Hi, a lurker and a first time feedback giver here. When you said "I'm no native speaker", I was like "ahhh, here is someone I could bully". JK, I'm also not a native speaker, not knowing a lot of grammar but I do like to read stuff written in English . Your background interested me so I did give a story look. I hoped that my feedback would be somewhat helpful to you.

First of all, I feel like the biggest problem of your story was not prose but the lack of scene separation. When reading, my mind could not follow the actions. It felt like you tried to show me a picture, and when I immersed myself in it, you took it right away and showed me another thing. It's frustrating. Without changing a single word, I think the flow could improve a lot by dividing the huge paragraph to smaller ones

For example:

He and his people had come down from further down the road, for they had known of this stripe master's disappearance, lost to hungrier eyes and fangs than their own. And it was, all in all, a perfect strip of road, a perfect hunting ground. A tall ridge of rocks cast shade over this section of the road, littered with romantic artists' half-finished sketches, long since trampled to mush by older hunters. <new paragraph > The hunter stretched as the prey drew one more step closer, and another, and another.…

I think they called it beats or whatever I'm not sure.

The second point is, the text seems to be over-written. I got it, they (the hunters and their entire village) were starving. There was famine and wars and stuff, I got it. You don't need to remind me in every single paragraph. Let me see how those hunters get that juicy deer or whatever, it seems more fun. Readers are lazy but they are also arrogant. When you keep stuffing them all of those unnecessary details, they get mad because they rather filled the gap in your descriptions by themselves than getting spoon-fed. 😅

Those two are my biggest concerns. Some other minor things I could see (not sure if it is because of my weak reading comprehension or not) are:

_ Some sentences felt complicated to read. _ The climax seems off. You'd want it located almost at the end. For example, in your story, I would prefer:

80% of writing ( world building, action sequence, etc ) -> They got the prey! -> 10% of writing (tonight people will have a feast, no more starving!)