It wasn't everyday someone wandered into her territory. Not long ago she had met a human male and she had tolerated his presence, for he seemed harmless enough with no weapons and no real means of survival. But this female, with her strange little animal that smelled all wrong, like death, had Raxta on edge.
She was perched in a tree, a half-consumed deer wedged between the branches, but she had paused her meal and gone very still when the creature started to act strange--especially when it looked in her direction. She didn't know if she'd been sighted, but it still made a lump form in her throat when the human took out a knife.
Her particular kind of not-quite-jaguar, not-quite-human weren't very common, but it was common enough for them to be killed in jaguar-form. Raxta's initial instinct was to abandon her kill and try to slink away and disappear, as she was very good at doing, but she'd chosen the wrong tree for that--the closest branches of the trees neighboring hers were too thin, not capable of supporting her weight. Option two was climbing higher where the leaves were thickest and waiting for the female to pass--most humans were terrible climbers, she'd found, though the problem was it was easier going up than down, even for her.
Cursing silently, she settled a third option--rather than wait there until she was spotted, make first contact herself, as a human. That had worked well enough with the male. Though she was a powerful hunter, the thought of leaping down and scaring the human away didn't really enter her mind; she was a hunter that relied on stealth and surprise, on landing on her prey and killing them in one quick, skull-piercing bite. Confrontation was another matter altogether; she didn't want to fight. Fights meant injury, and injury meant infection and death.
Very well, then.
She shifted, no longer a jaguar lounging on a branch, but now a strange naked woman that looked mostly human with blood smears on her face and hands. She peered down at them, ears pinned back and tail tip twitching.
"What are you doing here?" she called out.
Not the most friendly welcome, but she was nothing if not blunt.