Not much happened to me for a few days afterward, aside from excruciating pain, that is.

.The swelling mostly prevented me from moving or doing any useful work. I did however, capitalize on one of my early discoveries.

I remembered the bitter willow bark tea tasted like aspirin. After two days of being tormented by pain, I decided that risking poisoning was worth it if it could actually work as a pain relief.

Meanwhile, I managed to tie the travois to my back, and made crutches out of two pronged branches, so I could hobble around my camp like a misshapen quadruped Pinnochio, with my swollen leg dangling in the air. I was still in incredible pain, but at least it was not getting worse. I scraped some of the willow bark into a ladle made of the same material, topped it with water, and boiled it until the bark started burning through.

The resulting brew was even stronger and more bitter than I remembered. It made me gag, and my stomach cramped immediately in protest, but I forced it down, and smeared the remaining dregs over the bruise.

It took forever for the concoction to start working, but it did work.

It was not just a placebo, the maddening pain subsided to merely a throb.

I wanted to dance with joy, but, sensibly, haven't.

I did not know how long the primitive aspirin would work. I remembered that doctors usually prescribe a maximum of four doses of painkillers a day. However, this only made sense if one knew the actual dose, and in my case, it could be at best approximated as a hearty spoonful.

Still, I decided to rather risk a mild overdose, than suffer a day more.

I was restless.

I felt like inaction and resting, as important as they were to my immediate health, were detrimental to my long term survival.

I tried to tinker with the forge, but soon abandoned that idea. I grew skinny over the last two months, and could appreciate how my muscles flowed one into another. There was no way for me to work the blower, let alone strike with a hammer, without using my core muscles, which in turn moved the muscles of my groin, which pulled at the injured leg. Best I could do was lay on my side and tap feebly with a hammer, to no real use.

I needed to focus on light work that could bring the most benefit. And I had just the idea, even though I postponed it for a long time.

Pottery.

Every now and then I tried to bake clay in the bonfires to create ceramic pots and containers, but invariably they cracked or even exploded. The few bigger shards that survived weren’t watertight, and leaked like a sieve. I tried to repair them with pitch glue, but the effect of the repairs was just a useless mess.

But being invalid and almost immobile, I had all the time on my hands to approach the problem intelligently.

Experiment, analyze, and then come up with rational conclusions based on evidence, that's how you progress technology!

I prepared a few lumps of clay, some cloth kerchiefs and several trays of water and arranged them around the pine stump, close to the duplicators.

It was the time to do some experiments.

First, I washed and sieved the clay through several kerchiefs, to purify it and get rid of all the grit and organic bits in it. Soon, I had a handful of creamy, brown stuff that looked like smooth peanut butter. Inspired, I put making actual hazelnut butter on my list, and moved on.

I multiplied the clay cream until I had a dozen samples. First sample, I mixed it with a pinch of sand. The second, with a dose of ground rock. Third with finely powdered ash, and fourth with charcoal. The next samples were enriched with ground clam shells, ground bone, crushed pottery from previous attempts, pitch, glue, silk strands, and every other substance I could think of, until I ran out of ideas.

Finally, I rolled each sample into a ball, flattened the balls into disks, and shaped the disks into tiny bowls. The bowls then sat for a few hours drying in the sun, and, once they became leathery to touch, next to the bonfire.

It was not until dark when I felt confident enough in their dryness to multiply them and put them into the hot coals inside the forge, and pile more embers on top of them. I could not really work the bow of the blower, as it aggravated my injury, but I could awkwardly spin it with a crank, creating some minuscule draft.

Only a few seconds in, I heard the damn things cracking and exploding, but kept cranking the blower and keeping the heat up, determined to see at least some results. The hole in the forge allowed me to see that the bowls were glowing bright orange, despite the unimpressive oxygen intake.

As usual, the bottleneck of all my work was not the lack of fuel and resources, but of manpower. I simply ran out of strength cranking the blower, and the pain in my thigh became impossible to ignore. I topped off on my willow aspirin, and went back to my hut to sleep the pain off.

