I woke at dawn, to the sound of splashing water. For a few seconds, I was not fully aware of where I was and what was happening. Did I doze off at the public pool, and my kids woke me up with their shenanigans? I lazily opened my eyes and would bolt upright in an instant, if I was not tied to the tree. Instead, I fell off the branches, ass first into the river, with the cloth tying me to the tree and straightjacketing my upper body. I was as helpless as I could be, staring at my visitor.

For a second I thought it was a bear, but soon it dawned on me that it was something much, much worse. It was a wolverine, but much larger than what I remembered from Animal Planet, easily the size of a black bear.

The creature was balancing on the pine trunk, deftly fishing out the soaked corpse of the unlucky dimension-traveler from under it. The corpse however, was too soggy and came apart into chunks, frustrating the animal. Undeterred, the wolverine neatly piled up the fished-out bits on the trunk, and started munching on them. The moment it crunched the man’s femur in its jaws somehow was the last drop of indignity I could tolerate.

“Hey! Shoo!" I yelled at it, almost immediately realizing that trying to defend the corpse of a man I didn't even know against a hundred-kilogram mustelid with claws like steak knives was utter idiocy.

It regarded me with a mildly curious expression and returned to lazily gnawing on a rotten knee. It could easily kill me in seconds even if I were not trapped by my own design. Probably the only reason it did not attack me was its sheer laziness, and the fact that an easily available lump of fragrant carrion was right in front of it.

I considered my options. I could try to wriggle my way out of the coat, and fall into the river completely, then try to swim away. I was a decent swimmer back in the day, but I severely doubted even with my fastest butterfly stroke I could outswim a wolverine. And even if I miraculously did, where would I go? There was no other clearing in sight, just an endless strip of water walled with near-impassable thickets of reeds. I would just get entangled and caught anyway.

Fighting the thing was out of the question. One slice of its claws would open me like a piñata. All I could do was to wait patiently until the beast was done and would leave.

Which turned out to be a long, long time. After what must have been a few hours, I was impatient enough that I almost reconsidered going down fighting this thing. The wolverine was absolutely meticulous with its feast. It ate all the meaty bits off the corpse, licked the bones clean, and then cracked all the bigger ones to get to the marrow. It even swallowed some of the bone shards whole, which I was nearly certain would be incredibly dangerous to most mammals, but, apparently, not for this guy. It ate and ate until its belly was like an inflated beach ball. It must have eaten a third of its weight in dead human flesh.

After its delightful meal, it stretched, not unlike a cat, yawned, and noticed me again.

‘'Well, that’s all folks,’ I thought to myself. Waiting to be eaten, for hours, had fermented the fear in me into sardonic fatalism. The animal considered me for a moment as if weighing its options. It was obviously full, almost bursting, but then again, I was equally obviously an easy prey. Finally, it turned around and walked down the pine towards land. Right before hopping off the trunk, It raised its tail and pissed all over the place. The stink was indescribable, as if all the tomcats in the world used this place as their bathroom.

I stared daggers at its disappearing rump, not daring to yell at it again. After waiting another excruciating hour or so, to increase the odds that the wolverine was truly gone, I untangled myself from the tattered coat and climbed back on the tree. Carefully, I snuck back onto land and towards the stump. I did not know if my adversary truly went away. It could very well be napping in the bushes right beside me. I tried to look for its tracks to know where it went, but It looked as if it just vanished.

I crouched, my back to the river, and considered my options carefully.

Point one. This place was definitely not safe. It was either the hunting grounds of that beast, as evidenced by it marking its territory with great gusto, or it was simply a place of interest for local animals. After all, the pine jetty provided easy access to the river, making it an ideal watering hole for prey and predator alike. And underneath that awful stench of piss, it likely smelled of delicious rotten human, and not so rotten but sweaty human as well.

Point Two. Or maybe Counterpoint. The duplication pools were here, and they were likely to be my sole means of survival. I did not trust my meager Boy Scout skills to keep me alive without the literal physics-defying boon of these things. I considered trying to, somehow, remove the pools and take them with me to some safer place, but I had no idea how to do it, and it would likely damage them. For all I know the duplication effect could have been a one-in-a-million fluke that depended on some unstable and delicate variables. Or maybe it would explode if moved. Especially if one of the pools poured itself into another, I was pretty darn sure that would be worse than my reckless pine root loop experiment.

So, the only option was to make this place safe and stay here, at least until I figured out what to do next. And that meant fire.

I looked at my blistered hands. Spending another day trying to rub a stick hard enough to set it ablaze was out of the question. I could not brute force it, I needed to use my brain.

I examined the fire-stick, and the chunk of willow I tried to drill into. The stick was blackened, but polished smooth. The most likely reason it would not heat up, was insufficient friction. I tossed it away and found a less-used one from the duplicated pile.

The hole In the willow was lightly charred, and full of soot particles. Why won’t they ignite, or even smoke? Surely the heat must have been substantial. Lack of oxygen was likely the issue. Even when the soot got hot enough to burn, I could not see that and smothered it. I decided to drill a new hole, but this time stop every few seconds to see if it produced any char that could be poured out and blown on. No dice, it did not work at all, if anything it made the heat vanish faster instead of building up.

