Chapter One

A Tiger Hunt (circa. 1,500 B.C.)

The tiger quickly lifted his head from his prey, dragging a length of intestine by his teeth with the movement. Jerking his head to the side, he dropped his ears back and raised his upper maw in a silent snarl. As if he could see through the dense undergrowth of the jungle, he focused on a point in the distance where he could hear the clatter and yells of the villagers as they stomped and hacked their way through the jungle, slowly moving in his direction. They are hunting him and he knows it, but his instincts won't allow him to relinquish his meal just yet. It almost seemed as if he were aware that he had enough time to finish the little twelve year old girl laid out before him before the villagers got close enough to even see him.

The young girl was taken within the past hour while she was squatting at a stream washing her clothes. Normally, she would have been accompanied by several other girls and women from the village for protection in numbers from the wild beasts of the jungle and especially not this early in the day either. But this morning, in her innocent embarrassment, she went to the stream alone to cleanse herself and wash her underclothes before any of the other villagers had awakened.

Ironically, it was her rite of passage into womanhood that would make her an attractive mate and future mother in her village that drew the tiger to her like a magnet through the early morning mist.

The bloody mess at the stream was an obvious testimony to the carnage a tiger would leave behind. The blood trail was fresh and could easily be seen from the village side of the stream leading into the jungle on the other side where the body had been dragged through the dense foliage. The villagers had been alerted by a young man who had gone to the stream a couple of minutes after the girl and had witnessed the brutal killing. The men had quickly gathered the tools and weapons for a tiger hunt and set out almost before everyone was fully awake.

The tiger, angered by the noise rapidly approaching him through the jungle, bolted from his breakfast, barely half finished. Running at a full gallop through the gigantic leaves of the jungle and over and under the gnarled roots of trees that made up the jungle's canopy, he barely realized that the noise from the men had started to encircle him.

The villagers, ancestors of the people who would come to inhabit modern-day Cambodia, had become extremely successful hunters over the generations. Spreading out in a line a half mile or more in length, they would move forward through the jungle towards a clearing of about two hundred meters in diameter their forefathers had created for this very purpose.

As they neared the clearing, the middle of the line slowed it's forward progress through the jungle as the ends of the line sped up. By the time they had reached the clearing, the line had come together on the opposite side, trapping any animals that had been driven from the jungle to the inside of the great circle. It was then that they all stepped into the clearing as one, and closed in on their individual prey, ignoring all others by allowing them to flee through the gaps of the closing circle of men.

As the tiger broke through the jungle into the clearing, his breathing was labored and his heart was pounding a cadence of fear and desperation. The noise and screams of the men hunting him had surrounded him and was deafening to his sensitive ears.

When he realized his cover was gone, he quickly turned around to retreat back to the safety of the jungle just as a man with a sharpened bamboo pole and make-shift shield stepped into the clearing followed by another to his left and another to his right. The startled cat turned and ran to the center of the clearing hoping to escape on the other side as one by one, each of the villager's men cleared the tree line around him, each screaming and yelling and banging his shield with his pole, each wearing a scowl of murderous determination on his face. Then, in concert, with the thunderous rhythms of pole against shield, the circle started to close.

As the men stomped further and further from the tree line, the tiger finally came to a stop at the center, defiantly making his stand, daring the men to approach closer as he swiped his claw-bared paws through the air threateningly, his fearsome roar lost in the clammer of the hunters.

The noise reached a crescendo as the men closed the circle to within twenty yards of the trapped animal, bracing themselves for the charge that would end the hunt, when a blinding, thin beam of bright white light shot down from the heavens above, slicing the tiger across the middle of his back with a single swipe as clean as if it were done by a sword. The men froze in place as the two halves of the tiger fell to the ground and a brightly glowing disk quickly came into view overhead, momentarily hovered over the dead tiger, and then slowly descended as three thin pole-like legs extended until it settled and came to rest on the ground over the big cat.

Dropping their shields and poles, the men panicked and ran for the safety of the jungle where some just kept running until they got back to the village, with a few of them stopping to turn and watch what was happening back in the clearing. By the time they had turned back to look, there were three naked, small skinny, gray, children-like creatures with over-sized heads and large black eyes bent over the tiger's carcass.