Come next morning, the coals in the forge burned down to ash, and I could scoop out the now cooled bowls. Predictably, most of them cracked, some violently so. It was the same lesson again, I needed to let pottery sit and dry for a much longer time, and bake it slowly, to get rid of the pockets of water that likely turned to steam, with explosive results.

Still, there were at least some survivors, and thats what mattered most.

The bowls that had any kind of organic matter in them burned to a spongy mess, and fell apart. The ones with coal or pitch in them mostly disappeared. The ones with sand in them seemed fine, but disintegrated when I poured water into them. Of the ones with crushed shells in them, one survived. Finally, the bowls enriched with ceramic dust, stone grits and ash weathered the fire quite well. The ash-filled ones held water the best, but the gritty ones seemed strongest and had fewest cracks.

It was time for tier two of the winner-takes-all ceramic combat. This time, I combined clay with ground rock, ground pottery and fine ash in different proportions, and took time to make bigger dishes with different shapes. I dusted off my preschool skills of plasticine crafts, and made ugly bowls, pots, jars, even small trays, plates and a bottle with a neck. I also made lids for all of them.

By necessity, all my creations had to be small, no bigger diameter than a whisky glass, or they would not fit in the duplicators. But this was likely for the better, as the pots became wobbly and threatened to fall apart at that size anyway, bigger ones would immediately lose the battle with gravity. In theory, I knew the proper way to do this was to build a pottery wheel and turn them on it, gently and precisely, but I had no strength for such a feat of carpentry, nor did I have the ghost of Patrick Swayze to guide my hands on the wheel later.

I made a grate out of sticks on top of the forge, and laid the pots on top of it. Then I lit a gentle fire at the bottom, letting them slowly dry in the heated air and smoke.

Having nothing better to do for the rest of the day, I wobbled towards the river. I could not climb onto the pine, but in the last few days I found a new fun activity to pass the time by.

I gathered a few handfuls of pinecones off the ground, and started tossing them into the water, gently enough as to not strain myself. By the third plop of a cone hitting the water's surface, a furry torpedo shot out of the reeds and grabbed it. The otter gnawed at the cone, and spit it out. Immediately, another one tumbled over its friend to steal its find. I threw another cone, and another, and soon there was a pandemonium of slithering bodies and squeaks of mock anger.

Every once in a while one of the beasties would look at me expectantly, then flip and turn, showing me its belly. I learned over time that this was an invitation to play. When one of them outdid its brethren and caught a flying cone mid-air, I clapped to congratulate its performance. To my utter astonishment, several of the otters joined it, slapping together their paws. I clapped some more, and they imitated me again.

“Holy cow, how intelligent are you guys?” I assumed the giant otters would be about as bright as their smaller cousins, which I knew could be taught simple tricks. But these guys looked as smart as seals, dogs, or possibly dolphins. It was not exactly surprising. They were pack animals, with brains as big as mine. I was glad they were not hostile, because between their brawn and their smarts, they could easily break through any defenses I could muster and annihilate me, like a furry team of commandos.

One of them, a big spotty-bellied female I assumed was their leader, swam closer, and sniffed at me.

“Sorry Muppets. I ran out of fish a long time ago. I have a rotten rump of a boar, you can help yourself to, but I doubt you would stoop that low.” I almost patted the otter on the head, but thought better of it. “It was a gift from a…fre.. uh…frenemy. That's a good word. Frenemy. A certain wolverine you guys know, who has terrible taste in gifts.”

This got me thinking. If the boar’s ass was truly an offering from Logan, maybe I should at least pretend to eat it? I could think of no reason why it would just drop several kilos of pork on my doorstep, other than as a reciprocation for the food I left for it. What if the damn critter watched me from the bushes, and grew annoyed with my ingratitude? Having no better idea, I awkwardly dragged the piece of carrion to the nearest bonfire, covered it in fresh firewood, and did my best to cremate it. Hopefully, that was polite enough by wolverine standards.

