment Haku thought that the karkadann had sensed his presence, but he was wrong: in fact, he soon discovered that he wasn't the only predator around.
A large white spot suddenly leapt out of the bushes and flung itself at the karkadann, snapping at its right hind leg. The big beast bellowed in pain and prepared to charge, but other white spots came out of the undergrowth from several directions and snapped at it furiously. They were so fast that it was almost impossible to make out any details, and only when one of them stopped for a moment Haku wasbable to figure out what they were.
Wolves. Haku had never met them, but his mother had described them to him. She had spoken of them as some of the best hunters in the valley, though obviously not comparable to dragons. According to Neytiri, there were numerous species of wolves, but all of them shared the following traits: a long and slender body, narrow legs suitable for running, a long tail, a soft and thick coat and a long snout with a mouth full of teeth and nostrils placed on the tip and clearly visible. Haku didn't know what species of wolves these ones were, but he was sure that they were wolves since they perfectly matched the description given to him by his mother. Perhaps, since their fur was white, they could have been garmr, the 'big white wolves with saber teeth'... maybe? Since they also had a few small horns on their heads, he probably guessed right. However, Haku wasn't sure, so he decided to simply consider them wolves.
The wolves aimed exclusively at their prey's paws, moving nimbly and quickly, attacking and fleeing before their victim could react. In less than a minute, the karkadann was too badly wounded to stand and collapsed on his stomach with a bellow of pain. Haku couldn't believe it. The karkadann was at least fifty times the size of the wolves, but they had cornered it in seconds! If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes he would never have believed it.
His mother had told him that wolves were animals that lived together and hunted in coordination, led by a leader. Haku at that time didn't comprehend what she meant, but now he understood it perfectly. The wolves moved as they were a single animal, each one of them acting in harmony with the others, as if they were animated by a single mind. They were perfectly coordinated and each individual played a specific role.
However, the wolves hadn't won yet. The karkadann wasn't dead at all: its wounds were healing rapidly. A strange red energy emerged from its cuts and seemed to speed up the healing process. In two or three minutes it would have been able to get up again. The wolves had to finish it off at once, while it was still down and it was unable to charge.
But the karkadann wasn't willing to give up: it raised its head and let out a loud bellow, a clear sign of warning. The spines on its tail turned red and a terrible heat started emanating from them, so strong that even Haku could feel it even though he was quite far away. Some tufts of grass near the karkadann even caught fire. The wolves recoiled as red-hot thorns stirred in the air. And in the same way the horn also became hot.
The karkadann seemed to have become impenetrable from all sides. However, the wolves had something the karkadann didn't: coordination, cooperation, and cunning.
At a single signal from the wolf leader, two wolves moved in front of the karkadann and began to threaten it; the huge herbivore snorted furiously and focused its attention on them. The two wolves howled and then charged; the karkadann completely forgot the rest of the pack and prepared to fight them. But the instant they touched its horn, the wolves disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Haku's eyes widened in surprise. Was it an illusion? How had the wolves created it? Even the karkadann was confused: it had fallen into the trap. The wolf leader took advantage of its distraction to jump on its neck. The karkadann started to squirm, but four more wolves followed their pack leader, and with their weight they prevented the karkadann from moving its neck. The wolves sank their fangs into the karkadann's jugular and for an instant their fangs lit up with a strange light, similar to that which emerged from the horn and spines of their prey, but white instead of red. The thick, pockmarked skin that normally would never have been penetrated by the wolves' little jaws broke instantly and the bones split like twigs.
The karkadann fell completely to the ground. Blood flowed copiously from his body. There was still some spasm, then it didn't move again. The wolf leader howled in victory, and all the other wolves followed suit. However, suddenly the wolf leader stopped howling and wrinkled its nose, as if it felt something, and a small growl emerged from its throat. Seeing that scene, Haku quickly withdrew: it was clear that the animal had smelled him, he had to get away from there immediately. He made sure he had memorized the scent of wolves so he could avoid them in the future, and then he immediately returned to the cliff and after climbing it he returned to take refuge in the cave. He had no intention to risk that such dangerous animals find him, so he preferred to remain in the nest for that day and hope that the wolves would have been gone soon.