My carefully built wigwam was torn apart, its frame sticking out like spokes of a broken umbrella. My sleeping mats were shredded. Entire camp was covered in deep animal footprints impressed in the soggy riverside soil. It was the prints that filled my guts with icy fear. Each one was at least four times as long as my footprint, and shaped like a trident, with deep gauges where the animal’s claws hit the ground on every step. The prints circled the camp, showing that whatever destroyed my shelter kept going back, to it to mangle it some more. Then it meandered the clearing, exploring every nook and bush, but giving a wide berth to the smoldering remnants of the fires, and weirdly enough, the duplication pools. Then the creature must have hopped on the pine jetty as well, looking for me.

The trunk was covered in curved gashes, as if the animal used its talons to balance itself on it.

And yes, I thought, these were definitely talons. Huge bird talons. No mammal leaves that kind of weird tracks.

I remembered such tracks from my childhood, only much much smaller, and belonging to a rooster that harassed me when I was vacationing on my grandparents’ farm. That bird was vicious and murderous beyond all reason, and I did not want to meet its dinosaur-sized cousin. Or maybe it was an actual dinosaur? This place seemed prehistoric, though not that prehistoric. I was pretty sure giant wolverines, ducks, and dinosaurs did not coexist, though every hour in this place eroded my confidence in what I thought I knew about the past.

Something moved in the bushes and I crouched, with my spear raised to strike, like the caveman I was turning into. How I wish I were an actual caveman, with a cozy cave to hide in, and ancestral knowledge of what lurks in the woods and how to deal with it!

My lousy spear would be like a toothpick to this creature, if the size of its tracks served as any indication of the size of its actual body. I backed closer to the nearest bonfire, not taking my eyes off the woods, and kneeled to blow at the embers. When a flame appeared, I fed it the remnants of my shelter, until it roared twice my height and filled the air with choking smoke. Soon after, the remaining three bonfires were re-lit, and I was surrounded by flames.

As I gathered dry reeds to put into the fire, I found a feather. A feather the size of a small sword, with its shaft thicker than my thumb. Whatever dropped it must have been massive, the wolverine I feared earlier would be like a puppy compared to it.

“What the fuck do I do now?!" I asked myself aloud and immediately regretted it.

The woods were eerily quiet, so my voice bounced off the trees with a clear echo. If the dinosaur, or giant rooster, or whatever that thing was, skulked anywhere near, it would have heard me. I had to act quickly If I were to survive, standing around paralyzed would not accomplish anything. I duplicated several dozen torches and tied them to the spear shafts, making giant bundles on a stick that could be immediately turned into a ball of flame half a meter across. Not losing sight of the darkness between the trees, I multiplied the spears and stuck them into the ground at a forty-five-degree angle, pointing away from my camp. I surrounded myself completely with a field of sharp stakes, with the only way in, being by jumping over a bonfire.

I did not bother with recreating the shelter, it would not save me if the creature crossed my fortifications, and at this point, I did not care about the cold or the weather. Not knowing if the beast was a day hunter or nocturnal as well, I decided to keep watch and feed my fires until the next morning. I sat wrapped in the rags of the sleeping mats, eyeing the darkening woods, and hand-spinning thread out of the spider-silk to calm my nerves with mind-numbing work. I forced myself to carefully straighten the strands, one by one, set them parallel, then meticulously twist them into the most uniform thread I could make, then duplicated that thread. Both threads were then unraveled to one-third of their length and painstakingly twisted together. The double thread was also duplicated, twisted with its twin, and so on, until I had a single, unbroken, uniform strand of spider silk easily over a hundred meters long.

I have spent most of the night spinning thread and it was not until morning that sleep won over fear. My fire burnt down to ashes but no monster came to eat me. As the sun rose, the woods erupted in birdsong. I read it as a sign that the threat was gone, after all, no prey animal would dare peep if a predator was nearby… or at least that's what I hoped.

I was so tired and cold that fear took the back seat. I knew I could not be terrorized into inaction because the completely mundane threats of thirst, cold, and hunger would claim me anyway. I re-lit the fires which now sat atop small hills of ashes. I wondered if there was a way to use those ashes for some purpose, but this was an idea for later.

I ate a few handfuls of berries and even decided to tentatively snack on some reed tips. Surprisingly, they tasted like cucumbers. I did not feel nourished, but the food distracted me from my misery.

Once again I repeated my mantra. Hammer. Nail. Nail. Hammer. Focus on the obvious, count your options, and organize inventory. I had a ball of silk thread the size of a grapefruit. It took me the whole night to carefully twist it. The thread was immensely strong. No thicker than a bass-guitar string, yet strong enough to support my weight when I tied it over a tree branch and hung from it.

It was, in fact, so strong that I had trouble cutting through it even with a glass-sharp shard of flint. My mind was racing with possibilities now. I could make ropes. Nets. Clothing. Maybe even a tent out of silk cloth. It would improve my defense if I used it in traps and snares. If it worked for the spider it might just as well work for me.

