...But had a shifter instead.
Raxta had her powerful jaws around a freshly killed monkey and, with a few fluid leaps, she climbed a tree and wedged the body between a fork in the branches--dinner for later. Not quite a full meal, not quite the deer she had been hoping for, but it would do as a snack. Working her way back down and landing light on her feet, she shifted seamlessly from jaguar to human form (or as human as she got, anyway), as naked in that form as she was as a jaguar but with significantly less fur.
She sank to a crouch, knees drawn to her chest, and took deep breaths as she recovered from the change. It was always jarring at first, that switch in not only physicality, but mentality, and the change in senses and perceptions, in sight and sound and color and feel. A jaguar's brain was different than a human's, and that was what made the shifting tricky and potentially dangerous. She could not spend too much time as a full jaguar lest she lose herself to it.
When she had come back to herself, when her head stopped spinning and the sensory overload had faded (even touch was different as a human and a jaguar; hands were more sensitive than paws, and jaguar skin was protected by fur that a human's was not) she took a deep breath and wiped the blood from her lips, though it had already dried and smeared.
Alright. Hunting was done. Now she just needed to--huh?
She bristled, an unfamiliar smell catching her nose, and her ears flattened and tail lashed. Peering through the bushes, that was when she saw him.
A human. Too close for comfort.
With a jolt, she crouched down lower and held her breath, waiting. Perhaps he had not noticed her; humans could be incredibly imperceptive.
