In the course of a few months I became an expert at anything kidnapping related. Mind you, I wasn’t a Rambo fighting machine. I was still a little pudgy and probably couldn’t give a normally trained man a good fight. But I didn’t need to be. I just needed to not be seen or noticed by bystanders and kidnap a highschool girl. You don’t need to be strong for that. Nearing the end of my training I got into the habit of stalking and tracking things I encountered in the woods around my house. Sometimes I would be tracking some deer or boar, but it happened quite often that I would follow some man walking through the forest. This was quite thrilling. Some of them would be trapping and check all the rabbit traps they laid out. Others would just be camping with a friend or a son. But some were hunters. They were always paying a lot of attention to their surroundings. Also they were holding a gun. Not getting caught by a camper was thrilling but not getting caught by a hunter had the extra thrill of not getting shot. Obviously, I didn’t track them for days. I made up a little stalking game to hone my skills. If I could get a good close up mug shot of my prey before dusk I won. Otherwise they won. To make this challenge slightly more doable for myself I always brought a good camera with me.
On a sunny saturday in May I was doing one of my tracking practises again. I was tracking a hunter from the village. I had seen him before in town, he was one of the clerks at the local bank. I tracked him the entire morning and nothing interesting happened. I was getting quite bored. He kept to clearings and never paused, making it very difficult for me to circle around and get a good mugshot. I was almost ready to call it a day when it happened. I was just on top of a small hill expecting him to be some 300 meter further when he vanished! He was nowhere to be seen!