My priority however was making clothing. Last night showed that the weather was getting chilly, and even though the cold was not bad enough to kill me on its own, it sapped my energy.

I needed footwear as well. Walking barefoot would have been fine on a nice sandy beach, but in the woods, it was very much not so. My feet have turned into giant balls of pain, and were covered in sores. None had turned septic yet, but I didn't want to push my luck. I was not sure I could make shoes, but I thought simple socks or foot wraps would not be out of the question.

But first I needed to find a way to make actual cloth. In theory, I could make knotted felt out of spider silk, but I was pretty sure it would be stiff as a board.

A better option was to find a way to weave the cloth. I needed to make something like a loom, while keeping one eye on the forest, to not be murdered by a dinosaur mid-work.

The problem was, that I had no idea what a weaving loom looked like. I’ve seen some looms in a museum once, but that was ages ago, and I barely remembered what they looked like, let alone how they worked. I never thought it would be useful knowledge. As far as I understood the theory, all I had to do was criss-cross warp and weft threads, which was easier said than done. I tried it last time, but the algae thread simply fell apart. This time I had a much stronger and thinner thread. I multiplied the thread balls until I had a heap half my size.

Time for weaving experiment number one. I tied four dozen threads to a tree branch at eye level and tried to weave between them. The warps immediately bunched together into a tangled mess.

Experiment number two, I tied heavy sticks to the bottoms of the warps, to make them taut. I managed to weave several lines of weft, but the result was more like a loose net than actual cloth. Any attempt to pull the weft tighter resulted in the whole thing wrapping around himself. After about an hour of repeated failures, I became quite adept at making what could only be described as primitive fishnet pantyhose, or perhaps a narrow fish trap. But not actual useful fabric.

Time for experiment number three. I tied together four spearshafts into a rigid frame and staked it to the ground. Wrapped the warp as taut around it as I could, without the shafts snapping. The silk thread was strung so hard I could strum it like a harp. Then, thread by thread, I painstakingly woven the weft over and under the warp.

After about four hundred eternities, I only managed to weave a thin strip, no wider than my pinkie. This was the most inefficient work known to man!

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Then I slapped my forehead in sudden realization.

I was thinking in Nails and Hammers, or maybe Warps and Wefts, but I should have also been thinking in Duplicators and Copies! I did not need to try to weave a bedsheet-sized continuous piece in one go. I could very well make a piece of cloth the size of a handkerchief, duplicate it, and sew the pieces together. I did so with strands I needed for the thread after all.

Faced with a much less frustrating task, I put my best effort into making a square piece of cloth in the corner of the loom. I wove each and every pick of the weft as tightly and precisely as I could, and tied the ends so that it could not unravel. The result was a piece of sturdy white fabric, about two palms in length, which I promptly copied. I made a needle out of a hedgehog quill, and sewn the two copies together, with thick, doubled stitches I tested repeatedly by trying to pull them apart. They would not give, so I doubled the sewn-together pair, stitched the copies, copied those, and then repeated the process until I had a blanket longer and wider than my height. I could not double it any further, because then it would get too big to fit into a duplicator, even when rolled tightly.

I was so happy with the duplicators I wanted to kiss them, and damn the consequences! They increased the efficiency of my work a hundredfold. Without them, I would have spent at least two or three weeks making enough cloth to cover my body. Thanks to duplication, it took the time from the morning to early noon to go from a ball of thread to an effectively infinite amount of thick, extremely durable silk canvas.

I wrapped the resulting blanket over a shoulder, like a heavy, thick toga. I felt like a Roman or Greek philosopher of old, though with my dirty bare feet and patchy beard filled with forest detritus, I could at best pretend to be Diogenes The Abnegate.

Now, how could I turn this giant blanket into any kind of reasonable clothing? It would be easiest to just cut a hole in the middle of it and turn it into a poncho then wrap it around my body, but I was pretty sure that this would be just cumbersome to wear in the woods, and insufficient to protect me from the cold.

I did not wish for my wife Anna to be stuck here with me, but if were she here, she would know what to do. She's an excellent seamstress, quite the opposite of me. I have grubby fingers and no spatial imagination for cloth. Being a carpenter by trade, I'm used to thinking in right angles and flat surfaces, not in curves like a tailor should.

Ultimately though, with an infinite supply of fabric, I could make all clothing so oversized that minor tailoring mistakes would not matter. So instead of trying anything fancy, I just painstakingly cut T-shapes out of cloth and sewn them together into an extra big T-shirt. Pants were much more difficult. At first, I just stenciled the shapes of my legs on the cloth and chopped it out with a broken lump of flint, but the resulting pieces were too narrow. I could never really wrap them around my thighs and crotch. I kept on making the pants wider and wider still, until the fourth iteration of them was as baggy as MC Hammer’s trousers, which at least did not constrict my movement. I could likely do splits in them if I wanted, and of course, if I was not a stiff log of a man barely shy of forty and entirely incapable of such gymnastics.

I tied the pants with a drawstring and put on the giant tunic. Now, all I needed was some form of footwear.