I checked on my pottery but it was still not dry enough, so I decided to take a nap.

I was woken up by the most unexpected sound, a knock on the door.

More than a knock, a forceful thump.

Humans! I thought. At last I was found!

“Heey! Hello, oh my God…” I hobbled to the door bursting with hope. Heedless of my injury, I grabbed the handle and heaved the door open. I was greeted by several pairs of beady black eyes. The otter gang frolicked at my doorstep. The Alpha female held a rock in its paws, and surprised by the sudden lack of door to slam it against, thumped it against my leg.

“Oh! Stop that!” I yelled,and without thinking, slapped the rock out of its paws. The animal did not react to my aggression. It just looked down, disappointed, and nudged the rock towards me.

With a grunt of pain I crouched, picked it up and threw it down the yard. The otters scampered after it, except for two, which ran in the opposite direction, into my house, and started to burrow through my bedding. I did not dare to shoo them away, but luckily their attention span was seconds short. They stole one of my blankets and slithered after their brethren.

“Well, welcome to my humble abode. I guess mi casa is apparently your casa now. But please, limit the destruction to a minimum, okay?”

Watching them tumble and play around my yard, I laughed at myself. How easily my mind jumped to a conclusion that I was found by humans. Even when I logically knew that encountering another human being here was next to impossible, and these furry agents of chaos would likely be my only companions for the foreseeable future.

And their companionship was non-negotiable. I thought my palisade and caltrop fields would stop them, but they just slithered through it like snakes. Just in case, I removed all of the low hanging snares, so they would not get caught, but they seemed too smart for it anyway.

Meanwhile, the clay pots had dried. Many of them cracked already at that point, so I tossed those away, to be soaked and recycled. The rest, I gently lowered into the hot hearth of the forge, then covered in a blanket of wood shavings, and finally, with a layer of charcoal.

I let the pile ignite properly on its own. There was some more of the popping sounds I learned to recognize as pottery exploding, but I filled the makeshift kiln with so many pots that I was not worried much. I only needed one or two to survive.

Slowly, I started spinning the blower, turning the heat up. The otters kept rummaging through my camp, but gave the fires a wide berth, wrinkling their noses whenever a whiff of smoke blew their direction. Given their thieving nature and their rather enthusiastic handling of my stuff, I decided to store anything valuable inside the hut, behind closed doors which I planned to reinforce.

Another interesting thing I noticed was that they kept away from the stump and the duplication pools. Whatever was going on in those two dish-sized event horizons, it freaked animals out even more than it freaked out me. Maybe it gave off a sound I could not hear, or radiation that they could detect but I did not?

One way or another, these strange singularities were my only option for long term survival, so I long ago decided to make peace with the idea they might be emitting something deadly.

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Meanwhile, the pots and the surrounding coals reached bright orange and glowed fiercely.

I could no longer spin the blower, the pain caused by the effort broke through the numb haze brought by my painkiller concoction. With no other choice, I simply sealed the bottom hole of the kiln with some fresh clay and covered the top completely with charcoal, reasoning that letting the pottery fire and cool slowly over many hours, is going to give better results than trying to bring the heat up then let it drop suddenly when I ran out of stamina.

I was about to go wash and have supper before retiring for the day, when I heard the sound of Hell itself coming.

A loud, echoing, trumpeting roar, like an air-horn going berserk.

The fuckin' bird!

I jumped to my feet, nearly tearing-up my freshly healed thigh muscle. I could not tell where the sound was coming from, and whether it was near or far, because the echo bounced around the woods. Limping back to my hut as fast as I could, I only stopped to throw a bundle of kindling into the nearest bonfire, to raise the flames, and to grab a spear.

The otters bunched into a tight group, and, one by one, vaulted over my palisade.

All, except one.

