Sam didn’t want to get out of the bivvy when he woke up. He was so sore that he thought for a moment they’d given him back his sixty year old body for some reason. He contemplated taking a couple of pills, but not for long. He’d better damn’ well toughen up, or he was going to run out of the damned things before he got out of Massachusetts, and he had a long way to go beyond those borders.

Sighing heavily, he dragged ass into the frigid darkness. The watch told him that it was close to midnight, which meant he’d slept for something like nine hours. He kindled a small fire. Nothing big, since he wasn’t planning on doing much tonight. Just big enough to warm the hootch and feed the Biolite stove. He’d been using batteries like crazy, and the solar charger alone wasn’t keeping up.

While he waited for his little blaze to become self-sustaining, he addressed the flashing light. Somebody had apparently enjoyed the stalk, and he was several dozens of points richer. Several someones, looked like. He hadn’t noticed the flashing before he’d turned in, though. Had he missed it, or had it been somebody watching on time delay? Come to that, was there time delay available?

That opened up a whole new rabbit hole. I mean, he thought to himself. Isn’t this whole stupid escapade, like, a fifteen hundred year time delay? Hey, bro, I heard you liked time delay, so here’s some time delay with your time delay. Then he pondered the notion of somebody at some point in the future binge watching the whole three or four years of his prospective adventure and couldn’t help but chuckle.

All of which got him wondering... did they have some way of shifting focus forward or back to zero in on a particular moment they wanted to see better? Damnit, this was why he hated time travel stories. They made his head hurt.

Shaking his head clear of the vagaries of string theory and multi-planer transitions, he took a quick trip around the lake to reset the trotlines he’d taken up when he’d left on his short scout.

Afterwards, he slouched over to where he’d hung the doe. She was still hanging unmolested, and his light revealed no tracks around the tree. She’d do to wait for morning, he figured.

An hour of language study and some videos on making pine tar and pine sap glue, and he was ready to call it a night. He wasn’t really tired yet, but he didn’t want to be tired tomorrow either, so he let the fire die and lay back in the bivvy, trying to be still and to doze.

The next day was primarily spent butchering and preparing the deer. Some, he just stuck over the fire with a few spices sprinkled over the surface. Most, though, he cut into thin strips for jerky and pemmican, working with one of the Old Hickory knives he’d brought for trading, laying the meat along some flat rock at the lake’s edge he’d scrubbed with sand .

There wasn’t much heat in the sun, but he compromised by laying out rocks around a small fire, warming them and placing the meat onto the warm surfaces. Some, he hung inside, on makeshift drying racks high up near the exhaust slit for the fire as an experiment. Maybe the warmth of the smoke and the draft from the defacto flue would dry the meat more quickly.

Lunch was a working affair. He was running against the clock, even as cold as it was. Between chasing after firewood and keeping the meat from growing too warm around the fire, and rendering what fat he could recover, there wasn’t much time for relaxed contemplation.

Most of what he was doing here wasn’t new to him. He’d done all of this repeatedly over the years. What was different was that those other times he’d been doing it for fun, with basically all the time in the world. He could afford to work the animal in small chunks, safe in the knowledge that the remainder was safe in the freezer. He’d had plenty of fat and supplementary fat to work with, and all the spices Meg’s pantry could throw at him.

Then there were the stove and oven, the electric fans for the drying racks, the hot and cold running water, the soap, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Here, it was him, the cold air, and whatever wood he could gather, with clean water being at a premium.

Supper was another venison steak, eaten while keeping the two fires going.

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It took him another full day to get the whole of the doe butchered and separated into what he’d cook fresh and what he was turning into jerky and pemmican. And the pemmican was another problem, as he hadn’t yet managed to make containers to store it in.

There was supposed to be clay down in the Boston area. He remembered reading about them having to dump millions of cubic feet of it on Spectacle Island when they were building some tunnel or other back in the day. It had been a big story because they’d ended up disturbing archeological sites.

he caught himself thinking about hiking down there and looking for some. What would that do, really? Was he seriously getting so used to squatting up here by this lake after so little time that he was contemplating building a kiln and making pottery? This was a temporary camp, meant to allow him to scout the area before moving on. That was all.