What if I cut a groove into the wall of the hole, to let the produced charcoal bits pile up there? I did not have any tools, or even sharp rocks, though… I swallowed hard at the thought. There was one source of sharp, hard edges nearby, in the leftovers of the wolverine’s meal. Hating myself for this, I went back to the pine trunk and examined what was left of the unfortunate human carcass. Most of it was licked clean down to the wood, but digging through the mud at the river bottom near the trunk revealed a broken shard of what was likely a man’s mandible, with one lonely tooth still in it. I shuddered at the awfulness of further desecrating what was left of the man’s body, but after what the wolverine did, there was quite literally not enough of the man to bury. I could not help him regain his post-mortem dignity, but he could, In a way, help me survive.

The bone shard made for a surprisingly effective chisel. A few minutes later, I turned that circular hole into a C-shape.

Drilling into it produced a nice little pinch of charred punkwood, that was ever so close to ignition, but my palms failed before it smoked.

Think! Rolling the drill in my palms was not the way to do it. Maybe some fitter man, or perhaps a hunter-gatherer tribesman who did start his fire like that every day could manage it, but I could not. How do I spin the drill faster, harder, and with less effort?

Putting a crank on the stick wouldn’t work all that well, that's more torque but lower speed. Speed was key here, because I had to get a hot ember before my hands gave up. What if I spun it like a spinning top? I had no string, but could always use the bramble vines or pine roots as thin rope. After some experiments and duplications, I made a braid out of pine roots and wrapped it around the stick. With a tug, I managed to spin the stick quite fast, though with too little force.

Finally, I let go of the rest of my dignity, and concerns for safety. I put a thick bit of bark in my teeth, and used it as a top bearing to pivot and push down on the stick, grabbed several lengths of root braids and wrapped them around it, then started pulling them back and forth rapidly.

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I reasoned I would either get fire, or the bark would snap and I’d drill a hole into my stupid head, a punishment for clearly violating basic rules of workshop safety. My idle musings were stopped by the most beautiful sight of that day.

A thin strand of white smoke came out of the hole.

I tossed the stick away and gently scooped the smoldering pinch of charred wood onto a dry leaf. Put that leaf inside a much bigger pile of charred bits and cattail fluff.

I got on my knees, imagined I was blowing the candles on the smallest birthday cake in the history of mankind, and gave it the gentlest breath I could dare.

The ember grew into a tiny flame that quickly spread all over the cattail tinder and exploded into a merry bonfire. I roared and hooted like an ape, scaring the crap out of some bush birds nearby, and ran to get some firewood. I did not bother collecting any from the woods, I simply mass-copied the firestick, cattail tips, and dry bark, and kept adding to the fire until the flames were taller than I was and the heat was baking my face.

I did not care. I cried, out of joy, and because the smoke got into my eyes, but it was still a cry of ecstasy.

"Fuck you, Logan! "I yelled in the general direction where I thought the wolverine went, naming it after its namesake Canadian superhero. "This is fire, you weasel-ass bitch, come and get some!”

The woods responded with a cacophony of animal noise, which shut me up, because some sounded like it came from large creatures. Or maybe it was just birds, with deep voices? I was immediately not so sure that fire was an absolute deterrent against wildlife, and decided to keep my mouth shut and my fire as big as I could make it without burning down the forest.

The joy brought by fire washed off quickly, and I was restless again. With the fire roaring, and an effectively infinite amount of fuel, I did not have to worry about it, and could focus on other problems I was facing. How do I get some water? The river was muddy, and now the accessible water was additionally contaminated with bits of carrion and smelled of mustelid piss, which, dear reader, is the worst smell in the animal kingdom, I assure you. I splashed some water on the marked pine trunk, and washed most of the smell, so that at least going back to my jetty hideout was possible without feeling like I would retch my guts out.

Should I try to boil the river water? It would at least kill dangerous germs. In theory, the water could also have been contaminated with dangerous chemicals, but I assumed it would not be thick with wildlife if that was the case. If so, how do I boil it? I had no pots or containers to put it in.

After some rummaging around my camp, I found a bowl-shaped piece of willow bark, not bigger than my palm. I filled it with water taken from the furthest part of the river I could reach, so that it would be the least chunky with scum. I placed the bowl gently on the hot coals, but soon realized my mistake.

For one, the bottom of the bark bowl almost immediately ignited, which caused it to split and leak half of its contents. I managed to salvage some of the water, and patiently kept the bowl suspended further away from the heat, until the water started boiling. I let it cool, and tentatively took a sip.

Yeech! It was bitter as if I bit through an aspirin pill. I almost laughed at my stupidity. By boiling water in a bark container, I effectively made bark tea. Why was it so bitter I had no idea, does willow contain aspirin? Might be useful if I had a headache!

I prepared a new pot, this time made of a strip of fresh ashwood bark. Then I reconsidered my idea. Do I want to try and taste bark tea out of every tree in the woods, until I either stumble on relatively fireproof bark, or poison myself? I had to find a way to bring the water to boiling point quickly, before it leached the chemicals out of the bark.

