"He might be dead now," Ivan Dume says grimly. "Did not think there would be danger immediately as we landed!"
Follow them tracks! Have the others follow as well.
The three of you follow the tracks to the best of your abilities. You lose sight of the tracks when whatever made them apparently went onto the road for a bit, but after some searching you manage to pick up the trace again. You follow it to the other side of town, not too far from the banana plantation families' compound before you lose the tracks in the thick vegetation. You are currently about 30 meters or so away from the compound wall, but there is no way of telling which way the tracks were actually going when they stopped.
be really absorbed in the tracts. Would a cat large enough to make that track be light enough to make it that lightly on the ground. . . After that, pull out my blow gun and finger my darts. Keeping them at the ready.
Well, you're no zoologist. But you let your mind wander a bit and try to imagine how big a cat that leaves that size print would have to be. You gulp when come to the conclusion that the only way that size footprint would be that light is when the cat is made out of fluffy marshmallow. You somehow doubt you're going to come across a marshmallow cat. You grab your blowgun tightly, just in case.
Make sure I can pull my rifle out quickly, and cover the rear.
"Shouldn't have gone off on his own..."
Keeping to the rear of the group, you fumble with the guitar case in an effort to make your rifle easy to get to. The best you can do without having the rifle out of the case is stuffing the extra rounds in your pockets, loading the rifle and leaving one of the case straps undone. You're sure you can get the rifle out quite quickly like this, though it will mean throwing the case to the ground.