The last otter, visibly smaller than the rest of them, got entangled into a snare I left hanging off the canopy of the trees right above the palisade edge. I did not remove that one, reasoning that the otters usually kept safely low to the ground. From what I could see, the otter was not even caught in the noose of the snare, just wrapped itself in loose tangling rope that it could easily get out of, if it was not panicking. Instead, It turned itself into a fifty kilos marionette dangling from the branches, futilely trying to regain its footing.

Fucking fuck!

The snares were the one thing I made that has proven more effective than anticipated, and as of yet, only caused problems.

I could sit hidden safely in my fort, and ignore it, but I knew that sooner or later the poor thing would become bird-feed, strangle itself, or lose a limb like the wolverine did.

So, gritting my teeth in pain and frustration, I went out to do the right thing.

Luckily, this time I had a spear with an actual metal blade on it, so I could cut the otter loose without coming too close and risking it would pounce on me in angry confusion. The plan was to snip the rope in such a way that the creature would fall on the other side of the palisade.

Only once I hobbled all the way to it, and climbed the wooden fence, did I realize that if I cut the otter from this side, it would likely drop on the sharp spikes below. I needed to go all the way around, use the butt of the spear to push the poor thing back onto the log fence, and then cut the ropes.

I sighed, opened the gate, and crawled into the tight space between the fence and the first line of spikes. The other otters ran back and forth between their trapped friend and the river, squeaking and growling.

I was busy sawing through the rope, when I heard a loud crash behind me, and the otter pack exploded in angry hisses.

My muscles froze, but I made myself turn around regardless.

The high-plumed terror bird stood at the edge of the woods, pinning me to the ground with its raptorial gaze.

Up close and in broad daylight, it looked much bigger than I thought it would be. Its plume touched the canopy of the riverside trees. Without taking its eyes off me, it took several slow, methodical steps. When not running, it moved deliberately and silently like a hunting heron. A detached part of my mind, unconcerned with immediate survival, pointed out that the beast was beautiful. With its graceful movements and a crest of feathers that reminded me of a hussar’s wings, a truly marvelous sight to behold.

Good thing too, I thought, because it was likely the last thing I was about to see in my life.

Suddenly, the bird tripped, breaking the illusion.

I noticed its legs were entangled in the snares I spread all over the woods, but it only seemed to inconvenience it. The silk rope held, but the bird was powerful enough to just pull out the spikes and break the branches that the ropes were tied to, and dragged a mess of wood behind it like an anchor.

Meanwhile, the otter pack transformed. Instead of a bunch of animals, they crawled into a twisting, slithering heap, with a dozen of undulating heads that bobbed back and forth, snarling. Separately, each otter was much smaller than the terror bird, but together, they formed a many-headed hydra twice their enemy’s size. They were determined to defend their trapped youngling, and I hoped, me, by proximity.

This was about to end in a bloodbath, and I was not sure our shaky alliance would win.

Despite the fear, the growing pain in my leg, and the apparent hopelessness of the situation, I was overcome with rage. I was through with being afraid of these damn animals.

I was a human for fuck’s sake! Mine was the top spot on the food chain!

It was bad enough that I was nearly killed by angry pork, I was not going to let an oversized chicken bully me too.

It might have been twice my size, and five times my weight, but I was surely smarter.

“Hey!” I yelled at it, and started slamming my spear on the palisade. “Yeah, you fucking turkey, look at me! ” I started backing off towards the gate. The bird followed me with its gaze, twisted towards me, and crouched. I could see the powerful muscles in its legs bunch up in anticipation.

I reached the gate, and closed it behind me, but kept making noise to occupy its attention. The bird was so tall, it could easily see me over the fence. Meanwhile, the otter youngling managed to untangle itself and fall inside my yard as well.

Confused, instead of trying to hide or join its pack, it ran towards me.

The bird’s giant eyes instantly refocused, and it leaped.

In our prior encounters, I saw how fast the thing could run. But I forgot it was still a bird, and despite its undersized wings, it could become airborne just by uncoiling the enormous springs in its thigh muscles.

