The paper bags I was carrying clattered to the floor as my arms around them slackened, and the tins of beans and soup rolled out underneath the sofa. My eyes widened as I took in the condition of my cabin in shock, it looked as if a hurricane had passed through the tiny living room. The plait cotton of my sofa was ripped open, and the cotton wool and springs peeped out from between the tears. My books, papers and newspapers were all over the carpet like the floor of a hamster's cage, and my photographs of birds and otters had crashed onto my desk. My camera was still in the dry cabinet which was the only thing in the 10x10ft living room that was intact. I pulled out my rifle underneath the couch and cocked the weapon, pointing it directly in front of me. Cautiously, I stepped off the steel ladder and into the lounge. I kept my boots on the carpet, cautious that I would not scrunch my soles on any paper or glass in case whatever wild animal that had broken into my trailer would not be alerted of my position. I kept my right eye in the eye piece and my left eye wide open to reduce my blind spots and my ears were perked. I could sense it, it knew I was near, and it was waiting for me to find it. But I stayed with my back facing the doorway, rifle at shoulder length. My finger pressed against the trigger, but it did not appear.

Very gradually, I raised my left foot and let it sink into the carpet two feet in front of me and stood facing the kitchen. I was met with a view of my kitchen counter below the window, nothing else. Then, it came into view and for a moment, I was mesmerized.

It must have stood five feet tall on all fours, gazing at me with honey-yellow eyes that looked as clear as stream water. It's fur shone like the coat of snow that covered the earth on the first day of snowfall and its whiskers and muzzle shone a light, almost white gray. There were no fear in its eyes, no hint of it feeling threatened, and an aura of intimidation hung over it. It raised its head without losing eye contact with me, as though challenging me, go on, shoot. My fingers tightened on the trigger as it moved its head, but I did not.

I did not know what made me do it, but following that, I did the most unbelievable thing ever. I lowered the rifle.

That's when it lunged at me.

*

The first three hours of a Monday, Kevin manages to make them productive. Unlike any other weekday of the week, on Mondays, he wakes up at eight instead of seven, brushes his teeth, splashes his face with cool water without shaving, grabs his keys, laptop and sweater and walks idly to his car, ignoring his notifications beeping madly in his pocket, which probably consisted of his quality assurance dude liking to know 'where he was', and the deliberately ignored data entry intern's mundane habit of sending him embarrassing, blurry pictures of another intern eating his cereal, and of course, his sweet-tempered CEO wanting to know 'where the f*** he was'. He reaches his office in twenty minutes provided that there's there's no abnormally long traffic jam (it jams every Monday), swipes his ID over the digital slot next to the automatic door and nods at the pretty receptionist behind the seat who tells him the usual polite “Good morning, the CEO's looking for you,”. Kevin would smile, thank her, and slide straight into his cubicle, stretch like a tabby cat in his swivel chair, wiggle his fingers and promptly sign into Facebook, as though he has no messages. Three minutes later, he would start racing through his work, whilst the CEO would check on him every half-an-hour as unnecessary motivation, since no one gives a damn about their boss. It doesn't help that everyone's got way too much blackmail material to use on him provided that he maintains a certain amount of their bonuses.

Today, however, is an exception, and Kevin's productive hours are reduced by twenty minutes. He's in the midst of coding a chunk of data when his office line literally screams. The data entry intern roared with laughter at his own genre of humor as Kevin, cursing profusely, rips up the phone and clicks the green button.

“Kevin Wu speaking.”

“Kevin, it's ZiTao.”

Kevin's eyebrows furrow as ZiTao replies; he needn't have told him who he was, no one else Kevin knew had that lazy drawl when he spoke. But he wondered what on earth could have triggered his brother's best friend to call in the middle of work hours.

“Uh huh, what's up?”

“It's your brother, he's missing.”

Kevin forgets to breathe. He stands there, rooted to the spot, his eyes staring straight ahead at the executive director tossing a ball of tissue into the wastepaper bin, but his mind is wandering wildly. He's dead. Kevin almost whispers, after all, his brother had chosen a road where he has to live like a hermit instead of a decent human. Whatever the hell it was his brother did, it required him to squeeze his six feet figure into a miniscule cabin in the middle of a forest with zero human population and probably a hundred over species capable of eating him up whole. Some people call that dedication, Kevin calls that suicidal tendencies.

“Oi, you there?” ZiTao's voice floats back into his ears and he bumps back into reality, dazed.

“Yeah, how long has he been...?”

“He missed his check-in session last Saturday, but we didn't think much of it since it was raining bullets, but he missed it again two days ago and I started getting edgy. So I went up to his cabin this morning.”