Cutting cloth to fit around my foot was extremely frustrating. I could not get the shape right. In the end, I created something similar to a Christmas sock, out of two vaguely L-shaped bits. It was too soft and baggy for a shoe, so I put on several layers of those, one over another, until I could not add more. it turned my feet into giant soft paws, like those of a plush teddy bear. I also created a hood by sewing a bag of fabric directly over my head and neck.

When I put the whole costume over my body, I could not resist running towards the water to see my reflection. It was a ridiculous sight and for once I was glad that there were no other humans around. My brand-new designer outfit could not survive mockery.

With all the layers of white canvas on, I looked like a very misshapen snowman, a weirdly husky bedsheet ghost, or perhaps a caricature of a Ku Klux Klan member. But for the first time in days, I was warm, comfortable, and felt like a human being, and not a scared ape.

At this point, my career as a tailor consumed most of the day. But I was not yet done. I pushed several handfuls of berries into my mouth, immediately spilling purple juice all over my pristine silk shirt. I couldn't care less, I had two identical shirts already made with the duplicators, and could always make more. I decided to put them on too, as well as a second layer of pants, turning my blousy, ghostly look into that of an overstuffed white couch. Right after soiling my shirt with juice, I laso managed to burn a hole in the cuff of my left pant leg, when I crouched too close to the fire. Apparently, while the spider silk did not rip or cut easily, it caught fire nearly instantly. I decided to be more careful around my bonfires and curb my enthusiasm for weaponizing arson against woodland creatures, lest I turn myself into Human Torch by accident.

But the misadventure gave me an idea. I returned to the fire, and took a smoldering branch leaking pine tar. I let the flame die down, and scrubbed the still liquid tar over the soles of my plush booties. A few minutes later, when the tar solidified somewhat, the bottom of the booties became stiff and rubbery. I multiplied a lot more of the tar and spread it liberally over them until they became uncomfortably hot and had to remove them before my feet cooked. A dip in the river cooled the tarred boots, and resulted in something resembling the famous Polish rubber-felts, working man’s galoshes. I considered tarring my clothes as well, but I was flammable enough as I was, no reason to become a giant walking wick.

The last task of the day, before I allowed myself some rest, was to sew a backpack. I had no skill for anything fancy, so I made four rectangular cloth bags and sewed them one into another, making a stiff and sturdy pack to which I later added wide straps.

I thought about making a silk tent, but my fingers were sore and trembling from the unfamiliar work, and frankly, If I were to make another stitch that day, I would have fainted out of sheer boredom. Instead, I decided to multiply a dozen blankets and burrow in the heap of cloth like a hibernating badger. ‘Do badgers even hibernate?’ I thought. With my luck, the badgers of this place were the size of a pony, did not sleep at all, and prowled the night hungry for human flesh.

My last act before sleep was a victorious feast. I could not even look at another berry, after three days I had enough of them for a lifetime. But I already munched on several bulrush tips, and haven't got ill. I gathered some, multiplied them until I had a thick bunch, and roasted them over the fire. Once cooked, they tasted a little bit like grilled asparagus, or so I told myself. It was definitely, ah, an acquired taste. I hadn't acquired it yet at that point, but my hungry stomach easily outvoted my delicate palate.

A water rat scurried across my camp. I tossed one of my reed asparagus at it, but the ungrateful bastard did not eat it.

Seemingly, the smaller creatures grew accustomed to my presence. Maybe I could try to hunt? Or set snares? I had no idea how to do either, the only kind of hunting I ever tried was that with a camera. I did not kid myself that I could survive on a vegetarian diet and an occasional mollusk alone. This place looked like it belonged to the Northern Hemisphere, likely at least as far North as my version of Poland was. I could not count on any edible fruit once the cranberries went out of season, and besides, how do I tell edible fruit from poisonous ones? Cranberries, blackberries, blueberries raspberries, wild strawberries, those I could recognize, but every other berry was a mystery to me. And when it comes to berries, as far as I remembered from my Boy Scout days, unknown means poisonous, or at least diarrhetic, unless proven otherwise.

With a full belly and wrapped in more blankets than I ever owned, I laid down and stared at the darkening sky. The previous night was overcast, but on this one the sky was crystal clear and an abyss of stars. I have trekked through wilderness many times in my life, but only In this strange world, I could see the firmaments so clearly. There was something both terrifying and magical about it, as if at any moment I would fall into the sky and keep flying towards infinity.

Was my home, my Earth somewhere in there? Was I somehow stranded in the past? Another planet? Another universe entirely? I had my mantra of simplicity and pragmatism, but that night, I decided I would find the time every day to ponder my predicament and try to find an answer to this mystery. I did not kid myself I would ever go back, that would be two cosmically unlikely events in a row. But I wanted to know the how, if not the why, of the situation.

Oh, and the who, question if possible. I had a suspicion that some sapient, malevolent force did this, it was just too damn convenient that I was teleported to another Earth, not say, interstellar space. It seemed purposeful, even if the purpose was illogical or horrific. I promised the Pine Guy I would find the person responsible and kick them in the balls, and I intended to keep that promise.