I spent the day after the fight in bed, nursing my injured leg. All that prancing around and stabbing terrorbirds in the ass, just tore my freshly healed muscle open again. The swelling in my groin grew larger, and in desperation I decided to pierce it, to release some of the pressure.

It turned out to be a good call. The bruise spurted out dark, sickly looking blood. I cauterized the puncture with a red hot iron bar. The pain almost made me faint, but I felt much better afterwards.

Few hours later it receded to the point when I decided I no longer needed my primitive painkillers. Even though they helped keep me functional, I worried continued use would destroy my liver. While I was convalescing, the pack of otters dismantled the terrorbird. Amusingly, they ate all the guts and soft tissue but left the actual meat mostly untouched.

So my wish came true, I could roast and eat a turkey leg bigger than I was, and damn sure I was going to do it.

It took me an hour on the second day to just chop it off, and then another hour to drag it all the way to my camp. There was no way to suspend it over the fire, so I just piled hot coals and firewood over it, and half-roasted, half-cremated it.

I would lie if I said it was delicious. The meat was dark, stringy and gamey, but to me, it tasted like victory.

Not satisfied with humiliating the bird enough, I chopped off its beak and mounted it above the door frame of my house.

“That’ll teach ya, you damned Roadrunner. Should've not messed with me and my crew. But you did, and you paid the price, and you beeped your last Beep-Beep.”

Despite my confident words, I felt uneasy. The bird was just a half of a couple. Its female mate was even larger and more powerful. What if the wife comes looking for her husband? We won that battle by a nick of luck. Might not be so lucky the next time.

I needed to upgrade my defenses. The first thing, however, was making myself mobile again. I spent a while whittling a crutch out of a pronged branch. It allowed me to hobble much faster than before, keeping the weight off my leg.

Once that was done, I multiplied the spears until I had a heap taller than I was. Then I tied one to each caltrop around my camp, and one every five paces around the palisade. I also cut off all the snares left on ground level, and added more of them about two meters off the ground.

My fortifications looked good enough before, but now they were fearsome.

If a terror bird tried to cross that field of blades, it would turn itself into mincemeat before it reached me. Just to be sure my allies would not run afoul of any sharp points, I cut a small door in the riverside part of the fence, to let them in and out. It turned out though, that they were now reluctant to visit my yard, and when they did come, they avoided the spot where their brethren died. Their behavior reminded me, again and again, that they were not just clever animals, but sapient people, smarter than dolphins, elephants, even possibly possibly great apes.

Fighting in battle together, made them accept me into their pack, as an honorary member... or perhaps a pet. Whenever I was outside the palisade, especially anywhere close to the river, they would slither close and rub the sides of their mugs against me, spreading saliva and musk all over my pants. After a while, I was positively saturated with the eau de otter, the unsubtle smell that combined the fine odors of a wet dog, greasy hair and a well-used litterbox, with just a hint of rotten fish.

Of course by the third month in this wilderness my natural scent was that of stale sweat, wood smoke, and rancid tallow, so who was I to complain?

It took me a few days to remember that the remains of the destroyed kiln likely had some pottery in them. I combed through the mess, and to my disappointment, found only a few intact pots. Of all my experiments, only the simplest, vaguely pear-shaped pots survived. All the bowls, plates, bottles, and pitchers I tried to make cracked during firing, and what did not explode on its own was destroyed by my artillery shot, or trampled to bits by a rampaging bird.

But hey, beggars, choosers, the former can’t be the latter? The pots I got were big enough to hold about a liter of water, and seemed decently waterproof. I congratulated myself by making some giant-chicken soup, seasoned with dandelion leaves. It tasted just as bad as could be imagined. So for the second course, I decided to be imaginative. I ground some pine seeds and hazelnuts into flour, added some found ground-bird eggs, battered some terrorbird breast strips in it, and deep fried them in the bird’s own lard. The effects were…Interesting. Tangy and flavourful would be good adjectives as well. Lots of ... character.

“Suck on that, Colonel Sanders!” I mumbled, gnawing through the stringy, half-burnt mess. Since I doubted bird meat would dry and preserve well, I decided to just gorge myself on it while it lasted, tastebuds be damned. The otters showed no interest in the fried strips, which was telling, since they were perfectly fine eating fish heads, raw intestines and tanned leather.

Obviously, their crude palates could not properly appreciate fine cuisine.

If I only had a pinch of salt, I could make a meal that would be half-decent. Or maybe even two-thirds decent. But to have salt, I would need to sail downriver until I reached a sea, which could be anywhere between a few, to a few hundred kilometers away. I was not ready to make such a trip yet.

But this did not mean I was not ready for a shorter voyage. I knew I could try to finally go across the river, or maybe even paddle a few klicks upstream, to see what was there. Who knows, maybe there was a whole village just beyond the bend, and I never knew it?