It landed in the middle of the yard, right next to the young otter, and immediately attacked it with its hatchet-like beak.

The only thing that saved my furry ally, was that the ropes the bird dragged behind it caught on the palisade, and leashed it to the logs, stopping its reach just short of its prey.

I hefted up my spear, and putting all my rage and fear into it, threw it at the monster. I hit it in the head, right over its enormous eye, but I could very well try to throw it as a stone wall.

Its skull was impervious to such feeble attacks, and the blade only nicked its skin.

But I got its attention.

It focused on me, and pulled forward. The silk ropes strummed like guitar strings, but held. However, the whole front portion of the palisade did not, it buckled and leaned inward.

Step after giant step, the bird marched towards me.

I fell back, crawling in panic towards shelter, but immediately understood it was pointless to try. Even dragging the weight, the bird was faster than me, and seeing it pull apart my fortifications with ease, I doubted the door of my hut would withstand its power. Desperate, I rolled between my pottery furnace, and the duplicators.

The bird was about to hop over the kiln and catch me, but stopped and crowed in painful surprise.

The young otter, which, despite being juvenile, was still the size of a Rottweiler, wrapped itself over the bird’s leg and sunk its teeth into it. It made the monstrous rooster kick and dance in panic, trying to dislodge its attacker. Finally, it simply pecked down and caught the otter by the scruff of its neck making it squeak in pain. Then it flipped its beak side to side, savaging its prey, and tossed it against the fence with a loud thud. The otter fell to the ground, a bloody, mangled mess, and lay still.

The bird shook its head a few more times, and stood momentarily undecided, whether to grab its kill and go, or finish me off.

It decided on the latter.

Panicking, I rolled over the stump, nearly getting my hand sucked into a duplicator. In the two seconds my fingers rested on its edge, it almost tore the skin off them in its exponentially growing pull of impossible gravity.

Of course!

If I only had a spear, I could use the duplicators as projectile launchers and hit the bird badly enough to hurt it. But the closest spear was ten paces behind the slowly approaching enemy.

Desperate, I grabbed around looking for anything to load into my makeshift ballista.

My hand rested on a dull iron bar, left from my blacksmithing experiments. It was supposed to be a chisel one day, but now it had to be a bullet. I loaded the bar into one of the duplicators, at a sharp angle, so that the launched copies would fly out near-horizontally and hit the bird right in the chest. The space-time singularity of the duplication pool sucked hungrily at the iron bar, and for a split second, I swear I saw it elongating within its event horizon, like a spaghetti noodle.

I held it as hard as I could to the very last moment but underestimated the power of the pull. In seconds, it rose by such a factor that it tore the bar out of my hands, and launched two copies of it, with a whip-crack sound.

For a moment I thought the iron bars must have somehow exploded, because the world in front of me was turned into an inferno of fire and smoke. Only then I realized that one of the bars must have smashed into the fiery kiln, and sent its red-hot contents as incendiary shrapnel all over the yard and the bird.

And through the smoke, I saw that the other projectile had hit the bird right in the lower beak, shattering it, and tearing its neck open.

The monster tried to trumpet again, but it just gurgled, as blood gushed out of its ruined throat.

It stepped back from the burning coals, and tried to run back where it came from.

As it did, the otter pack poured over the palisade and converged on it, all snarls and snapping mouths.

Bleeding and dying, the feathery dinosaur was not about to go down without a fight. As the otters swarmed over it, it kicked and jumped, and shook them off.

I saw one otter sent flying with a razor-taloned kick, trailing blood in the air. Another was stomped on. Yet another, what I thought was the Alpha, climbed up their enemy, and sunk its teeth into the bird’s ruined throat, determined to tear it open completely.

The terror bird went berserk, and started slamming its head against the ground, trying to peel the otter off, but it held firmly.

I saw my chance.

I could not try to use the duplicators to launch another projectile, because I could easily hit one of the otters.

But I could go into the fray myself.