He needed to get his head square and remember what the hell he was doing. The deer hide tied him to the camp for another week or two before he could reasonably tan it. By then, the meat he’d cut would either be eaten, jerked, turned into pemmican, or going bad. That was his deadline. Two weeks, then, and he’d move on, one way or another.

He made another run inland while waiting for the hide to dry, following his previous tracks. It had snowed again in the interim. Only an inch or two, but that was good. At this point, cold was his ally. He swept east towards the bay once he’d reached his previous turnaround point.

The locals were supposed to have been all through this area, living in multiple villages, but it was a large area, encompassing numerous islands separated by varying widths and depths of water. It didn’t help that he had to move as though there were hostiles around every rock or stump.

He found his first indication of human presence his second day away from camp, in the late morning. A campfire ring, no more. It looked to have been cold for quite some time. He fished carefully around in the ash pile, looking for bones or scraps. A bit of scorched nut, too burnt to identify with his non-botanist’s eye.

He looked around, raising his regard. He had PDFs of numerous books outlining the various nut bearing trees that would have grown in the area. He contemplated digging the tablet out of his pack, but decided that looking for nuts would do him about as much good as studying leaves and branch patterns on a screen.

He’d crossed half a dozen shallow waterways at this point, having been turned aside by a few more as the depth approached the limit of his waders ability to protect him. It was tedious work, and cold, for all his modern winter gear.

That night, he sat perched on a hummock of earth before yet another campfire ring as water bubbled in his canteen cup, roiling pine needles around for tea. He hadn’t found a village yet, occupied or abandoned, but he’d found the odd sign of occasional habitation in the form of hacked branches and old fires. he’d give it one more day and then head back to check on the camp — make sure he hadn’t had unwelcome visitors.

Twice more in the two weeks he’d allotted himself, he ventured forth. The first time, he headed west at the river, following the waterway back up to the sea before returning. The second, he crossed over at a wide, shallow bar, probing the narrow channel before vaulting across on a pole he fashioned from a two inch tree he’d felled.

The more he moved, the wider he cast, the more he decided he needed some sort of boat, and some way to carry it from channel to channel. It didn’t look promising, and his self-imposed two week deadline was in trouble.

The doeskin was more of an ordeal than he’d imagined in these primitive conditions and working alone. Even with the handles replaced, de-hairing it was a chore, and the actual process of tanning with the pasty brain mush was unpleasant.

He’d never brain tanned before this trip, always using commercial tanning agents on his previous efforts. Bark tanning would have given him better results, but he had neither the equipment nor the six months to one year he’d need just for the one hide.

In the event, it turned out to be a good thing he’d popped the larcenous raccoon, as that bit of practice made the doe easier to work.

It was quickly coming to him that his situation was more dire than he’d previously expected. Things his modern man mind hadn’t even considered were turning out to be crucial elements to any sort of progress.

He’d fooled himself in his week of runup into thinking that bringing along a couple of steel camp pots and some steel trade goods would give him a leg up. He’d figured that wooden pegs would do for nails, and with that, he could build anything. There might be things farther from the truth, but he’d need a good pair of glasses to see them.

Reality was a bitch.

In any case, it was time to move. The meat wouldn’t last forever, even supplementing with the heath hens he’d begun finding and taking with snares and the .22, and he was pulling barely any fish out of the lake. Worst of all, between the weather and the rocky ground, he wasn’t in any position to make any progress on survival, let alone movement.

“Thanks, Bob,” he mumbled as he was packing dried meat into containers and wrappings not meant for it. “Tucker Shandry my ass! He had metal, at least.”

He wasn’t moving far, he figured. A day’s travel, maybe two. Someplace he could set up a more permanent camp and teach himself to live in this place and time. He had the learning tools, at least. He’d need to build the rest, and it was going to take much more time than he’d originally calculated.