I knew that if I wanted to sail to where the river ended and back, I would need a proper boat, and for that, I would need proper tools, and for that I would have to rebuild the forge… but I could conceivably make a crude raft and a paddle with what I already had at hand.

With that in mind, I hobbled out of my fort, and set to work. I did not bother with cutting down logs for my raft. That would be too much work, especially without a proper axe. Instead, I multiplied one long ash pole until I had a huge pile, and then tied them together with rope. As a result, I achieved a rickety wooden platform, about three meters long and a meter wide.

I had no idea how to build a proper raft, or how to steer it, or rather, I had a collection of half-remembered ideas about boat construction.

Therefore, with no other option but to test it experimentally, I decided to try all of them at once.

I added a removable keel that could be slid in the middle between the poles. I added a flat rudder made of stiff leather, that I had to protect from the destructive playfulness of my otter friends. After some deliberation, I added a mast with a crossbar boom, and tied a sail made of my biggest blankets to it. It billowed nicely in the wind, but I had no idea if it would propel my craft. Just to be extra sure, I made two paddles and a long, thin sapling that could be used like a gondolier’s pole, so I could push off the river’s bottom if all else failed.

Prudently, I also tied a bag of rocks to a long rope, making a crude but serviceable anchor. Duplicated it as well, just in case excessive anchorage was needed.

As a final touch, I added a small canvas tent, to be able to sleep on the raft if I failed to get back home before sundown. I filled the tent with supplies, pots of boiled water, a bag of taffy bars, and a few spears for protection.

Satisfied with the two days of hard work bearing fruit, I stood and gazed upon my magnificent watercraft, as it sat in the middle of the clearing in its full glory.

Wait...

Something was not right.

And then, when realization hit me, I laughed.

And then cried a little.

And then laughed again.

Defeated, I went back home, ate a dozen taffy bars, and fell asleep.

The next two days consisted of me digging through the soil with my tiny trench tool, cursing the raft, cursing at myself, and occasionally sulking. Finally, I managed to carve a path between the raft and the river. After putting makeshift sleds under the raft, and making a system of rope winches winded around the riverside trees, I slowly dragged it to the water, where it promptly got stuck in the reeds.

There might have been some more cursing involved, and another day of work of clearing the reeds away, mostly by pulling them out of the muck by hand. The otters rejoiced, because my work flushed all the wriggling creatures out, and they could have a feast. I, on the other hand, lost my appetite completely after digging through silt filled with nightmarish-looking worms, crustaceans and amphibians that would feel right at home in a Lovecraftian tale. I likely became this world’s expert on leeches, because by nightfall I counted over a dozen different species, half of whom had maws lined with vicious hooks, which were a delight to pry off my calves.

The otters considered them a delicacy though.

And on the third day, I dragged my raft to the end of the fallen pine, and climbed on it. In anticipation of this occasion, I even made a tiny pirate flag to put on my mast.

After all, with my crutch, lamed leg, haphazardly cut facial hair, and an unruly crew, I was the closest thing this world had to a pirate captain.

Of course, the moment I climbed onto the raft, about half of the otter pack decided to do likewise, and promptly capsized it. It took another hour, some creative work with makeshift rope winches and a lot of cursing to flip it back up. I had to replace the broken boom and the sail that was now soaked in river mud and silt. All my supplies were gone, floating down the river without me.

When I repaired and restocked my craft, it was already long past midday, and I needed to delay my trip until the next morning.

Luckily, the night was uneventful. The pack decided that the raft was boring without me on it, and did not try to board it again. In the morning I ate a hearty meal and restocked my fires so that they would burn long into the night, in case I needed a guiding light to reach back to my camp. To be extra sure, I placed a giant tallow candle at the very end of the pier, so that its light would shine across the river.

Once the preparations were done, I hoisted up the sail and unmoored from the pier.

In seconds I learned that my understanding of sailing was very faulty.

For one, what I took for a gentle breeze, that barely wrinkled the surface of the river, was actually a substantial wind that instantly yanked the raft forward.

Second mistake, which in retrospect should be obvious, was setting the sail at a right angle to the raft, and letting the wind hit it head-on. The sail instantly billowed, and the raft buckled under me, the bow nearly diving underwater. There was no time to angle the boom, so I jumped to the aft instead and leaned on the rudder. With its nose suddenly up, the raft took forward like an oversized windsurfing board. It immediately gained substantial speed despite going against the current. I realized that the sail was far too big for my dinky little craft, and if I didn't pull it down, I was likely going to capsize it again.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

But the truth was, I had too much fun to care. I whooped and hollered like a schoolboy, and steered towards the middle of the river where the wind was even stronger. The otters started a mad chase, flanking me on both sides like a pod of dolphins escorting a ship. Any plans of getting across the river towards the faraway beach and the meadows were ruined because in my excitement, I overshot my mark by a wide margin.

