With incredible strain Chepi got up, only to fall down again. As her senses came back she began to recall what happened. After the hunting party returned, with a strange deer, the clan had begun celebrating. End had become fiercely cold; many animals seemed to have disappeared. That night, looking down the river she saw a huge bird with claws that could break bones and wings that could carry her like a feather.

Watching it with fear, she saw that it was about to hunt a ferocious seal. Chepi watched the bird’s body lift of the branch; its huge wings cut the hair like a knife. Despite its size, it effortlessly managed to fly in silence. Then the bird gave out a harsh cry and flew away from the river like a rabbit from a dog.

She soon found out why, there was a huge amount of water coming down the creek, enough to flood the whole forest. Chepi ran for her life, ran knowing that the clan’s existence depended on her, but she was too late. Her parka had managed to catch on a bush as the flood caught up with her. Now she lay on the grass, listening to the howling of the strange dogs. She was startled when they had started to howl, because they had been so close to her. She counted the voices she heard in between them to realise that this was the biggest pack of the strange dogs she had ever seen.

Suddenly the pain in her back didn’t seem to matter, as she realised that a pack of dogs this big would require a lot of meat. Meat was anything that they could kill, that included her. She remembered her dad telling her, “The dogs we keep are different. In the wild they are smarter, faster and more brutal. Never trust a pack of wild dogs, never make that mistake.” He had then taken of his parka to show her lots of deep marks in his back. Some of them looked like dog bites.

Chepi got up and started walking west that was where the flash flood had carried her clan to. She knew that without weapons she stood no chance of surviving against the pack. As she started walking, as fast as she could, she realised that some of the dogs had stopped howling the song but were instead giving low grunts, like the ones that the clan dogs gave when they smelt food. ‘They probably just smelt a deer,’ she told herself desperately. After a while she started hearing more grunts, although they were a lot fainted because she was moving away from the pack.