Forgetting about the pain, I hobbled around the bird and found a spear. At that point, it was swarmed all over with assailants, who hung on it and tried to bear it to the ground.

If I were an experienced hunter, or just a braver man, I would try to stab the beast in the heart, or slice at its neck.

But I was a pragmatic coward with a vicious streak.

I was not going anywhere near that ferocious beak.

Instead, I grabbed the spear, and pushing off the ground as much as I could with just one functional leg, rammed the spearpoint point into the bird’s asshole.

It let out a tremendous gurgling shriek, and bolted forward, shaking off most of the otters. It tore out a section of the palisade it was tied to, and dragged it along, undercutting me with it. I grabbed the logs and rode on it, until the bird passed my hut and the makeshift sled hit the door, spilling me.

With its final effort, the bird reached the opposite side of my camp, and made the fatal mistake of trying to leap over the palisade again.

By jumping out, it landed not on grass, but on a killing field hedged with rows upon rows of sharp spikes.

I grabbed another spear and limped after it, but the otters reached it first.

By the time I got out of the back gate and circled my fortifications, they turned the fight into a one-sided carnage. The bird had impaled itself on the spikes, and could not rise. It still swept its head back and forth, trying to axe down its assailants with its ruined beak, but the nimble mustelids just weaved out of the way, and bit into its exposed neck, belly, and groin.

As I watched, the Alpha otter, which miraculously survived the bird’s crushing blows, gnawed a hole into its belly and started pulling out its innards. The shock put the bird into a fit, and it started slamming its beak against the ground in dying agony.

But the Alpha was not done.

When the hole was torn wide enough, it tried to crawl inside the bird, and savaged the organs it could not pull out. As the blood gushed, the rest of the otters went into a frenzy, gnawing, tearing, and just destroying their foe in a berserk orgy of violence. Soaked in gore, they no longer looked cute, but like frenzied sharks or morays.

I just dropped the spear and sat on the ground, horrified and mesmerized. These were not just predators dispatching their prey, they were a tribe of vengeful people brutally killing the monster that hurt their loved ones.

When the bird stopped breathing, and their bloodlust died, some of the otters slithered back into my camp. I followed them. I heard the sorrowful mewling before I reached the bodies. Two of the otters died in that fight.

The youngling that the bird savaged and the one that was stomped into the ground, were now both limp, bloody shapes, devoid of the life and energy of their brethren. The one that was kicked was in bad shape, curled over a hole in its flank, but its family was busy licking its wound clean. Meanwhile, the rest of the otters gathered around their dead, and wailed.

It was a heart-wrenching cry, that somehow combined the sound of a howling dog, a bawling child, and a dying cat. They tried to nudge the dead awake with their noses, and lift their heads up. They sniffed and huffed at their mouths, as if looking for breath.

And just as suddenly as the wailing started, it stopped. The otters somehow reached a decision that their packmates were dead, and could not be forced back to life.

And then, without any savagery or brutality they displayed earlier, they tore their dead apart and ate them, in as many seconds as it took to describe it.

I watched it all impassively, not daring to move, or disturb them. Once the deed was done, the otters left.

Only the Alpha lingered.

It sniffed me all over, as if looking for injuries. Satisfied with my condition, it just stood there, coiled around itself, its mug suddenly reminding me of a dog, except much, much wiser.

“I am so sorry,” I gestured towards the bloody smear where her youngling lay just seconds ago. “And thank you. You saved my life, and I don’t know why.”

Knowing I was being foolish, I crouched, and reached out. The otter let me touch its blood-drenched head. Then it moved closer, and started rubbing the sides of its nose against my arm. I recognized it as a sign of affection the otters gave to each other, but also realized it was something else as well.

It rubbed its musky scent all over me. I have been marked as their property, or perhaps, they adopted me.

The Alpha left, slithering away like a ghost, and I sat there, drained of all my strength, but filled with strange new resolve.

I fought a monster, and I won.

But most importantly, I found friends.