The wind kept pushing me further and further upstream. Soon, I passed the peat-covered marshes on my left. I saw no sign of the terrorbird female. I was not sure if the monster could jump into the river and swim after me, and even if it did, it could not have possibly chased me down, but still, I did not want to test that.

I noticed something else as well. As I came closer to the bend of the river, my pack of otters started to fall back. Another pack burst out of bamboo-like growth and crossed our path. The otters bobbed their heads out of the water and eyed each other carefully. There was no fight, no territorial posturing, just a silent agreement between the two aquatic tribes.

The new tribe did not follow me, only gave me the once over and dove under the surface. I was glad they did. I could not be certain they would be as accepting as, what I came to think about as, my tribe. But even that worry soon became somewhat irrelevant, because my raft whipped past them too.

The river grew narrower with the shallow shores overgrown with bamboo. A giant sandy hill loomed in the distance, surrounded by small conifers. I thought it would make a great observation spot to take stock of the world around me, but there was no way to come to shore by it, with the growth blocking the path.

I was about to maneuver the raft towards the opposite shore when I heard a blood-curdling scream.

A human scream.

To be more precise, it sounded like the terrified and enraged screams of several women.

It was more of a battle cry, than a cry for help.

I sprung to action and grabbed my spear, nearly flipping my raft over.

And then I realized I did not know where the sound came from. The scream was loud and clear, but it simply echoed over the water from no obvious direction. I could only assume it came from someplace around the sandy hill because it was the most obvious place for humans to try to reach. But before I managed to pull down the sail and turn towards it, I was easily a kilometer upstream from the source of the screaming. Determined, I took out the oars and paddled right into the bamboo growth ramming it at full speed. I almost got through to the dry land. I hobbled off the raft, crutch in one hand and the spear in another. There were no more screams, just the usual sounds of birds tweeting in the treetops and the soft murmur of the wind in the reeds.

Was that all in my imagination? Had I gone insane from loneliness? No, that was not a productive line of thinking. I had to check it because otherwise, the doubts would have eaten my mind. Maybe that was just a fox screaming, or a trill of some particularly nasty-sounding birds…

But…what if they were not? What if someone really was in danger? What if I was not alone in this green hellhole?

As I pushed forward, I noticed the woods on this side of the river were completely different from mine. The ground was covered in dry grass, with the only trees being giant, twisted yews and occasional junipers. I considered trying to climb the hill for a better view, but it was far too steep for it to be realistic with my injured leg.

Instead, I turned right towards the meadow.

I was almost out of the woods when I heard a hellish sound that made the terrorbird call sound like a lullaby in comparison.

It was a fiendish, whining laughter, which made my blood freeze, because I knew exactly what kind of animal sounded like this.

Hyenas.

An animal species that was already absolutely horrific and deadly in my world, and I dreaded to imagine what form it took here.

I was paralyzed with indecision.

Going forward was the only way to find fellow humans.

But it was also a route to almost certain death.

The hyenas decided for me. I heard a staccato laugh come from the juniper bushes to my left and a similar response sounded in front of me. I was not an expert on wild animals, but as luck would have it, hyenas always fascinated me and I watched many documentaries about them. They were not stupid and cowardly scavengers like cartoons would have us believe, but smart, tactical predators. I knew that if I heard their maniacal cackle in front of me, then this was just a distraction so I would've failed to notice the ones sneaking behind me.

I turned around as fast as I could, and half-ran towards the raft. Once I reached it, the giggling ceased but I was not fooled. They were not gone, but positioning to strike. I considered jumping into the river and trying to swim away, but I was not sure I could outswim a wild animal, with one leg barely functioning. Instead, I braced against the raft. Step after step, I managed to push it almost back into open water.

There was no warning.

No splash, no growling.

But after two months of living in this wilderness, after my encounters with the wolverine, the terrorbird, and the wild pig, my subconscious ape instincts learned to react to danger without bothering with conscious thought.

I twisted off the path of the attack, and whipped the pouncing hyena in the head with my crutch, as hard as I could. The thick ashwood branch snapped in half, but the beast was only momentarily stunned. I did not give it time to recover, and instantly stabbed it in the neck with the spear. Instead of backing off, it lunged at me with such force that it pushed me onto the raft and the raft onto the river.

The raft spun into the current, forcing me to drop the spear embedded in my enemy and try to reach for another. I saw several more hyenas burst through the thickets and splash into the water. True to my expectations, they were much bigger than what I knew their species to be in my world. The one I speared must have been a juvenile because it was barely the size of a German Shepherd. The other ones of its pack were larger, hunched over, with powerful musculature and oversized trap-like jaws.

I had a surreal thought that this was how It would look like to be pursued by werewolves.