I needed to think outside the box. Literally! After all, I didn't really need to heat up the container, just the water in it. I remembered how my Communist-era Grandma would boil water for tea by putting a 'Boil Coil' immersion heater into the cup, and heat water itself rather than what held it. Maybe I should just drop some hot coals into the water? Or better yet, find a small stone, heat it in the fire, and toss it in?

Finding a pebble turned out to be surprisingly hard, as the whole area was thick with plant growth. Finally, I decided to dig blindly through the river silt until I found one.

Combing through it I found plenty of leeches and rotten reeds, and whenever I found something that felt like a stone, it turned out to be a river clam.

I kept tossing the clams back until it dawned on me. I was being an idiot. Food! I was always a sucker for seafood, and river clams surely could not be that far from it? And as long as they were cooked fresh, they were unlikely to give me food poisoning. I kept collecting them, forgetting I could have just picked one and multiplied it. I even found the pebble I was looking for.

In my hungry digging, I was not even deterred by fat leeches trying to attach themselves to my palms, and when I felt a painful pinch on my thumb I grabbed the offending creature and pulled it out.

It was a crayfish, but so big it looked almost like a lobster. It trashed angrily and pinched me some more but I was hungry and drunk on success. I tossed the pinching bastard and the clams into the duplicators, over and over, until the clearing around the pine was lousy with terrified crustaceans trying to crawl back to the water.

Around an hour later I was lounging by the fire, finishing my meal of barbecued shellfish and crawdaddy tails. Between my bounty and the duplication pools, I made more grilled food than I could need, so I mercifully swept the surviving crayfish and clams back into the river.

As I expected, heating a pebble over the fire and then using two pieces of pine as tongs to toss it into the water, resulted in it instantly boiling. The resulting brew tasted like ash and dirt, but was scalding hot, so all the germs and bugs were likely cooked to death.

Duplicating the boiled water was a bit trickier, but I learned that if I poured it into the duplication pools at just the right angle, they turned into a water fountain that self-replenished for several minutes before running out. I could not wait to see what would happen when it rained on the duplicators.

Fed and content, I decided to focus my newfound energy on creating some rudimentary shelter. I considered trying to build a platform on the crown of the fallen pine, away from land, but the events of that morning showed that it would not make me safe from predators. Only fire could give me any kind of protection, and even that was not certain. I knew wild animals were wary of fire, but this was not the same as them being completely deterred. For all I know, my friend Logan, the corpse-munching wolverine, could very well grab me from right next to the hearth.

One solution would be to surround myself with a ring of bonfires before going to sleep. But I was pretty sure that would most likely lead to me getting burnt or poisoned by the smoke and carbon monoxide. Having no way to test it without hurting myself, I made four bonfires surrounding a relatively flat piece of the clearing. This seemed like a good compromise between not being eaten, and not being smoked alive.

What about the shelter itself? I would not mind building a solid log cabin with a sturdy door, and a shingled roof, in my old life that was one of the items on my Bucket List. But in this primitive world, with no tools save for a shard of a bone, I could not really build one, could I?

I also did not fancy venturing deep into the woods in search of construction wood. Even If I made myself several torches to fend off darkness and critters that hid in it, I was not confident in my chances. What did I have at hand? After some effort and a lot of cursing, I managed to cut down a tall, straight ash sapling that sprouted from the bushes at the very edge of the forest. Minutes later I turned it into a pole, stripped of bark and side branches. Several duplications later, I had enough poles to make myself a small wigwam-like tent. I tied the top together with bramble vines as hard as I could and criss-crossed them all over the frame. Next, I made a giant heap of algae rags, by duplicating my tattered coat, and wrapped them all over the construction.

The result did not look all that sturdy, let alone waterproof, so I wrapped downward-facing bushels of reeds all over it. Now it looked less like a wigwam, and more like a strange bird’s nest, but it had thick walls that seemed like they would stop both the wind and the rain.

Finally, I put a thick mat of algae rags in one corner of it as my bed, and started a small bonfire inside. The smoke streaked upward through the small opening near the top, and barely bothered me, as long as I did not stand up.

Clearing the entrance to my tent, I threw away spare ash poles. One of the thrown poles flew true, almost like a javelin, and embedded itself in the ground. I picked it up again and gave a few experimental thrusts. I doubted a makeshift spear like that would help much against any of the bigger beasts, but it was better than nothing, especially if I sharpened and fire-hardened the tip. What if I made hundreds of those, and surrounded my camp, not just with fires, but with a field of sharp stakes too? I needed to start to take my duplicators into account, they gave me so many options!

My happy thoughts were disrupted by a loud, rumbling growl. One that did not come from a wild beast somewhere in the woods, but my own belly.

The clams, as it turns out, were not safe to eat, especially in such great numbers. They chose that particular moment to enact their vengeance.

Even though I already wrote about rotten corpses and wolverine piss, I will not delight you with a detailed description of what happened after. Suffice it to say, the top and bottom holes of my digestive tract decided to challenge the duplication pools in the game of spewing out matter. The last thing I remember was crawling out of the tent to deposit my refuse in the bushes and finally, passing out.