Kevin held the receiver closer to his earlobe.

“His place was trashed, freaking nightmare. Kris is anything but a fusspot, but his stuff was all over the damn place, his books, his work, his stuff, and I hiked up to the places he usually hangs out. No sign of him.”

“Could he have been dragged off by something?”

Silence.

“I think you'd better come down here to Pemberly,” ZiTao finally comments, his tone cold and a dial tone rang in Kevin's ear. He placed the receiver thoughtfully back onto the handle and grabs his stuff.

“Where are you going?,” his intern inquires, his eyes still glued to the Excel slide on his Dell Latitude.

“Family emergency, I'll be back in a couple of days,” Kevin races out of his cubicle with his head ducked to avoid the CEO from glimpsing him, sidesteps the coffee trolley and into the arms of the elevator. Just as the elevator doors are about to close, his boss steps in and his eyes widen at the sight of his employee.

Ah, crap.

*

Tao stuffs his phone back into his pocket and stares around the trailer. The intensity of the silence makes him shudder, and once again his imagination soars crudely as he takes in the unorganized surroundings once again. His Columbia boots crush upon shards of glass and he picks up a wooden frame from the floor. He freezes as he stares at the photograph. It wasn't the quality of the photo that stuns him, or the otter in the photo bathing in the stream.

It was the patches of dried blood on the blue skies and water. He peers down at his feet and his blood turns cold.

*

After filing the missing person's report and filling in on the questions, Kevin drives into his parents' house before checking on the cabin. The police, a lazy sheriff whose name he can't seem to pronounced had taken all his info with half an eye closed. As far as he was concerned, Kris had probably strayed off path and ended at the other part of the mountain. Disappearances rarely occurred in Pemberly, everyone knew everyone, and no one was interested in killing or kidnapping each other. That is one of the advantages of living in a town with a population of five hundred.

Kevin hasn't stepped foot in his parent's house only nearly a year, yet already, the furniture had been moved. The smell of cigarettes and coffee fills the house, and the baby pictures of Kris and Kevin that originally stood on the mantelpiece has been removed and replaced with Kevin's graduation photos. None of the frames indicates that the couple has another son, Kevin notes uncomfortably as he watches his mother brew coffee with a pot. She had thrown out the coffee maker Kris had bought, just as she said she would when he moved out because she has never approved of it. She said there was chemical in the machine and he was bound to get poisoned.

“Mum, listen,” Kevin sat down on the pouffe facing the counter as he addressed her back, “ZiTao told me to go check it out myself later, so I think it's kind of serious...”

“Serious? Of course it's serious,” my mother turns to him with two mugs of coffee, “everything that disappointment does is serious. Besides, I don't see why that silly boy called you, it's not the first time Kris has disappeared doing lord knows what.”

“The difference is that he's in Pemberly Forest, mum,” Kevin tries to be patient, but then irritation swells up. If his brother bothers updating his family about what he did at least once a week, they wouldn't be sitting here wondering what on earth he was up to.

“He's the one who insisted on working in that horrible place, that stupid boy. It's about time he got himself lost.”

Now that Kevin thinks of it, his parents has always complained about everything his brother did. They were always convinced that he would end up badly because he was brave, and sometimes stupid enough to do what he wanted to do, even though they disapproved or said no.

That's what Kevin's mother thinks of this whole affair as well, his compensation for throwing away his law degree and taking zoology. “It was just a matter of time before he got himself killed,” her mother had said when Kevin had briefed her about Kris' disappearance on the phone on his way to Pemberly.

There was once when he was three years old when he wanted a mat in his room because he found the room he shared with Kevin lacking. His mother had ignored him, of course, telling him that if anything, it was a bookshelf that he needed. He had went ahead and painted on a piece of paper and stuck it to the doorway, with wet paint and all. Of course, when his father walked in to make Kevin brush his teeth, he'd slipped and fallen face first on the unfortunately, solid floor.

That was the first time. The second time was three weeks later, when he had tried to reach for the television controller due his 'television time' after a row with his mother and left the TV on the whole night. He hadn't wanted to watch TV, he'd just wanted to see her pissed.

Maybe that was the only time he felt like she cared. Even as a child, Kevin had been aware of his mother's preference towards himself, and as for his father; as far as he was concerned, the light shone out of his wife's arse. So if she thought Kris was Denise the Menace, then Kris was Denise the Menace. 'Nuff said.

