| Subject: Chapter two |
Author:
Mike
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Date Posted: 02/21/05 2:55:04pm Mon
In reply to:
Mike
's message, "Mike brand Fiction (Chapter one)" on 02/21/05 2:53:39pm Mon
How long he lay there, dazed from his ordeal, he did not know. All he was aware of was the passing of seemingly infinite time, and of the stars coming overhead. For a moment, he wondered if he had died, but the insistent gnawing in his stomach and the soreness of his parched throat informed him that he was still very much alive.
As he regained his feet, he slowly became aware that there was no one about, and all he could see were trees. It looked to him, for a moment, that he would starve, but lessons from another time, from a life taken away by slavers drifted back to him, and he looked at the knife in his hand.
The first order of business was to find water. It took a determined march through the trees, but the forest was such that he was not unfamiliar with the plant life, and the nature of it was that there must be a source of fresh water about.
So, in keeping with his present luck, he nearly fell into it. He had been hunting for it, his ears having finally caught the sound of running water as he moved, and had walked through some particularly dense foliage, and had the ground give way on him. Had he not jumped backwards (and directly into some plant that seemed possessed of particularly long, sharp thorns), he would have fallen into the swift current of the river.
Kneeling down to the edge of the water, he drank, letting the cool, fresh water run down his parched throat as he thought about what to do next. He needed first, he realized, to check over that wreckage before anything useful could be washed away with the tide.
By the time he got back to the beach, his bare feet, cut by the sharp branches and rocks in the forest, left blood on the sand. Stomach growling, he set to looking over the wreckage.
One of the immediately obvious things was large piece of the ship’s mast that was washed up on the beach, useful for a number of reasons. First, of course, there was the rope that remained attached to it, second, a number of good arrows were sticking out of it in places, though some arrows had been snapped, probably when the whole thing had come crashing to the deck… but not only this, there was sail canvas, torn though it may be, Rethan was sure it would come in handy.
Once had stripped the mast as clean as he could, he had about ten feet of rope, six still serviceable arrows, and about twelve broken arrows that he could salvage the tips from. He also had a very large amount of sail canvas.
Moving on, he began to check the barrels, conscious of the growing insistence of his stomach. Such as it was, he at once thanked whatever deity provided him providence, and groaned when he found a barrel full of salt pork.
Salt pork, of the type served at sea, was not among the greatest of foods. There were many things people might prefer to eat, some might have even preferred a meal of hair and hide to salt pork. Unfortunately, those options weren’t presented to Rethan, who promptly began cutting small branches from trees and then went to work on a fire.
If you’re going to have a meal that tastes utterly foul, it may as well be warm… or at least, that might be how you think if you could actually start a fire. Rethan found himself unwilling to dull his knife on a rock for the surer way of starting a flame, and banging two rocks together, didn’t seem to work the way flint and steel always had. Admittedly, you got a spark, but it had an unfortunate habit of flying off in unexpected, and for the most part, decidedly unwanted, directions.
Finally, in a moment of defeat, there was the scrape of knife against stone, and wood shavings cut from the sticks they were about to light, lit fire as he blew on it, then began to warm flesh so chilled that Rethan hadn’t been aware of how cold he was until the fire began to warm himself next to a swiftly building flame.
As he began to eat, he looked mournfully at his wounded feet, wincing as he appraised each cut before cleaning it with a bit of the sail canvas.
“I have to figure out how to survive and get back to where people are,” He said absently as he began to wrap his feet thoroughly in strips of sailcloth to form makeshift boots.
He needed several things, he realized as he looked at his collection of arrows and broken arrows. One, was a fair strip of sinew, to make a bowstring, where he would get that, he didn’t know.
Second, he needed clothing, and for that, some sort of cloth or leather, also things he didn’t know how to get. Last, and certainly not least, he needed armor. He had learned, the hard way, of the cruelty of people, and had no desire to press his luck without something to protect his skin, yet again, he was faced with acquisition problems.
The next day, he worked at finding the right limb for a bow, and using the rope that he had taken from the wreckage to set snares, his specialty.
Just as he was finishing with cutting long, straight limb from a tree, he heard something that was music to his ears. The loud crunch of twigs and brush, something heavy had wandered onto one of his pit traps.
It didn’t surprise him to see the deer at the bottom of the pit, as he had chosen this place because of the deer run nearby, and had used a bit of fat from the salt pork as bait.
Meat did not normally attract deer, but salt, and the smell of salt, certainly did, Rethan had known. What he didn’t know however, was how to deal with the deer that was now roaming around the bottom of his pit trap, and would most likely try to gore him with antler, or beat his head in with razor sharp hooves if he got too close.
In the end, he found a very large rock, and dropped it on the poor brute, then spent the rest of the day cleaning it and preparing the skin and meat, along with carving out the sinew he wanted to use.
Making the bow was a similarly boring process, involving carving it out from the solid wood, properly curing the wood in animal fats (It was truly amazing how much of a boon that deer had been).
Finally, after four days, he was outfitted with a shirt (albeit one that had taken quite some time to make, because of difficulties making tools out of bone), and he had a working set of soft leather boots… on top of that, he had a bow, and several arrows.
Hunting on this day went horrible, especially when he stumbled across him. The him in question, was a large male boar that seemed decidedly irritable and angry, and unfortunately, saw Rethan before Rethan saw him.
The boar had burst from the brush and its tusk had found one of Rethan’s legs as it rushed past him, then skidded to a halt and turned while Rethan, blood tricking down from the nasty gash on his leg, fitted an arrow into his bow, and pulled back.
The bow was, by its nature, an incredibly hard pull, yet Rethan, grimacing at the combination of pain in his leg and the effort of pulling a bow back and aiming under the conditions of having a boar charging him, finally let fly with an arrow.
Unfortunately, wild boar are stubborn, stubborn creatures, prone to not stopping a charge even when impaled upon several feet of spear, and an arrow, thin in shaft and not so long, no matter how hard it flew, would not outright stop the charge of such a beast.
What precisely happened in the moment of collision was never clear to Rethan, who vaguely remembered the sensation of something very large hitting him as he tried to dodge aside, and knocking him directly into a tree, then the sensation of falling to the ground, just before everything went black.
When he awoke, the boar was very dead, and his leg wound was crusting over, but it hurt to move. “This is awfully familiar,” He muttered to himself, being reminded of when he was taken.
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