Chapter 13

I may just die, I thought as I crunched through the knee-deep snow beneath the bare trees. Something was following me. I’d been in the woods for two months now. My wood pile was probably a little short of what I’d need to get through the rest of winter, but I was still piling up more as the months went on, it circled about two thirds of my tipi to make it harder for critters to get at it. Not that that was going to last once the snow really started to get deep.

I'd coated my tipi in mud, forming inner and outer walls, using branches as a lattice to hold it in place. It was pretty warm with the fire pit in the center blazing, even with the opening in the roof for smoke. I'd dug the floor down a foot or two for the dirt I had used to make the mud which increased the interior's height.

My larder was stocked with a dozen or so small birds and rabbits, gutted and just waiting to be thawed and eaten. Or there had been anyway. When I’d gotten to the tree I’d hung them in, planning to take a rabbit out for breakfast, I’d found the net I’d constructed from chokevine had been torn down and the entirety of the larder had been scattered and devoured with scarcely the odd scrap of fur and feathers to mark its previous existence. I didn’t recognize the tracks in the area, but they were big, and they were clawed. Some kind of predator. I’d dodged the odd wolf pack by climbing trees, so I knew their tracks. These were bigger. I'd also stabbed a bear in the face repeatedly with my spear when it tried to come into my tipi. It had eventually left, unhappy and bleeding heavily from its nose. These tracks were every bit as big as those that bear had left behind.

I could swear I felt eyes on me, but I couldn’t spot it. I heard the crack of a branch and spun around, brandishing my wooden spear.

I stared around me and listened as hard as I could. My left ear no doubt looked pretty fucked up, having gone the way of cauliflower due to the knockout blow I’d taken from the noble, but fortunately it hadn’t affected my hearing. I froze and listened, my breath steamed from my mouth as I breathed as slowly as I could, trying to listen over the hammering of my heart in my chest.

Wait, if it could get into the tree to get the larder…I slowly looked up. Almost directly above, it was staring down at me with yellow eyes from the shadowed side of the tree’s trunk. A low growl pierced the silence of the forest and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Practically the moment I met its golden eyes, it sprang down at me, and I jerked the spear up into its line of attack. The fire hardened wood spear tip pierced the beast just below its throat, and I tried to throw myself out of the way to the side.

I almost made it, but one of its paws struck a glancing blow to the side of my face. It felt like it had torn my head off, and I flew through the air, spinning. I landed face down in the snow, stunned. I had to get up. Even if it’s hurt badly, it could kill me before it dies, and you never know with monsters. Apparently some of these critters have multiple hearts and will only go down if you cut off the head. I pushed myself up as quickly as I could and spun to face the creature.

It was the biggest cat I’d ever seen, it had to be thrice the size of an african lion. You could ride this fucker like a horse, for about two seconds anyway, before it ate you. Jet black, it was the personification of death. I’d only heard rumors of such beasts, since they weren’t supposed to come close to towns and generally left people alone. Or maybe it was just that the only people that ever saw them died shortly thereafter and never got a chance to spread the tale.

I tore my hatchet and knife from my belt and prepared to die. The cat was snapping at the spear that it had impaled itself on when it came down at me. It grabbed the haft of the spear, and, with a single chomp, snapped it in half with a loud CRACK that echoed through the cold woods. I could see blood dripping from its mouth and nose, it probably took the spear through a lung. The bloody spear tip emerging from its back moved with each breath. That was probably a fatal wound, but it just looked pissed off. It spun to glare at me. I could feel its palpable hatred as it crouched and sprang at me, its muscles rippling beneath thick black fur.

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I think I did the last thing it anticipated, something no other creature had ever done. I expect that’s the only reason it worked at any rate. I dove directly towards it, tucked into a ball, and did a single roll. When I came up, it was just passing over me and I quickly raised my knife up into its belly almost gently. Its momentum did all the work and I heard the sound of my blade slicing flesh as it parted around the small knife, dropping its entrails with a splash on the ground behind me. As it landed, I turned, it did the same, looking very much as if it intended on taking me with it into death since it immediately sprang back at me again trailing gore. I brought the hatchet around as hard as I could, horizontal to the ground, and smacked it cleanly into the side of its massive head.

The force of its final attempt to get at me knocked me down, and the beast landed on top of me. Well, guess this is it. Probably pretty impressive I took down a death panther even if it did kill me. I lay there waiting to die, but it didn’t move. In fact, it was completely still. When I realized it wasn’t breathing I started thinking I may just live, but I was fully pinned under it. At least it’s warm, I thought, and started laughing hysterically. It took a few minutes to worm my way out from underneath its oppressive weight, but once I did, I got a good look at it.

Holy shit, I can’t believe I’m alive. I could feel the blood running down the side of my head and gingerly felt at the wound. Or wounds plural it turned out. I had four deep parallel grooves running from my cheek, two below the corner of my eye and two on my forehead, all the way to the back of my head, my fucked up ear was now split in two and missing a chunk near the top. Well, I was never pretty to begin with. I chuckled, pain hadn’t bothered me much for some time now. Still, I recalled from my past life that a big cat's scratches almost always got infected, so I was probably going to spend some time sick again. Fuck, and just after I got over my infection from that whipping too.

I sighed, with my larder gone where the fuck was I going to get food in a hurry so I could lay up and heal. I looked down at the cat. Oh, yeah. I bet it’ll taste like shit, but I don’t have a lot of options, and I’ll probably start getting feverish within the next six to eight hours or so. Just an estimate but it helps to have deadlines.

I recalled how warm that fur had been while I was laying under the cat and smiled. I started skinning the cat. It’d take awhile to skin something this big but I'd have some seriously warm winter wear once I was done.

In the end I made multiple trips throughout the day and even into the evening when I was starting to lose the light entirely. I had almost the entirety of the cat’s meat and fur. I’d taken its claws as well and even hacked off its head and made a whole trip just to bring that back. I had the meat stacked up next to my hut and had buried it in snow to keep it fresh and hopefully hidden from any critters that would want to eat it, not that it smelled great. Apparently predators generally taste like shit, but I didn’t have a lot of options. My garbage trained nose was telling me it was edible.

I was sweating like a pig, and it wasn’t all from the effort of making the slog back and forth, I was feeling more and more feverish. I’d stuck the cat’s head on the remains of my spear that I’d pulled from its corpse and had it currently standing out in front of my tipi. The cat’s skin was stretched out over my floor to dry, but there was so much of it that I’d had to freeze a good portion to try tanning later. I thought I vaguely recalled something from my past life about drying it, scraping it, smearing it with brains, piss, water, and salt water, or some combination therein, but I wasn’t enthused about the prospect of trying my hand at it myself. I sat down on the pile of dried grass that comprised my bed, and, using my knife, flensed little bits of flesh from the skin as I sat there getting sicker and sicker. I’d cleaned out the cuts as best I could with snow, but I was right, it’s definitely infected.

I cut up the cat’s heart into big chunks and cooked it on sticks over my fire. I choked down the disgusting meat, suppressing my gag reflex, reminding myself that I could eat anything. I filled my belly to bursting and lay down with the torn side of my face up. I stared at the fire until I felt sleep dragging me down.

I grinned as I closed my eyes, ignoring the pain as my smile tugged at the cuts on my face. I may just qualify as hard to kill after all this bullshit.