Even though the raft started to drift downriver, they steadily gained on it, until one reached the aft and lunged at it. Unlike the otters, however, it was a poor climber and just slid off, yelping in frustration. I did not give it a chance to try again, and walloped it over the head with the oar.

On the third hit, it managed to snap its jaws on the oar’s tip, and bit through it like through a wet biscuit.

“Bite on that, fucker!” I yelled and stabbed it with a spear awkwardly held in my left hand. The blade sunk into the creature’s shoulder, and it started to trash in pain and panic. Meanwhile, three other hyenas reached closer to my raft, and were seconds from climbing on it. I could not outrun them going downriver like that. I had to weaponize my previous sailing mistake.

I lunged for the boom and turned it all the way, then hoisted my unwisely oversized sail. For a horrifying second nothing happened, because the forces of the wind and current equalized, making the raft immobile.

And then it accelerated backward, plowing water with the now-useless rudder.

The hyenas had enough smarts to try to swim out of its way but were not quite fast enough. They didn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, dive down either, so the several hundred kilos of wooden grating ran them over at an appreciable downwind knot.

Thump! Scree! Thump! Screeee! Thump!

I heard the cross-beams hit their heads, drag over them, and tumble them under. I had to scramble to the rudder and work it in reverse before the raft ran itself back into the reeds. Fumbling with it, and the rope tied to the boom, I managed to maneuver the raft towards the middle of the river, where I pulled the sail down, thus letting the current push me again.

Of the hyenas that pursued me, two were bobbing limply on the surface, either severely injured by my impromptu hit-and-run, or from stab wounds. The rest dogged it towards the shore. I soon realized why they quit so easily. I saw the telltale triangular waves pursuing them. The injured hyenas suddenly vanished, pulled under the surface. The otters that grabbed them were not my pack, but all the same, they were nature’s own wetsuit commandos, unmatched in their ferocity in aquatic combat. I heard some pained laughter and yelps from the bushes, that almost instantly ended with a splash, then silence. One of the surviving hyenas must have not been fast enough to reach dry land before they grabbed it.

Good fucking riddance. I always considered myself environmentally conscious, but the encounters with local predators made me dream of nothing more than to make them all extinct. If it took luring them towards the river, where the otters could overpower them, so be it.

As I mused, the current took me around the hill, and towards the spot where the meadows reached the water, forming a natural beach. I steered towards it and worked my remaining oar hard to not overshoot.

This time, rather than ram the raft into the shore, I dropped the anchor a few meters away and scanned the land before swimming to it. My leg hurt fiercely, but I reasoned I could swim back faster and moor off, than push a beached raft back onto open water, if I had to escape quickly.

I sneaked onto the meadow, spear in hand, and the heart beating in my throat.

Not thirty steps from the beach, I saw an unmistakable proof that humans were there… but I really wish I did not.

It was a scene of carnage.

Surrounded by burnt-out bonfires, a hole has been dug in the ground, patches of grass and soil torn haphazardly. And in the middle of it, was a pool of gore, torn meat and offal, that once must have been a person. I tried to lie to myself that it maybe it was an animal, until I approached closer and saw an unmistakably human finger stuck in the mud, still attached to a strip of flesh, pointing accusatorily at a dead hyena that lay in the bushes a few paces away.

Whoever died here was a human.

A human who died fighting, and yet, ended up torn to chowder anyway.

Then, foregoing all caution, I fell on my knees and retched. And I cried. If the hyenas were anywhere nearby, they could have easily ambushed me. But at that point, I did not care. I had one chance to find and save another human being, and I missed it by minutes, only because I was careless with the raft!

My feelings changed instantly though, when I wiped my tears away and truly saw the ground I was staring at.

There were human footprints impressed in it, going towards the beach downriver from me. I was too shocked by the bloody scene to notice it before.

I needed no tracking skills to read these. Even to my untrained eye it was obvious. These were prints of at least two people desperately running for the river, with predators in pursuit.

But where were they? If they just jumped into the water and tried to swim away, the hyenas would have caught them quickly and dragged them back to land. But that was not the case, obviously, as there were no more bodies. I stared at the distance downriver and could not see any swimmers, or any signs of bloody struggle. I had a horrific thought that maybe these people were drowned and killed by otters, along with their pursuers, but I dismissed that idea quickly. I had plenty of evidence that the otters were friendly, or at least definitely not man-eaters.

There was only one thing I could do. Slowly sail down the river, looking for survivors.

I was about to lift the anchor when the thin rope in my hands gave me an evil idea. I took some of the spare rope and quickly turned it into several constrictor snares. Stomach heaving with revulsion, I ran back to the splash of gore in the middle of the meadow. I placed the spare anchor atop of the corpse, and spread the snares around, tying them to it.

I could not save that human, or even give them a burial, but sure as fuck I could avenge them. Let the damned hyenas come back for a meal and strangle themselves.

“Bon Appetit you evil sons of bitches.”