At first, especially during fights, Kevin had felt triumphant when his mother took his side, convinced that he was in the right until things started getting ridiculous, like when Kevin accidentally broke a glass in the kitchen in first grade. The boys weren't even supposed to use glasses, and he was shivering with fear whilst Kris tried keeping off the puddle. Upon hearing the crash, their mother had rushed into the room. One look at the puddle and she had turned and given Kris a blow across the cheek. Kevin had been stunned into silence, staring wide-eyed at his mother's sudden motion. But what scared him that day wasn't just his mother's ridiculous preference, it was the fact that Kris didn't even flinch when the smack landed on his cheek and left a red mark. He just stood there whilst their mother shook his shoulders violently and shoved him into the bathroom as time-out. And that night, when Kevin had tried to apologize for not saying a word, he'd stared into his brother's eyes, eyeballing him into silence. As though he was afraid that talking about it would make him crack up. It was then that Kevin realized that his brother was physically tougher than anyone he had ever met.

He was like a bottle, which stored up all the burden and hate within him without a word. But Kevin used to wonder what would happen when the bottle was full and overflowing.

What kind of animal will he turn into?

YiXing's POV

For one thing, I didn't like geese near me. They were far too large for birds, too clumsy and too nippy. Some people say they pinch, but I'm certain they nip. The bruise on my arm is my evidence. Give me a sparrow, or a dove, or even a penguin, and I'd be happy to work with them as a keeper, but absolutely no geese. Or swans, for that matter.

Yet then and there, were two fat geese waddling up to me like Donald Duck on crutches. Well, technically, they were racing towards my partner, Luhan, who was in charge of them as well as the ducks, cranes, chickens and his least priority, the horses. Luhan was pretty much mad about birds, and was perfectly happy with the giant birds honking around him and pinching sandwiches out of his hands. They looked so greedy that for a moment, I was worried that they might gobble up his fingers.

“Pilgrims like these are easier to rear, since they're actually domestic geese. There's been a lot of debate about where they come from and which breeds they're descended from though.”

For the record, I didn't give a rat's crap where the Pilgrim geese came from, as long as they kept the heck away from me. Because if they pinch me again, I'll have them deported to France where they're ancestors are supposedly from, according to Luhan.

Luhan has been working for the farm for six months now, and he's forever telling anyone who would listen about him seriously considering taking ornithology, even though his mother wanted him to be an accountant. I think being the bird guy suits him better, though. I was in charge of the smaller stuff, like the stinky, lazy fat rats in disguises – hamsters. I suppose my boss wasn't exactly confident about my resume, since nothing on it brands me as an animal lover, and there was no other kid for the job. The farm we worked in wasn't even a farm, it was actually an animal detainment centre that took in animals that had been caught destroying public prop. So basically, the white collars, who have nothing better to do around Pemberly, catches them and dumps them here as long as they are domestic. Not the bears though, if they needed any help on 'wild' situations, they called Kris or ZiTao directly.

They've had been called a total of eleven times now, whilst Luhan and I had given more than a couple of hundred rings. The biggest monster I'd had to deal with was a bull, when both Kris and ZiTao had been absent from work one day 'cause Tao had to send Kris off to the hospital. Kris had fallen into a frog pond in the beginning of a December morning and gotten pneumonia. So, Luhan had driven us to a farm where we saw that a part of the field fence had been demolished, compliments to the bull that was racing around the barn, scaring the feathers off the chickens. A shepherd was sitting on top of the roof, waving his staff at Luhan's Prius, and we could hear a string of profanities from our one mile radius from him. When we looked closer, we saw that there were a couple more guys up there with him, on the verge of falling off. The stupid son of a es had been initiated 'Slap the Bull' at four in the afternoon whilst being drunk out of their minds, hence their dilemma.

It was a pity Luhan didn't like bulls, because if he did, I'd gladly hand the job to him.

“Are they friggin' crazy? Look at the nuts on that thing,” Luhan breathed whilst he parked at the side of the road, watching the bull breathe smoke and circulate the wooden building.

“They should've just slapped a chicken.”

Four hours later, we still couldn't get the bull into one of our guy's trailers, and the entire farmhouse was getting hysterical. Just then, Kris arrived (Sehun must have left fifteen million voice messages on his machine). He looked a mess, but he'd had some shots. He didn't even need a traq dart, and he'd had the thing in the trailer in an hour.

So yeah, he's pretty much the animal prodigy around here – he could tame a saber-toothed tiger if he wanted to. The big cases around here required both him and Tao and I couldn't imagine the centre without him. But last week, ZiTao found blood in his cabin, and the dude was still nowhere to be found.

Even experts had casualties with their expertise, but Kris' disappearance seriously weirded me out.

Like, it wasn't all as it seemed.